The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit (20 page)

 

AT LAST, THE ENDLESS
night journey across France came to an end. We were in Paris and it was morning and there was light.

From the station, my father telephoned a contact at the relief agency helping the flow of Jewish refugees from the Arab countries. We were listed as “stateless” on all our travel documents, and we didn't know our final destination. Dad anxiously inquired what was in store for us now that we had left Egypt. He had an exhausted family on his hands, and he wasn't well himself. There was also a six-year-old child, “une petite qui est très fragile,” he informed the agency official, his voice nearly breaking from tension and fatigue. We were told to report to our temporary lodgings in the tenth arrondissement, at the Violet Hotel.

Leon's identification papers, Paris, 1963. This nationality was “a déterminer”—to be determined.

I liked the sound of it. I expected a building of lavender walls and lilac floors rising beneath a mauve-tinted sky. Instead, we found ourselves staring at a dingy and singularly charmless establishment that was all gray and discolored broken bricks and stone. Our rooms were situated on an alleyway known as the passage Violet, a narrow lane of fabric stores, fur workshops, and small factories that made buttons and dolls. I vainly scanned the little street for a speck of purple, but there was none that I could see.

It was even worse inside.

Home was now a couple of rooms containing six beds and the twenty-six assorted suitcases that had followed us from the station. Because of their bulk and size, they turned us into virtual prisoners of our hotel, taking up so much space we could barely walk without stubbing our toes or bumping into one another.

Our rooms were on the second floor of an annex that was, if possible, even more decrepit than the main hotel building. We had to climb a rickety flight of stairs, a painful and awkward undertaking for my father.

It was in Paris that Papa's cane, packed as an afterthought when we left, made a surprise reappearance. I had rarely seen him use it in Cairo, where years in the care of top doctors had enabled my father to attain a fair degree of mobility and independence. But he now needed it to get upstairs, and then to get down again.

We didn't bother to open any luggage. It wasn't clear if it was because we were too depressed, or because it would have been pointless. The bags that my older sister had packed with so much excitement, cramming them with her new wardrobe, were now a source of exasperation. Why can't we unpack? she kept asking my father. Why do we have to keep the suitcases locked as if we were about to flee again?

He shrugged as if to say that at nineteen going on twenty, she was old enough to figure it out. Paris was only a stop on a long, as-yet-unfinished journey. When we arrived in France, at the end of March 1963, we were still in the same limbo status indicated on our luggage tags from Cairo, “Famille Lagnado,” but no discernible address.

Around the corner was the rue du Faubourg Poissonière, a narrow, windy street that looked exactly like every other narrow, windy Parisian street, with one major difference. Poissonière and the area around it
had catered to generations of Jewish refugees who had fled any number of countries that no longer wanted them.

The cultural and historical landscape had changed over the years, but the story of exile and persecution was numbingly the same.

France had historically been a transit point for refugees, a role it was re-creating assiduously now with the flow of Jewish families like my own. In the 1930s and '40s, Jews fleeing the Nazis converged on this small strip near our hotel, some opening ateliers and plying the fur trade. Later, in the 1950s and 1960s, Jews seeking to escape the violence and turmoil in the Middle East unleashed by the creation of Israel descended on the faubourg. The area attracted immigrants from Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, and Libya who were housed in the shabby residential hotels that did a booming business. Joining them were another class of refugees, once-prosperous families such as mine, from Cairo and Alexandria, who went overnight from riches to rags, and were in a state of shock at the seaminess of their new lives.

It was possible to walk around the rue du Faubourg Poissonière and hear a cacophony of languages—old furriers who still spoke German and Polish and Yiddish, refugees from the Maghreb who felt comfortable conversing in their native Arabic. That left French to the streetwalkers and transvestites who plied their trade not far away, by the boulevard St. Denis.

Paris had a relatively efficient, coordinated system of social service and relief agencies dedicated to helping refugees like my family. Funded by private philanthropists such as the Rothschilds, as well as deep-pocketed American Jewish organizations, the French groups tried to lessen the trauma. Refugees were immediately given a free place to live—typically a room or two in an inexpensive hotel—along with subsidized meals. They were put in contact with officials who would help find them a permanent home somewhere in the world.

The main agency helping us in Paris was the Cojasor, an organization that had once aided Holocaust victims. HIAS—the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society—was the other major group in charge of our fate. Headquartered in New York, but with satellite offices around Europe, HIAS's mission was to help repatriate Jews forced to flee because of the tumult in the Arab world.

From our first day in Paris, we trooped from one to the other, one to the other. Cojasor, which was helping us navigate life in France, assigned us our own social worker, kindly Madame Dana, to help us through the rough spots. HIAS was trying to look ahead and help us decide where we wanted to settle for good.

The choices were clear: either Israel or America. Those early weeks, we leaned strongly toward Israel. My sister dreamed of finding Nonna Alexandra again, while for my father, there was the hope of joining his relatives, including his ailing brother Shalom and Marie, his little sister.

Dad went regularly to the Cojasor to collect our allowance, which amounted to eighteen francs daily, or three francs a day for each of us. That austere budget was supposed to cover all our needs, from food and clothing to the occasional movie or treat. The money was handed directly to my father, who was tasked with deciding how to spread it among the six of us.

We had arrived in France with exactly $212—the sum total that we'd been allowed to take with us out of Cairo—and much of it was gone.

For Dad, who had spent a lifetime investing in the stock market and building a nest egg, what was most painful was finding himself destitute, dependent on charity for himself and his family to survive. My father was used to giving alms, not taking them.

He had dreaded that moment but had been helpless to avoid it. We heard, of course, of families who had been able to smuggle their fortune out of Cairo by using trusted intermediaries or couriers to transport their cash and jewels, or by establishing secret Swiss bank accounts. But most of the Jewish refugees of the Levant found themselves in exactly the same straits: they saw their social status and wealth vanish overnight. They went from being solid members of the bourgeoisie to beggars.

Now, Dad had to mediate between the demands of my siblings, who wanted pocket money to enjoy what they could of Paris, and the family's basic needs.

He spent almost nothing on himself. The boulevardier of Cairo now wandered around in a faded raincoat, which became increasingly battered. In spite of the shopping sprees in the months before we left, Dad
had never thought practically about what he would really need in the world beyond Egypt. It almost never rained in Cairo, so raincoats were a rarity, and even an ordinary umbrella was an exotic object, almost impossible to find even at Cicurel or the other great department stores.

He asked the Cojasor for help in purchasing a new raincoat. The agency refused, though his request was passed along in global telegrams to HIAS offices overseas. The answer was always no. Rebuffed and humiliated, he stayed inside our hotel room. He spoke up only to order my brothers to pray with all the authority he could still muster. He seemed anxious that they maintain the old rituals, while they seemed less and less interested in doing so.

My sister, who had argued so vehemently for us to leave Cairo, was now complaining the loudest about France. Like Dad, she found our
nouveau pauvre
status almost impossible to bear. The Paris we were inhabiting had nothing to do with the Paris of her dreams and literary sensibility. Suzette had never imagined being penniless in a city whose boundless charms required sizable sums of money to enjoy them.

She was in a perpetual funk about our reduced circumstances—the cramped hotel room where we were constantly on each other's nerves; the drab neighborhood that didn't interest her in the least; her inability to work or attend school because she didn't have proper papers, and besides, we could be on the move again any day, so what was the point of going to university or getting a job?

Our identity was reduced to a number, Dossier #45,135 of the Cojasor, filled with case notes by Madame Dana and one dismal word,
stateless.

Unable to stand our new digs, Suzette left the hotel early and wandered around Paris by foot; there was no money for the metro or a bus. She couldn't shake the despair that had overtaken her, the sense that she was somehow responsible for getting us into this mess: if it weren't for her arrest, we would still be in our sun-drenched homeland, living in a real house, with friends, and furniture, and money.

A month after our arrival, my mother received a letter that would plunge us even deeper into darkness.

Nonna Alexandra, of the hard luck and the tender soul, had died.
The flower on the mountain—our edelweiss—had passed away weeks earlier, while we were still in Egypt. The very morning we heard about Nonna, Dad had gone to Cojasor to say we wanted to move to Israel, where we hoped to be reunited with family. Later that afternoon, he returned and told them apologetically that we had changed our minds. We didn't know anymore where we wanted to go, he said truthfully.

The devastating news had arrived in an airmail letter from Oncle Félix, who was now working in Geneva. He hadn't told us what happened for some weeks, he conceded, to spare Mom. After all, there was “nothing left to be done,” and it seemed pointless to risk interrupting our plans to emigrate. He, of course, had been in Switzerland, hundreds of miles away from my grandmother, even as her health and hope were failing, and he hadn't seen her in some years. It had taken his estranged wife, Aimee, to inform him that his mother had been rushed to the hospital.

He caught a plane home only to arrive—as always—too late.

Alexandra of Alexandria, the old woman who was more like a child, the grandmother who needed such intense mothering of her own, had died alone and bewildered in an institution, as solitary and lonely a figure in her narrow sickbed as on those walks, six years earlier, among the orange groves of Ganeh Tikvah. “She is finally at peace, after an entire lifetime that was for her nothing but a lifetime of sacrifice and suffering and misery,” Félix said in his flowery two-page letter. None of this was especially comforting to my mom. My uncle didn't bother to say precisely when Alexandra had died, what day, what month, from what, whether she had been ill a long time or had suffered a sudden decline. But there was one line in Félix's letter that seemed genuinely aimed at providing comfort:

“I have been told that she was asking about you and your children until her last moment on this earth.”

The news rendered my mom almost mute with despair. Trapped in Cairo and now Paris with the five of us, separated from the one person whom she had loved utterly and completely, she hadn't even been with Alexandra when she died. She hadn't seen the body. She had missed the funeral.

She would never see or speak to Nonna, or listen to her sing some
cherished, long-forgotten Italian love song, she wouldn't hold her fragile form or comb her silky hair, turned white from sorrow; and now, with neither the means nor the ability to travel, she wouldn't even be able to pay her final respects at her grave.

It was almost worse than when her other Alexandra had died.

Madame Dana at the Cojasor was the first to notice the change. The social worker noted in her case files how broken down my mother seemed, how unkempt and neglected: it was clear she had lost interest in her appearance. Madame Dana was worried about my mom's passivity, the fact that she seemed to agree with whatever was told to her. She had no will of her own anymore—no will to say yes, no will to say no, no will to demand, no will to object. What could a social worker do to help this soft-spoken, intensely sweet woman, old before her time, toothless before her years, who had once been beautiful but was no longer so?

Suzette now found Paris truly unbearable. She had lived for the moment when she would leave for Israel and find Alexandra. But what was Israel without Alexandra? A promised land bereft of any promise. In a world without my grandmother, every country lost its appeal, and there was nowhere Suzette could point to and say, Yes, this is where I want to live.