In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

chapter 3 4 Tough Love for France Herman Lebovics All of my historical work (and much of my life) has been dedicated to refusing , disassembling, and attacking laws and rules. Questioning the idols of authority has not made my personal life or my professional one easy. But it has benefited my history writing by adding the passion of engagement to the scholarly work. When, in my late twenties, I had become emotionally and intellectually ready, France took a privileged place in my imagination as the homeland of secularism, freedom, and equality—of rules not imposed from above. But to discover this potential France, I soon learned, I first had to peel back some layers of the really existing France. Brought up in a refugee, unskilled, working-class, Orthodox Jewish family , I got a great dose of fear of the world outside. I was born in Czechoslovakia in 1935. My family lived in a small village in the extreme eastern part of the country, where the Jews—many of them religious—spoke Yiddish and Hungarian, and the peasants spoke various Slavic dialects. Soon after I was born my parents decided to move to America to harvest the rich rewards of life in the New World. In the classic immigrant pattern, my father left first, in 1938. But history—unexpected as usual—caught up with us. A year later, now stateless, with no passports, just a travel document issued from Budapest (the country had just been invaded and divided between Germany in the West and Hungary in the East), my mother, sister, and I made a harrowing voyage to the United States. We had planned to travel west from the United Kingdom, but in 1939 that was no longer possible. Instead we were forced to go south. In Genoa we found a boat that would take us to America. I can still recall the smell of third class, that mixture of sweat, diesel oil, and salami. Proust would not have liked it. Arriving in New York, my waiting father and his uncle loaded us in a car for the drive to Bridgeport in nearby Connecticut. During the ride, I remember finally feeling safe. As the car rolled to our new home, I sunk into a deep sleep in the precious feather bed my mother had brought with us to our new home. Bridgeport was an ugly industrial town. Apparently it had always been so. But it had rubber and brass factories vital to what became, soon after our arrival , the war effort. There were plenty of jobs. My mother worked as a seamstress and my father held down two industrial jobs to make ends meet. My neighborhood was ethnically very mixed. Bridgeport had a large Hungarian community. Along with the several Hungarian kids who gathered after school to play touch football in our little green park surrounded on all sides by factories, other families came (some fairly recently) from Norway, French Canada, Italy, and Ireland. And then there was Ricardo, our American Indian buddy. Once I started public school, I integrated easily into my America-in-theplural . I had learned English in a few months. At home we spoke a classic immigrant mélange of Yiddish, Hungarian, and English—often in the same sentence. Our hybridized language evidenced the archaeological strata of our lives. But whereas I embraced my variegated new world, my mother and father responded to the refugee experience and the murder of most of the family that had stayed behind by hewing even tighter to a sense of group loyalty. The survival strategy they followed in this strange new world—along with many of their condition and generation—was that, if we followed the rules of G–d and that of the sanctioned American public order, we would be safe. This was an old practice/strategy of East European Jews that, it must be said, seemed to have worked at certain conjunctures in the past. Accordingly, in this fearful world, the explanations for why human situations played out in a certain way came down to me either as “it is natural” or else as citations of rules and obligations that G–d had imposed on us. From my first memories, I can recall that I was not an obedient believer. But only when I was much older could I put my “no” into words. I preferred to pass the long dreary Orthodox Sabbaths immersed in faraway worlds. Without a guide or mentor, I read whatever came to hand in...

Share