André Gregory - This Is Not My Memoir

W E PERFORM THREE CRUCIAL ACTIONS in our lives. One is meeting the partner with whom we will spend our years, if we are lucky enough to do so. One is choosing a vocationor surrendering to the vocation that chooses us. And the last is finding a spiritual teacher, should we be blessed to find one.

Our vocations come to us very early in life. My friend Richard Avedon, the photographer, once said that as a relatively small child, he would put up a black curtain in his doorway, poke a hole through it, and spend the day watching his family through his improvised lens. The birth of a photographer. Luis Miguel Domingun, one of the great bullfighters of all time, was already, at the age of two, carving little bulls out of wood. The birth of a bullfighter. By the time my family arrived in America I had experienced so muchviolence, dictatorship (including within my family), war, and flight. I already had so many stories to tell. That was my initiation into the world of the artist. You dont necessarily celebrate or appreciate your vocation. In fact, at times, you wish you could escape it. But it never leaves you alone.

I WAS BORN IN PARIS IN 1934 to Russian Jewish parents who had fled to France after years in Germany. Hitler was elected Fhrer three months after I was born. Two years later the Spanish Civil War and the Moscow Show Trials began. More than eighty years have passed, and I still dont know exactly what my parents did to survive, what kind of deals my father had to make to get away from both Stalin and Hitler.

While our life in Paris was beyond comfortable, the disquieting truth of what it meant to be Jewish in Europe at that time was coming into focus. My parents friends were leaving without saying goodbye; the choice to depart couldnt have been easy. And to where? America? To my cosmopolitan parents, Grisha Josefowitz and Lydia Sliosberg, America seemed dangerous, disturbing, devoid of culture. America for them was John Dillinger gunned down in front of a movie theater, the gangster Al Capone, and the kidnapping of the Lindbergh child. They werent ready to leave their apartment in Paris, the city they loved, the world they loved. The only thing that could persuade them to flee to the United States was an even greater fear: the fear of Adolf Hitler and the coming of a second world war.

MY PARENTS MET in the late twenties shortly after Stalin came to power. My father, who had worked with Leon Trotsky during the USSRs New Economic Policy, exporting furs to the United States, was by this time a representative in Moscow for IG Farben, a huge German chemical conglomerate, which a decade later would develop Zyklon B, the gas used in the Nazi death camps. Working for IG Farben meant my father had a German passport as well as a Russian one.

The Soviet secret police wanted one of its own traveling back and forth between Germany and the Soviet Union. As a Soviet representative with IG Farben, he was perfect, except for one thing: He wasnt a member of the Communist Party. They needed their go-between to be a member of the Party. And so they arrested him. His arrest, he theorized, was a first attempt to get him to join. Once released, though, he used his German passport to escape to Berlin. He would spend the next several years trying to get my mother out of Moscow, too. (They had not yet married and, though they hardly knew each other, he had decided she was the one.)

Even before he left Russia for Berlin, my father worked to help other family members leave. He spent time in Warsaw, meeting with the Soviets, who had a small office there in which you could negotiateas you would with Turkish rug merchantsfor relatives already trapped in the Soviet Union. You would offer $10,000 for visas; the Soviets would demand $20,000. Somehow, by the time the war began in 1939, my father had succeeded in getting out of the USSR every single relative that he and my mother had there.

AFTER MY FATHER FLED THE USSR, he made a fortune in Weimar Berlin, one of the wildest cities in all of Europe at the time. The city of Marlene Dietrich and Louise Brooks, and, within a few years, groundbreaking films like