Every Home Needs A Balcony. Rina Frank
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tops of our voices, we said it, so he’d hear!
On Thursday our mother left us in the bath for a full two hours—as if the longer you soak yourself in the water, the more likely you are to be thoroughly rid of all the dirt.
“We’re expecting an important visitor tomorrow,” Mom explained to us as we were falling asleep in the water, as usual. “The famous playwright, Eugène Ionesco, is coming to visit us.”
“What’s a famous playwright?” I asked my mom. And even Yosefa, who was wiser than anyone, didn’t have an answer to my question.
“It’s someone who writes plays,” Mom explained. And I didn’t understand how you could write plays. You watch plays, like you see movies, don’t you? It’s not a book that you can read.
“Why is Ionesco coming to visit us?” my sister asked my mom. She’d always been practical, my sister.
“Because he’s a friend of Tante Marie’s, and he’s coming to visit her.”
“And will he live here with her?” My sister went on being practical and suspicious, knowing that it was crowded enough already in Lutzi’s house.
“No. He’s a tourist. He’s not immigrating to Israel. He’s only coming for a visit,” Mom replied, and left us too long in the bath.
The important guest arrived the following day. So important was he that even Tante Lutzi opened wide her red room, with all its chairs; she ran out the red carpet, as they say.
Tante Marie was my father’s aunt, as well as Lutzi’s and Vida’s. When she immigrated to Israel to live out the rest of her life near her nieces and nephew, she was housed in the kitchenette, and when Dori, Lutzi’s younger son, was recruited into the Israeli navy, she moved into the elegant room that faced the balcony; because she was elderly and because she was well educated, she deserved to have a room of her own.
Before World War II, Tante Marie had been a teacher of French in Paris, and it was there that she met her Christian husband, who was later appointed French consul in Tunisia. They had a daughter, Odetta, and Tante Marie continued to teach French to the children of the French colony in Tunisia. In time, she fell deeply in love with a Tunisian army officer and spent more time alone with him than was respectable for the wife of a consul. When her husband discovered her betrayal, he sent her packing and returned with their young daughter, Odetta, to Paris. A sad Tante Marie went back to Romania without her daughter, who had been torn from her suddenly; she obtained a decent position in Bucharest as headmistress of the French school for daughters of the Romanian aristocracy. She reverted to her maiden name—Franco—and when war broke out, she was known by that name. Franco, which had a non-Jewish ring to it, enabled her to continue in her post in the school for Christian girls, despite the war. She met Eugène Ionesco at the school in which she taught; he taught literature in the same school. Now that she was retired, she had come to live in Israel to be near the only family she had left, her nephew Moscu and nieces Lutzi and Vida. Convinced that French was the international language that all educated people should be able to speak if they are to get along in the big world, she undertook the task of teaching French to the princesses of the house of Franco: Yosefa and me. She decided to instill in us—the last known members of the Franco dynasty—her accumulated knowledge and wisdom. Tante Marie told us that in Spanish the name Franco means freedom and generosity. She also told us that our family had been among the most established in Spain, and when the Spanish Inquisition began, the family had moved to Turkey and from there, one part of the family settled in Bulgaria and another part went to live in Romania.
Once we understood that Dad was the last in line of the Franco dynasty—since our mother didn’t know how to make sons—my sister and I were riddled with guilt for cutting short this aristocratic line; so I agreed to learn French. Yosefa agreed because she wanted to learn everything.
Because we were having private French lessons, Mom forbade us to go around looking like urchins and insisted that we had to be suitably dressed.
So we got ourselves spruced up in the clothes we owned, washed our faces, and crossed the landing from our room to Tante Marie’s.
Over ten lessons we learned to how to say “Bonjour,” “Comment ça va?” and “Frère Jacques,” until I rebelled and refused to continue with the lessons. Having to give up a whole hour of playtime out of only three at my disposal every afternoon between four and seven o’clock, coupled with the pungent smell of age that emanated from Tante Marie, just to learn a subject that was not included in the official school curriculum was just too much for me. Also, I had told my sister that in all the movies we went to see, they always speak English and not French, a sure sign that French was not so important a language as Tante Marie made it out to be. The lessons were discontinued. I don’t know why Tante Marie didn’t continue teaching my sister, who wanted to learn everything. She probably felt that teaching only Yosefa was too much like a private lesson, whereas having me there gave her more of a feeling of being in a classroom, which she must have missed.
My sister never forgave me; because of me she never learned French, because of our poverty she never learned to play piano, and because of the steep streets of Haifa she didn’t know how to ride a bicycle.
And then Ionesco arrived in Israel in search of the stimulation he hoped to find in our tiny little country. As a famous playwright, he was sure that the post-Holocaust Jewish state would provide the perfect inspiration for a new play, and the new landscapes would expose him to materials he could never have found in Europe.
For five full days, my father took Ionesco all around Haifa step by step and on foot. Ionesco was shown the vista from the top of Mount Carmel, spreading down toward the sea. He saw the golden dome of the Baha’i temple, a source of pride to the city, and went down the myriad stairs and slopes that led from the Carmel to Haifa’s downtown region, while the scent of coffee (from my father, no doubt) filled the air. Together they wandered among the laborers of downtown Haifa, a complex blend of colors, languages, and people; Arabic, Romanian, Yiddish, Polish, and Turkish ruled the street. And Moroccan—a lot of Moroccan.
And everyone was friends with everyone else, everyone went to the same place, even though they had not come from the same place, and most important of all, they were all Jews—well, apart from the Arabs, who in our eyes were also Jews.
Ionesco was very keen to know how a nation that had lost six million of its sons had succeeded in building such a state, albeit surrounded by enemies, but a homeland nonetheless. And Dad told him that he didn’t for a minute regret having left the fleshpots of Romania, the movie house that the Communists had confiscated from him, so that his daughters could grow up as proud Jews in Israel; and it made no difference that, just for the time being, he was making his living selling cups of coffee.
After five days, Ionesco informed Dad that all the material he had accumulated would enable him to write ten plays about Israel.
In the end, after everything that he saw and absorbed and smelled and was impressed by in Israel, Ionesco wrote the play The Chairs, about my aunt Lutzi and uncle Lazer’s front room. The room was described in great detail: the double bed at its end, the long table—about ten feet of heavy mahogany—with many, many chairs all around, as many chairs as such a long table can accommodate. And along the room’s western wall, as if these chairs were not sufficient, there stood a further row of chairs belonging to the same dining room suite. The chairs were heavy, their edges decorated with a carved circular pattern, hand carved, of course. And most important, their red velvet upholstery had the soft, embracing feel of a loving chair. Like soldiers, Tante Lutzi and her husband Lazer’s chairs stood regally along the wall, and this is what Eugène Ionesco wrote his play about. The play tells the story of an elderly couple setting up chairs, arranging and rearranging them like soldiers, in anticipation of the arrival of invisible guests.
The Chairs is 40 Stanton Street; at least that’s the story that was repeated proudly in our home.
And my father, who spent five whole days taking Eugène Ionesco all over Haifa to provide him with inspiration, waited a long time for the play to be released, only to discover that he didn’t get so much as