Toward the Endless Day: The Life of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel

Epilogue

Epilogue As the elevator goes up to the tenth floor, I feel a knot in my throat. I’m recalling all those Saturdays when Elisabeth would greet me at the door of her apartment, with a twinkle in her eye and with her arms wide open: “Oh, there you are! Come in, come in!” I’m thinking of that very first Saturday when I timidly entered her apartment in Épinay and was impressed by the bookshelves and the photographs and the porcelain from Alsace. Above all, I was fascinated by the diminutive mistress of the house, who went toddling off to the kitchen to pour me a glass of port. Elisabeth’s high-pitched voice, a bit shaky from breathing difficulties , transports me far from Épinay to the suburb of Strasbourg, where she was born nearly a century ago. “I remember my childhood very well.” Thus did she begin on that first Saturday, while I struggled 295 Editor’s note: Olga Lossky presented these reminiscences of her Saturday lunches with Elisabeth at a conference in her memory at the St. Sergius Theological Institute in Paris on June 23, 2007. On July 21, Elisabeth would have been one hundred years old. With Olga Lossky’s permission, her talk, which pulls together this whole biography, serves as an epilogue here. It appeared in the French Orthodox journal Contacts, no. 220 (October– December 2007): 498–502. to grasp the fact that this fragile old lady, who barely occupied half of her armchair, had heard the declaration of the outbreak of hostilities in the First World War. Figures long since disappeared lit up her sparkling eyes: her grandfather, Eugene, who had left his studies to become a pastor and instead became an officer: “he had lost his faith ...”; her mother, Emma, who died when Elisabeth was only twenty years old; her father, Charles, with whom she had a very tender relationship . And then the encounter with the “young Russians” of Paris, her immersion in the exciting intellectual circles of the 1930s . . . During these lunches, Elisabeth would evoke the different stages of her life, some exhilarating, some painful. She often lingered on the period of the Second World War, on her daily struggle for survival, in Nancy, in the company of her husband. She returned several times to the episode of the roundup of the Jews and seemed to relive it each time she spoke of it; the little grocery store at the end of the street, the German truck parked in front of it, the passersby gathering around it, the family dragged out of the shop and Elisabeth’s question on seeing an old man molested by the soldiers—a question that expressed all her anguish in the face of the tragedy she was witnessing: “Should I throw myself under the truck?” In the small apartment in Épinay, time marched on. Sometimes, Elisabeth, exasperated by her awkwardness when she tried to pull out the papers she was seeking, would rise to dig up a file in a cupboard. From her stack of archives she would come up with an article scribbled in her impulsive handwriting, a photograph accompanied by a commentary on the people therein, sometimes a dog-eared review or book with a dedication by the author. Often, with a weary wave of her hand, she would point to the piles of paper and the shelves sagging under their weight: “All that should be sorted out. I’m no longer up to it.” Every time I proposed that the two of us tackle the job, she would shrug: “Some other day . . .” Between Saturdays, I would listen to the tapes I had recorded, sort out her recollections, take note of topics that should be explored more in depth. Elisabeth turned out to be an inexhaustible mine of information . Pastor Marc Boegner, Nicolas Berdiaev, Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, Mother Maria Skobtsova, Fr. Lev Gillet, Vladimir Lossky, Paul Evdokimov —she had vivid memories of all these personalities, peppered 296 Epilogue with anecdotes that made them very human and accessible. The Fédé, the first Francophone parish in Paris, the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius, the Word Council of Churches, the ACAT—so many enterprises in which she participated, lived out her faith, and communicated it to the world! The “grande dame of Western Orthodoxy” was also anchored in the present and liked to evoke current political and religious matters, but always with the...