A rumor is circulating that it was the Sidis who set the factory on fire because they were forced to work in such a filthy smelly place. It's true that the terrible stench of the cow hides being remade into leather had disappeared with the fire.
For weeks after the fire was finally extinguished, workers continued to demolish and remove the ruins of the factory. When it was all cleared up, from the windows of our apartment we could see the entire city of Montrouge. It made me feel free. It made me feel like I could fly away. I would open the window and lean way out over the edge, my arms extended like wings and I would pretend that I was flying into the sky. My mother would scream at me, Stop that, you're going to fall. Move back from the window.
That's how the factory in front of our house disappeared. After that, the people were saying that the neighborhood had become less dangerous now that the
Sidis
were no longer working here. In the evening people would walk in the street without fear, and...
Federman, did you just make up this whole thing about the fire just so that you could tell us a little adventure story.
No, the fire really happened. And it's true about the view.
But the following year big ugly apartment buildings were built there, and the view disappeared. Just like that.
Just like that. But my imagining flying out of the window, that was a happy moment.
Oh, I have to tell something else that happened in our neighborhood. Something funny.
One day, or rather one night, Marius's café at the corner of the street was burglarized. It was a big café, with an old zinc bar, and a billiard table in the back. Children were not allowed to go into the café. Except when their parents sent them to by cigarettes. This
bistrot
was for adults who came after work to have a few drinks, and often remained late into the night and would stagger home totally drunk.
The next morning, a Sunday, three police cars arrived full speed with their blaring
Pin Pon Pin Pon
and stopped in front of the café. Everybody in the neighborhood rushed to see what was happening. The policemen explained that during the night burglars broke a window to get into the café, and stole a lot of bottles of liquor, and even some money.
During the burglary, one of the thieves relieved himself on the billiard table. When Marius arrived early in the morning and saw that big load in the middle of his billiard table he almost fainted. But when the policemen saw that, they all laughed, and soon after all the people in the neighborhood knew what had happened, and wanted to see that big pile on Marius' billiard table. People lined up outside the café, and there was such a crowd the policemen had to direct traffic.
They would allow only a dozen people at a time to enter. Outside in the street, people were pushing and shoving like mad to get in. Without the police it would have been a real riot. The policemen kept shouting, Calm down, everybody will get a chance to see. Move along, move along, they would say to the people around the table. A little faster. Don't be selfish. Let the others see. Some people were taking pictures. That day even children were allowed into Marius's café.
Even I went to see, but my sisters refused to go. They said it was disgusting to go see something like that.
Poor Marius. He looked so ashamed. He was sitting at a table in the corner of the café, his head between his hands. He looked like he was crying.
That pile of shit on his billiard table bugged him for the rest of his life. When people came into the café they would ask, Marius how is your big turd? What did you do with it? Did you cook it? Marius became neurasthenic because of this burglary, and barely talked to anyone.
Well, that's enough for that, now I'll tell something else. But before going any further with my stories, I have to decide whether or not I should put here what I wrote to Francesca, a young Italian graduate student who is writing a doctoral dissertation about the bilingual aspect of my work, who asked in a letter how the book I am writing is going, and in which language it is being written.
I don't know if I should put my reply here, in the pages reserved for stories, or in the separate pages of commentaries and arguments.
Well, I'll put it here, I can always displace it later.
Dear Francesca,
I'm on page 217 of a novel I'm writing in English. It's called
Shhh: The Story of a Childhood.
I say novel, but is it really a novel, in the traditional sense of that word? What I'm writing has no plot. No suspense. No possibility of a resolution. Let's just say that I'm telling stories.
I'm telling, in my usual way, the story of my childhood. The thirteen years that preceded the adventure of the closet.
I say telling, or rather I should say, I'm reconstructing with words what I believe my childhood to have been.
I'm reinventing most of it. I do so, without any respect for chronology, with debris of souvenirs, and fragments of stories I've already told elsewhere. I also do it by inserting poems, mini-stories, quotations, digressions into the text.
I'm telling this childhood in the first person, in a tone perhaps a bit too serious for me. It's dangerous, because such a tone can easily lead to sentimentality.
Fortunately, voices constantly interrupt the narrative by addressing Federmanâ that's the name of the storytellerâwarning him to avoid agonizing realism and decadent lyricism, and especially not to exaggerate too much.
These interruptions, commentaries, arguments, critiques, etc. are presented on separate pages in italics.
It is difficult to tell now where all this will lead me, but I'm progressing, in spite of my deficient memory, in this reconstruction of a childhood, and in spite of the interruptions. I would like to be able to get to 250 pages. After that, we'll see.
             With best wishes,
             Raymond
OK, I'll leave this here, and we'll see. Now perhaps I should tell about my mother's family.
I don't know much about my mother's origin. And even less about my father's.
About my father I know that he was born in March 1904, in Siedlec, a little town in Poland near the Russian border. That's what is indicated on the
Acte de Disparition
I obtained after the war from
Le Ministère des Anciens Combattants et Victimes de Guerre
when I searched the archives to find out what had happened to my parents. On that document his first name is given as
Szama,
his Polish name. But in France everybody called him Simon. The Act of Disappearance does not indicate the day of his birth. Only the month. I know that my father had three brothers and five sisters. Most of them died in concentration camps. I never knew my grand-parents who lived and died in Poland. Those are the only facts I know about my father and his family.
As for my mother, this is what I learned from
L'Extrait des Minutes des Actes de Naissance du 5ème Arrondissement de Paris, année 1902.
I want to quote exactly what is written by hand on this old yellowed, half-torn document that I found in the box of papers and photos abandoned in the bedroom closet of our apartment in Montrouge.
Le dix septembre mil neuf cent deux, à une heure du soir, est née, dans le domicile de ses parents, rue Saint-Séverin 8, Marguerite, du sexe féminin, fille de Salomon Epstein, âgé de vint-sept ans, cordonnier, et de Rose Varseldorf, son épouse, âgée de trenteet-un ans, ménagère. Mariée à Paris, 4ème arrondissement, le ving-huit janvier mil neuf cent ving-six, avec Szama Federman.
Pour extrait conforme
Paris, le cinq décembre mil neuf cent quarante-et-un
Here is a literal translation of that birth certificate.
On the 10th of September 1902, at 1:00 in the evening, was born, in the home of her parents, 8 rue Saint-Severin, Marguerite, of the feminine sex, daughter of Salomon Eptstein, 27 years old, shoemaker, and of Rose Warseldorf, his wife, 32 years old, a homemaker. Married in Paris, 4
th
Arrondissement, on the 28
th
of January 1926, with Szama Federman.Conform extract
Paris, December 5
th
1941
It's all there. That's how one reduces the essential facts of a person's life to a paragraph.
One almost feels like laughing or crying reading such a document. What style!
But from this birth certificate I did learn a number of things I didn't know beforeâthe address where my grandparents lived, that my mother was of the feminine sex, that my grandfather was a shoemaker four years younger than my grandmother, and that my mother and father were married on the 28th of January, 1926.
I have no idea why my mother needed this birth certificate in 1941. Probably to prove that she was a French citizen. That was the time when Jews had to declare their identity, and wear the yellow star.
My mother had five sisters and two brothers. Here is the list in chronological order of the Epstein children.
Fanny
Jean
Marie
Léa
Marguerite
Maurice
Rachel
Sarah
Except for Marguerite, my mother, all her sisters and brothers died in their own beds of old age. My mother was thirty-nine when she was ...
Federman, these details about the origin of your parents are interesting, but a bit sad. Do you think they are necessary?
It's especially my mother's birth certificate that I wanted to include here. The style and the tone of these documents are so laughable. It adds a touch of humor to the sadness.
I always imagined that my maternal grandparents were Polish. But one day, after the war, talking with my aunt Fanny, I asked her where my grandparents lived in Poland, and she said to me, Oh, no, my mother and father were not Polish. They were Palestinians.
Palestinians!
Yes, we are Palestinian Jews, she explained. There were many Jews in Palestine during the 19
th
century. Your uncle Jean and I were born there. But you won't believe this, my aunt said, at a moment when things were not going well in Palestine, the whole family moved to Poland. Don't ask me why. It was such a crazy idea. Marie and Lea were born in Poland. But life in Poland was worse than in Palestine because of the pogroms. So around 1900, your grandparents emigrated to France with four children. Your mother, Margot, was the first to be born in France, and then three more children after that, Maurice, Rachel, and Sarah.
Everybody called my mother Margot. So being French born, she was a French citizen. That's what the birth certificate indicates.
I suppose that means that I am of Palestinian origin, at least on my mother's side. That's why I've always been fascinated by the desert. I have a passion for the desert. I feel that I am a nomad. When I was a child, I dreamt of wandering in the Sahara with the Foreign Legion.
I should perhaps say more about my mother's brothers and sisters. After all, they were all present during my childhood. I would see my aunts and uncles and cousins when the whole family gathered on Sunday at my grand-mother's apartment. So without elaborating too much, this is what I can recall about them.
My aunt Fanny was married to Nathan Gotinsky. They didn't have children. They sold kitchen utensils at the
marché.
They had a little truck. They were well to do, but they lived in a very small apartment in the
14ème arrondissement,
not far from where my grand-mother lived. I liked my aunt Fanny. She was nice to me and my sisters. When we went to visit her, she would slip a little money to my mother without Nathan noticing. Nathan was totally bald, with yellowish skin, and a lot of freckles on his face. He only spoke Yiddish to me even though I didn't understand what he was saying. He always insisted on playing cards with me. Belote. I usually won. He was not very smart. Fanny was the boss in that family. After the war, Nathan finished his life in Charenton, the famous insane asylum of Paris.
Ida was the wife of my uncle Jean. They lived in the suburbs. I don't remember which one. We didn't see them often. Jean worked in a factory, so he was not rich. Ida and Jean had a daughter, Renée, whom I never really knew well. When my aunt Ida died rather young, Jean remarried a woman who was not Jewish. After that he rarely visited my grandmother and the rest of the family, and when he did, he always came alone. My grandmother and the rest of the family were angry with him for having married a
shikse.
I believe that when the Jews started to be deported, Jean and his daughter spent the rest of the war hidden at his wife's parents farm. I cannot remember her name, but I liked her. She had a good farm woman face. She was always smiling, and when we visited her, she would bake special cakes for us. After the war I lost contact with my uncle Jean and his wife. And also with my cousin Renée.
The next in age was my aunt Marie. She had married Leon Marcowski the tailor. They had one son, my cousin Salomon. I knew them best since we all lived in the same apartment building. They were the wealthiest of the aunts and uncles, and aunt Marie thought of herself as the matriarch of the family. She was the one who organized the Sunday lunches at my grandmother's, and decided who should come on such and such Sunday. Not all the aunts and uncles came at the same time because grandmother's apartment was very small. And besides they didn't get along with each other. My mother and her three children were invited every Sunday. That's because we were poor, so this way we would eat well that day. My father never went with us.
I don't remember Lea's husband, but their family name was Abramowitz. We rarely saw them. They lived in Montreuil in a fancy apartment. They were very
embourgeoisés.
They owned a large shoe store. During my entire childhood we visited them only three or four times. They had one daughter, Agnes. A little snob who thought of herself a
grosse merde
because her parents were rich. And she acted like she was beautiful. When she was still very young, she would wear red lipstick, and red nail polish. Personally, I didn't find her very attractive. When she and her parents came to the Sunday lunch at my grandmother's, she was always trying to attract attention to herself. My sisters and I never played with her. She was older than us. Her parents would get into arguments with the other aunts and uncles. Usually about money. I saw my aunt Lea and my cousin Agnes only once after the war.