He directed the Monte Carlo ballet company after the death of Sergei Diaghilev; he was a friend of Marcel Proust and helped him publish the first volume of 'In Search of Lost Time,' in Witnesses later said that upon their arrival in Auschwitz, Blum was taken and thrown live into one of the furnaces. He was an example of a courageous man, fighting as an officer in World War I and then returning from the United States to fight for France.
Serge Klarsfeld said that he established a court of justice in a place where there was none. The outbreak of the coronavirus has also contributed. Does anti-Semitism pose a threat to France? There is no doubt that populism and anti-Semitism are on the rise in France, but I hope everyone has learned from the past about the dangers and will avoid a similar catastrophe such as that of World War II.
Western democracies are not pursuing anti-Semitic policies, as is happening in some Eastern European countries such as Hungary, or marginally in Poland.
The coronavirus will also contribute its part in the search for someone to blame in countries that have been hit hard. What would have happened if this had taken place in the s? Undoubtedly, it is a democratic country that needs to be protected. How have you managed during the pandemic? It evokes thoughts about life, death, the elderly, loneliness, inequality, solidarity and survival — which is a more apt word than the one used by President [Emmanuel] Macron — a battle — in order to define the coronavirus.
Gaby Levin Jun. Get email notification for articles from Gaby Levin Follow. Open gallery view. Credit: Natan Dvir. Place de Vosges, Paris. Credit: Guillaume Baviere. The Drancy detention camp, outside Paris, in July, Sinclair's grandfather, Leonce Schwartz, one of the so-called notables, was snuck out of there and survived the war. Anne Sinclair. Anne Sincalir at home in Paris. Click the alert icon to follow topics: Jewish literature Holocaust Antisemitism France.
Rosenberg and Picasso were the same age and became such close friends, they lived next door to each other in Paris. Picasso gave his dealer a priceless gift -- he painted Rosenberg's family: Anne Sinclair's grandmother and her mother as an infant. Years later, Sinclair made a decision she now regrets: she actually turned down a chance to pose for Pablo Picasso.
A year-old girl -- imagine her twisted face, with eyes everywhere and nose everywhere! And so I said, 'No! In her book, Sinclair describes the events that forced her grandparents to flee France.
In , Adolf Hitler denounced the art that Paul Rosenberg loved as ugly -- degenerate art. When the Nazis confiscated the offending paintings and sculptures in Germany and offered them for sale, Rosenberg convinced other dealers to boycott the auction.
So the minute the Nazis invaded France, he had to flee. Adding insult to injury, the Nazis used her grandfather's Paris gallery during the war to house an institute charged with spreading anti-Jewish propaganda in France. Rosenberg never set foot in those rooms again. Instead, he made a new life in New York. Rosenberg started over in an elegant New York townhouse that is still owned by members of Sinclair's family.
Sinclair herself was born in the U. But those glory days changed sharply with the onset of World War II. Using his connections and through considerable good fortune, Rosenberg managed to flee to New York in with his family. The art collection wasn't so fortunate however, and dozens of his paintings by Cezanne, Monet, Sisley and others were seized by the Nazis.
In a cruel twist of fate, his abandoned Paris gallery was even turned into a Nazi headquarters, called "The Institute for the Study of Jewish Questions. After his death in , his son, Alexandre, Ms Sinclair's uncle, managed the gallery until the s. And yet, of a once vast collection, Anne Sinclair claims to only have four important paintings left today. Given the struggle and difficulties surrounding the early years of her life, it's perhaps not surprising she wanted to move on from those days and create a life on her own terms.
She says that, growing up, she wasn't as interested in the world of art as she was in politics and journalism. It wasn't until she was 62 that she decided to probe her family history. The trigger was a commonplace event - she lost her identity card and had to go to the police station to renew it. While there, she noticed the harsh treatments of immigrants who have to fight to obtain or maintain French nationality.
When she faced with an officious clerk who asked her to produce her grandparents' birth certificates to prove her Frenchness Sinclair was born in New York City , she spat back with "the last time people of [my grandparents] generation were asked this kind of question was before they were put on a train to Pithiviers or Beaune-la-Rolande" naming the French camps where Jews were interned before being deported by the Nazis to concentration camps.
The event made her reflect. If she, a famous broadcast journalist who once sat as the model for the face of Marianne, the national emblem of France whose bust sits in every French town hall, had to fight to remove any doubts about her origins, what about everyone else? She realised that she could no longer ignore her past, and in , a year before her husband would do the "perp walk" before the whole world, began to dig into her family's Pandora's box.
Get the best home, property and gardening stories straight to your inbox every Saturday. Enter email address This field is required Sign Up. Before she began her research, Sinclair knew the broad outlines of her family history, but didn't realise all she would find. To her surprise, she discovered her grandmother had an affair with her grandfather's arch business rival, Georges Wildenstein. Rosenberg knew about the affair and wrote bitter letters to his wife, which he never sent.
Sinclair writes: "I feel unmoored in the face of such intimacy, and I turn the letters around in my hands, trying to work out what to do I loathe absolute transparency, finding it voyeuristic at best and a bit totalitarian at worst.
Although in this passage Sinclair doesn't deliberately set out to reveal her personality, in it we can clearly see the same woman who rejected media intrusion into her life so vehemently in the wake of the DSK scandal. Throughout, Sinclair held her head up high and stood by her husband in the face of criticism from the whole world.
Having journalists dig into her personal affairs must have felt like a violation, especially when the couple were trapped by the media in their Washington DC home in the summer of In another interesting reflection, Sinclair explains that according to her paternal grandmother, when faced with adversity, you "button up" - grit your teeth and get on with life.
It seems this has been her motto through her own life, too. Before all hell broke loose that summer, Strauss-Kahn and Sinclair were very happy together.
They first met back in the late s. She was still married to Ivan Levai, a well-known radio journalist with whom she has two sons, David and Elie. But her love story with Strauss-Kahn was too passionate for her to resist. They first started seeing each other in public for lunch and at work-related occasions but then began having clandestine meetings with coded messages exchanged by beeper long before the days of the SMS!
In the end, Ivan Levai and Anne Sinclair put an end to their year relationship and parted as good friends. They are, in fact, still very close. Notably, it was Levai who was one of the first people who came to Strauss-Kahn's defence saying that "I saw my sons' stepfather being guillotined.
There was Tristane Banon, an attractive young French journalist who alleged she was subjected to an attempted rape by him during an interview many years before the scandal in New York, but was afraid to speak because of his political power.
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