Charlotte

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Auschwitz, Berlin, David Foenkinos

 

  

Life is full of strange coincidences. I first encountered the story of Charlotte Salomon about twenty years ago, when an exhibition of her work, a series of paintings with captions describing her life and entitled ‘Life? Or Theatre?’ was held at the Royal Academy in London. It made a great impression on me at the time, with its unique way of recounting her autobiography through painting, music and text. Using all these media, this talented and sensitive young Jewish woman, who happened to grow up in Germany just as the Nazis were coming to power, illustrated her own history and that of all of Europe. In fact, I even went so far as to buy the very extensive catalogue of the exhibition, which still today holds pride of place in my book-case.

Very early one morning a few days ago, I happened to hear a programme on the French radio recounting the story of Charlotte in music and describing her life as retold in a recently published book. Lo and behold! the very next day, while trying to buy a copy of ‘Charlie Hebdo’ in a local newsagents-cum-bookshop, there on the shelf behind the salesperson was the book entitled ‘Charlotte,’ a novel by French writer David Foenkinos. I bought the book, which had been awarded an important French literary prize, and began to read it almost immediately.

 The first shock I got upon opening the book was to find that it was not written in the usual form of a novel but rather in short lines, in the form known as blank verse (‘verse libre’ in French). It neither rhymed nor scanned, but I persevered, and felt that somehow this form was indeed appropriate for describing Charlotte’s unique and tragic life.

Foenkinos gives his account of Charlotte’s story based almost entirely on what she herself had written and painted. Here and there he interrupts the poetic narrative to inform the reader (still in blank verse) about his own experiences when tracing Charlotte’s journey through life. He visited the part of Berlin where she grew up, the high school she attended there, as well as the south of France, where she spent her final years before being rounded up by the Nazis and dispatched to Auschwitz and the gas chambers. She was twenty-six years old and pregnant at the time.

Foenkinos admits that ever since encountering Charlotte’s story through her work he has been obsessed by her, and that writing about her in this form was his way of dealing with this obsession. I can understand him, and I think that he has done a good job. Charlotte Salomon’s life seems to epitomize all the horrors of life under the Nazis and all the dashed dreams and hopes of young people all over the world. The author even goes so far as to end the book by imagining her entering the gas chamber, describing the process in a brief but telling way on the basis of known accounts of how this was done.

The book is written in relatively simple, free-flowing French, and I found it almost impossible to put down even though I knew what happened to Charlotte at the end of her life. Charlotte’s story is just one among many millions of lives cut short, talents wasted and tragedies not averted. But by producing her oevre in a kind of creative frenzy during the last two years of her life, and then entrusting the suitcase containing the pages to a local doctor saying ‘This is my whole life,’ Charlotte Salomon has left us a precious legacy, and David Foenkinos has made her story accessible to many people who would otherwise never have heard of her. But only if they read French, I’m sorry to say.

 

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Wintry London

 

 

In winter I get up at night

And dress by yellow candlelight.

In summer quite the other way,

I have to go to bed by day.

Spending a few days in London in January reminded me of the little ditty by Robert Louis Stevenson, and although I now have the benefit of electric light, there’s no getting away from the long, dark nights, the late rising and early setting sun — if you manage to get a glimpse of it, that is.

 Living in Israel for so many years, I’d forgotten how cold and dreary London can be in the dead of winter. Of course, it compensates anyone who ventures there with a plethora of entertainments and cultural events – concerts, plays, exhibitions, etc. – but the paucity of daylight has a depressing effect on even the most cheerful of souls, which I perhaps delude myself I am. Even in the winter Jerusalem generally provides crisp, cold days (and sometimes even snow), but there is generally some blue sky to be seen to cheer one up. Maybe it’s something to do with the quality of the light in Jerusalem, which seems to bounce off the stones of the buildings and provide an aura of something that is akin to spirituality or positivity or aesthetic delight, according to the character of the beholder.

 Another of London’s hazards is the inevitability of catching a cold in one or another of the many crowded spots that cannot be avoided – travelling on the underground or buses, attending a concert or play,going shopping in malls or Oxford Street – everywhere is so crowded. And although everyone is polite and someone even younger than myself almost always offers me their seat on the ‘tube,’ as it’s affectionately known, those journeys are fraught with germs and hazards of various kinds.

 I don’t want anyone reading this to get the idea that I had a thoroughly miserable time in London. I did not. I enjoyed the theatre, some wonderful art exhibitions, and even a recital by a world-renowned pianist, though my enjoyment of the latter event was marred somewhat by my efforts to suppress my cough. Kind people around me offered me cough sweets even though I had come equipped with some of my own, but there’s no disguising a stubborn cough.

I was born in London, grew up there and still have many friends and acquaintances there, but I’m glad to be living in Jerusalem, where my colds and coughs occur with less painful regularity, and although some days can be cold and wet and dark you always know that the sun is lurking just around the corner, and the light blue sky will soon be enveloping the hills and cheering even the darkest mood.

 

 

The Baroness, the Search for Nica, Rebellious Rothschild and Jazz’s Secret Muse by Hannah Rothschild

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Thelonius Monk, Tring

 

The House of Rothschild, the semi-official aristocracy of world Jewry, has been a constant source of fascination for Jews and non-Jews alike, with its fabulous wealth, global reach, and philanthropic undertakings. In Israel many places commemorate members of the family, especially those of Edmund de Rothschild, the munificent benefactor, who poured money into the country well before the State was founded, seeking to provide succor and employment for the impoverished Jews who were fleeing eastern Europe and Russia. I found this well-written memoir of one member of that tribe fascinating and almost impossible to put down.

Kathleen Annie Pannonica Rothschild, known as Nica, the third daughter and youngest child of Nathaniel Charles de Rothschild, head of the British branch of the family, and a Hungarian beauty, Rozsika von Wertheimstein, was born in 1913. She grew up in the rarified atmosphere of Tring House and various other Rothschild grand residences, “moved from one great country house to another…in reserved Pullman coaches…guarded night and day by a regiment of nurses, governesses, tutors, footmen, valets, chauffeurs and grooms,” as she described it. Together with her two older sisters, her days were ruled by a fixed regimen, with little or no contact with children of her own age, other than the cousins she met at various family gatherings. Everything was run on rigid, formal lines. The girls were educated at home while their brother, Victor, was sent to Harrow, where he suffered from anti-Semitism, epitomized by occasional ‘Jew hunts’ in which his role was to run fast enough to escape from the other boys’ beatings.

It would seem that quite a few members of the Rothschild family were susceptible to severe mood swings, if not something that could be defined more clinically, and suicide was not unknown. This was the case with Nica’s father, Charles as well as others, and every effort was made by the wider family to obscure every record of these events. Documents and medical records were destroyed, and the deed itself was glossed over by relatives. Some Rothschilds displayed characteristics that could only be described as eccentric. Nica’s older sister, Miriam, became an obsessive etymologist, and Charles’s obsession involved collecting and displaying stuffed wildlife speciments in his private museum. While Miriam did marry and have a family, her main concern seems to have been her study of fleas, butterflies and chemical communications, whose mating habits she studied intensely continuing her father’s unfinished research. She became one of Britain’s leading naturalists and went on to be awarded eight honorary doctorates and be made a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Their brother, Victor, also had similar interests, going on to read Natural Sciences at Cambridge, but he was also interested in jazz music and when he took lessons from jazz pianist, Teddy Wilson. he took his little sister Nica along. This later served as her entrée to the New York club scene. At the same time, he pursued his studies at Cambridge, in which he excelled, and continued to focus on zoological research, eventually being made a Fellow of the Royal Society. It was Victor who encouraged Nica to learn to fly, to become knowledgeable about jazz, and who bought her a sports car for her eighteenth birthday (and a plane for her wedding). It was at the time of her ‘coming out’ that Nica discovered jazz, first in London, especially at the fashionable Café de Paris and later on trips to Paris and Le Touquet, and then to New York, where she first came into contact with the leading jazz performers.

Hannah Rothschild, the author, gives a vibrant account of her search for information about her elusive great-aunt, who eventually slipped off the shackles of aristocratic life. In 1935, a few years after ‘coming out,’ as was the custom in England at the time, she married an eligible Jewish-French widower, Baron Jules de Koenigsvarter, and produced two children. The outbreak of the Second World War found the family living in grand style in France, and after taking her children to stay with their good friends the Guggenheims in America, Nica joined her husband in the ranks of the Free French Army, serving as an interpreter and broadcaster for the Resistance forces and engaging in exciting trips into Africa with Jules (both of them were pilots and owned a plane of their own).

After the war, the return to married life and the birth of another three children, Nica found herself increasingly unable to slip back into the routine of entertaining and return to the pre-war way of life. In line with the atmosphere prevailing in Europe, she was ready for a change. While accompanying her husband, now a French diplomat, in Mexico, a friend played her a record of Duke Ellington’s symphony, ‘Black, Brown and Beige.’ She later related that this served as some kind of wake-up call for her, making her feel that “I belonged where that music was. There was something I was supposed to do.”

At this point the author links Nica’s ‘calling’ to similar obsessions, albeit for other subjects, mainly scientific or financial, displayed by other Rothschilds, causing her to wonder whether there might not be some inherited obsessive-compulsive trait behind the single-minded determination that has characterized many of the members of the family over the generations.

In 1949, after a visit to New York, Nica visited Teddy Wilson, the jazz pianist, on her way to the airport to say goodbye. He played her a record by Thelonious Monk, which struck her as so brilliant and amazing that she insisted on hearing it another twenty times. She missed her plane and, in fact, never really returned to her husband. After that she made her home in New York, associated with the jazz musicians there, almost all of them black, went to jazz clubs almost every night, lived extravagantly and also helped, supported and encouraged many of them, although the one she was closest too was Thelonious Monk. At times these connections got her into trouble with the police, as drugs and alcohol were an integral part of that way of life, but in a very real sense Nica formed the mainstay and safety net of many jazz musicians, sharing their way of life and helping them out in times of need.

Although Nica and Jules were divorced and Jules retained custody of the five children, her eldest daughter Janka lived with her in New York from the age of sixteen. The small New York house that was eventually bought for Nica by her brother Victor, was a haven for dozens of cats as well as occasionally for jazz musicians who had fallen on hard times. It was the refuge where Thelonious Monk spent his last few years, afflicted by an unknown disease that made him incapable of playing or making music. Many jazz musicians dedicated music to Nica, the ‘Baroness of Jazz,’ who lived on until 1988, dying suddenly and peacefully in her New York home at the age of seventy-five.

In this thrilling book that describes the life and interests—you could say obsessions—of her great aunt Pannonica (Nica), Hannah Rothschild has brought to life a fascinating and indomitable character. What is more, for me, a classical-music afficionado, she has given an insight into the beauty and meaning of jazz, and opened my eyes and ears to a whole new world of experience.