from French Seduction: An American’s Encounter with France, Her Father, and the Holocaust, pages 100-101, chapter “Tease” (buy book here), by Eunice Lipton

So, Boucher may have tricked me when it comes to equality between the sexes, but he didn’t trick me about pleasure. And the Revolution made it available to everyone. Or did it? French people of Arab or African descent wouldn’t agree. Nor would Jews have in the 1930s. the aristocracy before the Revolution felt that they were France, that only they were France. Outsiders – in those days peasants, artisans, workers, the petit bourgeoisie – were invisible. Outsiders are still invisible in France, and when they are not, they are shunned.

My father missed the Opera House in Riga when he emigrated to the U.S., but he did not miss the anti-Semitism. He was proud of the mixture of languages and cultures he grew up amidst, and he found that Americans didn’t have that culture. Yet it is precisely that European culture that didn’t want my father, and slaughtered the likes of him in the millions. How can one live with both feelings, loving a culture and knowing that it doesn’t love you? {emphasis my own – Carolyn}

Portrait of Eunice Lipton is © Ed Alcock