All You Need Is Morbid

Pastrami in Paris

Mason and I wandered the Sunday streets, holding hands inside my coat pocket. Even if January loomed gray and cold, Paris was still more beautiful than we’d imagined.

We strolled through the Marais district, enjoying the watery yellow sunshine. We paused beside a worn brick wall to read the plaque bolted there. With my imperfect French, I translated it to say that the pockmarks on the wall were bullet holes left where the Nazis shot martyrs.

Our guidebook added that the Nazis and Vichy French dragged 75,000 Jews down this same street on their way to concentration camps.

I had no references for what had happened here, other than a trace of World History in high school. Jews had seemed exotic in the small Michigan farming community where I grew up. Until I met my husband, I’m unsure I’d ever known anyone who wasn’t, in some vague way, Christian.

Mason had gone through his Bar Mitzvah to placate his grandmother. That same grandmother still refused to allow anything of Japanese or German manufacture into her home. She’d disowned Mason for marrying me -- without ever meeting me -- even though I’d offered to convert. My blood wasn’t Jewish, so our children would not be Jewish. That mattered to her more than her only grandson.

Being ostracized was hard for me to understand, harder still to accept: I would never be one of them. Love could not transform me.

It amazed me that Mason loved me enough to cause a rift in his family.

Afterward, to my disappointment, I found that prejudice ran both ways. My Presbyterian mother said that she didn’t care that I was marrying a Jew, but she would have preferred that he at least practice his religion. My Baptist grandmother sniffed, “At least he isn’t Black,” but raised no objections at the wedding.

I’d grown up so sheltered, I hadn’t seen the prejudice in my own family. Visiting Europe for the first time opened my eyes to the history of bigotry against the Jews.

Rue des Rosiers, the street we traveled down, was the main artery of the historic Jewish quarter of Paris. The quarter had been created in the thirteenth century when King Phillipe Auguste “invited” the Jewish merchants living in front of Notre-Dame to move outside the newly built city wall. The name Rosiers referred to the rosebushes growing against the wall. I could only admire a people who found beauty, despite their exile from the safety of the city.

After some consultation of the map, Mason led us to Jo Goldenberg’s deli. I hadn’t realized our wandering had a destination. Paris Access reported that on August 9, 1982, masked gunmen killed six customers in the deli. The PLO took credit for the murders. The gunmen remained unidentified.

At the time of our trip to Paris, the world had sunk one week into the First Gulf War. Everywhere in Paris, armed soldiers guarded the national treasures. Mason and I read the Herald Tribune each day, dreading the news that Iraq had unleashed germ warfare against Israel. Half-convinced that Jews and those who loved them were safe nowhere, I worried about entering the deli.

Added to that, I’d only been in one deli in my life:  Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor, which my mother-in-law proclaimed as good as those she’d grown up with in Brooklyn. In big, dark Zingerman’s, I’d stayed with familiar foods like egg salad, although I daringly ordered it on pumpernickel, which I’d confused with rye bread. I’d had a purely white bread childhood. While I explored knishes and hamentashen and Doctor Brown’s cream soda at Zingerman’s, I remained a Presbyterian-raised girl only a couple of years off the farm. I didn’t know corned beef from pastrami. I just thought I didn’t like it.

Goldenberg’s deli was huge and bright inside. The people behind the counter bustled around in spotless white aprons. Their middle-aged patrons filled string shopping bags with packages handed over the counter to them wrapped in white paper.

Mason and I pushed each other forward. He wanted me to order, in my fractured French. I wanted him to do it, because I felt like such an outsider.

While he negotiated with the counterman, I wandered around the fringes, looking over the merchandise. I didn’t recognize most of it. What was matzo, or gefilte fish? Nothing had prices that I could see. I chose a bottle of wine that I hoped would be both inexpensive and palatable, a vin table rouge. I slipped it onto the counter as Mason got ready to pay.

“You want this too?” the man behind the counter asked in English.

I nodded, too shy to speak.

*

Mason and I stopped to eat in the little park behind Notre-Dame. We huddled together on a green bench. The buttery orange late afternoon sunlight gave little warmth. It flared from the stained glass windows of the great cathedral.

Not far away stood the Deportation Memorial, which honors the 200,000 French men and women of all races and religions murdered by the Nazis in World War II. One wall of the memorial is starred with 200,000 backlit crystals:  one burning for each life snuffed out. Visiting the memorial the previous day had been the first time I’d encountered the command to “Forgive, but never forget.”

How could you forgive?

How could you live without forgiving?

Mason unwrapped the sandwich and handed half to me. The pastrami piled so high I couldn’t open my mouth wide enough to bite it. Instead, I contented myself with nibbling. The pastrami had a marvelous metallic tang beneath its mouthwateringly salty flavor. The caraway seeds in the rye bread burst between my teeth. I laid my head against Mason’s shoulder and swooned, chewing with eyes closed in order to savor. I’d never had a sandwich so delicious.

We ate until we were thirsty, but Mason wasn’t comfortable swigging from the bottle of wine in the park. We decided to cross the Petit Pont back to our hotel in the Latin Quarter.

The Hotel Esmeralda dates to 1640. Huge yellow boulders, mortared together, formed the outside walls. We laughed that such a place would never survive an earthquake. A single steep, narrow stairway wound up from the lobby to the warren of rooms. We saw no such thing as a smoke detector or a fire escape. We found it charming.

In our little room, in the evenings, I’d been reading The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. I’d read the book as a child, but it came so much more alive for me now, in a hotel named for the Gypsy dancing girl. Still, I’d had to put the book down in a moment of horror when I came across the crones gossiping over the Foundling’s Bed. On viewing the child Quasimodo, one of the women said, “I should guess that it’s a beast, an animal -- the offspring of a Jew and a sow -- something, at any rate, which is not Christian.”

My God, I thought. How could people have said such a thing, and meant it? I know that fiction is not reality, but twentieth-century bigotry had turned out to be so much worse than Hugo’s nineteenth-century fiction.

*

That frosty January, our small steam-heated room remained chilly. Mason and I snuggled together in our clothes on the soft bed, pulling the blankets up over our knees. We each drank deeply from the wine, rich and thick and slightly sweet. The perfect complement to the sandwich, it chased the robust flavors of pastrami on rye across my tongue and touched a flush to my cheeks. We rested the wine bottle on the rickety nightstand and held the remainders of the sandwich carefully, so that pastrami did not slip between our fingers.

I thought I was in heaven, even before Mason produced dessert. Generally, I don’t like cheesecake. Mason has always regarded this, with amused resignation, as a character flaw. I agreed to sample a bite of this cheesecake, only a bite, when he held it toward me on his fork.

Jo Goldenberg’s was like no other cheesecake I’d ever experienced. It melted inside my mouth, exquisitely sweet and creamy, with just a touch of lemon. It tasted not too rich, not at all cloying. The texture was just dense enough to be solid, but not gummy like the cheesecake my mom made from a box. The subtle aftertaste of lemon lingered on my tongue.

I found it impossible not to watch the fork travel from the dwindling slice to Mason’s mouth.  He laughed and fed me the final bite.

And then I was in heaven: safe in the arms of the man I loved, cozy and sated in an old hotel in Paris, tasting the trace of sweetness on my husband’s lips.

***

"Pastrami in Paris" was originally published on Trip Lit in January 2003.