The Fighter Page 3

  “If we catch you again, you stinking Jew, we’ll play some games that you won’t enjoy!”

  It’s very dangerous for a Jew to be “known by the police.” They can send him to jail for years under some false accusation or even kill him without bothering about the law. So Anschel changes his mind about Paris. While he’s waiting for Schmiel to obtain a working permit and send a train ticket, he stays at home. I bring him leather and some tools. I teach him the basics. Having such a fast learner as a student is a real pleasure. He’s even more skillful than me!

  …

  One year after Schmiel, Anschel takes the train to Paris. My mother becomes the queen of the courtyard. Two sons in France, and they send American dollars every month! Everybody here knows we’ll soon go and join them. We’re angels ready to fly to paradise.

  We take the train in May 1929. I am fourteen years old (even if my passport says sixteen). We carry huge bales, tied with miles of string. My mother and Pola need to bring their sewing machines, of course, but my mother also wanted to take her crockery and cutlery. We didn’t leave anything in our apartment except the table and beds. We’re moving, we’re emigrating, we’re leaving Poland forever.

  During the long journey, we speak of the past and the future. In Poland, we were treated like strangers. We risked our lives every time we left our courtyard. There was no hope and plenty of fear. In Paris, we’ll really be strangers. We’ll have to learn French. We’ll need to work hard.

  The train is full of people. We spend thirty-six hours sitting on our bales. Ten minutes before coming into Paris, we see small houses with vegetable gardens, warehouses, factories, garages—suburbs similar to Warsaw’s.

  “Look, Pola, all the streets are paved!”

  “You’ll have to give up your favorite pastime, wallowing in mud!”

  “Oh, look, a motorcar! Do you think all the French people own motorcars?”

  “Don’t be stupid! France may be more modern than Poland, but it isn’t America.”

  The train rolls slowly under the high vault of the railway station. It slows down and stops. Brakes and steam emit loud shrieks. We step down onto the platform with our bales. My mother runs toward two well-dressed gentlemen.

  “Schmiel! Anschel! I am so happy to see you again!”

  “My name is Jacques, Mama.”

  “I’m Albert.”

  My brother doesn’t pronounce his name Yakuhess, but something like Zhak.

  “Wow, Moshe, you’ve grown up since I saw you last! You’ll have to take a French name. Maurice, perhaps. That’s close to Moshe. Pola, you’ll become Paule. Mama, you’ll always be Mama! You’ve brought too much luggage. I told you to stick to what was strictly necessary. I don’t know where we’ll put all this stuff…. Albert, take Mama’s package.”

  “Albert? Who’s this Albert? I won’t let someone I don’t know carry my bag.”

  “It’s me, Mama, your son! Have you already forgotten my French name?”

  My brothers used to share a tiny room. To accommodate us, they’ve moved.

  “We found a bigger room for the whole family—in the nineteenth arrondissement of Paris, near La Villette.”

  As it is not very far from the railway station, we walk there. We climb six flights of stairs with the sewing machines and the bales full of crockery. The room is ten feet long by ten feet wide. Pola, I mean Paule, can’t help laughing.

  “This is your ‘bigger’ room? The other one must have been really tiny! I’ve heard that French people have water taps inside their homes. Where is it, this wonderful water tap?”

  “Well, ahem, it is in the courtyard. The toilets, too.”

  “Let me see whether I get it right. It is just like Praga, except over there we had to climb down one flight of stairs to get water, whereas here we climb down six.”

  It really looks like our Praga home. We even use two folding beds in the same manner. When one of us wants to pee in the middle of the night, he has to step over the others to get out.

  Before we came, Albert made bags and wallets with Uncle Henri (whom my mother still calls Hersch). He had also taken another job, with a tailor named Brod, in order not to lose his main skill. He went there in the evening. Now I take his place with Uncle Henri and he works for the tailor full time.

  My mother and Paule find as much sewing work as they want. They install their sewing machines on a small table. When we come home, Jacques and I put the sewing machines away. The first thing we do is eat our dinner on the table. Then we use it to make wallets. The pieces of leather that we bring home are already cut. Paule helps us curl and hemstitch them. We earn so much money that we eat meat every other day, just like rich people. In Poland, it was once a month when business was good. It doesn’t take long for Paule to become finicky:

  “Here, chicken doesn’t taste as good as at home.”

  “This is home!”

  “You know the joke: When does the poor Jew eat chicken? When either one of them is sick!”

  Chapter 5

  Here, nobody guesses we’re Jewish

  A certain very clever lady has produced residence permits for us as if by magic. It takes three or four months for Jacques and Albert to pay her off. Then we earn enough money to rent another small room in the same building, which we use as a kitchen and a dining room. Now we can unpack our crockery and cutlery!

  In the spring of 1930, nearly one year after our arrival, we feel so rich that we decide to take Sunday afternoons off.

  “Come,” Jacques says, “I’ll show you a beautiful public park nearby. It is called Les Buttes Chaumont.”

  While my mother and Paule prepare the Sunday chicken, I go out with my two brothers for my first walk in Paris. On rue Armand-Carrel, I see five tall fellows coming toward us.

  “There’s five of them against three of us. They seem strong. We’d better cross to the other side of the street. Quick!”

  “Are you crazy, Moshe? After a whole year, you still think you’re in Poland! Nobody guesses we’re Jewish here. They don’t even attack Jews.”

  In 1931, we move into a gigantic apartment near the boulevard de Belleville. We switch from the nineteenth to the twentieth arrondissement. We have two rooms, a kitchen, running water! We no longer have to climb down to the courtyard, since there are toilets out in the hallway.

  Jacques and Albert speak a little French. I don’t. I haven’t met many Frenchmen. I don’t even work at Uncle Henri’s place anymore. As Jacques finds me skillful and fast, he brings a stitching machine for me in our new apartment. Thus, I can work for several bosses. I make handbags from seven in the morning until ten at night. I don’t go out much. I curl, I stitch, I do everything from A to Z. These bags are pouches with a flap but no clasp: cheap stuff. I don’t have to rivet, which is the toughest work.

  I soon earn enough money to reduce the length of my workday. After all the hours I spend at my machine, I unwind in a sports club called YASC (Yiddische Arbeter Sporting Cluba—Jewish Workers’ Club). I go there every other evening and on Sunday. They also have conferences on Saturday afternoon, usually on communism and the Soviet Union. Over there, they don’t exploit workers and don’t persecute Jews. I would like to enroll in the Communist Party, but I can’t run the risk. The French might decide to expel me as a “subversive foreign plotter” or something.

  On Sunday, I often go to the countryside with my friends from the sports club. The YASC actually belongs to a bigger organization, FSGT (Fédération Sportive et Gymnique du Travail—Workers’ Sports and Gymnastics Federation), which is close to the Communist Party. They rent meadows near Paris where workers can go and camp on weekends. I learn my first few words of French from communist factory workers on the banks of the Marne River. I also meet Polish Jews who are not tailors or leatherworkers, but medical students. They come from the better neighborhoods of Warsaw or from the parts of Poland that belonged to the Austrian empire before the Great War. Jews there were not as poor as in the Russian empire. They study medici
ne in France because the Polish universities limit the number of Jewish students. Their parents send them money, so they don’t need to stitch wallets. When we play volleyball on the campgrounds, they can hardly hit the ball. They’re thin and delicate. Some of them don’t even speak Yiddish, but only Polish. The French would call them bourgeois. They did suffer for being Jewish, though, just like me, and believe, also like me, that the communist revolution will end our troubles.

  I learn how to swim in the Marne River. I play volleyball and basketball. My favorite sport, however, is boxing. I remember the day I entered the YASC’s gymnasium, near the Place de la République, for the first time. Some guys were hitting a punching ball. Others were fighting. It was wonderful. It looked like dancing! My fists had been idle since I’d left Poland. I wanted to imitate these guys right away. The boxing teacher, a German Jew named Karl, gave me some gloves.

  “You try to hit my face or my body. We’ll see what you’re worth.”

  “I won’t hit too hard.”

  “Don’t worry about that. Hit as hard as you want.”

  I am small but strong. He’s a shrimp of a guy, with about as much muscle as a jellyfish. I was afraid I’d hurt him.

  I couldn’t hit him even once. He dodged all my blows, as if he figured them out in advance. After a few minutes, or maybe only thirty seconds, I was out of breath. I couldn’t fight anymore. He could have knocked me down with a mere slap if he’d wanted to. He laughed.

  “You’re quite gifted. You give many punches. You’ve got lots of energy. How old are you?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “If you work hard, you’ll become a good boxer.”

  I follow his advice. I work hard. I jump rope to improve my legwork. Three minutes of jumping, then I rest and start again. Twelve times three minutes. I lie on my back and I do exercises to strengthen my abdominal muscles. I hit the punching bag “Faster!” Karl shouts. “Harder!” I hang a punching bag in our apartment, like I’d done in Warsaw. Except it is now filled with sand, rather than with pieces of cloth.

  Before fighting against a real live opponent, I learn to move in a series of jumps: sideways, forward, backward, with a rotation or a twist. Karl teaches me to dodge blows by moving my head backward, by rotating, by crouching. I parry with my fists and my forearms, which become as hard as steel. I already know how to give and take punches, but I must work a lot to improve my dodging.

  When I fought in the streets of Praga, I used to just hit whoever was in front of me. Karl tells me there’s more to boxing than straight punches. He shows me other ones. The hook goes around your opponent’s guard. The uppercut, when aimed carefully upward at your opponent’s chin, knocks him out cold.

  If both guys know how to fight, they’ll avoid a knockout. They try to land a punch and count one point. During the first months, my score stays at zero. None of my punches ever connect.

  “You shouldn’t announce your moves in advance,” Karl says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just before you hit, I see you move your arm and grin ever so slightly, so I can guess you’re getting ready to let one go. You must learn to throw your fist as if you didn’t think about it.”

  My first official fights take place in the club’s gymnasium. I lose them all. My opponents just land more punches, so that they win on points. Then, by and by, I begin to win a fight now and then. After two or three years, I’m good enough to go to amateur tournaments with the club’s team. As I weigh 108 pounds (being five foot three), I belong to the flyweight category. We fight in a gymnasium or a public hall, in front of a crowd that shouts and whistles at us. I’m good at hitting and parrying, but I’m especially good at thinking while I’m fighting. I look at my opponent, I size him up, I zero in on his weak points, and I knock him down. I always stay on my feet.

  I don’t consider becoming a pro. I like boxing, but not enough to make a life of it. People also say that professional boxing is controlled by gangsters and that matches are often fixed.

  My biggest fight is against Nab, amateur flyweight champion of Paris. I feel rather nervous. This guy has fought so many different boxers that he’ll find out how to beat me in no time. My teammates shout, “Crush him, Maurice!” As soon as we begin, I see it’s not his day. He isn’t exactly slow, but he reacts with a slight delay when I feint, so I succeed in landing a hook to his liver and several other good punches. At the end of the second round, I am several points ahead. He hates to lose, though. In the third round, he finds hidden strength somewhere and hits me twice in the face. He doesn’t even seem to be trying hard. In the end, the match is a draw. If I had won and the title had been in play, I would have become champion of Paris!

  I also fight in the street just like in the good old days.

  The French people may hate Jews less than the Poles, but they did accuse a Jewish officer, Captain Dreyfus, of spying. As they had no proof, they made up a false telegram or something and convicted him. Many Frenchmen knew he was innocent. Others considered all Jews guilty. This was such a big event that Jews still talked about it twenty years later in our small corner of Warsaw.

  These people who hate us say the Great Depression that followed the 1929 stock market crash in America is due to some kind of Jewish plot. Stupid politicians and journalists pretend that the best way to find work for jobless Frenchmen is to send foreigners, and especially Polish Jews, back to their own countries.

  “This is just plain wrong,” Jacques says. “We actually developed the market for handbags, so we brought more work for everybody and more money for France.”

  Thugs who admire Hitler and his Nazis have formed “leagues.” A bunch of them roams our Belleville neighborhood. We call them Coats, because they wear long raincoats in order to hide clubs and other weapons. They recognize Jews sitting at outdoor cafés easily, since we’re speaking either Yiddish or heavily accented French. They shout, “Down with the Jews!” and attack us with their clubs.

  We boxers have decided to organize a counterattack. A Romanian Jew named Noika, who boxes well and runs even better, sips a coffee with a pal while speaking Yiddish loudly. The Coats come and begin to insult them in the usual way. Noika stands up and lands a heavy punch on the nose of the nearest fascist. Then he runs away, with the whole group of Coats trying to catch him. He doesn’t run too fast, because he doesn’t want to outpace them. All of a sudden, he slips through a door as if to vanish. This door belongs to an old Parisian building with a large archway for carriages. The Coats enter after him, hoping to give him a good beating in the archway. That’s just where we’re waiting for them.… They rush in, pushing and squeezing, so that tripping them is kid’s play. Some fall flat on their faces and knock themselves out on the pavement. Others are frozen stiff with surprise. Although there are ten of us against twenty of them, we snatch their clubs without much effort and give them a taste of their own medicine.

  After this reversal, the Coats stop coming to our neighborhood, but the cops start checking our ID papers all the time.

  “Either the Coats and the cops are friends,” Jacques says, “or they have mutual friends.”

  I’m lucky, I have a legal working permit as an apprentice leatherworker. Jacques also owns a precious worker’s card, which he got when he came to France. This was before the Great Depression. Albert, Paule, and my mother, who have residence cards but no working permit, could be expelled. When the cops come to check his boss’s workshop, Albert hides in a closet.

  Chapter 6

  She speaks French like a real Parisian girl

  In the spring of 1935, I meet Rachel during a camping weekend. She was born in France, but her parents are Polish Jews. She speaks Yiddish like us and French like a real Parisian girl, which amazes me. I find it fantastic that a Jewish woman, belonging to our people, looks like one of these fascinating Paris femmes whom we pass in the streets. Although my sister Paule (who is the only other young woman I know, actually) follows the latest fashion when cutting dresses for herself, sh
e doesn’t look as refined as Rachel. She’s jealous.

  “Well, my dear Maurice, it seems this dame has cast a spell on you! Beware: not everything that glitters is gold.…”

  “What are you talking about? She’s just a friend. We see things the same way. She hates the fascists and admires the Soviet Union, like me. She teaches me French. When I don’t understand a sentence, she can explain it to me in Yiddish.”

  “She’s kissing your feet because you’re a boxer. Women love boxers.”

  “I can introduce you to my pals at the club, if you want to kiss their feet!”

  Before long, Rachel becomes more than a friend. Before the end of the year, we marry in the nineteenth arrondissement’s municipal hall. The marriage certificate says we’re both twenty-two years old, but of course I’m only twenty. We move into a room and kitchen two blocks from my mother’s apartment. My brother Jacques, who got married a little before me, also lives in the same neighborhood. Albert and Paule stay with my mother.

  Rachel supervises deliveries for a company that sells women’s hats. She takes evening courses to become a typist. We’re not millionaires, but we have saved enough money to go to a furniture store, Galeries Barbès, and buy a fantastic modern invention, a “convertible.” In the daytime, it is a large comfortable sofa. At night, we push the dining table near the window, we put the chairs on top of it; then we unfold the sofa, which becomes a king-size bed. The mechanism is very clever. I would never have thought to use springs and levers in such a way. Otherwise, I made everything: the table, the chairs, the shelves.

  “Did you saw wood in your courtyard in Warsaw?” Rachel asks.

  “No, but I worked for a cabinetmaker.”

  I saw, I plane, I drill holes, I chisel, I fit parts, I paint, I varnish. I’m what they call a do-it-yourselfer. Poor people must always do things themselves. How else? I enjoy repairing a dripping faucet or replacing a fuse.

  You turn the handle and water flows. You push a button and the lamp lights up. What wonderful inventions! Rachel laughs at me.