To continue my life story…
During a European car trip with my parents in 1948, it felt like we were entering a different world when crossing the border from Italy to Switzerland. The aftermath of the war on Italy was obvious in the still-scarred countryside, while Switzerland had remained impervious to its damages. Switzerland was then, and still is, a country of abundance. From the geraniums hanging on balconies to the ferries crisscrossing Lake Geneva, from the lifts taking skiers or hikers to mountain tops to yodeling contests, there was a feeling of eternal vacation which remained 20 years later when I was teaching at the University of Lausanne.
After staying a few days in Zurich visiting friends, we took the train to Paris. I had not been back since October 1939 when we fled the Nazis, frightened refugees on our way to America. Now we were back as tourists, full of nostalgia. As we drove from the train station to our hotel, I cried at the familiar sights; scenes from my childhood were inundating me. We stayed at the George V Hotel for a month, which gave me time to reconnect to my city and make new friends, as most of my childhood friends had been sent to concentration camps.
It was common in France for mothers who could not, or would not, nurse their children to hire a wet nurse—a woman who had recently given birth and thus could nurse other people’s babies. The children she nursed were considered milk siblings, forming a special bond, similar to being first cousins. My milk-sister (soeur de lait), Natacha (French spelling), took me around to meet her friends. I became immersed in the intellectual fervent of the French post-war youth culture. Jean-Paul Sartre and existentialism were passionately discussed at parties.
Existential philosophy asserts that human beings have no pre-established purpose. We choose what we will become and define ourselves by our actions. Man is nothing until he will be what he makes of himself; he is his own project. The emphasis is on the freedom to choose who we are—in other words, we create ourselves.
According to Sartre, each person may have within him the capacity to write a novel, find the cure for cancer, or perform a heroic deed; individuals do not exist except for their concrete actions in the world. Sartre also believed that each person is responsible for society as a whole. Each individual’s decision affects all of society and can lead to its betterment.
Existentialism is very appealing to young people on the cusp of adulthood and its consequent identity struggles. We can be whatever we chose to be, defined by our actions. It influenced my philosophy on life until very recently when I exchanged doing for being.
I was going out every night and kissed a few boys whose names I don’t remember. My parents and I attended the horse races at Longchamp. Before the races began, there was a parade of beautiful women dressed to match their convertibles slowly passing by the stands. My friend Nora was sitting precariously on the hood of her convertible wearing an enormous hat. I visited her in New York sixty years later, when she was the widow of the famous opera singer, George London.
There are places that elicit wonder and longing, words that echo distant, exotic places known through songs, poems, or books. For me it is places like Timbuktu, the jungles of Borneo, or Antarctica, but also Stratford-upon-Avon to see a Shakespeare play, and the White Cliffs of Dover. The last two were more feasible, so I took the train from Paris to Calais to board the ferry crossing the English Channel to Dover. A disappointment: The White Cliffs of Dover are actually gray!
Stratford-upon-Avon was a lovely town. I sat in its famous theater wondering how many centuries of people had watched the same play spoken in Elizabethan English with a British accent.
By the time the play was over, I had missed the last train to London. Luckily, I was able to board what was known as the “milk train,” which took all night with stops every few minutes to deliver milk and a variety of produce. I sat on a hard, wooden bench until the wee hours of the morning, delighted to have fulfilled one of my life’s dreams. I took the ferry back to Paris, wanting to remain there forever, but my parents insisted that I return to the States with them. They were right.