Friendship

Elena Ferrante’s novels about her childhood in a run-down Naples neighbourhood and her life subsequently focus to a great extent on her friendship with Lina, a.k.a. Lila, the girl who dominated her life as a child and to some extent as an adult, too. The character of Lina is portrayed as a mixture of angel and demon, someone of great intelligence but also with a destructive and vengeful nature. The relationship between the two girls is one of love-hate and mutual fascination.

This led me to give some thought to my own experience of friendship, both as a child and as an adult. In childhood one’s friends play an important role as regards both one’s self-image and one’s sense of confidence. Until I was about ten years old my family lived in an impoverished part of London (which has since been gentrified) and my next-door neighbour was a girl of my own age, Jeannie. What was unusual for those days, soon after WWII, was the fact that she came from a large family and was the third of six siblings. We both spoke English, but she spoke as the local Cockneys did, whereas I spoke what I assume was the English I learned at school and from my parents (and the radio). Her family was Christian and mine was Jewish, and although my parents were refugees from Germany we two little girls were happy to skip rope and play ball together in the street outside our house or in our garden. Jeannie was smart and knew about all kinds of things that were alien to me, but despite the cultural gulf between us we understood one another and enjoyed one another’s company. My world became darker when her family was finally awarded a council house in another part of London and moved away. We visited one another desultorily after that, but the distance made such visits few and far between, and eventually they stopped. It never occurred to us to write to one another, and so over the years we have lost contact.

When I went to grammar school at the age of eleven I found a new friend, Diana, and we were very close throughout the six years of our school career. We came from similar backgrounds, lived just two stops away from one another on the tube (on what was then the Bakerloo line and is now the Jubilee line), and would go to our respective homes together, and then spend hours on the phone to one another. We went to different universities, and when Diana got married at a very young age (almost like Lila in Ferrante’s book) our lives diverged radically. We both moved to Israel later, but to different parts of the country and in different circumstances. When the Six-Day War broke out in June 1967 Diana was in England visiting her family, and decided to remain there. Our lives diverged but we remained in contact through snail mail. It was always a red-letter day for me when an envelope in Diana’s unmistakable handwriting arrived in our letterbox. But life took over, gradually the letters became fewer and eventually stopped. Today we don’t even communicate by email. But when either of us visited the country where the other one was living we would see each other, although the closeness of earlier times was never recaptured. We still remain very fond of one another, however (at least I am of her).

The friends we acquire in adult life tend to assume a less prominent role in one’s consciousness, and although I feel I do have some very good and close women friends with whom I can share the things that concern me, the intimacy of one’s childhood and youth cannot be recaptured. Maybe that’s just an indication that I’m finally growing up, but without those friends I know my life would be impoverished.

 

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Jours Parisiens (Parisian Days) by Banine

This book (published [in French] by Gris Banal in 1990) is the sequel to the memoir the author wrote a few years earlier about her childhood and youth in Azerbaijan, and which ends with her flight to Paris and desertion of the husband she was forced to marry while still in her teens. I reviewed her previous book, ‘Jours Caucasiens,’ a few months ago, and it, too, was lent to me by my kind next-door neighbor.

Banine’s delight at finally finding herself in Paris, the city of her dreams, and joy in being reunited with her sisters and father is soon superseded by the need to work in order to support herself. The jewels and precious objects the family had been able to salvage when their wealth was confiscated by the Soviets were all sold off to pay the rent and buy food, so that now each member had to make his or her own way in life.

The author describes the existence of the thousands, if not millions, of refugees from Russia and the Soviet satellites who found refuge in Paris after the Revolution. The detailed analysis of this new diaspora portrays a sad picture of displaced persons forced to leave their home and struggle to make ends meet, after having lived in comfort if not luxury. Many of them had no professional training and were quite unequipped for life in a modern city. Russian night-clubs sprang up throughout Paris, and former members of the Russian military and aristocracy found themselves eking out an existence as dancers, singers, or circus entertainers. The fact that there were some forty thousand Russian taxi-drivers in Paris is testament to the dire situation in which many found themselves. Some of them were former officers and soldiers in the White Army, which had been defeated by the Bolsheviks. Among the latter, I might add on a personal note, was Viktor Savinkov, the man who later met and married my aunt, Ilse van Son, and thus became my uncle. His brother, Boris Savinkov, whom I did not know, was persuaded by the Soviet authorities to return to Russia, and met his death at their hands.

But to return to Banine (who peppers her narrative with expressions of this kind); we find that despite her own sense of not meeting Parisien standards of beauty, she is employed as a mannequin or model by the fashion houses of the city, and is able to support herself on the meagre salary she receives. She describes the other models she encounters, deriding their obsessive concern with money, lovers and sex. Her life consists of a mixture of the luxurious clothes she is required to put on in order to parade before wealthy customers (whom she hates) and the miserable living conditions she is forced to endure.

Her life takes a turn for the better with the arrival in Paris of her cousin, Gulnar, with whom she had played as a child. Gulnar is pretty and vivacious and has a wealthy lover, enabling her to rent a large apartment and bring Banine to live with her. The life of the two young women is dominated by Gulnar’s affairs, the relations with the various young and not-so-young men who appear and disappear, the parties they attend and the night-clubs they frequent. One of Banine’s sisters has married a painter, and so we are given a glimpse into the bohemian life of Paris in the 1920s, many of the artists being themselves Russian emigrés. Gulnar and Banine benefit from the platonic friendship of Jerome, a very knowledgeable young man who instructs them in literature and cultural matters, takes them to the races and introduces them to interesting people, among them the man who eventually becomes Banine’s lover.

The book ends with Gulnar’s marriage to a wealthy American and departure for the USA, leaving Banine lonely and miserable until she decides to find consolation in writing.

 

The Second Generation Syndrome

 Growing up in postwar London I never heard the term ‘Second Generation,’ nor was I aware of it until many years later. In Israel at some point in the 1960s or 1970s there was a discussion, possibly even an argument, as to whether people who had fled Europe before, during or even after the Second World War could be considered Holocaust survivors if they had not actually been incarcerated in a concentration camp. Once that debate was settled, anyone whose life had started somewhere in Europe or Russia (or even North Africa in some cases) and had been obliged to wander as a result of Nazi persecution was officially defined as a Holocaust survivor. Their offspring became known as the Second Generation.

My parents were refugees from Germany, and although they – thankfully – did not experience a concentration camp themselves, their lives were completely disrupted and they experienced terrible personal loss as a result of Nazi persecution. Nonetheless they, like their friends and acquaintances, went on to live active and productive lives, and as a child I was not aware of the dark cloud that must have overshadowed their life. It was not until much later that I learned that both my parents had experienced Kristallnacht, and that my mother would often cry out and  scream in her sleep.

As a child I was very conscious of the fact that my parents spoke English with a foreign accent. Since I must have been a very nasty child, I remembering laughing at them with my sisters for that. In that respect, however, I felt that my parents were no different from most of their friends and associates, many of whom were themselves refugees. Some of their friends’ children were my friends, and we all found it perfectly normal for our parents to speak with a foreign accent. What did bother me as a child, however, was the absence of a grandparent, and I managed to persuade one of my father’s elderly cousins to let me call her ‘Auntie Grannie.’

I went to a Jewish primary school, an all-girls’ grammar school and belonged to a Zionist youth movement. I mixed with young people like myself, some of whose parents were born in England and others who were not, but it never occurred to me to ask about their parents’ origins. It’s true that most of my friends at school and university were Jewish, but I prided myself on also having friends of the non-Jewish persuasion.

When I realised that I was a member of the second generation, namely, that I belonged to a group that I hadn’t known existed, I acquired a new sense of identity, which I gladly accepted. I found that in many ways it defined who I was, and it led me to explore this situation in articles as well as in my first two novels. In fact, by now my awareness of what my parents and that whole generation went through has come to inform much of my thinking and writing. I have even been accused of allowing it to dominate my consciousness excessively. I suppose that there is more than a grain of truth in that, but I am happy to accept it as an intrinsic aspect of my being.

We Survived the Great Freeze

 

All the talk of the Polar Vortex hitting the Midwest of the USA reminds me of the year my family and I spent in Nebraska, the funnily-shaped State bang in the middle of the country. People are saying that there hasn’t been a freeze like that for a generation. That’s exactly when we were there.

We spent the academic year of 1983-4 in Nebraska and were completely unprepared for its hot, humid climate when we first arrived in September. It reminded us of Tel-Aviv, though without the benefit of the cooling sea breeze. However, that didn’t last very long. The winter came upon us very suddenly and harshly right after Thanksgiving (mid-November), when overnight the temperature dropped to below freezing, there were heavy and continuous snowfalls, with their concomitant icy roads and sidewalks (in England we call the sidewalk the pavement, which is the word for the road in the USA, and this of course gave rise to a lot of confusion when doing our driving test until we managed to get the terminology sorted out).

We were told to equip ourselves with snow tyres and a heavy-duty battery for our car, though driving was still a risky business. The car had to be inside our garage at night, as leaving it out at the side of the road was prohibited and would also have meant it would have been impossible to start it the next day. I have managed to dig out some of the letters I sent from there to my family in Israel at the time, and was happy to read that while my husband and sons were clearing the snow from our driveway with special snow shovels they were able to help various drivers who had got stuck in the road.

Another priority was to acquire warm clothing, starting with thermal underwear (long-johns) for every member of the family, and appropriately warm coats, hats, scarves,gloves, and boots —  no small expense for a family of five living on a miserly university salary. Face masks were also required, though were soon discarded as they left the nose and mouth exposed, which seemed to defeat the purpose. It was still possible for my husband to drive the children to school (unless school was cancelled on the especially cold days, as the roads were impassable and the car-parks where high-school pupils left their cars were still blocked by snow and ice). Then there was the ‘wind-chill’ factor, which brought temps that were already well below freezing to minus twenty or thirty degrees — something we had never encountered before (and hope to never experience again).

The case of our youngest son was different as his elementary school was just a five-minute walk from our house. On the short walk home his hands and the backs of his knees froze and became painful, but at least the house was well-insulated and warm, so he could thaw out at home. I was shocked, one morning when the school nurse phoned me to say that Eitan (Ethan in America) had arrived at school in a bad state, his fingers frozen even though he was wearing warm gloves, and that she had had to ‘defrost’ them by putting them in cold (!) water. Yes, that’s how one defrosts frozen fingers. You live and learn.

I remember venturing out from time to time, on foot as I was too scared to drive on the slippery roads, just for the short trip to the local grocery store. Walking past piles of dirty and slushy snow along the sides of the roads I remember pulling my scarf up over my mouth and nose as breathing in the icy air was physically painful. Icicles adorned the trees and roofs, and the one consolation was that Eitan and Ariel could earn a few dollars digging driveways and paths for elderly neighbours.

The snow showed no signs of melting for months on end. The municipality’s snow-clearing budget ran out, and so no roads other than the few main thoroughfares were cleared. If there was a little sunshine in the daytime it would melt the snow and ice, but the freezing night-time temps meant that everything froze over again, making walking and driving even more treacherous than before.

Like the current Polar Vortex, the great freeze we experienced was due to the fact that there are no mountains to impede the flow of icy air from the Arctic in the winter. The same applies in reverse to the heat from the Gulf of Mexico in the summer.

The climate of the Midwest is not for sissies.