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Travel Piece by Ida Nasatir
Letter from Paris, by Ida Nasatir, December 15, 1950
December 15, 1950—Ida Nasatir, "A
Letter from Paris," Southwestern Jewish Press, page
4: Dear Julia and Mac: During these weeks of our stay here, I've come to
notice that among other things, Paris is noted for its "tours." Four
times each day large blue buses packed with tourists go forth to "see the
town." Countless Americans equipped with expensive cameras and jauntily
perched new berets sally forth with notebooks in hand. In now way do I mean to
deprecate these tours. They give the hurried visitor an overall panoramic
picture of Paris, and the competent guide is full of wisdom about every ancient
structure and cobblestone. But tours emphatically DO miss the vignettes, the
special scenes, the nuances of a place. For instance: No one can
"tour through" Belleville, the second largest Jewish area of Paris.
Here live 50,000 of our people. The name itself means "pretty village"
but that is an incongruous misnomer. The dark cellars, the dank attics where
these people live, the profuse grime and dirt is anything BUT pretty. A great
percentage of these people, like those on the "Pletzel" (the largest
Jewish area) are sustained by the "magic" JOINT (Joint Distribution
Committee). It was a busy morning when we were there (Sunday) and
pushcarts flourished in abundance. I was especially attracted to the carts
marked in pink chalk: ANTIQUES...If there is a thin line between tragedy and
comedy, those antiques are it! David Abromovitz, emigre from Poland, stood
behind one such cart. He had his name marked in Yiddish on the pushcart.
There was a rakish air and a gracefulness about him in spite of his rags. The
"antiques" in his cart consisted of a broken iron stove with its legs
up in the air like a dead animal, a Swiss cuckoo clock that had bravely died one
cold morning many years ago and had kept on pointing to twenty minutes past two
ever since, and several mangy pieces of carpet that made me sneeze with thoughts
of an army of germs. (I wish I had left my American conception of sanitation at
home, where it belongs). In direct competition to Abromovitz, stood Mender
Smolensky. His treasures were placed in neatly assorted piles. In the midst of a
heap of battered cups and dead coffee pots was a rubber hot-water bag that had
known healthier days, a green-glass pickle dish full of side combs, and a vast
mountain of ancient mattresses, grimy and smelly, all of which was crowned with
a tin bathtub, on top of which was jauntily perched a stuffed duck that had lost
his tail feathers. And finally, the third cart of "antiques" was
presided over by an elderly Jew who had the tight, worn features of one who
reaps what he hath NOT sown. Here you could buy rusty bolts, pieces of decayed
bicycles, and hundreds of old clock wheels, a few of them still assembled and
able to tick feebly like expiring vivisected creatures. No, Mac and Julia, you
see what I mean when I say you can't tour through Belleville—these
"antiques" and their owners must be looked at long and slowly...both
must be handled gently, so gently! Love, Ida.
.