Dear Friends,

Are cities rivers or trees? It’s a peculiar way to ask the question, but the question itself isn’t at all peculiar. In fact, it was the specific question that I noticed haunting me last week as I wandered around Paris first with my younger son Emil and then, after a few days, also with my daughter Lucy and her boyfriend.

I know I’ve raised this river/tree thing with you in the not too distant past, but let’s review again quickly. Rivers flow endlessly from their subterranean sources into the sea. The water is always in motion, always moving in the same direction, always traveling the same path…but, of course, it’s not really traveling the same trajectory because it’s not really the same water. Indeed, that’s the whole concept in a nutshell: the framework—the river bank and the river bed and the line the river draws on the map—is always the same, but the water itself that is  the river, that’s the part that’s never the same at all. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. Where it goes, who knows? It flows into the ocean to be lost amidst countless billions of gallons of sea water or it precipitates up into the sky eventually to return as rain or it seeps into the earth to become part of the alluvial mud that forms the middle ground between sea and dry land. But gone is gone…and gone is what the water in any river surely is once it flows past your feet on its way to wherever it’s going never to return no matter how long you stand there and wait.

Trees, on the other hand, are entirely different. They too grow through a certain growth trajectory from saplinghood to adulthood to death. (Even the biggest trees die, at least eventually.) But unlike rivers, trees keep it all inside. Rings upon rings of inner history are preserved within the bark and beneath the blea and there they remain for as long as the tree stands. Indeed, even if a woodman fells the tree, the rings inside still remain in place as mute testimony to what came before for as long as the trunk is intact…and this is so even when the tree itself is no longer a living thing and thus incapable of adding rings in the future.

I was first in Paris in the fall of 1972. I was nineteen years old, untried in the ways of the world and naïve in the extreme about most things, including—if I remember correctly, which I do—those specific things in life that would eventually matter to me the most. I spent a week there semi-successfully trying to figure out which way was up, then headed off for the French-language ulpan offered in those days by the University of Rheims for foreign students planning to spend the upcoming academic year in French universities. Eventually, I made my way even further east to devote a year to studying—because I was already on my way to becoming who I eventually turned myself into—not French at all (which came, to put things mildly, as a bit of a surprise to my academic overlords at CUNY) but Hebrew at the University of Nancy, a city in the east of France about two-thirds of the way from Paris to the German border that ended up playing its own unexpected role in my journey into the rabbinate. I’ll write about that too someday, but now I want to talk about Paris.

It feels like a lifetime ago. On Christmas Eve, my parents arrived. They had been to Paris a few times before—my mother spoke French well and could get around easily—and, having installed themselves in a tiny hotel on the Rue des Eaux just across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower, they proceeded to be my parents in the American mode. They bought me a winter coat at the Galleries Lafayette. They professed alarm, which I thought exaggerated at the time but now realize was probably entirely genuine, at how thin I had become. (I heard that! But I had recently begun to keep kosher, but without any clear sense how to go about it other than by not eating most of what they served at the restaurant universitaire attached to my dormitory. I must have looked terrible, and all the worse because I had allowed my then-all-black beard to grow in and hadn’t had the sense or the sensitivity to trim it even slightly before my fastidious parents arrived for their visit. I must have been making a point, although I can’t quite recall what the point actually was.) On New Year’s Eve, we went to see Barbara Streisand in Hello, Dolly!, even then a few years old—it was made in 1969, I believe—but for some obscure reason in those years sufficiently beloved by the French (I heard that too, by the way) to warrant a gala New Year’s Eve screening in one of the large movie houses on the Champs Elysées.  In between shopping expeditions and trips to the movies, we walked around and argued about my future, about the unexpected direction of my studies, about the worth of kashrut, about Viet Nam—the draft was going to end only weeks later, but we had no idea—and about all the other things kids and their parents fought over in the early 1970s. And then they left for the airport and I, untrimmed beard and new coat and all, returned to the Gare de l’Est awash in some soupy amalgam of elation, depression, and confusion and took the train back to Nancy.

I’d been back several times since then when I landed at CDG ten days ago. The Seine, Paris’ defining physical landmark, is still flowing. The Eiffel Tower is still there. So, I suppose, is the Rue des Eaux, although I didn’t bother walking over to see if my parents’ ghosts were hovering anywhere overhead. (They’re always somewhere around anyway, so there wasn’t really any need.) My very good friend Rivon Krygier, rabbi of the Adath Shalom synagogue in Paris, and his wife Raphaelle were the consummate hosts, inviting us over and over to their home for fabulous meals and Rivon even heading out with me very late one night to hang out in one of the most picturesque parts of Montmartre for a bit of time alone together. We were only there together for four days, but we had a great time. I had a great time. In some weird way, it was like visiting with my nineteen-year-old self as I walked along the same streets I remembered strolling along back then and recovered some of those ancient feelings that I had considered long flowed off into the sea, but which I now noticed present beneath the outer bark of urban landscape in a way I wouldn’t have thought possible.  So now I know for sure…cities are trees, not rivers!

As all my readers know, however, my parents’ ghosts aren’t the only ones accompanying me on my journey through life.  And those ghosts too were present, more mute than my parents’ usually are but no less real.  We stayed in a hotel near the Place Cambronne on a street just off the Boulevard de Grenelle. We were, therefore, just seven short blocks away from the Rue Nélaton where there once stood the Vélodome d’Hiver, the indoor bicycling track and hockey rink popular called the Vel d’Hiv in which over 13,000 Jewish men, women, and children were assembled on July 16, 1942, and where they were subsequently imprisoned for eight days with minimal food and water, and with no toilet facilities at all, until they were deported first to Drancy and then to Auschwitz. (Of the 13,152 detainees, 400 survived not including any of the children.)

This story has been part of my past too for almost as long as I can remember because my year in France was also a profound year in the story of my own Jewish awakening. I lived down the street in Nancy from a building that had a plaque on its side marking it as the former headquarters of the Gestapo. And in the course of my many visits to the local synagogue, I met any number of men and women who survived either in hiding or in exile, plus the occasional person who had somehow survived the camps.  (It seems amazing for me to note that the war had only been over for twenty-seven years when I was a student in France.   People who survived as teenagers were younger then than I am now.) And the fact that the horrific murder of the Israeli athletes at the Olympics in Munich took place on one of the first days I was in Nancy only heightened my sense of being, for the first time in my life, on the ground where the Shoah was not history but reality…and, as I grew into myself, my personal reality as well.   And so, as I grew into my Jewish self, the survivors among whom I lived became “my” survivors, and their story in some way my own. I didn’t meet anyone who had actually been present at the Vel d’Hiv in the summer of 1942, nor have I ever since. But I somehow incorporated this specific Shoah story into my own recollective consciousness in a way that was especially deep. 

In retrospect, it’s not hard for me to understand how or why that happened. The Nazis were the Nazis, but the people deported from the Vel d’Hiv were arrested by 450 French policemen acting upon the orders of the Germans, a detail first openly acknowledged by the president of France only in 1995.  So the Vel d’Hiv affair stands out in my mind as the definitive example of how fragile life even in the most gilded diaspora setting really is. This was, after all, France itself we were talking about—the country of the Enlightenment that gave the world the Declaration of the Rights of Man—not some country unfamiliar with the concept of civil rights and the obligation of any state to protect its people against foreign aggressors. The emotional experience of confronting this story somehow became the spur in my own life that led me to embrace a future inextricably intertwined with the development of my own Jewishness and the self-imposed obligation to deny the Nazis the posthumous victory that would be constituted by the end of meaningful Jewish life in the lands of our dispersion. And there we were just down the block, walking by—or driving by or taking the Métro by—each day of our stay at least once.

In the end, the world returned to its normal ways. The Vel d’Hiv re-opened as a bicycle track, then closed for good in 1959.  Some apartment houses and a French government office building now stand on the ground it once occupied. The plaque that noted what had happened there was moved to some building nearby, then replaced entirely with a commemorative statue in 1994. (It was there, at that site, that Chirac made the very memorable speech referenced above just a year later.) Not one person in a thousand who passes by stops to consider in detail—or possibly even at all—what happened in that place. I wondered how many months it would take for me to stop looking out the window when the train passes by, how long it would take me to forget, to tell myself that what’s past is past and thus best forgotten (or at least not obsessively dwelled on). The answer to that is…who knows?  I first walked past that corner closer to forty than thirty years ago and I still can’t not look. Of course, I don’t pass it daily. Years go by without me being in Paris…so really who knows? But it’s there. And I’m here too…so maybe I’m destined permanently to retain my self-generated attraction to that place and that particular horror story of degradation and death among so many analogous stories. I’ll let you know if my interest flags!

Paris is as beautiful as ever, as elegant and charming a city as there is on God’s earth. Even the weather cooperated during our stay—no snow, no rain, reasonable temperatures—and the mood in the streets seemed upbeat and friendly.  My trip wasn’t the best thing for my waistline or my wallet, but it was excellent for my spirits and I highly recommend four days in Paris to all of you in need of a quick infusion of urban culture at its finest. I’ve gotten used to my ghosts over the years, even the ones hovering over the corner of the Boulevard de Grenelle and the Rue Nélaton. They’re part of me now, and I’ve made my peace with that too. It’s not the simplest way to live…but it’s one of those peculiar burdens in my life that would actually be heavier and more upsetting to set down than to continue to carry along as the river of my life flows on to the great sea that awaits us all.                                 

Sincerely,