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Paris ˜ My boyfriend and I were headed out for Sunday
brunch when we saw it. The storefront Jewish center across from our
apartment had been torched during the night. Our tiny street, the Rue
Popincourt, was blockaded by the French police and swarming with
reporters. To make it clear this wasn¦t an accidental fire, police had
hauled a freezer from inside the center, on which the arsonists had
scrawled two backwards swastikas in red marker. Photographers were
jostling for a shot of it.
I couldn¦t help it: I burst into tears.
The center was where old Jewish men from the neighborhood spent their
afternoons, often spilling out onto the pavement outside and into a nearby
cafe. The building¦s heavy wooden doors, carved with two Stars of David,
were always wide open. I had only lived on the street a few months, and
hadn¦t yet worked up the nerve to go inside. But whenever I walked past I
would strain to see what they were doing in there.
Standing in
front of the wreckage that Sunday, I found out what they¦d been doing: not
much. Until about 40 years ago the center, built in 1913, had been the
synagogue for Jews from Turkey who owned the wholesale clothing shops
along the Rue Popincourt, and lived in apartments upstairs. They spoke
Judeo-Spanish and met in local cafes called (le Bosphore,¦ (L¦Istanbul¦
and (L¦Athenes.¦
When waves of North African Jews arrived in the
1960s, a bigger synagogue opened down the road. The Rue Popincourt locale
morphed into a canteen for France¦s dwindling world of Ottoman Jews, and
whoever else wandered in for a hot meal. Immigrants from mainland China
began buying up the clothing shops, but men who¦d had their bar mitzvahs
in the old synagogue still lived in apartments they¦d grown up in. They
spent afternoons kibitzing in French and Ladino at the center and, as most
everyone in France aspires to do, enjoying a few cigarettes and a glass of
wine.
The neighborhood seemed to have a sweet spot for the old
guys. Shocked neighbors arrived at the scene of the fire and huddled with
us. People who had barely said (bonjour¦ before now introduced themselves.
Jean-Claude, a teacher with his son propped on his shoulders, gave us a
brief history of the neighborhood, and pointed out the best boulangerie
and gym. We met a friendly British fellow who lives right next door.
Together, we all speculated on who could have started the fire ˜ Muslim
youths, skinheads? There were rumors of more anti-Semitic scrawlings
inside the building; we¦d later learn these were misspelled and somewhat
contradictory invectives including references to (itler,¦ (Vive l¦Islams¦
and (France to the French¦ ˜ a far-right slogan.
A man in a
yarmulke who¦d been conferring with police approached us and asked why I
was crying. (We shouldn¦t cry, we should be strong!¦ he said in a rousing
voice. Then, looking over at the swastikas he leaned in and whispered,
(but also we must leave.¦
Leave? I¦d only just arrived in Paris,
to set up house with Simon. We were drawn to this area¦s cobblestone
streets and loft apartments. We hadn¦t known about the Ottoman Jewish
history, but we were tickled that the local kosher and hallel butchers
seemed to sit benignly across the street from each other.
We spent
many dinners trying to convince visiting American friends that France
isn¦t the snake pit of Jew haters they seemed eager to imagine. Certainly
I was concerned about the rise in anti-Semitic crimes, and I agreed police
needed to do a better job of solving them. But I could see that the
perpetrators were almost all on the margins of French life: far-right
ideologues, and children of Muslim immigrants who felt deeply alienated
themselves.
The people in charge of the country seemed genuinely
disturbed by the Popincourt attack. Within hours of the fire our street
was visited by the French prime minister, and the mayor of Paris.
President Jacques Chirac vowed to prosecute. Israel¦s foreign minister
flew in to inspect the damage. Newspapers ran full-page stories on the
fire, and teams of police kept a 24-hour vigil over the now boarded-up
building. An unknown Islamist group took credit for the fire.
But
the attack confirmed the suspicions of friends in the U.S., who read about
it in The New York Times. My friend Julia sent an urgent e-mail from the
Upper West Side: (I can¦t believe you live across the street from that
Jewish center. That is very upsetting+If anti-Semitism becomes an
increasing problem in Paris I think you should move back to NYC!¦
Her panic seemed overblown, but I had to wonder whether she had a
point. I began to see the darker possibilities along the Rue Popincourt:
at the local beauty salon, a technician recounted how two women in
headscarves, who¦d come to have their eyebrows waxed, walked out when they
noticed her Star of David necklace. I started to wonder why the Chinese
merchants hadn¦t joined the protests after the fire. And did I catch the
kosher butcher scowling?
About 10 days after the fire, police
arrested the alleged arsonist. He¦s a 52-year-old Jewish man, born in
Casablanca, who had worked as a guard at the center and was apparently
aggravated about losing his low-rent apartment. They found keys to the
center and a red marker in his house; he¦d gone missing right after the
fire. It was confusing: Were we safe again? Maybe the butcher wasn¦t
scowling after all.
Like the real ones, fake anti-Semitic attacks
are on the rise in France too. In July, a woman who wasn¦t Jewish claimed
a band of Muslim kids thought she was, and attacked her on a train.
Politicians raised a stink, until the woman confessed she¦d made the whole
thing up. Another attention-seeker in Lyon said he¦d defaced Jewish graves
because his earlier attack on a Muslim man hadn¦t gotten enough press.
An American friend arrived in Paris this week, and I gave him a
tour of the neighborhood. (This is the best boulangerie,¦ I said, newly in
the know. And then, pointing at the boarded storefront across the street,
I added (and this is where we had our faux anti-Semitic
attack.¦ It¦s a landmark
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