Moussa Abadi led a double life. He revealed in detail his secret mission to save children only a few years before he died. But his public life in the theater and as an author made him a well-known figure in French artistic circles decades earlier.
Well before the war, in 1937, Moussa enjoyed his first great success. When only twenty-seven years old he became a rising star. The one-time student actor was hired by a leading French director, Andre Barsacq, for a professional troupe called la Compagnie des Quatre Saisons (The Four Seasons Company), and played the lead role in New York in a classic French comedy, “Knock” by Jules Romains. The play, a satire on modern life, tells the story of a young doctor assigned to a mountain village where no one falls ill. Doctor Knock turns the village tavern into a clinic, introduces scientific methods, and ends up curing the population from illnesses they don’t have. Knock grows rich and the locals regard him as a genius.
Moussa’s troupe had been invited for a five-month engagement, from October 1937 to February 1938, by The French Theater of New York, an off-Broadway house at Fifty-eighth Street and Sixth Avenue. It was a different era. Nobody asked the audience to switch off cell phones. Instead, the program said: “Women are requested to remove their hats during the performance.” “Knock,” and the other plays performed in repertory by the troupe in New York, were all in French, with program notes in English but no modern simultaneous translation. No matter. As always, it was the reviews that counted, and Moussa received excellent notices.
The young Abadi was on his way. Theater would remain his lifeblood for the rest of his days, although his subsequent roles were in real life—as Monsieur Marcel saving lives during the war, and as a theater critic and broadcaster afterward.
One incident during the New York theater-run proved fundamental to Moussa’s outlook on life. He met Antoine de Saint Exupéry, the famed French author and pilot, who inspired him to aim high, despite the risks. Saint Exupéry, author of The Little Prince, set time records as a pilot for long-distance flights such as Paris to Saigon. He died in a plane crash in 1944.
One winter night in early 1938, at loose ends in New York, Saint Exupéry decided to go to The French Theater. After the play he knocked at Moussa’s dressing room door, introduced himself, and said: “I have just spent an enjoyable evening thanks to you. Would you join me for a drink?”1
Moussa readily agreed, fascinated to find himself in the company of a celebrated French hero. Saint Exupéry led Moussa along the Broadway sidewalk and into a bar where he ordered two whiskies followed by two more, and then another two. Moussa, unused to heavy drinking, found it difficult to finish the three whiskeys ordered for him. His head started to spin, but it gave him the courage to question the celebrity he admired both as a writer and a daredevil pilot. Saint-Exupéry had been talking in the bar about his coming attempt to set a new record time for a flight down the length of the Western Hemisphere from northern Canada to southern Argentina.
“You told me you want to break another record,” Moussa said. “Why do you keep trying to break records when you have broken so many already?”
“Undoubtedly to try to surpass myself, to reach the absolute top of my potential,” Saint-Exupéry replied.
“And how do you do that?”
“It’s very simple. You must always try to go through the clouds.”
Moussa never forgot that advice. For the rest of his life, he would aim high, despite the risks, and try to go through the clouds to do his best. When asked years later why he and Odette took the risks they did to save children from the Nazis, Moussa would reply like Saint-Exupéry: “Odette and I had to go through the clouds because we were where that had to be done when it had to be done.”
He continued to aim high after the war. And again, he succeeded, this time as a well-known critic and broadcaster. From 1959 to 1980, Moussa hosted a weekly program on “The Theater of Today” broadcast by Radio France International, in France and around the world. Each of his eight hundred programs over those twenty-one years included an interview with a theater personality, among them the leading actors, directors, and playwrights in France, such as the actor-director Jean-Louis Barrault or the playwright Eugene Ionesco. His broadcasts also included his reviews of current plays.
“I always loved the theater passionately,” Moussa wrote on his retirement as a broadcaster. “I served it to the best of my ability and consecrated a good portion of my life to it. I have perhaps contributed in a modest way to the influence of French culture abroad. Of everything that I did in my life it is perhaps this that I claim with the most pride.” It should be noted that at the time Moussa and Odette had still not gone public with their account of saving 527 children during the war.
Moussa loved every minute of his theater life. He and Odette went to a play almost every night. They mixed socially with the stars of the theatrical world. He befriended younger playwrights, encouraged them, and helped them financially. They in turn adored him.
In interviews with three French playwrights, much the same portrait of Moussa’s character emerges—a strong-willed, uncompromising charmer—all qualities that helped him succeed as Monsieur Marcel in saving the lives of hundreds of children against horrendous odds.
All three playwrights met Moussa as guests on his radio program and all three remained friends with him for decades afterward. Moussa was a perfectionist, they said, just one example of his strong will. He taped his radio interviews. “If he made the slightest mistake in diction, he would stop the tape and record the phrase again,” Victor Haim, an actor-playwright and longtime friend, recalled.2
All three saw Moussa as an exceptional critic. He was honest, saying frankly what he loved about a performance, or what he hated about it, but he never got gratuitously nasty, never set out to destroy a career or a play as he felt some critics did. Moussa worried that critics had too much power. He wanted them to be fair, and tried to impose his own uncompromising standards on them. Once he was so angered by Le Figaro’s critic Pierre Marcabru, who mercilessly panned an actor in a review, that he telephoned Marcabru and berated him for going too far. “You yourself aren’t good enough to play in an amateur theater,” Moussa said, according to the playwright Robert Pouderou, a friend of the Abadis for decades.3
Moussa’s strong will made him unbending in his convictions, and intolerant of those who disagreed with him. Once, Guy Foissy, a playwright and friend of thirty years, showed Moussa a script he had just completed called “The Wake,” a farce about death. “He did not like it at all,” Foissy said. “He did not want Odette to see it. He tore up the script and called it ‘crap.’” A few years later Foissy returned to the subject. “You remember that play you tore up?” he asked Moussa. “You know, it is being performed quite often now.” To which Moussa replied, “So what? That doesn’t change anything. It’s still crap.”4
All three playwrights said Moussa had strong views on what ailed the modern theater. He refused to set foot in any theater that received subsidies from the state, arguing that such financing opened the way to government censorship of plays. He hated producers who put on classic plays for the umpteenth time, a safe bet to sell tickets, but a practice that denied opportunities to aspiring young playwrights with worthy new offerings—underdogs whom Moussa had long championed. Most of all he despised pompous theater directors. He felt they stole plays from the authors and, out of vanity, distorted them to enhance their own reputations.
Moussa himself stressed this point in La Comédie du Theatre (The Comedy of the Theater), published in 1985, the first of the three books he wrote. The passages in which he skewers directors are also good examples of his charm, his writing talents, and his impish humor. “The director is the child of our century,” Moussa wrote. “He came to the world of the theater three thousand years after the author and the actor, and now it is he who reigns as the head of the family.” Moussa called directors “omnipotent computers” and “absolute tyrants.” Pity the poor author, Moussa wrote. The director proposes “a slight modification, only a suggestion, of course” to the author. By the fifteenth rehearsal, the slight modifications have transformed the meaning of the play. “The author permits himself to raise his little finger to remind the director that the play he wrote was a light comedy conceived only to amuse but has been turned into a heavy satire on daily bourgeois life.” The original happy ending has been turned into a suicide. All that remains is the title, originally “Springtime for Martine.” The director changes that to “The Machine.”5
People who spent time in Moussa’s company called him a great raconteur. He spoke beautiful French with a slight accent, rolling the letter R while recalling weird anecdotes from theater life such as this one told to Robert Pouderou:
A man came to the box office of a Paris theater with a dog and asked for two tickets. “Are you expecting someone?” the cashier asked. “No, it’s for my dog,” the man said. “Wait a minute,” said the cashier. “I have to ask the manager if you can bring in a dog.” But the man would not be put off. “Don’t worry,” he told he cashier, “my dog is extremely well-behaved.” The theater was far from full that night so the cashier relented and sold the man two tickets. During the first act the lead actress began a long tirade. The dog, on a seat near the stage, let out a long howl. “Shut up,” the man said to his dog in a voice loud enough for everyone in the theater to hear. “Let the lady talk.”
Moussa was generous to a fault. He had money in later life. Two incomes made Moussa and Odette comfortable. They lived in a modest apartment, had no children, and few expenses. They treated themselves to dinner in the best restaurants and vacations at luxury hotels. Moussa often invited younger playwrights to lunch and always picked up the check. “When we had financial problems, he lent us money,” Victor Haim recalled. “He never asked when we were going to pay him back.” The young authors would pay the debt eventually in cash, theater tickets, or gifts. “I must have had a dozen lunches with him per year,” Robert Pouderou said. “I would tell him it’s my turn, but he always insisted on paying. I would pay him back by inviting him and Odette to the theater.”
Over lunch they would talk about the theater, about politics, but never about Moussa’s clandestine past. Victor Haim once got close to the subject. “I had the feeling he wanted to say something,” Victor remembered. “He started a sentence, but broke it off and all he said was ‘someday I will tell you.’ I never had the curiosity or the courage to ask him what would he tell me. I was younger. It was not considered polite to press an older person.” (Moussa was already in his sixties at the time of that lunch, and Victor twenty-five years younger.) “I figured when he was ready to talk, he would tell me,” Victor said. “But of course, he never said a word about the Marcel Network.”
Guy Foissy got even closer to the truth, without ever knowing it. In the 1980s, Moussa and Odette came to visit Foissy in Grasse and took long walks with him around the city and outlying villages. They passed the convents, schools, and homes where they hid Jewish children during the war, often smiling but without saying a word. They didn’t explain anything to Foissy about what these places meant to them. “It was very strange,” Foissy said. “They were obviously getting pleasure reliving something, but I didn’t understand what.” In Grasse, they passed the theater where Jeannette Wolgust had played Joan of Arc. The building had become a bank. “That’s where it was,” Odette told Moussa, without elaboration. Only he could understand that she meant the former theater. Foissy, uncomprehending, walked on.
The three playwrights agreed that Moussa was a high-maintenance friend. They loved him, but admitted that it required work to keep the friendships going. He had a temper, demanded total loyalty, easily took offense, and often broke off friendships with people who told him something he did not want to hear. His broken relationships included both casual acquaintances and close friends like Victor Haim.
Victor was acting in a play at the Petit Odéon, a theater in Paris. Moussa phoned him after attending the dress rehearsal with other critics. “You started well,” Moussa told him, “but then you were not so good. You got better later.”
“I had the reaction of an actor,” Victor said. “I am opening in the play tonight,” he told Moussa in a raised voice. “You should not be giving an actor negative criticism on opening night. Give me a chance. The part I am playing is hard enough. If you start tearing me apart just before I go onstage that is not encouraging.”
“One cannot tell you anything,” Moussa replied. He said he had wanted to be helpful. Victor’s reaction and tone of voice angered him. So Moussa broke off the relationship. Victor tried to repair the damage, to no avail. He phoned Moussa and apologized, as if it had been his reaction rather than Moussa’s action that caused the problem. He wrote Moussa, and appealed to him through Odette. But Moussa refused to resume the friendship that had lasted twenty years. The same uncompromisingly stubborn willfulness that ruined his friendship with Victor and others was what had enabled Moussa to save children in his earlier clandestine life.
Even Victor, and the other friends Moussa broke with, never stopped adoring him. It pained them that he put them off. They were not blind to his faults. But in the end they still remembered him fondly. They, like all Moussa’s friends, missed him and regretted his passing. To them, he remained an outsized character, a charmer, warm and generous, and, above all, an exceptional raconteur.
The stories he told usually came from one of the two worlds that shaped his life: the theater, the subject of his first book; and his youth in the Damascus ghetto, the basis for the other two. In his last two books, his storytelling skills reached their peak. The first, La Reine et le Calligraphe (The Queen and the Calligrapher) published in 1993, won the grand prize of the Académie Française, one of the most distinguished literary awards in France, roughly equivalent to the Pulitzer Prize or the National Book Award. Moussa won it in the category for short stories. The sequel, a further collection of short stories from the ghetto called Shimon-le-parjure (Shimon the Perjurer) was published in 1999. Both are subtitled Mes Juifs de Damas (My Jews of Damascus) and recount ghetto life in the 1920s.
Some seventy years separate the scenes in the ghetto from publication of the stories, a lapse of time allowing Moussa to exploit an imperfect memory with so many embellishments that the reader cannot tell the fact from the fiction. In all the stories Moussa lovingly re-creates the absurdities of ghetto life, with humor and a sharp eye for just the right detail to ring true. Examples follow, one from each of the Damascus books.
In La Reine, Moussa’s uncle, a member of the ghetto’s administrative council, visits a school that was supposed to be modernized with new equipment. He finds the new desks and benches just purchased piled up in a heap, unused, in a corner of the schoolroom. The children are on the floor memorizing Psalms.
This was then the state of what we called a modern school. My uncle asked the children to go play in the courtyard without making too much noise. Then he addressed himself to the specialist on Psalms like one speaks to a delinquent caught in the act of shoplifting.
“And now rabbi, you can perhaps explain why you are not using either the desks or the benches or even the chair that Mourade the carpenter made especially to measurements to accommodate the curve of your ample backside.”
“Desks. Benches. A blackboard. What would you want me to do with them?” the rabbi replied. “I taught for forty years in Aleppo. I have educated hundreds of Talmudists without ever resorting to such useless objects. One is far better off sitting on the floor. Our ancestors had no chairs or blackboards and that didn’t stop them.”6
In Shimon, the ghetto’s Rabbinical Court convenes to hear a divorce case.
The court, presided over by our Grand Rabbi, assisted by two notables and the rabbis Aboulafia and Khalfoune, had a peculiarity. Whatever the rigorists of Jerusalem might have thought, our court did nothing to enhance its own credibility. Its illustrious president spoke only Ladino, his mother tongue. And since no one else in the ghetto understood this “foreign” language, it was the wife of the Grand Rabbi—la Signora—who was given the task of interpreting, which she performed for better or worse, and usually for the worse as she came from Salonika and possessed only the vaguest rudiments of Arabic which she learned on weekly visits taking tea at the homes of the great ladies of our bourgeoisie.
She had to attend all sessions of the court, next to her husband, and translate for him, word for word, everything that was said, and sometimes what was not said, by the litigants and witnesses, people who, let’s face it, were only grudgingly tolerant of the presence of a woman in the tribunal, even if she was the wife of the Grand Rabbi.7
Moussa had a way with words. He was the talker. And Odette let him talk for both of them. But Odette was a formidable personality in her own right, something her many friends never let anyone forget. Together they were an extraordinary couple, as they proved in running the Marcel Network as a true joint venture. Neither could have done it without the other.