Frenkel - No Place to Lay Ones Head

Franoise Frenkel was a Jewish woman born in Poland and enamoured of all things literary and French. In 1921 she set up the first French-language bookshop in Berlin, recognising the craving for French culture in that city in the wake of the First World War. Her business was a success attracting diplomats and celebrities, authors and artists. But life in Berlin for a Jewish woman and a foreigner soon became untenable.

Frenkel was forced to flee to Paris and compelled to keep moving as she attempted to survive in a world disintegrating around her. Her observations of and interactions with the French people, both those who would give her up to the Nazi authorities and those who risked their own lives and families by offering her refuge, show how humanity strives to assert itself even in the darkest times.

Frenkels book, written with piercing clarity and sensibility in the immediate aftermath of her escape to Switzerland, was originally published in 1945 in Geneva. But only recently was a copy of this forgotten work discovered and a decision made at French publisher Gallimard to republish it, seventy years later.

Very little is known of Franoise Frenkels subsequent life, except that she returned to live in Nice where she had spent much of her time during the war, and where she died in 1975.

No Place to Lay Ones Head is the story of refugees, those fleeing terror, the world over.

No Place to Lay Ones Head

The copy of No Place to Lay Ones Head that was recently found, Im told, in Nice, in an Emmaus Companions charity jumble sale, had a curious effect on me. Perhaps because it had been printed in Switzerland in September 1945 for Geneva-based publishers Jeheber. That publishing house, now defunct, had in 1942 published Laventure vient de la mer , a French translation of Daphne du Mauriers novel Frenchmans Creek , published in London the previous year, one of those English or American novels banned by the Nazi censors but sold covertly and even on the black market in Paris under the Occupation.

We dont know what became of Franoise Frenkel following the publication of No Place to Lay Ones Head . At the end of her book, she recounts how in 1943 she smuggled herself across the border into Switzerland from Haute-Savoie. According to the note at the end of the foreword, she wrote No Place to Lay Ones Head in Switzerland on the shores of Lake Lucerne, 19431944. Sometimes strange coincidences occur: in a letter sent by Maurice Sachs a few months earlier, in November 1942, from a house in the Orne where he had taken refuge, I happen upon the title of Franoise Frenkels book in the course of a sentence: It appears its rather my path, if not my fate, to have no place to lay my head .

What was Franoise Frenkels life like after the war? These are the scarce pieces of information I have been able to gather about her thus far: she recalls, in her account, the French bookshop she had established in Berlin in the early 1920s the only French bookshop in the city and which she apparently managed until 1939. In July of that year, facing imminent danger, she abandons Berlin in all haste for Paris. But in Corine Defrances study La Maison du Livre franais Berlin (19231933) we learn that she ran this bookshop with her husband, a certain Simon Raichenstein, about whom she says not a word in her book. This phantom husband is supposed to have left Berlin for France at the end of 1933 under a Nansen passport. It seems identity papers were denied him by the French authorities, who issued him with a deportation order. But he remained in Paris. He was taken from Drancy to Auschwitz in the convoy of 24 July 1942. He had been born in Russia, in Mogilev, and it appears he lived in the 14th arrondissement.

We find a trace of Franoise Frenkel among the State Archives of the Canton of Geneva in the list of persons recorded at the Geneva border during the Second World War; that is to say, those who were granted permission to remain in Switzerland after crossing the border. That list provides us with her true full name: Raichenstein-Frenkel, Frymeta, Idesa; her date of birth: 14 July 1889; and her country of origin: Poland.

One last trace of Franoise Frenkel, fifteen years later: a compensation claim in her name dated 1958. It refers to a trunk she had left in the Colise storage repository at 45 Rue du Colise in Paris in May 1940, and which was confiscated on 14 November 1942 on the grounds it was Jewish property. In 1960, she is awarded compensation in the sum of 3500 marks for the despoliation of her trunk.

What did it contain? One coypu fur coat. One coat with an opossum collar. Two woollen dresses. A black raincoat. A dressing-gown from Grnfelds. An umbrella. A parasol. Two pairs of shoes. A handbag. An electric heat pad. An Erika portable typewriter. A Universal portable typewriter. Gloves, socks and handkerchiefs

Do we really need to know more? I dont believe we do. What makes No Place to Lay Ones Head unique is that we cannot precisely identify its author. This eyewitness account of the life of a woman hunted through the south of France and Haute-Savoie during the Occupation is all the more striking in that it reads like the testimony of an anonymous woman, much as A Woman in Berlin also published in Switzerland in the 1950s was thought to be for a long time.

If we think back to our first readings of works of literature, around the age of fourteen, we knew nothing of their authors either, whether it was Shakespeare or Stendhal. But that nave and direct reading left its mark on us forever, as if each book were a sort of meteorite. In this day and age writers appear on television screens and at book fairs; theyre constantly interposing themselves between their works and their readers, and turning into travelling salesmen. We miss our childhood years when we would read The Treasure of the Sierra Madre , written under the pseudonym B. Traven, a man whose identity remained unknown even to his publishers.

I prefer not to know what Franoise Frenkels face looked like, nor the twists and turns of her life after the war, nor the date of her death. Thus, her book will always remain for me that letter from an unknown woman, a letter forgotten poste restante for an eternity, that youve received in error, it seems, but that perhaps was intended for you. That curious impression I had upon reading No Place to Lay Ones Head was also the effect of hearing the voice of somebody whose face one cant quite make out in the half-light and who is recounting an episode from their life. And that reminded me of the overnight trains of my youth, not in the sleeping cars but the seated compartments which used to create a great sense of intimacy between passengers, and where somebody, under the night-light, would end up confiding in you or even confessing to you, as if in the privacy of a confessional. It was the feeling that you would no doubt never see each other again which lent weight to this abrupt intimacy. Brief encounters. You retain a suspended memory of them, the memory of somebody who didnt have time to tell you everything. The same can be said of Franoise Frenkels book, written seventy years ago but in the confusion of the moment, still suffering from shock.

I ended up tracking down the address of the bookshop run by Franoise Frenkel: 39 Passauer Strasse; telephone: Bavaria 20-20, between Schneberg and Charlottenburg. I imagine them in that bookshop, she and her husband, who is absent from her book. At the time she was writing, she was probably unaware of his fate. Simon Raichenstein had a Nansen passport, since he belonged to that group of migrs from Russia. There were more than one hundred thousand of them in Berlin in the early 1920s. They had settled in the Charlottenburg neighbourhood, which, as a result, had come to be known as Charlottengrad. Many of these White Russians spoke French, and I assume they were the main customers of Mr and Mrs Raichensteins bookshop. Vladimir Nabokov, who used to live in the area, no doubt one evening crossed the threshold of that bookshop. No need to consult archives or study photos. All you need do, Im sure, if you want to find a trace of Franoise Frenkel in Berlin, is read Nabokovs Berlin stories and novels, which he wrote in Russian and which are the most moving of his works. You can picture her on the crepuscular avenues and in the poorly lit apartments of Nabokovs descriptions. Leafing through The Gift , Nabokovs last Russian novel and a farewell to his mother tongue, you come across the description of a bookstore which must have resembled that of Franoise Frenkel and the enigmatic Simon Raichenstein. Crossing Wittenberg Square, where, as if in a colour film, roses trembled in the breeze around an old-fashioned stairway that descended into an underground station, he made his way towards the bookshop the lights were still on Books were still being sold to taxi drivers on the nightshift, and he made out, through the yellow opacity of the shop-window, the silhouette of Misha Berezovski