A History of the Grandparents I Never Had by Jablonka Ivan

Author:Jablonka, Ivan [Jablonka, Ivan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2016-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

6

THE PROVIDENTIAL DENTIST

Gitla Leszcz is in the last stages of life. Her spindly arm, nothing left but veins and tendons, emerges from her yellow “Hospitals of Paris” bedsheet. Her skin is translucent, her muscles melted away. I shake her hand and she stares back with a look of suspicion. Her nails have long since grown back, but her son Serge explains that she never completely regained feeling in her fingers, which was a problem since she was a seamstress.

Serge lives in the suburbs, at a bend in the Seine. We arrive at his place about forty-five minutes late, after getting lost somewhere around the Levallois bridge. Traffic is heavy; my father is cursing the lack of proper signage. While he parks, I dash over to a nearby pastry shop and buy three small pastries. Serge greets us at the door.

“I’m deeply touched,” my father says, shaking his hand warmly. “We read a lot of names on paper, but now yours is no longer an abstraction.”

Our interview is somewhat scattershot, with my father constantly interrupting with new questions, even though we had agreed back in the car on how we would conduct things. “You take the lead,” he insisted. While talking to us, Serge is digging through some boxes belonging to his mother, and pulls out stacks of photos, letters, bank statements, tax returns, utility stubs and lab results, all those pieces of accumulated evidence that prove a person exists. He hands me a text in which his mother tells of the torture she suffered at the Kowel prison in 1933, as well as his father’s autobiography, entitled Trompe-la-mort, or “death dodger.” Raymond Gardebled belonged to the generation traumatized by World War I, and was therefore fiercely antimilitaristic; and yet, when the Spanish Civil War broke out, it made his blood boil, and he signed up with the International Brigades. He refused to call himself an anarchist (though when I checked the National Security archives, I found that he was on file for this opinion-related offense.1) He wasn’t really a hardware dealer; rather, he’d worked for one, but once returned from Spain, he had no job at all, since his bosses refused to take him back. In 1938, he married Gitla Leszcz, a young Polish Jew recently arrived from Dębowa-Kłoda, to save her from being deported. The wedding took place at the Neuilly-sur-Seine town hall, Communist at the time. Love at first sight, or marriage of convenience? Whatever the case, things didn’t work out. On the eve of the war, Raymond and Gitla lived at 7 Place Auguste-Métivier, right over the bakery (which is still there today). So, why did they agree to attest to Matès’s good conduct at the Père-Lachaise police department on 8 October 1939?

“Helping folks out,” said Serge, “that was just part of our family values. Everyone was welcome at our table, even if my mother complained about it later.”

Gitla’s and Idesa’s lives were amazingly similar. One was born on 14 September 1913, the other on 14 May 1914, in two shtetls connected by a small country road.

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