It was in Paris that my birthday almost disappeared.
We had been there several months, stuck in the Violet Hotel. Fear for my brothers’ safety finally clinched the decision: my father had chosen America. But that in no way guaranteed we would be able to go. Our application was winding its way through the mazelike bureaucracy of global refugee resettlement agencies, and we still hadn’t unpacked.
My father now occasionally ventured to Montmartre, where an outdoor fair, complete with barkers and games of chance, restored his good humor. His passion for gambling found an improbable outlet amid the small kiosks where for less than a franc and the spin of a wheel of fortune, it was possible to vie for watches, dishes, pocketknives, transistor radios, even jewelry, which I eyed longingly, since all I possessed was the pair of earrings I’d found inside the chocolate Easter egg. The fair became Dad’s daily destination, after morning prayers and before joining the sad sacks who gathered at noon at a nearby soup kitchen.
The Cojasor had set up an elaborate system of meals for the waves of immigrants from the Levant. A communal cafeteria on the rue Richer, a block from our hotel, served hot, nutritious meals that adhered to the strictest Jewish dietary laws, all for a nominal fee. Once a day, around noon, elegant socialites from the sixteenth arrondissement descended on a mission to help feed the poor and destitute, which now included my family.
At Le Richer, as we called it, meals were freshly prepared and plentiful—almost too plentiful. Every few minutes, bejeweled volunteers came to our table, offering to ladle more food on our plates from the large tureens they carted up and down the aisle. They seemed more than willing to offer us extra helpings of dishes that tasted foreign and delicious—especially the charcuterie they served once a week with bread and mustard. I’d never tasted cold cuts in Cairo, where the lone kosher purveyor had packed up and moved before my family left.
I found the thin slices of salami and turkey Le Richer offered us intensely exotic, unlike any food I’d ever eaten.
An elderly countess—at least, that is what César said she was—gold bracelets dripping from her arms, precious stones adorning the fingers of each hand, would approach us and always ask the same question, in the high, squeaky aristocratic voice that my oldest brother loved to imitate: “Beaucoup ou un peu?”—A lot or a little?
If we shyly nodded beaucoup, she heaped our plates with mountainous portions of meat, rice, vegetables, and potatoes, and if we said “Un peu,” she still tried to fill our plates to the brim, so that it really didn’t matter how we answered her. We were encouraged to take food home; among the few amenities of the Violet Hotel was a small kitchenette with a rechaud, an electric burner where it was possible to recycle leftovers and have them for our supper.
Though the volunteers behaved graciously and made sure no one went hungry, most of us still found Le Richer impossibly bleak. Dad yearned for his simple meals of pita bread and cheese. My sister couldn’t get used to the noisy, impersonal cafeteria-style dining. I longed to be seated at our dining room table , sneaking bits and pieces from my plate to Pouspous.
Day after day, we had nothing much to do except report for lunch and rejoin the community of losers who shared our sense of aimlessness.
My reprieve from the world of exiles and lost souls came as a result of my mom’s restlessness. After news of Alexandra’s passing, she began to take long walks with me, clutching my hand and forcing me to wander with her for hours through Paris. We sprinted down the passage Violet and over to Montmartre and its bustling, low-budget stores, with their foraging and stampeding crowds of shoppers, and continued to walk for miles until the scenery changed, the stores became silent and spare, and the people we glimpsed within them seemed to glide rather than walk.
We crossed boulevards and avenues. We explored alleyways and peered into courtyards. We traversed bridges and islands. I knew only to hold her hand tightly and try to keep up. Her brisk intense pace was so different from my dad’s labored shuffle.
The few words she exchanged with my father were to ask for a few coins each day. She would use them sparingly, conscious of how little we had, and treat me to an ice-cream cone or a bag of chips. It had to be one or the other, not both. Each day, I was forced to make what seemed an impossibly difficult decision, as tough in its own way as the choice that had been rankling my parents and siblings, namely, whether to settle in Israel or America.
I, too, couldn’t make up my mind, couldn’t decide between a cool refreshing vanilla ice cream or the crisp, salty potato chips I’d never tasted before France. I tried desperately to accept the limits placed on my once limitless needs and desires, the needs and desires of a pampered little Levantine girl, used to seeing the world from her charmed balcony facing Malaka Nazli.
Occasionally we walked with a purpose and destination. We ventured to the Prisunic, the French five-and-dime with its bins of bargain fare, or the Tuileries gardens, whose bucolic expanse was so restful. But nothing gave us more pleasure than going to Parc Monceau, the lush, rich children’s playground nestled in the seventeenth arrondissement. It seemed miraculous that it was free and accessible to us because so much of Paris was out of bounds—the lovely bistros and cafés, the theater, the opera or the Comédie Française, all cost money we didn’t have.
As we prepared to walk through the wrought-iron gates with the gold “PM” insignia, Mom reminded me this was Marcel Proust’s playground, and she said it with so much feeling and intensity that I knew I was expected to absorb the magic that she suggested was in the air and the grass and the swings and the sandlots.
I noticed a change in Mom the minute we entered. It was as if we had reached a spot where the oxygen level was higher, and she could breathe again. There, amid the Japanese gardens and rolling brooks, in the shadow of simulacra of an Egyptian pyramid and a Roman ruin where toddlers played before the watchful eyes of their English nannies, my mother seemed to come to life again, and her beauty returned.
As Edith sat on a bench gazing at the elegant young mothers, feeling neither young nor elegant, but distinctly more hopeful, I ran in the grass, fed the ducks in the pond, climbed hills, and watched puppet shows alongside the other children whose outfits probably cost more than all my family now possessed.
The sandlot and the swings were great equalizers. I began to join in their games, strangely at ease with the privileged girls of the Parc Monceau. This most exclusive corner of Paris emerged as the most egalitarian.
Certainly, I felt more at home there than at my school. I attended the École Chabrol, around the corner from the hotel. Though it was a working-class public school, I felt wildly inferior to my classmates, who arrived each morning in stylish pink or blue nylon smocks over their street clothes. My parents couldn’t afford to buy me either. In my unfashionable dark woolen slacks and sweater from Cairo—and no colorful smock—I felt awkward and out of place. I suffered in silence, not daring to complain.
I thought yearningly back to my gray-and-white jumper with the embroidered crest, the uniform of the Lycée Français de Bab-el-Louk. My first day of school, I’d walked round and round the courtyard with my friends, feeling terribly stylish and grown-up in my elegant cotton dress. My books were in a brown leather satchel my father purchased for me and which I carried in my arms, comme les grandes filles—like the older girls.
On our last day on Malaka Nazli, as we pondered what remaining items to stuff in our suitcases, I kept staring at my leather bag, lying there on the dining room table. I started to reach for it a dozen times, but then Pouspous wandered in and commanded all my attention, so that the bag stayed on the table as we walked out the door.
I found the French girls of the École Chabrol alien so that even French, my native language, began sounding oddly foreign to my ears. Come lunchtime, I’d join my family at the Richer, even as the other little girls bonded in the cafeteria. During afternoon recess, I stood by myself in a corner of the schoolyard, praying for the games to end.
I am not sure whether I was pleased or mortified when my teacher surprised me with a gift.
One morning, I came to class and found a box on my chair. Inside was a small beige canvas book bag with leather trim inscribed “Pour Loulou.” Had my kindly homeroom teacher noticed my discomfiture and sense of isolation? After months at the school, I hadn’t made a single friend and barely spoke to anyone.
Somehow, I still managed to finish the year on a high note, collecting first prize at la distribution des prix held in the auditorium, where the mayor of Paris came to hand out the awards. I heard my name and stepped up to the stage, where stacks of books were lined up on a long table. Monsieur le Maire shook my hand as he gave me a set of books, tied together by a silk ribbon. Later that day, Mom and I trooped to the Cojasor to show off my bounty—the collected works of Hans Christian Andersen, a history book, and a fat Larousse dictionary. My mother was in a surprisingly jaunty mood, and Madame Dana beamed, thrilled either with my performance in school or, more likely, with the fact that Edith at last was smiling.
My birthday on September 19 was fast approaching. It would all be different then, I was sure of that. It was, in part, a child’s mystical belief in the power and transcendence of birthdays. But it was also Cairo, where my birthday was a day when the world seemed to come to a full stop and all efforts were expended on making it as pleasurable as possible. My father saw to that.
It always began with the doorbell ringing early in the morning.
“Loulou, c’est pour toi,” my father called out from his seat by the window facing Malaka Nazli. I’d run to the door to find Abdo, our porter, carrying an enormous white cardboard box bearing the distinctive name in blue lettering—Maison Groppi. Abdo would hand me the box, which was almost too heavy for me to carry. I didn’t need to open it to know what was inside. The white box from Maison Groppi had been arriving on my birthday ever since I could remember.
To the end, my father had indulged my passion for Groppi’s. Going there every afternoon was a ritual for the two of us, as it had been in former years for my siblings, and even my rebellious, wayward sister had happily accompanied Dad there and allowed him to treat her to one dessert after another.
Because we could never bear to leave, Dad and I would take a piece of Groppi’s home with us—some of its delectable crème Chantilly. The cream had such a rich consistency, the staff simply placed it in a compact white cardboard box and tied a string around it, and voilà: it would withstand the taxi ride back to Malaka Nazli.
The box that I carried from the door to the living room was bigger. I tore it open and found what looked like a wedding cake, large, white, with pink sugar lettering and frosted flowers and curlicues and other elaborate decorations made of cream. On it were the words “Bon Anniversaire,” in butter frosting. It was too early in the day to eat cake but no matter—it was also impossible to resist.
My father helped me cut large slices for members of my family, who gathered by the living room sofa. I was of course entitled to as much as I could possibly handle. I tried in vain to tempt Pouspous with some of my cake, holding it to her nose, but she seemed singularly unimpressed, the only resident of Malaka Nazli—possibly in all of Cairo—who had no use for Groppi’s delicacies. My last birthday in Egypt was spent laughing, opening gifts, and hearing my family marvel at how Groppi’s had outdone itself this year.
Paris seemed on the verge of obliterating all of that.
On September 19, I left school as usual to meet my family at the Richer for lunch. They were seated at their familiar table in the corner. The cafeteria was hot and more crowded on this autumn day, perhaps because of a new wave of refugees. The old countess came by and tried to pile extra portions on my plate. My family began eating as if it were any other day. I picked anxiously at my food.
It was when our aristocratic waitress returned to ask if I wanted more that I snapped. I took the plate heaped with hot food and hurled it across the floor, smashing it into dozens of small pieces that flew across the room, along with clumps of rice and meat and vegetables. My family sat, horrified at my uncharacteristic display of rage, aware that the entire dining room had turned to stare at us. Even the well-meaning countess was speechless, her gracious smile faded, and she looked as if she were about to cry.
I demanded to know where my cake was—my birthday cake from Groppi’s:
“Mais où est-il?” I asked my bewildered parents and siblings. “Où est le gâteau d’anniversaire?”
My mother tried to level with me. It wasn’t possible to get me a birthday cake this year, she said. It simply wasn’t possible. Besides, I wasn’t a child anymore. At seven, she said, I was old enough to understand how much our circumstances had changed: “Loulou, nous sommes à des milliers de kilomètres de chez Groppi”—Loulou, we are thousands of miles away from Groppi’s.
My father rose slowly—it was difficult for him to get up from a chair these days. He motioned to me to follow him.
Together, we walked out of the Richer. I could feel all eyes on us. We strolled silently up the streets near Poissonière, passing countless fur wholesalers featuring luxuriant mink and sable coats in their windows—items that no one in the neighborhood could afford, produced for an outside clientele we never saw, who didn’t deign to venture on to our street.
We continued walking until we came to a small bakery, the size of a broom closet, with a simple display of baguettes in the window.
Inside, a glass case featured a modest selection of cakes. They couldn’t have been more than a couple of inches wide, but they were delicate and elegant in the manner of all French pastries, decorated with waves of frosting, cherries, strawberries, and puffs of Chantilly cream.
“Combien, madame?” my father politely asked the woman behind the counter.
She went through the price list with us. He finally pointed to a small cake with cream frosting and nodded. She placed it in a square white box, tied it with string, and handed it to my father, who in turn gave it to me to carry. I took the box, but I didn’t say a word.
I had begun to feel horribly guilty and ashamed, as it finally dawned on me that my father had spent much of the family’s allowance simply to get me to stop crying. It was then that I understood that life as I had known it was never going to be the same. While most children mature many years later, my coming-of-age took place on the afternoon of my seventh birthday, outside a small Parisian bakery.