Free Crossing the Borders of Time by Leslie Maitland Page B

her prior academic success, Janine’s French was deemed insufficient for her to continue at her own class level, and she was required, chagrined, to drop back two grades. And excluded as she had been as a Jew from joining her Freiburg friends at joyously nationalistic Hitler Youth rallies, now she felt branded as a German and thus different again from most of her classmates. So in her young teenage years, a point when girls yearn more than anything to fit in with their peers, Janine became an outsider, a careful observer of the people and culture around her. She tried to blend in, but, afraid to make overtures, at the same time developed a reticent stance she would never abandon and that others often mistook, believing her proud and coolly standoffish.
    To the extent she could look forward to starting school in a new country in a new language, Janine was pleased to think that at least she’d be stylishly dressed in the new wardrobe Alice had ordered before leaving Freiburg. Since they could not take their money with them, Alice spent what remained after multiple taxes on indulging her two girls in ways she had not done before and could never do later. On the momentous day she landed in France, for example, Janine tottered off the train in unforgettable pain on her first pair of high heels, chosen in navy blue leather to match the outfits she envied on her classmates in Freiburg. There were also fresh summer dresses in floral prints—dresses I found in my mother’s closet and wore myself in high school and college—and blue silk pajamas with tops so beautifully made that the sisters would wear them as blouses. But on their second day in Mulhouse, Aunt Marie took them to buy the drab buff-colored smocks that the lycée required from the moment the girls entered school in the morning until the end of the day. With long sleeves and buttons up to the neck, the smocks completely covered Janine and Trudi’s custom-made clothes, introducing a French sense of égalité , if not liberté , to the new German students.
    It was here, too, that for the first time the Günzburgers joined a community with a significant number of other Jews, a result of the fact that after its revolution, France became the first European nation to grant Jews full citizenship, gradually leading their numbers to double. In search of freedom, many Jews had long since crossed over the Rhine to find themselves in a place where entire populations of farming towns had started turning their backs on the fields—on seasonal labor and nature’s careless tricks and privations—in exchange for long and hard, but regular hours in textile factory jobs. Chemists and colorists, artists, engravers, machinists, and workers with specialized skills were employed by the thousands in flourishing printworks that already by the eighteenth century had transformed Mulhouse into a major manufacturing center, producing fabrics for a growing international market.
    Widely forbidden in Europe from owning land, Jews thrived in this industrial setting, working as merchants wholesaling textiles and later on producing apparel. Over time, the Jewish community grew, winning sufficient acceptance that by the point Janine arrived in Alsace, her class at the lycée was divided into three different groups—Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish—to study religion. A Hebrew teacher came to the school expressly to teach Jewish students about their own faith, and the Günzburger children were surprised to find a welcoming circle of Jewish friends who eased their adjustment to the French way of life.
    For Janine, this meant taking part in a social ritual that continues today in a great many cities and small towns of Europe, as locals derive their prime entertainment in the late afternoon from the sheer pleasure of strolling and greeting each other. In Mulhouse, the street where they walked was the rue du Sauvage, where at number 25 in 1859, the French Army captain Alfred Dreyfus was born. Himself