Roots?

Gene's mother was born in Paris.  Family legend has it that his grandparents had lived in the rue des Rosiers in the third arrondissement, at that time the center of Eastern European Jewish immigrant life. Apparently they had come separately from Eastern Europe to find work, had been caught in Paris by the outbreak of World War I, met, married, had two children and left for the US in the early 1920s.

A couple of years ago we tried to pin the story down by going to the mairie (the local town hall) of the third arrondissement to get copies of his grandparents' marriage certificate and his mother's birth certificate.  They didn't exist, at least not in that arrondissement.

Somewhere we got a bad photocopy of the page of an official register listing Gene's mother's birth.  Family legend was way off.  Her name was spelled differently, her birthdate was one day off and the family residence was way across town, in Montmartre, on a tiny street climbing the hill behind Sacre Coeur.

The other day three generations of that family went looking for that street:  Gene, his niece and her baby son, with wives along for the ride.  The rue du Chevalier de la Barre is a short, narrow, winding street slipping down the hill behind the huge Basilica of Sacre Coeur, (the official address of which is actually on that street, it turns out).  The street address on the photocopy was unreadable; all we knew was that somewhere on that street a baby had lived who grew up to become Gene's mother and that baby's great-grandson was being carried down the same street nearly 90 years later.

 

It's a pretty little street, vaguely picturesque, steep but not requiring steps to climb it as many others in the neighborhood do.  At the top of the street is a building, le Centre Israelite de Montmartre, with a plaque on it, one of the ubiquitous plaques on Parisian walls commemorating an event or a person.  This one tells of the 79 Jewish children who had been sheltered in that building until the bombardment of April 1944 had forced them out and that they had eventually been arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Auschwitz, where 71 of them had died.  How they had managed to stay there until 1944 isn't clear.

The building is a refuge for homeless Jewish families and has been since 1920.  We don't know if this is where Gene's family lived or if they had an apartment elsewhere on the street.  There is a Jewish creche next door, an infant day care facility.  We don't know if his mother might have been taken there while her parents worked.  We don't know any more details.  What we do know is that if her parents had not left Paris for the United States in the 1920s the chances of any of those three generations being on that street on Tuesday were slim to none.

Just an Ordinary Day

Enter here by objetsparis.

I may have mentioned that we don't tend to get out of the house at the crack of dawn. The fold of noon would be more accurate, in fact. We had no particular plans for the day on Friday but I happened to read that the harvest festival called the Fête des Vendanges was currently happening in Montmartre and thought we might go check it out. Yes, there is a real vineyard still operating in Montmartre.

It was a bit of a ride from our place, but we decided to go up there and have lunch at a wine bar that Clotilde recommends near Abbesses and then wander a bit. Abbesses, by the way, is said to be the deepest metro station in Paris. There is an elevator to get up to the top if you don't want to walk up. We took the elevator up to the surface; when we returned to go down a bit later on it was out of service. Talk about good timing.

Discovering that the recommended wine bar was closed we sat down at a café and got into a conversation with a young couple who looked like they'd had a hard night. In fact, they told us, he works at the Moulin Rouge and they'd partied after the last show. What does he do there? He's a habilleur, a dresser. This raises some interesting questions, it seems to me.  Other than fluffing a few feathers, what can he possibly do for an entire shift? Aren't those dancers nude? Isn't that the point? Gene offered to relieve him for a night or two, just to research the issue.


After saying good bye to our lunch mates we went on to see the apartment we had rented from photos (and reports of friends) but had never actually seen before we committed to spend six months and lots of rent money there. In St-Germain des Près, it's very different from our rustic little nest in the Marais. How different you'll have to wait to find out. We move in on November 1.


Later we were on the metro when my cellphone rang. It was our neighbor S., one of the group with whom we were to have dinner, sounding desperate. She had locked herself out of her apartment.


Now, this is something of a big deal in Paris. For some reason locksmiths have decided that their path to early retirement is paved with opening and replacing locks. We had heard tales of people paying many hundreds of euros to be let into their own apartments. After considering climbing in a window (too high, we didn't have a long enough ladder), shimmying the lock with a credit card like in the movies (we didn't have the knack, apparently) or simply crying (also ineffective) S. finally called a locksmith who agreed to come quickly and said it would cost between 100-350 Euros.


Going out to dinner was clearly not going to happen, so the six of us (the rest had shown up during the proceedings) settled into our kitchen, found pasta, veggies and leftover roast chicken and actually made a pretty good meal. S. however had lost her appetite. The locksmith had shown up, drilled the lock, thereby making it unusable, and told her it would cost 900 Euros to put a new one in! She told him she wouldn't pay any more than the amount she had been quoted and threw him out. The next morning a friend of hers went out to buy a lock and installed it in half an hour. It cost 147 euros.


Hang onto those keys.

Note: I've been having Internet problems and may not be posting as regularly until I figure it out.