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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.

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