Читать книгу Helena Rubinstein - Michele Fitoussi - Страница 8

She was born Chaja Rubinstein, the eldest daughter of Hertzel Naftaly Rubinstein and Augusta Gitel Silberfeld, on 25 December 1872, under the sign of Capricorn.1 She so despised her first name that she changed it as soon as she left the country: on the passenger list of the Prinz Regent Luitpold she was registered as Helena Juliet Rubinstein, aged twenty.

Four years younger than she really was: that was her way of thumbing her nose at the passage of time. She would always lie about her age and tell untruths about other details of her life with equal aplomb. Her earliest passports stated 1880 as the year of her birth.2 Administrative bodies were not very particular at the time, and besides, she did look ten years younger. ‘I’ve always thought a woman owed it to herself to treat the subject of her age with ambiguity,’ she dictated for the opening pages of her autobiography at the ripe old age of ninety-three.3

Her place of birth, Kazimierz, was founded in 1335 by the Polish King Kazimir III as a separate fortified city next to Kraków, the capital. One hundred and fifty years later, all Kraków’s Jews were ordered to live inside its walls. Over the centuries, the Jewish town of Kazimierz expanded alongside the Christian capital of Kraków, and benefited from varying degrees of protection from Polish sovereigns. Hertzel Rubinstein often told his daughter that in those days there was a fair amount of cultural cross-fertilisation with the rest of Europe. Jews came to the city from France, England, Italy, Spain and Bohemia, fleeing persecution.

The political situation, however, was unstable. Coveted by its neighbours, Poland was constantly invaded. In 1772, a first partition divided Poland (then part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) into three territories: Austria annexed an area containing the two major cities Kraków and Lemberg and called it Galicia, while the rest of the union was divided between Russia to the east and Prussia to the west and north. A second partition took place in 1793. A third, two years later, destroyed the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth once and for all. In 1815, the Congress of Vienna created a fourth division, the Congress Kingdom of Poland, while Kraków, of which Kazimierz was now a suburb, was made an autonomous republic until the middle of the century. The city preserved its Polish heritage but, as with all of Galicia, remained a dependency of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Torn apart, Poland still refused to submit. Successive revolts for independence were met with bloody repression, which only served to intensify the nationalist movement. At the same time, waves of political emigrants left Poland, most of them headed for France – a brilliant community of painters, writers, musicians, and aristocrats for whom nostalgia served as artistic inspiration. Among them were Frédéric Chopin and poet Adam Mickiewicz. Many of the country’s great masterpieces were created outside Poland.

Austria-Hungary claimed to be a civilised nation that allowed its subjects to live in peace. The fate of the Jews was somewhat more tolerable there than elsewhere. In 1822, when the walls of Kazimierz were demolished, the richest and most determined Jews settled in the Christian district. In 1867, Emperor Franz Josef finally granted them full rights. When Helena was born, Galicia, and all of Poland along with it, was in the feverish throes of modernisation. Railways, factories, and apartment buildings were being built, cities were expanding and streets were being widened, paved with stones and fitted with streetlamps and gutters.

With 26,000 Jews, a quarter of its population, Kraków became an important centre for Judaism. Synagogues and religious schools – yeshivot and cheders – were built. Increasing numbers of young people attended secondary school and university, breaking down social barriers. Jewish officials were elected. Galicia’s Jewish doctors, lawyers, dentists, writers, poets, actors and musicians outnumbered Poles and Ukrainians in their respective professions.

Well-to-do families lived in the centre of town, in vast townhouses like those of the Catholics, filled with books, paintings, mirrors, tapestries and expensive furniture. The Orthodox community and poor Jews – who were often one and the same – stayed behind in Kazimierz. This was the case for Hertzel Rubinstein and his family. In spite of the economic boom, the vast majority of Jews still lived in poverty in Galicia, particularly in the countryside. In town, the artisans, tailors, carpenters, milliners, jewellers, and opticians fared somewhat better. But most importantly, assimilation was under way. The Jewish elite was becoming Polish.

However, anti-Semitism was by no means a thing of the past. As a child, Helena lay in bed and heard the adults talk in hushed voices about the pogroms. They described everything in detail: shtetls burned to the ground, synagogues desecrated, houses destroyed, mothers and daughters raped, babies thrown alive into the flames, old men forced to whip their peers, fathers massacred with pitchforks by Polish peasants, impaled by Ukrainian bayonets, scythed by Cossack sabres. Bloody nightmares haunted the sleep of the Rubinstein sisters: men hanging from their hands, shreds of flesh torn off, eyes gouged and tongues ripped out, heads cut off for soldiers to kick around.

Those Jews who could left in waves for less hostile countries. Between 1881 and 1914, 300,000 fled slaughter, war and poverty, emigrating to America or to Australia. Among them were Gitel’s three brothers – John, Bernhard, and Louis Silberfeld – to whom Helena would eventually be sent.

Kraków was also an intellectual centre with theatres, publishing houses, literary salons, concert halls, and secret societies. There was the Jagiellonian University, the second oldest in Central Europe; Helena liked to tell a story of how she studied medicine there for a few months, before being forced to drop out because she couldn’t stand the sight of blood.

In reality, she didn’t even finish secondary school.4 She attended the Jewish school in Kazimierz but at the age of sixteen, as was customary for girls of her social class, she had to end her studies. She did so reluctantly because she liked learning.

She had a quick intellect and a thirst for knowledge. Her favourite subjects were mathematics, literature, and history, particularly that of her country. She felt Polish to the depths of her soul.

And Jewish too. It couldn’t be any other way with such a pious, well-respected family. Both branches of her family, the Rubinsteins and the Silberfelds, boasted several rabbis, wise men, scholars, and men of the Book. Her father’s side could trace their lineage back to the famous Rashi of Troyes, one of the most famous authors of commentary on the Bible and the Talmud.5 Salomon Rubinstein, Helena’s great-grandfather, had been a rabbi. His son Aryeh, a cattle dealer, had three children, of which Hertzel Naftaly Rubinstein, Helena’s father, was the eldest.

The family came from Dukla, a little town in the Carpathians. That’s where Hertzel was born in 1840, and where he married Augusta Gitel Silberfeld, his cousin on his mother’s side. Gitel was born in 1844, and was the ninth child of nineteen, of whom over half died before the age of twenty. Her father, Salomon Zale Silberfeld, had been a moneylender; Helena’s eagerness for social promotion transformed him into a ‘banker’.

The year before Helena’s birth, Hertzel and Gitel Rubinstein settled in Kraków at 14 Szeroka Street, a narrow red stone building. As the family expanded – of the couple’s fifteen children, only eight daughters would survive – they moved house frequently, but always stayed in the vicinity of Joszefa Street. That’s where Hertzel Rubinstein ran a sort of bazaar, selling a bit of everything: eggs and preserves, huge barrels filled with herring, jars of pickles, candles, wheat and barley in bulk, kerosene. Walking in, the smell of brine and oil was overwhelming. Hertzel did not make a good living from his store but he did his best to feed his family. ‘Jews didn’t have an easy time of it in those days, we were people of very modest means, with virtually no money,’ Helena would confess, much later on, in a rare moment of candour about her early years.6

The house where she was born stood close to five of Kazimierz’s seven synagogues: the High synagogue, the Old synagogue, Popper’s, Remuh, and Kupa. It was also near the mikveh, a ritual bathhouse where women went to cleanse themselves at the end of the week. The days were governed by the times for worship, the seasons and the holy days. Every morning and evening, Helena would hear the prayers and chants as they rose towards the heavens.

Her district was a labyrinth of paved streets, flanked on either side by large, balconied houses of wood or stone. It was home to all manner of shops, printing presses, newspapers, banks, cafés, markets, wedding houses, schools, cemeteries, and a hospital. On the shopfronts, names were written in Polish and Yiddish. Between the Miodowa, Dajwor, Wawrzynca, Bartosza and Joszefa streets and Nowy Square, prosperity and poverty lived side by side, as did culture and ignorance, religion and profanity.

Rabbis with payot in long black coats walked past pious Jews in fur hats and bearded Hasidim wearing belted caftans over trousers tucked into boots. Notables in their top hats ceremoniously greeted old men in velvet skullcaps as they scurried past with their sacred leather-bound tomes beneath their arms. Women in wigs, their heads covered with a stole or an embroidered bonnet, shooed away little boys with caps pulled down over their curls. Gaunt students clustered outside their yeshivot, endlessly debating a paragraph from the Talmud.

In the summer everyone lived outdoors in the street, or kept their windows wide open. From her bedroom, Helena could hear weeping, arguments, matrons shouting to each other from balconies where laundry was hung out to dry and the cries of waterbearers calling to their customers. Carts filled with bricks or hay, drawn by skeletal horses, regularly blocked the road, forcing everyone to make a detour.

Yentas, or busybodies, sprawled on tiny folding chairs, gossiped malevolently about their neighbours and scolded the small children chasing each other along the passageways between the courtyards. Pedlars displayed their wares on trestles piled high with precariously balanced treasures – old clothes, worn shoes, umbrellas, prayer shawls, books, phylacteries, and menorahs. Craftsmen repaired broken furniture in the street, while young girls went to fill their buckets at the fountain. From early morning, the neighbourhood buzzed with people at work, from cobblers, fishmongers and pawnbrokers to an old woman on her balcony embroidering trousseaus for the rich.

In the poorest areas, there were cries and insults, people shouting out in Yiddish, Polish, and German; crates were unloaded in the dust, and the streets ran ankle deep with refuse while buckets of dirty water were poured out onto the pavement. The stench of rotting fruit, cat’s urine, smoked meat, onions, cumin, salted cucumbers and offal wafted on the thick air. In winter, the temperature could drop to thirty below, and icy gusts heaped snowdrifts along the pavements. The pitiless cold gripped you body and soul, walls rotted from the damp, and a leaden grey sky hung over the city. When the snow melted, the streets filled with a muddy slush that ruined shoes and skirt hems.

Helena Rubinstein always preferred to keep silent about that chapter of her life, as if she were ashamed of it. She preferred to talk about Planty botanical gardens or St Anne’s Church. She would rather chat away about the aristocrats’ stately homes where she dreamed of being a guest and would later claim she had been. Depending on her mood, she might describe Kraków as a cultured, elegant city, or merely dreary and provincial. The reality lies somewhere in between, although the city boasts an abundance of medieval and gothic monuments – the royal castle of Wawel; the tomb of the Polish kings, which overlooks the city; the ramparts of the old town surrounded by the Botanical Gardens; St Mary’s Basilica; St Catherine’s Church; and the observatory. And the grandiose central marketplace, the Rynek, common to all Polish cities, with its famous Cloth Hall.

Whenever she could, Helena would leave Kazimierz behind to head down Stradom Street, then Grodska Street, to stroll past the stalls beneath the arcades. Here there were no Jews in greatcoats, or gossiping housewives, or wretched street urchins. The men sported top hats and bowlers; the women wore fine milliners’ creations.

Young Helena admired the displays on the stalls as if she wanted to learn them by heart. She hadn’t a single zloty in her purse, but she dreamed of being able, someday, to buy lace and silk and fur, diamonds and pearls and crystal. When she was rich she would strut about like these distinguished Polish women strolling around the square wrapped in their pelisses, or travel like the ladies she glimpsed in fine carriages pulled by elegant horses – instead of going everywhere on foot, through the mud, dragging her sisters behind her, as she had to do now.

Very early on, Helena mastered the art of transforming the episodes of her life, embellishing or blurring facts as she saw fit. Her imagination knew no bounds, so much so that it is difficult to know where the truth lies. She was more of a fabricator than a liar. She would spend her entire life painstakingly stitching together her personal legend, indifferent to any contradictions in her story.

And yet the reality is infinitely more interesting than the story she stubbornly enhanced. She may have wanted to deny it, but the fact remains that she came from these dark streets, these impoverished alleyways, these poorly paved courtyards with their prayer houses and cheders – an entire Jewish world that seemed immutable, rooted in the shtetls and ghettos of Galicia, Poland, or Ukraine, and which has vanished forever.

The harsh environment where she spent the first twenty-four years of her life inspired her with the passion to leave it behind. It was where she found her strength of character, her courage, and her adaptability, like any emigrant who makes a new life elsewhere.

But she was an impoverished Jewish woman, born in Poland at the end of the nineteenth century.

This meant that she was a nobody.