The Voice of the Xenolith (19 page)

Searching for Ignace Edelstein (Part 2)

By Amethyst Simons

I have been searching for a person. A person who is dead.

I only know a few real facts about this person: his name, his date of birth, and the day he was murdered. I also know what his job was, and I know his address, the place where he was living in Paris on the day he was arrested by the French police and sent to Auschwitz.

The little information I have is really nothing more than some faint fossilized scratchings on a piece of sandstone, like the marks left by a wave moving over sand, or the tracks made by the feet and tail of a trilobite walking across a beach millions of years ago. They are not the whole person or the real person, but the faintest trail left behind by him.

But these few facts are all I have to work with. I am trying to be a detective, and from these few facts I am trying to re-create not just a story, not just a biography, but a whole life. The life of Ignace Edelstein.

Michelangelo worked from the outside in: He took a huge block of granite and hewed away until he revealed the person within. I have to do the opposite: I have to work from the inside out. I have a few facts about the person and I have to build up, not hew down. I have to build and add and flesh out. I have to put those facts in a place and a time and a landscape, until I have a complete person.

In science you start with a hypothesis and try it out; you test it to see if it holds. If you can find something to disprove it you have learned that your hypothesis needs to be adjusted. But you have to start with a hypothesis.

This is how detectives work, and this is how archaeologists work: they look at a few clues, and they fill in the gaps; they hypothesize a story. Sometimes they see tracks or lines on a field, which become clear perhaps only at sunset when the sun’s angle falls just so onto the field, and knowing the history of the area they hypothesize what might be found there, and they dig a trench to see if their hypothesis was correct.

Here’s an example. From the pattern of wear on the teeth of stone age skeletons you can make a guess, you can infer, that these people ate roots and bulbs, not just meat, and this helps you guess that they would have used some kind of digging tool or stick to dig up the roots and bulbs. The fact that all you find in that site is arrowheads does not mean that all they ate was meat that they had hunted; even though you don’t find a single digging stick it is not because they didn’t use them, but because wood does not last over thousands of years; it decays.

So you may find no actual facts about what happened long ago; all you have is hints and guesses, but you can still make inferences and build up a hypothesis.

I have often said that words are important, and this was another example of how that is true. Finding that word, the word “jeweller”, in the list with Ignace’s name and address, made it possible for me to see Ignace more clearly. I was able to build up a hypothesis and to know so much more about him because of that one word.

So even though I have no way of knowing for sure that Ignace was a perfectionist like me, I can make an inference from the fact that he was a jeweller; a jeweller living in Paris at a time when Paris was the centre of art and creativity and design. I know this because I did some research about life in Paris in the 1930’s and the 1940’s. There is no way Ignace would have been able to make a living as a jeweller in Paris at that time, to have ‘jeweller’ listed on the Nazi deportation lists as his profession, without his having been extremely good at his work; in fact, a perfectionist.

That is how I know things about him. I am a tracker. I am trying to do the same kind of thing that a tracker in the Kalahari does when he is hunting for food. They follow the clues and make a hypothesis, and set off to see if it is correct, and then they can put together a story about the animal they are tracking.

Of course you can make a mistake and make a wrong assumption. Once when thousands of animal bones were found at a prehistoric site in Spain, people assumed that this had been the ‘dining room’ of a group of hunters who had hunted and killed all these animals. But it is just as possible that this place with all its skeletons of animals could have been a marsh, where animals gathered to drink, and over many, many years some of them died there. The marsh would have preserved their bones, over thousands of years. So you have to be careful when making inferences because it can lead you totally on the wrong track.

So here is my hypothesis, the story I think is the real thing, about Ignace. I don’t know if it is correct. Perhaps I have mis-read the clues in the landscape, and perhaps I have made inferences which are not true. I hope he will forgive me if that is the case.

Ignace Edelstein was born in Constantinople, which is now called Istanbul, in Turkey. He had a brother, Andre, who was four years younger. His parents were Abraham and Fany Edelstein.

In Turkey in those days, Jews lived relatively safely, and there was very little persecution and very little danger. But there were other problems; people were being forcibly conscripted into the army, and there were economic difficulties. The news from Europe and America was all about the many young people who had left Turkey and gone overseas and had found a good life, and how they were making their fortunes there.

Lots of young people from the Jewish community were leaving; some went to Europe, and many to America. Ignace dreamed about going to a new place. But the thing that really got him thinking seriously about leaving was a string of violent attacks against Jews in 1934, in an area called Thrace which is now part of Bulgaria but at that time belonged to Turkey.

That year, the Turkish government had passed a new law which aimed to make minorities integrate more into Turkish society; it was called a Resettlement Law, and included forcing people to move from one area to another, so that minorities would not be living in large groups together.

The law led to unrest all over Turkey. It is unbelievable that while all minorities were affected by this new law, it was the Jews who were scapegoated. In Thrace, Jewish shops and houses were vandalized and people were physically attacked; thousands fled from the region and came to Constantinople, where they told their stories to people they met there. So Ignace knew very well what can happen when people turn on minorities and attack them.

But it wasn’t only getting away from danger that made him want to move. It was the whole idea of Paris: the art and culture and glamour. And something was pushing him to make a decision soon: there was news of an international exhibition to be held in May 1937, an exhibition of art and design, in Paris.

Paris had, since 1900, become the centre of new creative ideas in the arts, with people like Picasso, Chagall, Matisse and Modigliani working there. Artists from all over the world were moving to live and work in Paris, and Ignace wanted to be there too.

Ignace was a jeweller and he wanted to see what was being done in art and design in Paris. As a jeweller he felt stuck in an Eastern tradition, and he was thirsty for any news from Paris about the latest, most modern fashion and design and jewellery. He spent hours looking at magazines with photographs and illustrations, but it was not enough, because he had no real contact with the people actually working in France at the time.

It would be relatively easy for him to go to France, because all educated Turks spoke French. In Constantinople there was a French Jewish school and many Jews were completely fluent in the language. Several women students were going to Paris to train as teachers. Young men were leaving Turkey and going to Paris for adventure, glamour, and work.

Ignace and Andre may not have been rich, but what they both had was a profession: Ignace was a jeweller, and Andre was a radio technician. And that meant they could go anywhere and find work. Ignace and his brother were young, they were adventurous, they were single, they wanted to see the world, and Paris was the most exciting place they could think of.

One evening, when they were sitting at their parents’ dinner table on Friday night, after their mother had lit the Sabbath candles and they had eaten their meal, and they were talking about all kinds of things, they got on to the subject of Ignace’s feelings about Turkey and he told them of his decision to try his luck in Paris, for a year or two, and see how he liked it.

Andre had always followed his older brother’s lead, and announced there and then that he was determined to go too.

In a way, Ignace was sorry his brother was coming with him, because he felt a little guilty at leaving his aging parents behind. But he had always felt a sense of responsibility to Andre, because Andre was so much younger and had always needed to be protected by his older brother.

So they wrote to some friends who had left for Paris a few years before and were now familiar with the place, and asked them to find them a small flat, somewhere central, to rent. The flat which was found for them was in the 9th Arondissement, at number 12, Impasse Briare, which suited Ignace perfectly, because it was not far from the area where the artists were living and working and meeting each other: Montmartre.

So it was that Ignace made a big change in his life: he moved from East to West, from living with his parents to living more independently, from always looking elsewhere for new ideas and inspiration, to having it right there on his doorstep.

I think change must have been long overdue for Ignace, and I think he must have loved his time in Paris.

In some ways, I am a person who hates change. I hated going to a new school and I hated moving to a new house. But on the other hand, my parents have been taking me to other countries and other cities since I was small, and I have never felt stuck in a place, wishing I could see more of the world.

So maybe what I hate about change is not the change of place, but having to deal with new people, to talk to new people. I actually like changing places, seeing new things, and doing different things, and learning something that I never knew before. So I can imagine how Ignace felt when he made his change; the excitement of exploring a new place.

Maybe ‘change’ is not something you can like or dislike in itself. A teacher once asked me if I don’t like change. You can’t answer a question like that; it has to be a specific question. What kind of change do you like? What kind of change do you hate?

For me the answer to those questions is actually nothing to do with change: it is, how do you like spending your time? With people? Or with your own thoughts? Talking or writing? Seeing new things? Finding new places? And once you have answered how you like to spend your time, then it becomes obvious whether you like change or not.

I don’t know the year when Ignace moved from Turkey to France, or how old he was, and I don’t know how many years he had in his dream city, Paris, before he was murdered. But I hope that he had a few happy years to live with the change he had made and I hope he found what he was looking for.