Art of a Jewish Woman (2 page)

So why was Papa sending her to become an oral surgeon? She had grown up imagining she would be a lawyer because she loved to talk, reason, debate, and argue. Papa used to say that she would be a great lawyer, but later he said there were no opportunities for women to be lawyers in Poland. When she was in her mid-teens she had acted in summer plays and thought about being an actress, but her father always said actresses were whores. Her first two choices barred, she wanted to become a regular doctor, but she had failed the medical school entrance examination in Warsaw, either because she had no head for mathematics or because they had begun to routinely refuse Jews entry into Polish graduate schools. Anyway, Papa didn’t feel that it was right for women to examine men’s bodies.

On the train from Poland she met Isa Kurland who, like her, was going to the University in Nancy to study oral surgery in the intensive language program for foreign students from Eastern Europe. However unlike Felice, Isa was from a wealthy Katowice industrial family that owned coal mines in the south of Poland. She was so wealthy that Isa traveled with a governess to attend to her needs, manage her many suitcases, and ease her into independence from her family. Unlike Felice, Isa was reserved and cautious. Their differences complemented each other, and the challenge of being first-year foreign students brought them together and made them best friends.

Felice’s transformation into a soignée young French woman actually began the very first day facing the registrar at the university. “What is your name?” he asked.

“Felizia Ozerovicz,” she replied.

“But Felizia, that’s not French. Your name will be Felice.” Then he had her sign the required contract that she wouldn’t take a job in France when she graduated.

In Nancy, Felice read French
Vogue, “Le petit echo de la mode.”
It was a magazine with dress patterns then. She could no more sew than pluck a chicken, but she loved the fashions. She kept her eyes wide open, quickly mastered using cosmetics, and started to smoke cigarettes the way she saw the French doing it—pausing with the cigarette between her lips for reflection, gesticulating with the cigarette to punctuate a comment. She gave Isa lessons in makeup, socializing, and dress. In return, Isa was her confidante and paid for their cigarettes and coffee in cafés. Felice was always short of money.

By the time she stood before the university registrar in the fall of her second year and put down her nationality as Polish, her French was so perfect that he said, “That’s impossible. Don’t joke. You are from Strasbourg.” Strasbourg, just over 100 kilometers from Nancy, was the principal city of the Alsace region of France, and in generations past, Alsatian, a local dialect mixing French and German, had been the spoken language.

School kept her busy from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. with lectures, laboratories, and breaks to study. The entry to the library was a medieval arch, and when she passed through it she felt its age and the spirit of the academicians who had walked through it for centuries fortifying and enhancing her in a way she couldn’t quite define. The arch led to an inner courtyard from which doors led to reading rooms and archives. Several evenings a week she waitressed in the student cafeteria. She began at 6 p.m. and worked through the dinner hours, and for that she got a free dinner and a little bit more. When she started working, she laughed to herself: My father’s princess is going to be a waitress because he doesn’t have enough money.

At the beginning, Moses sent her 500 Zlotys a month on top of the tuition. It was just enough to pay for her room, some food, and books. Inexorably, conditions deteriorated in Poland as the democratic Post-War Independence Government of 1920 faltered and fell to a military coup d’etat. By the 1930s the respect for minority rights that had flourished in the new republic waned, and the dictatorship tightened restrictions on Jews’ incomes. There was an overall increase in rural poverty and privation as credit for loans to farmers dried up with the worldwide economic depression. Fewer fields could be planted, and food became scarcer. Moses, a grain exporter, had less and less ability to help his daughter while also trying to support his wife, the two younger daughters and a son.

Felice, like most of the students in the city of 115,000, rented a room in a family home. Her room was a mansard in the home of a widow at 15 Boulevard de la Pepinière. It had a bed, desk, sink, and bidet. She washed her few clothes in the sink, and once a week, to get totally clean with plentiful hot water, she met Isa at a municipal bathhouse. Her thirty-minute walk to and from school took her through La Pepinière (The Nursery), a park as large, beautiful, and manicured as the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris. Often during the walk children of all ages from nearby schools erupted gleefully into the park’s tree-lined alleyways for their exercise breaks; mothers wheeled their babies in carriages and strollers; and a children’s carousel played Viennese waltzes as its carved animals slowly revolved.

Student café life thrived on weekends. Felice and her friends especially favored Le Glacier. To give variety to their meager wardrobes, she and Rachela Schultke, a new friend who was a student in political science from Poland, exchanged skirts and tops. From their vantage point on the terrace of Le Glacier they could survey Place Stanislaus, more harmonious, formal, airy, and elegant than anything she had seen before in Poland or Lithuania. And yet there was a Polish connection, which explained why so many of the foreign students were from Poland. Stanislas Leszczynski, former king of Poland and Lithuania, had received the Duchy of Lorraine—a region of forested hills, valleys, and the rivers Meurthe and Moselle—as part of a peace treaty with France in 1736, in return for the hand of his daughter, who wed French King Louis XV.

Stanislas personally governed Nancy from 1738 to 1768 and selected the French architects and artists who designed the Baroque central square, which entranced Felice. To one side, a triumphal arch, led to the former palace. Directly across from Le Glacier was the city hall. To her left were the opera and theater, and on the right was the grand Musée des Beaux Arts. Fountains echoed the flow of water in the River Meurthe and canals passing through Nancy. The side where they sat was a block of fine shops and cafes with outdoor terraces. In a corner of Place Stanislaus a black wrought iron, fancifully filigreed, gold-highlighted, two-story tall gate led into the Pepinière park.

Samy

At a terrace table Isa raised a glass of wine and toasted rather loudly, “To Felice’s twenty-first birthday.”

Each table had a small notepad. By custom the students—French, Poles, Romanians, Hungarians, Bulgarians—flirted by exchanging notes between tables. A black-jacketed waiter approached the girls with a message on a silver tray and placed it in front of Felice, “For you, Mademoiselle. From the gentleman over there.” He pointed to a well-dressed, handsome, dark-haired man with a prematurely receding hairline seated at a table with another gentleman. “He is paying for whatever you order.”

Felice read it gaily and lifted an eye toward the young man, who smiled a greeting in return. The note wished her a happy birthday and proposed a walk in the park. The dark-eyed, laughing mite of a girl took up a pencil and sent back a note. A few minutes later on that chilly November 30, 1931, Felice and Isa were walking along a broad path between chestnut and plane trees already bare for the winter, teetering in their high heels on the cobblestone path with the two young men flanking them.

Pierre Mendelson, who had sent the note, was walking with his arm through Felice’s, and Samy Jakarkina with his arm through Isa’s. Laughing and talking, Samy paid a roaming photographer to take their picture. Pierre and Samy were both from Bucharest, Romania. They were in their final year of medical training. Pierre would open a practice in Nancy and teach in the medical school. Samy planned to open a practice in the village of Neufchateau-des-Voges, the birthplace of Joan of Arc, 70 kilometers away.

They were sharp, handsome, and carefully attired. Both were fluent and assimilated in French culture, good storytellers and gregarious like Felice. She enjoyed them, and the group became close friends. Nonetheless she felt that Poles had better characters because every Romanian seemed to support a mistress, usually a Jewish student from Poland. These two didn’t, and she didn’t need to be supported—yet—and Isa was wealthy. Felice’s part-time work and her father’s monthly Zlotys got her by.

As they approached the end of the park and the street on which Felice lived, Pierre whispered in her ear, “Happy birthday, Felice. Should I take your virginity this Thursday night? We can celebrate your adulthood and St. Virgil’s Day at the same time.”

Felice flirted back, “Or perhaps you think you can seduce me on Virgil’s altar because I love Latin poetry. Next you will throw in St. Felicity’s Day to make me swoon over your charms.”

They laughed and enjoyed each other. The group continued to meet for walks in the park, but after a short time Felice gravitated to Samy. He was the more studious, handsome one, leaner, with wavy fair hair and blue eyes. He held more closely to the values of hard work and study that her parents pressed on her as her education drained the family of money. She was to make the best use of school to prepare herself for the time when she would be on her own, and that included choosing wisely among the young men she met there. When Pierre saw what was happening, he stepped aside for his friend. Another picture was taken in the park with Felice and Isa on either side of Samy, who was wearing his elegant double-breasted suit. The girls were wearing knee-length skirts, stockings, and pumps. A few days later, feeling possessive of Samy, Felice took a pair of scissors and snipped Isa out of the picture. There was just enough of a ragged edge left so that a bit of Isa’s face still showed.

They had their social routines. A favorite stop on their outings—the men paying—was the confectioner Lefevre-Denise for its crunchy Bergamot candies made with a native herb from the countryside. It filled their heads with a taste and aroma like smoky, crystallized Russian tea and honey—a candy one remembers forever. Other favorite stops were the Soeurs’ macaroon shop and chocolates from La Lorraine on rue de la Hâche. They also went to tea dances at the Hotel Stanislaus, the tearoom of the Belfort on rue St. Jean, and the Café des Deux Hemispheres near the railway station. Most of all Felice loved going to the theater at the art deco Salle Poirel, where she lamented to Samy that her teenage passion for acting remained unfufilled. Isa’s father’s visits were a special treat. He insisted on Felice’s joining him and his daughter for fine dinners at the Brasserie Liègeoise, sometimes to Isa’s regret because she wanted to be alone with her father.

In spite of how much Felice enjoyed good food and other expensive distractions, she had strong socialist instincts. They began with her father’s belief in the potential of human beings to govern and organize themselves rationally for the benefit of all rather than exist by cutthroat competition marked by winners and losers. Her socialism was further nurtured during her high school years in Wilno’s political hotbed, where a hundred movements simmered and seethed. She participated in street demonstrations and meetings and read political tracts. In Nancy, Felice perfected the art of political debate in French and helped found the student Fabian Society to spread George Bernard Shaw’s socialist ideas.

As time passed in France, the money that Moses sent Felice steadily diminished as the Polish government, following Nazi Germany’s anti-Semitic lead, extinguished his livelihood. Felice increased her smoking because the nicotine staved off hunger; she could go longer between meals. One day in her third year, Samy came to visit her in her room and found her crying. She had just received a letter from her father.

“What is the matter?” he asked. “I have never seen you like this. What has happened?” He sat down on the bed beside her and put his arm around her.

She showed him the letter. “They’ve taken my father’s business away. They’ve confiscated his grain export license. Who will he be able to sell to? How will he exist?”

“Let me read the letter.” The black ink script was firm, careful and precise. He studied it, trying to decode the Polish that was so different from Romanian.

“I will have to leave school,” Felice said.

Samy put down the letter and looked at her distraught face. “My practice is going very well, better than I hoped. I have money to spare. I will pay your tuition and expenses. Now you must stop crying.” He took his handkerchief and dried her tears.

Thanks to Samy’s generosity, Felice was able to continue her studies and have a good time with her friends. Isa’s father, Mr. Kurland, continued his regular visits, entertaining them with meals that were too expensive even for the Romanians. Although the menacing cloud of Poland’s expropriations of Jewish-owned businesses was becoming more ominous and spreading to different regions of the country and to more and more industries, Mr. Kurland still retained his coal mines for the time being. He was too important to the economy.

Felice had no idea just how bad things had become back home because her parents shielded her from full knowledge. She and her girlfriends continued their relatively lighthearted ways. One became pregnant. “We must help Eva, and we must make a pact that if one of us becomes pregnant we will pitch in to help pay for an abortion. But only one time, only one mistake,” Felice told her friends.

One Saturday in her final year, Samy drove in from Neufchateau to pick her up and when they were sitting in his car he rolled up the sleeve of his shirt on his right arm. He pointed to an eruption he had just discovered on the skin—a round, inflamed circle with a pustule in the center. They both suspected immediately what it was. It had been part of their medical curriculum. There was no need to talk about it more that day; there were no words to talk about it.

On Monday the dermatology professor looked at the lesion on Samy’s arm, turned to Felice, and asked, “Are the two of you sexually intimate?”

“Everything but,” she answered.