MY EARLIEST MEMORY of Leon dates back to the 1960s, when he was living in Paris with his wife, Rita, my grandmother. They lived in a two-bedroom apartment with a tiny kitchen on the third floor of a worn nineteenth-century building. Halfway up the rue de Maubeuge, the home was dominated by a musty smell and the sound of trains from the Gare du Nord.
Here were some of the things I could recall.
There was the bathroom with pink-and-black tiles. Leon spent a great deal of time here, sitting on his own, occupying a small space behind a plastic curtain. This was a no-go area for me and my more curious younger brother. Occasionally, when Leon and Rita were out shopping, we’d sneak into the forbidden space. Over time, we became more ambitious, examining items on the wooden table that served as his desk in a corner of the bathroom, on which scattered indecipherable papers lay, in French or more foreign languages (Leon’s handwriting was different from anything we’d seen, spidery words stretched across the page). The desk was also littered with watches, old and broken, which fed our belief that our grandfather was a smuggler of timepieces.
Occasional visitors would arrive, elderly ladies with odd names and faces. Madame Scheinmann stood out, dressed in black with a strip of brown fur that hung off the shoulder, a petite face powdered white and a smear of red lipstick. She spoke in a strangely accented whisper, mostly of the past. I didn’t recognize the language (it was Polish, I later learned).
The absence of photographs was another memory. I recalled only one, a black-and-white photograph that stood proud in a beveled glass frame above the unused fireplace: Leon and Rita on their wedding day in 1937. Rita wasn’t smiling in the photograph, or later when I knew her, something I noticed early and never forgot. There seemed to be no scrapbooks or albums, no pictures of parents or siblings (long gone, I was told), and no family memories on public display. There was a black-and-white television, odd copies of Paris Match, which Rita liked to read, but no music.
The past hung over Leon and Rita, a time before Paris, not to be talked about in my presence or in a language I understood. Today, more than forty years later, I realize with a sense of shame that I never asked Leon or Rita about their childhoods. If curiosity existed, it was not permitted to express itself.
There was a silence about the flat. Leon was easier than Rita, who gave the impression of being detached. She spent time in the kitchen, often preparing my favorite Wiener schnitzel and mashed potato. Leon liked to wipe his plate with a piece of bread, so clean it didn’t need to be washed.
A sense of order and dignity abounded, and pride. A family friend who had known Leon since the 1950s remembered my grandfather as a man of restraint. “Always in a suit, beautifully turned out, discreet, never wanting to impose himself.”
Leon encouraged me in the direction of the law. In 1983, when I graduated from university, he offered me a gift of an English-French legal dictionary. “For your entry into a professional life,” he scrawled on the flyleaf. A year later, he sent me a letter with a cutting from Le Figaro, an advertisement looking for an English-speaking international lawyer in Paris. “Mon fils,” he would say, what about this? “My son.” That was what he called me.
Only now, many years later, have I come to understand the darkness of the events through which Leon lived before this time, to emerge with a dignity intact, with warmth and a smile. He was a generous, passionate man, with a fiery temper that sometimes burst forth unexpectedly and brutally, a lifelong socialist who admired the French prime minister Léon Blum and loved soccer, an observant Jew for whom religion was a private matter not to be imposed on others. He was uninterested in the material world and didn’t want to be a burden on anybody. Three things mattered to him: family, food, and home.
I had plenty of happy memories, yet Leon and Rita’s home never seemed to me to be a place of joy. Even as a young boy, I could sense the heaviness, a tension that hung around the rooms, of foreboding and silence. I would visit once a year, and I still recall the absence of laughter. French was spoken, but if the subject was private, my grandparents reverted to German, the language of concealment and history. Leon didn’t seem to have a job, or not the kind that required an early morning departure. Rita didn’t work. She kept things tidy, so the edge of the rug in the living room was always straight. How they paid the bills was a mystery. “We thought he smuggled watches in the war,” my mother’s cousin told me.
What did I know?
That Leon was born in a distant place called Lemberg and moved to Vienna when he was a young boy. It was a period he would not talk about, not with me. “C’est compliqué, c’est le passé, pas important.” That was all he said: it’s complicated, it’s the past, not important. Best not to pry, I understood, a protective instinct. Of his parents and a brother and two sisters, there reigned a complete and impenetrable silence.
What else? He married Rita in 1937 in Vienna. Their daughter, Ruth, my mother, was born a year later, a few weeks after the Germans arrived in Vienna, to annex Austria and impose the Anschluss. In 1939, he moved to Paris. After the war, he and Rita had a second child, a son they called Jean-Pierre, a French name.
Rita died in 1986, when I was twenty-five.
Jean-Pierre died four years later, in a car accident, with both his children, my cousins.
Leon came to my wedding in New York in 1993 and died four years later, in his ninety-fourth year. He took Lemberg to the grave, along with a scarf given to him by his mother in January 1939. It was a parting gift from Vienna, my mother told me as we bade him adieu.
This was what I knew when I received the invitation from Lviv.