The opening this year of the Camille Claudel Museum in Nogent sur Seine, 65 miles southeast of Paris, not only brings the sculptor out of the shadows of her teacher, lover and nemesis Auguste Rodin, it also shines light on Claudel’s work as a talented and innovative sculptor of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in her own right.

In an interview with Janet Hulstrand for France Revisited, Camille Claudel’s great-niece, Reine-Marie Paris, one of the driving forces behind the museum’s creation, explains how she came to appreciate Camille Claudel’s work and to understand the mental illness that caused her to destroy much of her own work and led to her eventual confinement in a series of psychiatric institutions, where she spent the last 30 years of her life.

Reine-Marie Paris is an art historian and the author of a number of books on the life and work of Camille Claudel (1864-1943).

This original interview, conducted in French, has been translated by Janet Hulstrand.

Janet Hulstrand: When did you first learn that your great-aunt was a famous artist? Or was she not really so famous when you learned about her for the first time? What did you learn about Camille Claudel, growing up in your family?

Reine-Marie Paris: My first encounter with Camille Claudel, my great-aunt, was, you might say, somewhat accidental. In fact, until I was a married woman no one in the Claudel family—my grandparents, my uncles and aunts, my mother, no one ever mentioned her in front of me. Later I understood that the subject was taboo, because bringing it up might reignite an old argument about her internment in a psychiatric asylum, which was considered abusive.

My earliest memory of her work goes back to when I was 10 years old. I was returning from a swimming lesson not far from the home of my grandfather, Paul Claudel, on the Blvd. Lannes, and I stopped to visit my grandmother. There, on the chest where she had put the cookies for my treat, was La Petite Chatelaine in bronze. I couldn’t take my gaze away from this little girl, who seemed to me to be lost, facing the mysteries of life.

My curiosity about the artist who had created this sculpture wasn’t awakened until much later, when a dealer specializing in Art Nouveau objects asked me if I would be interested in acquiring some of the work of Camille Claudel. From that day on, I have never stopped being interested in her life and work. Is it because of familial devotion? It’s not only that. The objects I bought from the dealer seemed to me to express a kind of beautiful melancholy. I decided to plunge in blindly and to learn whatever I could about the personality of this great artist, who was so little known.

JH: When and why did you decide to study the work of Camille Claudel and to learn about her life?

RMP: Once again, it was by chance. I encountered the historian Jacques Cassar who, in his pioneering work, had come across the name of Camille Claudel while doing research on Paul Claudel. It was he who put me on my path of exploration and gave me my first questions to research. His first work on Camille Claudel should have been signed by the two of us, but he died, putting an end to our joint efforts.

Initially my work consisted of putting together documents I found scattered among the innermost depths of libraries, museums, family archives, psychiatric hospitals. I was able to read Camille’s letters, so filled with terrible suffering. I was also given permission to consult her medical records, and I was able to feel, almost physically, her pain, a pain without hope of healing—30 years with no visitors except those of her brother Paul, and two visits from her English friend Jessie Lipscomb. In a word, a living hell.

JH: The story of Camille Claudel’s life is very dramatic, even tragic. There is also some controversy as to the way her life unfolded, who was responsible for what happened to her. There have been accusations leveled against Auguste Rodin, and also against your grandfather, her brother, Paul Claudel. Knowing what you know about her life, both as a member of the Claudel family and as a historian who has dedicated many years to learning about her life and her art, what would you like people to know about her? What misunderstandings or false ideas would you like to have corrected?

RMP: Who was responsible for her situation? It’s a good question. Was it her family? Her brother? Society? Rodin?

Camille is considered to be an artiste maudite. Her work gives evidence of the drama she lived. From the age of eight, she sculpted her dreams, and her heroes—Bismarck, Napoleon. She was drawn to them because of their strong character and because of the powerful feelings they inspired. As her mother’s least-loved child, she enclosed herself in a shell to defend herself, to allow herself to escape into a life in which she could fight the injustice of which she saw herself as a victim.

Her father, Louis-Prosper, protected her for as long as he was alive: he paid her rent, her expenses, collected unpaid invoices for the work she sold, in short, he did what he could, all the while treating her as a raving madwoman. Her mother preferred her sister Louise, who was destined to lead an ordinary life as a wife and mother. And Louise resented her.

Her brother Paul’s feelings for her oscillated between admiration and repulsion. As a child he was fascinated by this older sister, so beautiful, so intelligent, so authoritarian that he couldn’t escape the orders she was always giving him: he would pose for her for hours, bring her the clay she needed for modeling, and if ever he balked at her commands, there were endless battles. And yet, he loved the escapades they had together at a place called “Le Geyn” a sort of rocky promontory that reminded him of Wuthering Heights.

For Paul, Camille was his first image of woman, his model of femininity, “the promise that can’t be kept.” For Paul Claudel, as for Baudelaire, “all loved ones are vessels of bile that one drinks with closed eyes.” When he discovered that Camille had betrayed him in a sense, by becoming Rodin’s mistress, and especially after she admitted to having had an abortion, which he considered the worst of crimes, he rejected her as if she were diseased. He would portray her in his play La jeune fille Victorine as Victorine-Camille, a lepress. To a journalist he once said, “Oh, my sister Camille, that’s a subject that it’s difficult for me to talk about: the pain, the spectacle of this magnificent personality, and the failure that condemned her.” Later he would speak of her with remorse, and regret for not having done everything for her that he could have done. But for him, the main one responsible for Camille’s fate was Rodin. Rodin took everything from her: she gave him everything and got back nothing. I think so too. In return for all she gave, all she got was misery, poverty, solitude, despair–and in the end, 30 years in the obscurity of a psychiatric asylum.

Was it society? Camille was born too soon. In our day she would have known success as a woman and as an artist. Nevertheless, in her day, among her peers she was recognized and admired. Some critics referred to the “glow” of her genius, others simply said that she was a genius, Octave Mirabeau for example. He was indignant after having admired her Causeuses at the Salon. “And who is not left on their knees before such an artist?“ he asked. “If we were living in another time, a woman like Mademoiselle Camille Claudel would be covered with honors, and well rewarded.”

As for Rodin? As I said above, I think that he was partly responsible for Camille’s downfall, because he didn’t understand her, because her character was too strong for him, and because, consciously or unconsciously, he was afraid that she might surpass him, which I think she did in some of her works. I believe strongly that Sakountala is more powerful than l’Eternelle Idole, that Clotho is more interesting than La Vieillesse. I also think that Camille stayed far too long in Rodin’s studio, that she didn’t know how to rid herself of her anti-Rodin obsessions, and that art didn’t save her.

JH: Can you tell us a little bit about the new Musée Camille Claudel in Nogent sur Seine? Were you involved in its creation, and if so, how?

RMP: The opening of the Musée Camille Claudel is a miracle: now her work can finally be presented to the whole world. It’s a beautiful, light-filled museum in the center of Nogent sur Seine, this small city that was home to the Claudel family for three years (1876-79), a period that was crucial in the launching of Camille’s career. She is not the only artist featured in the museum: her works are surrounded by those of her first teacher, Alfred Boucher, who was a discoverer of talents and founder of la Ruche, and of Paul Dubois, who once made a prescient remark to Camille: “Have you studied with Monsieur Rodin?”

For a long time I had the idea of creating a museum dedicated to the work of Camille Claudel. I had spoken about it in the 1980s with Michel Baroin, who was then mayor of Nogent. He agreed with me that this would be a good idea. Time went by, and the idea eventually took hold. In 2003 Gerard Ancelin, who was mayor of Nogent for 25 years, and is passionate about sculpture, organized an exhibition of her work. It was a resounding success, even though Nogent is an hour away from Paris, and the weather was snowy and cold. More time went by, and then finally, in 2008, Gerard Ancelin decided to launch the municipality of Nogent in a museum project, after hearing me complain once again, during my speech at the opening of a Camille Claudel exposition in Dijon, that it really was time to find a place to house the work of this artist. Along with Gerard Ancelin—who had the courage to launch this adventure by having the city and patrons of the arts buy the collection I had put together through the years, along with about a dozen works of art owned by Philippe Cressent—I finally had the satisfaction of seeing this museum created. Now her admirers can see La Valse, Le grand Persée, Les Danseuses, portraits of Rodin and of Paul Claudel, and all this in an enchanting space, neither too big nor too little, the jewel of a small city rich in artistic and literary history.

JH: How much do you think things have changed for women artists since the end of the nineteenth century, when Camille was trying to make her way as a sculptor? What still needs to change?

RMP: I don’t know if women artists have more of a chance today than at the end of the nineteenth century, but they certainly have more freedom. I only know one woman sculptor, really talented, who is climbing bit by bit, step by step, the ladder of success. But I am sure there are others who are practicing this art, in principle so unfeminine, but so enriching for those who have the will, the courage, the determination that it demands, to arrive at the desired result.

JH: If you could somehow, magically, be able to say something to Camille Claudel, and she could hear you, what would you want her to know?

RMP: If somehow, by magic I could communicate with Camille, I would say to her, “You’ve given me lots of trouble, lots of work, many worries, but also many joys. For these joys I thank you, and I hope that you for your part you would want to thank me for having paid you the homage you deserve, as one of the great sculptors of the nineteenth century, along with Rodin and Bourdelle. Who, according to their own testimony, saw in you nothing but an equal.”

Musée Camille Claudel, 10 Rue Gustave Flaubert, 10400 Nogent-sur-Seine. Closed Mondays April-October, Mondays and Tuesday November-March. Nogent is 65 miles southeast of Paris. Trains run frequently from Gare de l’Est and take about an hour. The museum is a 10-minute walk from the train station.

Janet Hulstrand is a writer, editor and teacher of writing and literature who divides her time between France and the United States. She writes the blog Writing from the Heart, Reading for the Road.  Other articles that Janet Hulstrand has written for France Revisited can be found here. 

The post Camille Claudel’s Great-Niece Shines Light on the Sculptor’s Life and Work appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

By Janet Hulstrand

1880: On the Rue St. Georges in Paris’s 9th arrondissement, a painter of growing renown in both avant-garde and fashionable circles is having lunch at the crémerie where he often takes his meals. At nearly 40 years of age he is finally beginning to make his mark in the art world: his painting of Madame Charpentier and her children made a splash a year earlier at the Salon of 1879, which has provided needed income; and his other work, experimenting with new techniques of painting en pleine aire, is going well too.

He sees a pretty young woman enter the place with her mother. He sees in her instantly his ideal type: not too thin, rosy-cheeked, and with skin that “takes the light.” He introduces himself—his name is Auguste Renoir—and asks her if she will model for him….

The young woman, Aline Charigot, 21 years old, was from the village of Essoyes in the deep south of the Champagne region, near its border with Burgundy. She had begun her life in this village as an abandoned child: her father had walked out of their home one night before she was two years old and never returned to the family, leaving her mother without any means of support. Unable to pay the rent, or to provide for her child, the mother, like so many other poor women in rural France at the time, left for Paris to earn her living as a seamstress, leaving Aline with relatives, who would raise her. At age 15 Aline joined her mother in Paris and began to learn her trade. And that is when she met the man, the artist, who would change her life.

Aline accepted the invitation to model for Renoir and shortly after, they became lovers. In 1885 their first child, Pierre, was born. As the years went by, Aline made two significant requests of Renoir. One was to make their union legal by marriage. The other was to buy a home in Essoyes, the village where she had grown up.

He had no objection to the first request: by this time in his life he was ready to settle down. And so the marriage was performed in the district hall of Paris’s 9th arrondissement on April 14, 1890.

However, he was much less enthusiastic about the idea of spending much time so far away from Paris, the center of the art world, as well as the place where he had spent most of his life. Essoyes, today just 2½ hours away from Paris, was at the time a long and tedious journey, first by rail, then by horse-drawn carriage, that would have taken most of a day.

But eventually Aline’s entreaties won him over, and her dream of living a bourgeois life in her hometown came true. They initially rented a small house at the edge of the village during the summer of 1888, for a stay that lingered into the fall and even through the end-of-year holidays. In time Renoir became very fond of Essoyes, of the butter, the wine, the bread made there, declaring it superior to that in Paris. He said he loved being among the winegrowers “because they are generous.” He painted portraits of his family, of villagers, of the surrounding landscapes. The family was still spending much of the year in Paris, but from the late 1880s they began to regularly spend summers in Essoyes, the boy playing, the painter painting, the wife cooking. (She became famous among his artist friends for her culinary skills, in particular for her bouillaibaisse.)

Gabrielle Renard

By now, in his early 50s, Renoir’s work was selling well: he had achieved middle-class respectability, a position he balked at, but his wife took comfort in. By the time their second child, Jean, was born in 1894, they were able to hire a nanny, and Aline, now Madame Renoir, looked to her home village, and her family, for an appropriate person to fill this role. She found her in Gabrielle Renard, a young cousin living in Essoyes.

Like Aline, Gabrielle had not had an easy start in life: her mother was a widower who became pregnant out of wedlock, which subjected her to the disdain and disapproval of many villagers and even caused her own family to take her two older children away from her. So for Gabrielle too, the connection with Auguste Renoir would become a means of escape: she traveled and lived with the family in Paris, and later in Cagnes-sur-Mer, a town along the Riviera where the family would winter. Gabrielle became one of Renoir’s favorite models, the subject of literally hundreds of his paintings and drawings, including some of his most famous portraits—and a lifelong, dearly beloved maternal figure for Jean Renoir.

In 1896, the Renoirs bought the first home they had ever owned, on the edge of Essoyes. A two-story home with an open courtyard facing the street, and a spacious garden at the back of the house, this house became the center of the domestic life Aline had craved and Renoir scarcely knew he wanted but did appreciate when he had it.

For Jean Renoir, the second son, a filmmaker, the time spent in Essoyes became a kind of idyllic memory that he treasured all his life. “Essoyes, where my mother was born, has remained more or less unspoiled,” he wrote years later. “There is no other place like it in the whole wide world. There I spent the best years of my childhood…Every summer we would go back. My mother would invite friends and surround Renoir with this life that he loved so much…”

Ambroise Vollard, who became both the dealer and a friend for Renoir, as well as the dealer for many of the other artists in his circle, also recognized the importance of the ways in which Aline provided support to the artist in her own simple way. “I wonder if it is generally known that it is largely due to his wife that Renoir painted all his wonderful still lifes of flowers,” he wrote. “She knew what pleasure it gave him to paint flowers, but she realized that the trouble of going to get them was too much for him. So she always had them about the house…”

Jean also saw how important his mother was in his father’s life, and how well she understood him: “With her intuitive, rustic understanding, she saw that Renoir was made for painting the way vines are made to produce wine…” he wrote.

At first Renoir painted in a ground floor studio in the house. Nine years after they purchased the house, he built a studio at the far end of the garden, further evidence of their growing roots there. He built the studio, he said, so that he could paint “without disturbing the children at their play.” It was in this studio that he also worked on his first sculptures. Of course many of the works he did in Essoyes began en pleine aire. (Today several of those spots are marked with easels displaying reproductions of the works he painted there.)

Though by now he loved being in Essoyes, the damp climate in Champagne, with its cold winters, was not good for his increasingly severe case of rheumatoid arthritis. By 1907 his doctor had ordered a move to the South of France, and the Renoirs found a place in Cagnes-sur-Mer, where the the family began spending their winters in 1908. It was in Cagnes that Gabrielle met her future husband, Conrad Slade, an American painter. During the Second World War the Slades moved to the U.S., and in 1955, after her husband died, Gabrielle moved to California to be near Jean Renoir, who had also moved there during the war. They maintained a close relationship for the rest of Gabrielle’s life. “She taught me to see the face behind the mask and the fraud behind the flourishes,” said the filmmaker whose work shows great insight into both.

While they continued to spend time in Essoyes when they could, both of the Renoirs died on the Riviera: Aline in Nice in 1915, and her husband in Cagnes-sur-Mer in 1919. And though they were originally buried in the south of France, their remains were later returned to Essoyes for burial, in accordance with their wishes. Now they and all three of their sons, and some of the sons’ children and wives, are buried in the village cemetery, just a short walk away from the painter’s studio.

All three of the Renoir sons became artists: Pierre, a well-known actor of screen and stage; Jean, the director of La Grande Illusion and La Règle du Jeu, among many other films; and Claude, the youngest, a ceramist.

The house in Essoyes remained in the Renoir family and was used by Sophie Renoir, a granddaughter of Pierre Renoir, and her family until 2012. She then sold it to the municipality of Essoyes, which purchased the property in order to turn it into the centerpiece of Du côté des Renoir, Essoyes’ homage to the family. Renoir’s studio opened to the public in 2011: there is also a small but informative interpretive center next to the village hall.

Images of Aline and her young cousin, Gabrielle are prominently displayed in the streets of Essoyes. Several murals in the village reproduce Renoir paintings in which they appear: one, a portrait of Gabrielle and Jean Renoir as an infant, is on the site of Gabrielle’s birthplace.

The Year of Renoir

In honor of the public opening of Renoir family home on June 3, Aube, the department or sub-region in which Essoyes is located, has designated 2017 as the Year of Renoir. One of the major events is an exhibition entitled Un autre Renoir (Another Renoir) presented at the Museum of Modern Art in Troyes from June 17 to September 17 featuring portraits of the Renoir family and of Gabrielle, along with landscapes of the region.

Several Renoir works, on loan from museums in Bordeaux, Rouen, and Cagnes-sur-Mer, will be displayed in the Renoir home during the summer months. A weekend celebration called “Essoyes à la Belle Epoque” will take place on July 22 and 23.

Throughout the summer Bernard Pharisien, a local historian, will lead free walking tours of the village Sat., Sun., Mon. and Tues. mornings, in French only. Tours in English can be arranged for groups of 12 or more by writing to groupes.renoir@gmail.com

Champagne

The names Essoyes and Aube might be off the radar to most travelers, but the wines of champagne certainly aren’t. Indeed, Essoyes is one of the villages within the Côte des Bar growing area for champagne grapes. Visitors have the possibility to visit small grower-producers in Essoyes, as well as producers, from large champagne houses to small producers, in the surrounding area.

Getting to Essoyes

Essoyes is a 2 ½ hour drive from Paris. Troyes is an hour and a half train ride from Gare de l’Est in Paris: from there Essoyes is just under an hour’s drive southeast, through vineyards, fields of rapeseed and wheat, and beautiful rural villages. Trains run frequently from Paris’s Gare de l’Est to Troyes: some trains continue on to Vendeuvre sur Barse (one stop beyond Troyes) and Bar sur Aube. In Troyes you can rent a car from Hertz or Enterprise, both located near the train station (check opening times of rental agencies before purchasing train ticket). It’s also possible to take a taxi from Vendeuvre to Essoyes, about a 30-minute drive.

For further information

Essoyes Tourist Office: www.ot-essoyes.fr
Aube Tourist Office: www.aube-champagne.com/en/
Year of Renoir 2017: www.aube-champagne.com/fr/annee-renoir-2017/
Troyes Tourist Office: www.tourisme-troyes.com
Aube Champagne Growers: www.cap-c.fr

Another major art event in the department of Aube this year is the opening of the Camille Claudel Museum in Nogent-sur-Seine.

A Renoir Route that follows in the painter’s footsteps and naturally include Essoyes has been outlined as one of a dozen Impressionism Routes by the French association Eau et Lumière.

© 2017, Janet Hulstrand

Janet Hulstrand is a writer, editor and teacher of writing and literature who divides her time between France and the United States. She writes the blog Writing from the Heart, Reading for the Road. Other articles that Janet Hulstrand has written for France Revisited can be found here.

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The post The Painter’s Wife: Aline Charigot Renoir and the Renoir Home in Essoyes appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

* * *

The south of France is not generally associated with the Holocaust. But for many of the more than 6,500 Jews deported from the German provinces of Baden-Wurttemberg and the Palatinate during a single night in October 1940, the journey to Auschwitz passed that way. Among those rounded up was the family of Paul Niedermann, a boy of twelve at time, who would later become my friend.

I had first met Paul in 1978 when I was living in Bry-sur-Marne, where he had a small photo business. We became good friends, but I never knew that he was a Holocaust survivor until 1987, when he was called upon to provide testimony at Klaus Barbie’s trial for crimes against humanity. Prior to that, he never spoke of it: I didn’t even know that he was Jewish. The closest he ever came to revealing anything about what he had lived through before that was one day in the course of a conversation we had, when he mentioned that he had had “a difficult childhood.” At the time I didn’t know what he meant by that, and I didn’t press him for details.

What happened is this: during the night of October 22-23, 1940, Paul and his family were removed from their home and taken to the train station in Karlsruhe, where they and hundreds of other Jewish citizens were held for 24 hours. Then they were loaded onto trains and sent to an internment camp at Gurs, near Pau in the south of France. At the time this was in the unoccupied part of France, under the control of the Vichy Government.

In March of the following year, Paul and his family were transferred from Gurs to another internment camp, at Rivesaltes, near Perpignan. From there his parents were sent to Auschwitz, where they both perished.

Before his parents were sent to Auschwitz, Paul and his younger brother Arnold had been rescued from Rivesaltes by Vivette Hermann (later known as Vivette Samuel), who was working with an organization called OSE (Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants) to save the lives of Jewish children. A Quaker group had worked out an arrangement with the U.S. government for the United States to accept five convoys of refugee children. Through this arrangement Arnold was given the chance to go the U.S., where their mother’s sister lived: however, the Quakers were unable to send Paul since, under the terms of the agreement, only children under the age of 12 could be admitted. Thus Paul, at 14, was given the responsibility, as “head of the family,” to decide whether Arnold should go to the U.S., or stay with him in France. “I didn’t think about it too long. I gave my consent,” he says. His parents were gone, he knew not where. And it would be 14 years before he would see his brother again.

For the next couple of years Paul lived as a fugitive, hiding and being hidden in a series of safe places in France and Switzerland, including the children’s home in Isieu that was raided by the Gestapo on April 6, 1944, shortly after he had left there. Of the 44 Jewish children and seven adult caregivers who were arrested, only one survived deportation. Most were killed at Auschwitz.

After the war Paul made his life in France, but took frequent trips to the United States to spend time with his brother in California, and his aunt.

In 1992 Paul learned that his brother was in possession of a box of letters that his mother had written from Gurs and Rivesaltes to her sister in Baltimore. Arnold could not bear to read them, and for many years Paul couldn’t either. Arnold passed away in 2000. Paul eventually decided that he would allow these letters to become part of the public record of the Holocaust. Beginning in 2007 he read them all and translated them into French. They were published in a bilingual (German/French) hardcover edition, Briefe einer badisch-jüdischen Familie aus französischen Internierungslagern / Lettres d’une famille juive du Pays de Bade internée dans les camps en France  (Info Verlag, 2011; separate German and French editions have also been published).

One of the most impressive things about Paul is that despite all he went through he has never succumbed to bitterness. Another is his level of energy: since 1987, he has spent most of his time traveling and witnessing to school, church, and other groups in France and in Germany. He has also appeared in several documentaries, and a recording of his oral history is in the collection of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He takes very seriously the responsibility of telling his story, a responsibility that he feels more acutely as the number of Holocaust survivors still living dwindles.

What follows are his answers to my questions, which I have translated from the original French.

Janet Hulstrand: You lost your parents at an early age, and in a particularly terrible way. But what are some of the happy memories you have of your parents and grandparents, and of Karlsruhe before it was taken over by the Nazis?

Paul Neidermann: Certainly a childhood and adolescence in Nazi Germany was not easy for a Jewish child, but we were a very close family. Inside the shelter of our home, my childhood always seemed normal to me.

My family was observant, and we didn’t have any problems in this regard. Before the Nazis came into power, we were very well integrated into the city, and we had both Jewish and non-Jewish friends. I started school in 1933, and I was the only Jewish child in my class. The city of Karlsruhe, which was relatively young, had never had a ghetto, so Jews lived all over the city.

J.H.: You celebrated your bar mitzvah in the internment camp at Gurs. How did you manage to do that, and what was it like?

P.N.: I spent the first two weeks at Gurs in “Block K,” the women’s barracks, because my mother, being a good Jewish mother, didn’t want to let my little brother and me out of her sight. But when I turned 13 I was considered an adult and was transferred to Block E, where my father was.

Back in Germany I had been preparing for my bar mitzvah. A rabbi had saved a scroll of the Torah, and that is how the ceremony took place in Block E, with my father and grandfather, along with many other people I didn’t know—including the rabbi. There certainly was no special meal, and there were no gifts! At the time I didn’t think much about it—our concern at the time was first and foremost to survive.

J.H.: Can you tell the story of how you came to have the picture of your mother that is on the front cover of your book?

P.N.: We were transferred from Gurs to a camp at Rivesaltes, and it was in that camp that I stole the photo of my mother. The director of the barracks had sent me to deliver the roll call list to the director of the camp. When I was there, I saw a big box full of photos near the door. My family was always interested in photography, so I was curious about the pictures. I impulsively grabbed a handful of photos without looking at them. Back in my barracks I looked to see what I had gotten, and I saw that my mother was in one of the photos I had taken, there in the front row, waiting for soup to be distributed. Two weeks later, she went to Auschwitz, where she was killed. This photo is certainly the most precious of all the treasures I’ve been able to save from oblivion.

J.H.: I knew you for a long time before I ever knew about your experiences as a child during the war. What made you decide to begin sharing these life experiences with others?

P.N.: For a long time I wasn’t able to talk about what I had gone through. I had a real block about it. But I was called as a witness in the Klaus Barbie trial in 1987. [Ed note: Barbie was the notorious head of the Gestapo in Lyons. It was because Paul had been a resident at the safe house in Izieu that he was called as a witness for the prosecution in Barbie’s trial.]

The prosecutor, Pierre Truche, a wonderful jurist, questioned me about the smallest details without emotion. For him, I was just another witness. But for me he was kind of a “shrink,” without his knowing it. At the trial there were thousands of people who heard my story. Afterward many invited me to speak, mainly in schools. I’ve continued to go over all of what happened in my head now, and that’s how I became the witness of my own story, which is of course a part of the larger History of the Holocaust.

J.H.: How do you feel about the generation of Germans who allowed the rise of Nazism to take hold?

P.N.: During the war, everything German was the Enemy. But afterward, I realized that hate is a completely sterile emotion, and that you can’t build anything on this foundation. The criminals of that time are all dead now, and I have no quarrel with those who were born afterward. That allows me to speak to young Germans and also Frenchmen and women, to bear witness to what was possible and still is, unfortunately. I tell young people today that they must be involved in such a way that these things can never happen again!

J.H.: Many people who suffered as much from hatred as you and your family did come away from the experience embittered. While it is easy to understand how this can happen, and I believe it is wrong to blame victims of hatred who do end up this way, you have taken a different path. How did you come up with the courage, strength and compassion to retain your essential human kindness and compassion, and your positive attitude about life?

P.N.: More than anything, I believe that I owe my optimism and especially my positive attitude to my parents, who made me who I am. I thank them for this every day.

J.H.: You have received many awards and accolades for your work as a witness to the Holocaust. Can you tell us about some of them? Is there one of them that is particularly meaningful to you?

P.N.: My work as a witness has been widely recognized. I might mention the Federal Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. I’ve also been given the opportunity to tell my story in both Protestant and Catholic churches: all these are signs of respect for the Jewish communities in France and Germany. But I am especially proud of an abundant correspondence I have had with German and French youth, who have proved to me that I’m not “preaching in the desert.” I am very happy to be able to continue this important work, even at 86 years of age. Somebody has to do the job!

© 2014

Acknowledgement by Janet Hulstrand: Because of his dedicated efforts as a witness, Paul’s story has been given fairly broad exposure in France and in Germany. When I asked if he would be willing to share his story with an English-speaking audience, he readily accepted. I am grateful for the time and thought he put into answering my questions. I am also grateful to Gary Lee Kraut for the opportunity to bring Paul’s story and outlook to an American audience.

Janet Hulstrand is a writer, editor and teacher of writing and literature based in Silver Spring, Maryland.  She teaches Paris: A Literary Adventure each summer in Paris for the Education Abroad program at Queens College, CUNY, and literature classes at Politics & Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C. She writes the blog Writing from the Heart, Reading for the Road.  She has also profiled the American poet James A. Emanuel for France Revisited in two articles found here and here.

For another France Revisited article about deportations and the Shoah see Jewish Paris: The Deportation Memorial, the Shoah Memorial and the Holocaust Center.

The post Paul Niedermann: Interview with a Holocaust Survivor and Witness in France appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

* * *
By Janet Hulstrand

For thirteen years, starting in the summer of 2000, the students in my American literature class, “Paris: A Literary Adventure,” had the extraordinary opportunity of having James A. Emanuel, one of our nation’s great poets, read to them.

I had never met James Emanuel before the summer of 2000. In fact, I hadn’t even heard of him until a year before when I had asked Odile Hellier, owner of Village Voice, a major English-language bookshop in Paris at the time, if she knew of any expatriate American writers in Paris to whom I might introduce my students. I explained that I wanted to show them that great American literature was still being produced in Paris. James was among the writers she recommended to me.

When I returned home to Brooklyn, I went to the library and found a copy of his Whole Grain, Collected Poems 1958-1989.  I sat down and began reading. It wasn’t long before I knew I was reading the work of a great poet, and I thought it would be wonderful if I could give my students the chance to meet him.

I wrote to James to ask if he would be interested in reading to my students. In particular I asked him if he would read “Racism in France” and “Daniel in Paris.” “I won’t read those poems,” he said when I followed up my letter with a phone call.  “But there are others I would read if you like.”

That was a good introduction to James. He was very generous about sharing his time and talent, and he loved being back in a classroom again, among young people; I think it was something he missed. But he also did things his way, always. He had his reasons for not wanting to read the poems I had asked him to read. I didn’t ask what they were, and he didn’t offer a reason. I just promised him that if he would agree to come and meet with my students, he could read anything he wanted.

The first time he read to my class he was 79 years old, though he looked much younger. To my students, most in their late teens and early twenties, it was a revelation first of all to see just how full of energy and passion someone that age could be, and also how funny. It was also a revelation to most of them how interesting and fun poetry could be. Through the years, many of them approached the poetry reading with an opinion perhaps best summed up by one student who had said, doubtfully, the day before it, “Poetry and I don’t get along too well.”

James always won them over. Without aiming to prove anything, he proved to them that old age was not as boring or as fossilized as it seemed, and neither was poetry. When he introduced a poem in which a man in the street sees a wheel of cheese come at him, falling through the sky, by explaining to them that the poem (“It Was Me Did These Things”) had its start when he saw a friend’s young child push a cheese out of an open window, he taught them something important about how the events of everyday life can inspire poetry. Perhaps even more importantly, he showed them that poetry, even serious poetry, can make us laugh as well as cry.

The first few times he read to us, he stayed away from any poems that dealt directly with racism.  I would eventually learn, though not from him, that his own personal tragedy in the loss of his only son was what had driven him from the U.S., the reason he decided in 1984 to leave there and never return.  That was something he never talked about, and the one poem he wrote about that tragedy (“Deadly James”) he never read aloud at all, to my class, or to anyone else. But after the first few years of reading to us, he did read “Emmett Till,” a poem he’d written about the 1955 lynching of a 14-year-old boy who was murdered by white men for allegedly whistling at a white woman in Mississippi. “It took me seven years to write that poem,” he always said.

In the video below, filmed during his appearance in my class in 2011, James speaks about his struggles with the poem and reads “Emmett Till.”

James loved, understood, and deeply appreciated children, and some of his most beautiful poems are written about or addressed to them. After a period in the 1970s when he couldn’t write, it was interaction with a child that helped him get back to work, as he explains as a preface to his reading of “Wishes, for Alix.”

Over the course of the years we met in various places, sometimes at Paris III, sometimes in residence halls at the Cité Universitaire. He would always start by reading a selection of his poems, usually for about an hour. Several times he invited Godelieve Simons, the Belgian printmaker with whom he had a close artistic collaboration, to join him. (Their collaboration had begun when she created prints in response to his poetry: later, he wrote poems in response to her prints.) Her presentations, in addition to being a wonderful introduction for my students to another not-very-well known art, engraving, also exposed them to the way in which artists from different media can inspire each other, and respond artistically to each other’s work.

After he had read, James would invite questions from my students. Sometimes the questions were a little slow to come. One year, wanting to make sure there would be no awkward lull, I made it very clear the day before that they were expected to be ready with good questions. “They asked some really good questions this time,” he said to me afterward. “That’s because I threatened them,” I confessed.

The last time I was in Paris, in July of this year, James wasn’t feeling up to traveling to our classroom, so we met at the home of his friend Marie-France Plassard, who kindly offered her apartment as a venue for our poetry reading.

He read “The Treehouse” and “The Young Ones, Flip Side” and “A Negro Author,” and “Emmett Till.” He read “Daniel is Six” and “For France,” and “To Martin, To Luther, To King” and “Jazz Anatomy.”

Here, from 2011, is James’s reading of “The Negro”, “The Treehouse” and “A View from the White Helmet.”

During the last time he met with my class, he read for a long time, longer than he, or Marie-France, or I thought he would, and then for a while he answered questions from my students. I don’t remember specifically much of what he said that day, except that he made sure to tell the students that the most important thing they could do in their lives was to be true to themselves. (He always said something along those lines, every year.)

I do remember the light in the room, the sound of his voice, the way Marie-France’s face was aglow with pride and love as she watched him. I remember how the warmth of his humanity and his sense of humor once again filled the room. I remember the rapt attention my students paid him as they were caught up in a very special moment of their lives, and the hush that fell when he began reading, everyone listening intently.

None of us knew that this would be the last event of its kind. But we knew that it was a very special gift, to spend more than an hour with this man, to have him read his poems to us and talk to us about his poetry, about his life, about life.

By now, there must be more than 100 of my students who have had the experience of meeting James Emanuel and hearing him read. He moved them, taught them very important things, and inspired them, not only through his poetry, but through his extraordinary grace and humanity as well.  For me the knowledge that they have gone back to their families and friends with a newfound appreciation for poetry in general, and in particular an enthusiasm for James’s work gives me a feeling of deep satisfaction. I know this was important to him as well.

From various corners of the world they have written to me upon hearing of his death. They tell me how well they remember James and his poetry. How they still love reading it. How they treasure the books he signed for them. They tell me how meeting him was one of the most special things they experienced while they were in Paris.

Mr. Emanuel will be sorely missed. But he has left behind a magnificent body of work. That work has the power to inspire and enrich the lives of anyone who takes the time to read it—and to all who open their hearts and minds to what it has to say.

Text © 2013, Janet Hulstrand
Videos of James Emanuel by Gary Lee Kraut © 2011, 2013. All rights reserved.

Janet Hulstrand is a writer, editor and teacher of writing and literature based in Silver Spring, Maryland.  She teaches Paris: A Literary Adventure each summer in Paris for the Education Abroad program at Queens College, CUNY, and literature classes at Politics & Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C. A 2009 interview she conducted with James A. Emanuel appears on her blog Writing from the Heart, Reading for the Road.  She also wrote this 2011 profile of James Emanuel for France Revisited on the occasion of his 90th birthday.

Also read James A. Emanuel’s Sense of Place as a companion piece to this article.

James A. Emanuel’s ashes are in the columbarium at Pere Lachaise Cemetery (niche 16412).

The post Remembering James A. Emanuel, Poet, Teacher, Humanitarian appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

* * *

On June 15, 2011, one of America’s greatest living poets celebrates his 90th birthday quietly in the company of a few close friends, in Paris, where he has lived since 1984. Admired, respected and acknowledged as a master poet by many writers, literary critics, and scholars, wider recognition has eluded him. France Revisited is therefore pleased to introduce James A. Emanuel to our savvy readers and experienced travelers through this exclusive article by Janet Hulstrand, with photographs by Sophia Pagan, followed by Mr. Emanuel’s poem Christmas at the Quaker Center (Paris, 1981).

James A. Emanuel, a Great American Poet, Turns 90 in Paris

By Janet Hulstrand

Author of more than 400 published poems and 13 volumes of poetry, winner of numerous prestigious literary and scholarly awards, a well-respected critic and teacher, James A. Emanuel was referred to in a 2000 American Book Review article as “the Dean of Black Paris.” The same reviewer also noted that Emanuel has been “curiously overlooked…when one considers…the sheer power of his work.”

Who is James A. Emanuel and why is his work not more widely known?

“I represent almost everything that has happened to African-Americans in and beyond the USA, from the beastly things to the heart-warming things,” Emanuel says.

Indeed his life story is quintessentially American, for both better and worse. Born (1921) and raised in the small town of Alliance, Nebraska, Emanuel left home at the age of 17 and never turned back. In his youth he held a variety of jobs: cowboy, junkyard worker, elevator operator, professional basketball player, Confidential Secretary to Brigadier General Benjamin O. Davis, Sr. at the War Department in Washington, D.C., and foot soldier in the Philippines during World War II.

After the war he earned degrees at Howard and Northwestern Universities before continuing with graduate study at Columbia University, choosing to focus on the work of Langston Hughes for his doctoral research. Hughes, who responded promptly to Emanuel’s request for access to his papers, gave the young scholar free reign in his home.

Emanuel describes his life during that time as “a dream fulfilled…finding in his basement forgotten literary treasures; recording his answers to first-time questions; and, during his absence in Europe or elsewhere, whirling in his swivel chair at his desk, tapping my toes against his file cabinets.”When the work was done Hughes told Emanuel, “You know more about my stories than I do.” He saw promise in Emanuel’s poetry, and offered him editorial suggestions. (Always an independent thinker, Emanuel accepted some of the suggestions, and rejected others.)

In the 1960s, as a member of the faculty at City College of the City University of New York, Emanuel introduced the school’s first course in Black Poetry and championed the inclusion of African-American literature in the curriculum. His dissertation, published in 1967, was the first full-length critical study of the work of Langston Hughes by an American author.

“It broke the barrier of silence imposed upon African-American writers by the establishment,” Emanuel says, noting that there hadn’t been anything like it published since The Negro Caravan in 1941.

The following year Emanuel published, with Theodore L. Gross, a groundbreaking anthology, Dark Symphony: Negro Literature in America, referred to by many scholars to this day as a “bible.”

In the 1970s he began spending significant amounts of time in Europe, first teaching at the University of Grenoble on an invitational Fulbright, and later at the Universities of Toulouse and Warsaw.

“I don’t know what my rather long years in France, my year in Poland, and my travels in China, India, Thailand, Turkey and less exotic trips in Europe have meant to me beyond the clichés we all know,” Emanuel says. “Generally, my life as an American professor in Europe taught me what I already knew, or guessed: that all French people, all European and African people are not the same.”

Then, in 1983, he suffered a loss he has described as “the wound from which I never recovered” when his only child, James Jr., committed suicide after being beaten by “three cowardly cops” in California. His comment about the effect of this life-shattering event in his autobiography, The Force and the Reckoning (2001, Lotus Press, Detroit), is terse. “My life, turning a corner in 1983, has not followed old paths since then,” he wrote, with characteristic restraint and stoicism.

He left the United States in 1984. Since then he has lived in Paris, devoting himself to writing poetry.

In 1999 he introduced through the publication of JAZZ from the Haiku King a unique new genre, jazz-and-blues haiku. He has read his haiku with musical accompaniment in Europe, Africa, and Australia, and he recorded a CD of the poems, with saxophonist Chansse Evanns. He has also done innovative collaborative work with Godelieve Simons, a Belgian printmaker who was moved to illustrate some of his poems: over time they developed a close artistic collaboration, and he has also written poems in response to her prints. Occasionally he participates in readings, literary conferences, and other cultural events. He has been a regular participant in Jacques Rancourt’s Festival Franco-Anglais de Poésie since the late 1980s. In 2008 he was invited to participate in the Centennial Richard Wright Conference held in Paris.

American novelist Jake Lamar met Emanuel shortly after he arrived in Paris in 1993, through the poet Ted Joans. Lamar recalls that Joans invited him to join him at the Café Le Rouquet one “gray drizzly Wednesday afternoon” where Joans “held court” three times a week for a couple of hours in the afternoon with fellow poets Emanuel and Hart Leroy Bibbs.  During the course of the conversation, Joans quoted a brief passage from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Without missing a beat, Emanuel picked up where Joans had left off, quoting the rest of the passage from memory.

“I was thirty-two years old and had felt, up until then, very isolated in my situation as an African-American author,” Lamar recalls. “Suddenly, listening to James recite Ellison, I felt that I had somehow found my true place, my real community, right there at that café table.”

Of Emanuel’s work, Lamar says, “I could go on and on about his writing, the brilliance and profound depth of feeling…But one particular set of poems, the jazz haiku…there’s nothing like them that I know of in world literature. They’re imbued with the combination of discipline and play, improvisation and exactitude, inspiration and perspiration that defines the music he so beautifully describes. This is the work of a master artist. It has been one of the great privileges of my life to know him.”

Emanuel’s work is indeed powerful as well as prolific. His poem “A Negro Author” is an artist’s defiant declaration of independence from any “ism” that might confine him. “Emmett Till” is an American masterpiece: a spare, tender, and profoundly sad tribute to the innocent boy victimized by the incomprehensible brutality and violence of racial hatred. “After the Accident” is the poem that literally jolted me into realizing that I was reading the work of a great poet, and led me to seek him out, to see if I could convince him to read to my students. (He graciously agreed to do so, and nearly every year since 2000 he has read to them, answered their questions, and even—in one particularly memorable session—created poetry with them.)

Like his poetry, Emanuel’s personality is powerful, though his quiet, understated manner does not instantly reveal this. Almost inevitably it is the most skeptical of my students who are the most moved by Emanuel and his work when they meet him. One remembers his “very beautiful, kind, old-school type of voice…so different than what we hear most of the time.” Yet the gentleman and scholar is also a fighter, of which his poetry supplies abundant evidence, such as this small sample from “For Racists Remembered”:

We said “Sir” sometimes
“Sir Charles,” “Sir Honkie,” and then
the big lie: “the Man.”

Asked what he most appreciates about living in France, what it has given him, he replies, “Nothing visible or tactile, ugly or beautiful, can do more for me than leaving me alone, free to recreate my environment in ways that I can understand. France has been silent when I had no questions; and it has been wise and ultimately generous, even poetic, when I needed counsel to walk on, or surf to carry me toward some shore.”

Whatever the reasons for Emanuel’s work being overlooked, the fact of is a shame. It is a shame that, as he approaches his 90th birthday, one of the world’s great poets is not receiving the recognition and honor he deserves. It is an even bigger shame that his exquisite poetry, which ranges from the comic to the rageful to the elegiac—all of it masterfully well crafted, all of it infused with extraordinary grace and humanity—has not reached a wider audience.

In its condemnation of human oppression in all its forms, as well as its illumination of the best in humanity, especially the innocent genius of children, the poetry of James A. Emanuel is work that should be lifted up to its proper place in the pantheon of world poetry. More important, we should be reading it—carefully, for it reveals both our best and our worst selves, offering help in knowing ourselves better, and the chance to choose a better path.

Article (c) 2011, Janet Hulstrand.
Photographs (c) 2011, Sophia Pagan.

Article and photographs created for first publication on France Revisited.

Janet Hulstrand is a writer, editor and teacher of writing and literature based in Silver Spring, Maryland.  She teaches Paris: Literary Adventure each summer in Paris for the Education Abroad program at Queens College, CUNY, and twice a year she offers Writing from the Heart workshops in a village in the Champagne region of France. Her 2009 interview with James A. Emanuel appears on her blog Writing from the Heart, Reading for the Road.

Sophia Pagan is a Paris-based photographer. She grew up in the inner city streets of New York, where she witnessed and lived through the difficulties of urban culture. Through her upbringing she developed an appreciation for things considered to be “outside her reach” and seeks to use that appreciation in her photography as she sets out to capture the fine balance between the modern metropolis and the old world charms of Paris. Examples of her work can be seen on her website.

Christmas at the Quaker Center (Paris, 1981)

By James A. Emanuel

Once upon a Christmastime
sleighbells snowed the sky
and when I slid the covers back
to slip a wonder-why
through windowfrost I wiped away
I couldn’t see a thing
except the hushed Nebraska night
and the little flaky ring
a sparrow dug into the snow
to spring himself to flight.

Once upon a Christmastime
I sneaked a sandwich where
old Santa couldn’t miss it:
that table was so bare
his bag of toys and reindeer food
would leave him room to spare,
to sit on while he ate and thought
“This boy is really nice.
I’ll search among the toys I’ve brought
And fill his stocking twice.”

Years grew long, and years grew hard,
but I can clear my sight
by twisting certain memories
to make it come out right
that I still hope to see again
a lovely-featured time
that stirs beneath my pillow
and wakes my heart to climb
into the sky on Christmas Eve
and listen to those bells
that ring because I do believe
a snowflake sound that tells
about a sleigh that’s coming,
that’s driving through the air,
with gifts for everyone who’s good,
who struggles to be fair.

And now when I see Santa
I grip him with my eyes,
with all my how-about-its,
with all my tell-me-whys;
and if he takes them standing
and if he shakes my hand
I bag another year of them
and try to understand
this load that makes us human,
those gifts on Santa’s back,
our bells for one another
that chime our starry track.

From Whole Grain: Collected Poems 1958-89 (Lotus Press: Detroit, 1991)
© 1983 James A. Emanuel

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