I lost my big sister Jacqueline in 2020. The causes were old age (she was about to turn 91) and COVID-19. She had been living by herself since the loss of her husband 11 years before and had been deteriorating in the past year to the point that her eldest daughter, my niece Deborah, and her husband decided to bring her to live with them. My sister had been living in Saint-Cloud, a bourgeois suburb west of Paris, and they moved her to Strasbourg, a city near the German border, where they had been living by themselves for the past ten to 15 years. It was a wise move, although Jacqueline had gotten used to living by herself, with her own pleasures, like watching and listening to concerts and debates on television. Deborah, being a Chabad follower, doesn’t have a television, so those pleasures disappeared when Jacqueline moved in with them. Jacqueline was an avid reader, and she compensated for the lack of concerts and debates by reading book after book. She enjoyed the presence nearby of her youngest granddaughter and two of her great-granddaughters. Although she had lost some of her sense of time and distance, she was as happy as one can be living with these younger generations.
Jacqueline was, of the three children, the most traumatized by the war. She was a teenager then, and hearing the sirens announcing the bombardments would shake her to the core—not like me, for whom being awakened in the middle of the night to go to a flimsy shelter just bothered but never scared. I did not realize the dangers and just wanted to go back to my bed. She was so shaken by the dangers she lived through that at the end of the war, she rejected her Jewish identity and wanted to convert to Catholicism. All her friends were Catholic girls from school who had not experienced the threats of being deported.
After the war, Jacqueline quickly learned how to be independent from our parents. After finishing a study of commerce, she was eager to start working to become financially independent. She got a recommendation from my father’s boss and was hired at Hotel Matignon, the French prime minister’s office, where she was highly regarded. That is the time of my best memories of her: She would come to pick me up at school on Saturday afternoon, and we would go to a movie together. I was 12, and she was 20. I still remember the movies we went to see together.
But that was not enough for her; she wanted to discover the world. So, she traveled to England, where she was hired as an au pair. She wanted to improve her English, but she did not stay very long because she was miserable with people who would not talk to her or treated her as a domestic, something she was too proud to accept. So, after three months, she came back and started to look for other opportunities.
When she learned that the United Nations, freshly installed into its new building in New York, was looking for secretaries, she applied, even though she was not old enough. To us, New York was very far away and both fabulous and scary. For my parents, to see their daughter going so far away was like losing her. To my other sister, Gilberte, and me, it was also a painful separation.
In those days, the telephone was still out of reach for us, and the only way to communicate was with those blue one-page letters marked “air mail.” And, of course, by postcard. I still remember the big postcards she sent us of the United Nations building, and of Washington, DC, at the time of the cherry blossoms, and from Niagara Falls. To the teenager that I was, it was a source of dreaming. That was also the time of American CinemaScope movies, and one that really struck me was How to Marry a Millionaire, with Lauren Bacall and Marilyn Monroe, shot in New York City.
Jacqueline stayed three years at the United Nations. She met a charming American boy, Web, whom she married and flew back with. After a while, they were off to a new continent, Africa, where Web found a job with Texaco in Leopoldville, now Kinshasa, the capital city of the former Belgian Congo. For my parents, my sister, and me, it was another separation, but they would travel back to France and the United States every other year. They stayed in Africa for six years. After Congo became independent, she would come back by herself to escape the dangers of the war of independence, while Web looked for a job in a more secure area. He found one in Paris in 1961, to the great pleasure of us all. Then, Web and Jacqueline settled in Paris, had three children, and lived happily ever after. Web became a French citizen. The only thing that bothered my parents was that he was not Jewish.
By age 90, Jacqueline had two daughters and one son, eight grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren. One of their greatest pleasures was traveling, and they traveled all over the world.
One thing that bothered my niece Deborah was that her father was not Jewish. Deborah is herself a Chabad lady, and she always resented that her mother had not married a Jew. But in Jacqueline’s final years, she came to terms with her Jewishness and even demanded to be buried in Jerusalem. So somehow, they all found peace together.
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