Short stories & memoirs

The Forgotten Book

Short story — 2017

Arnaud has gone away for the weekend in Normandy.

He is walking on the beach at Trouville. It rained in the night, and a strong west wind followed; the beach is still wet. But winter stays mild here, and one can walk for a long while without getting too cold. Arnaud walks slowly, which lets his thoughts drift, lets him reflect on his past, his childhood and the present. He has put on his walking shoes, fairly waterproof. His parka, over his jacket, protects him from the gusts of rain that come now and then.

Ahead of him, twenty or thirty metres off, he notices an object that stirs a little. He comes closer. It is a bound book. The cover is leather, the title in gilt letters that fortunately remain a little visible. He picks the book up carefully. He looks at the title: “Memoirs of my childhood.” The author’s name is illegible, effaced by the water or by time. The first pages are hard to read: the leaves are still stuck together, wet. He tries to make out the first page.

Wholly absorbed in his task, he does not see the human form coming toward him. It arrives, draws near.

— Hello.
It is a young woman of twenty to thirty. Fairly tall. Blue eyes. Brown hair cut short. She wears a long, dark-blue raincoat.
— Hello.
— I forgot a book last evening while strolling on the beach. You haven’t seen anything?
— It might be the one I’m holding. I’ve just found it. It looks rather old. They don’t make leather-bound books any more. I was wondering whom it could belong to. I had already built a whole story around this book.
— Tell it to me.
— This isn’t the moment, it is rather cold after all. Later, perhaps. Let me introduce myself: Arnaud Bouteiller; I live in Paris. I’m a student at the Beaux-Arts, in my fourth year. I’m interested in nineteenth-century architecture, and so also in Norman architecture.
— As for me, my name is Pauline Drachin. I also live in Paris and I’m doing a master’s in English. My grandmother, a true Trouville woman, has invited me to her place for New Year. That way she has company, for my grandfather died quite a few years ago now. She has lived here for at least fifty years. She stays in a villa almost at the water’s edge. It’s a very old house, right next to the Villa Montebello. It was built in the nineteenth century, around 1860.
— Would you like to come and see?
— With pleasure, and with interest.

They walk a little and come upon an old house with pointed slate roofs and windows shaped like stained glass, with leaded divisions. The windows really do look like stained-glass windows.

“This book was written by my grandfather, toward the end of his life. They are his memoirs. He had written them, he said, for his grandchildren, to tell them his life, which was unusual and dramatic. It is precisely this book that I forgot yesterday, for I had taken advantage of a bright spell late in the afternoon to sit on the beach and read.”

She rings at the door. A rather elderly lady, dressed plainly but elegantly, comes to open it.

— Granny, this is Arnaud, who found Grandpa’s memoirs that I forgot on the beach yesterday late in the afternoon. Luckily the book isn’t too damaged.
— Come in, I’ll bring you a hot tea, or a coffee if you prefer.
— Thank you, Madame, a tea would be perfect.

After a few minutes that Arnaud spends looking at the paintings and the furniture, the old lady returns:

— Here are your drinks; warm yourselves well, for it’s winter, don’t forget.
— I’m eager to know who your grandfather was: a writer?
— Not really, but a little, all the same.
— Go on?
— Well, here it is. He had arrived some time before the war, coming from Poland with his parents, after a pogrom, in 1936. He hid during the war in a village in Normandy. He had lost his parents during the war. He went to Sciences Po, then became a journalist. There he met my grandmother. They married and settled in Normandy. He worked for forty years at Ouest-France. They had three children: my father and two daughters, my aunts, who live in Paris. When he grew old, he stayed in Trouville, with my grandmother. In his memoirs he tells of a world that has vanished for good. I’m passionate about discovering his story, and each time I’m at her place, I read a few chapters.
— Could you lend me this book?
— You’d have to ask my grandmother.

Arnaud listens attentively, and does not feel the day fall, so caught up is he in Pauline’s account. Night is already here. He would have liked to stay, but he does not want to impose.

— Would you come and have a coffee on the beach tomorrow?
— Why not.

A childhood memory: learning Hebrew

Memoir — Paris, June 2026

A memory comes to me from almost eighty years ago, and one that has also spread across eighty years: I think of the way I learned Hebrew.

I was a young adolescent of eleven, in the children’s homes of the OSE — the Œuvre de Secours aux Enfants — since my arrival in France in June 1945, after coming from Buchenwald with 425 other young Jewish survivors, former prisoners. I moved from one home to another. The beginning of this episode dates from 1946. At that time I had a counsellor named Ted Charny, and later T. Carmi. Carmi was a young American Jew from New York who had come to take care of the children of the Shoah, as a counsellor in the OSE children’s homes.

I did not know it — I knew it only decades later — but I have always had a thirst to know; that is perhaps what explains my becoming a physics researcher at the CNRS.

So I began to learn Hebrew with Carmi, and here is how it went. It was in a children’s home, at the Château de Boucicaut, in Fontenay-aux-Roses, a very beautiful place. I was then ten or eleven. I never much liked sleeping. So I got up early, a little earlier than the other children. In any case before the start of school, which took place inside the children’s home — a very fine building, probably nineteenth-century, probably lent by a wealthy Jew, a survivor of the Shoah. There was a lovely park behind the building, where one could hide behind the trees — everything that could be pleasant to young children.

So we had school — that is, in the end, primary class — inside the children’s home itself. And I remember at this moment that our schoolmaster was a tall gentleman named Monsieur Legal, who adored gliding. One day he had said he could give some of the children of the home their first flight. We were no doubt between twenty and thirty children, and so the children went, with the OSE’s authorization. But I, who from that time knew that my mother and sisters were alive and were in Germany, at Landsberg, a DP camp — Displaced Persons —, had to provide a written authorization from her, which arrived too late. So I could not take part in the first flight.

I come back to my Hebrew lesson: it is something that marked me deeply. For eighty years now, when I speak Hebrew — a little as when I speak Yiddish — I feel a certain emotion. Carmi, who was our counsellor, offered to teach me Hebrew before the start of classes. He loved to sleep in the morning. So around 7:45, before classes began at about 8:15 or 8:30, I would go to his room, and he would still be in bed. And I, I remember, would sit on the floor by the bed, and we would read a text in Hebrew; and I took great pleasure in this lesson. My memory is that I was progressing so well that he gave me a book of children’s tales by the Russian writer Pushkin, which I kept for years. It lasted a few months and I really progressed a great deal in my Hebrew. Then I perfected it throughout my secondary schooling, at the Maïmonide Jewish school in Boulogne, where we had several hours of Hebrew a week. I have always loved Hebrew.

And so, nearly eighty years later — perhaps seventy-eight years — I receive a telephone call from Israel.

— Is this Mr Rosenman? My name is Rahel Stepak, I am a researcher at the University of Tel Aviv, in Hebrew literature, and we are preparing a new, very scholarly edition of the book that made Carmi known, namely There Are No Black Flowers; in Hebrew, Ein prahim shehorim. I would very much like to meet you. When could I come?
I answer naively: whenever you like. She replies: well, listen, I’m taking the plane tomorrow morning. I am surprised, but I answer: “With pleasure.”

It is the book that made Carmi known in Israel, as a poet, and he became one of the greatest Israeli poets. It is a poetic chronicle of his stay as a counsellor in a children’s home for two years, between 1946 and 1947, since he left for Palestine at the end of 1947, a few months before the proclamation of the State of Israel in May 1948. There are two characters in this book: a woman called At lo Imi, that is, “you, my Not-mother”; and a little boy, named René.

The next day, this young woman arrives in Paris and comes to my home. And at once she says to me: I have brought you a small gift, a document of some thirty or forty pages, the transcription of the personal notes Carmi took during his two-year stay in the children’s homes, where you knew him. And above all, he knew you. This document is the personal notes Carmi took on Izio Rosenman — that is, on you, who were eleven years old.

And then I am more than surprised: I am moved. I learn, in particular, from this document, that the central character, who became René, was in fact called Izio. It was me. And above all the comment Carmi made to himself: “Izio loves books so much — I mean Hebrew books — that my personal stock is exhausted, and I am obliged to write to my friends so that they send me books in Hebrew.” And there I am at once surprised and moved: that an adult could devote so much time and space to a comment on a child; a child who studies Hebrew with him.

This shows that I had an enormous curiosity to know. Later I became a very good pupil, in secondary school. I am moved to know that he took such an interest in me. There is something in which I am at once moved and incredulous. A few months later she sent me the new edition of this book — There Are No Black Flowers, in Hebrew of course — in which there are, at the end, a few dozen pages of scholarly commentary where she recounts that the child character was initially called Izio, and that before publishing the book Carmi changed the name to René.

That is the story of my early relation to Hebrew.

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