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4. Fantasy Meets Reality: A Midwesterner Goes to Paris
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chapter 4 ! Fantasy Meets Reality: A Midwesterner Goes to Paris Lynn Hunt F. Scott Fitzgerald opened the door to France for me when I was sixteen. Since he had grown up only a few blocks away from our house in St. Paul, Minnesota , curiosity prompted me to read Tender is the Night, set on the French Riviera. One novel quickly led to another and yet another, and soon I had devoured all of Fitzgerald, then all of Hemingway, Stein, and the rest of the “lost generation” of American expatriates in Paris. Without Fitzgerald, France would have meant to me what it meant to any other ordinary kid growing up in the midwest of the 1950s: nothing more than a faraway and vaguely glamorous spot on some other part of the earth. Nothing else whispered things French in my ear: my father had not fought in World War II, my mother’s German-speaking, immigrant father came from Ukraine, and my parents spoke excellent Spanish, having met and married in Panama during the war. For them, expatriate life meant the tropics, giant papayas, drinking martinis by the pitcher under a whirling fan, and making friends in engineering, business, or the army. The literary hijinks of Paris or the Riviera could not have been further away. Fitzgerald made them part of my dream world, transmuting adolescent sexual longing with its insistent future orientation into nostalgia for the past intensities of the left bank. Still, Fitzgerald’s France only lurked in the background while I took German in high school and started out as a German major at Carleton College. German stood for family connection and for the social mobility offered by the United States in the postwar period. My maternal grandfather had welded ties for the railroad, and my maternal grandmother was one of fourteen children from a family that farmed in western Minnesota. With no running water and no electricity, her family’s farmhouse near the village of Odessa (population 204 in 1900, half that today) felt much further away from St. Paul than the measurable 170 miles. My grandfather said almost nothing about his early days in Ukraine, except that he had emigrated in order to avoid being drafted into the tsar’s army. He and my grandmother attended German-language services at a nearby Lutheran church. German therefore represented a link, however tenuous, with those worlds, even then fast receding from both my own landscape and that of the country. When I switched my major to history, the German influence carried over. As a college student in the 1960s I shared my generation’s obsession with understanding the whys and hows of the Nazis. Would I have resisted the Nazi evil if I had been a student in the 1930s? The concern was personal as much as it was generational: my grandfather’s first name was Adolf, after all, and he dropped an occasional anti-Semitic epithet. I remember wincing but saying nothing. My mother made it clear to us from an early age that references of that sort were unacceptable. We should never even call people “Jews”; they were “Jewish people.” A world of difference apparently separated the noun from the adjective. The issue of personal versus collective responsibility could not have been etched in sharper relief, and so at Carleton I spent hours in the library arguing with classmates about Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem . Although I eventually came to disagree with Arendt’s pejorative judgments about the French Revolution, she quickly became (and thereafter remained) my intellectual heroine. Her very existence proved that a woman could have a major impact on philosophical and political discussions. Everything pointed me toward graduate school to study the Nazi phenomenon , so I did just that—for a month or two. By the beginning of my second quarter at Stanford, I had decided to focus instead on the French Revolution . Fitzgerald had by this time received significant reinforcements. I had learned French because it was required of a German major. Once signed up as a history major, I had taken a course on the French Revolution from Carleton’s most charismatic professor, Carl Weiner. Although he emphasized interpretation and analysis as much as anyone, Carl also had a flair for storytelling , perhaps in part because his wife Ruth was the college theater director. Waving a sword borrowed from the wardrobe, stamping fiercely back and forth in front of the class, Carl recounted the fall of Robespierre in staccato detail . Would...