World in My Kitchen The Adventures of a (Mostly) French Woman America

Chapter 1: The Move We are on our way to Le Havre. The train is going so fast that the landscape is all but a blur. From time to time, I can see a farm in the mist surrounded by a sea of green fields. I am excited but also scared. It is 1955, and we are on our way to New York. Jimmy and I were married a couple of months ago. Anne, his widowed mother, was at our wedding as was his brother, Murray, but without his wife. The week before our wedding, Anne and my mother fought all the time: two jealous women bickering about dresses, jewelry, food, me, and God knows what else. They were horrible, like two witches. They nearly ruined my wedding. But as usual Mira, my stepfather, saved the day. Mira, born in Normandy, believed that food, that is, very good food, could solve any problem. He took Anne to lunch in a two stars restaurant. She loved it. Back home, she talked lovingly about eating snails with Swiss Char. "I had a great lunch! Snails with Swiss Char? I had never had that before. I simply loved it," she had said smiling happily for the first time in weeks. My mother looked slightly miffed. "Well, Anne, I'm so happy you liked it. Mira does know the best restaurants. Maybe tomorrow you and I can try La Coupole?" "Yes, of course! But only if you let me take you out for lunch." From that day on, my mother and Anne had a truce that lasted until the day of the wedding. Anne's choice of a dress for the wedding, a pale green tulle dress shocked my conservative mother. "Can you imagine? At her age! Wearing a young ballerina's dress!" my mother had whispered on the telephone to her best friend a few days before the wedding, recounting all the real or imagined problems she had had with my future mother-in-law. My stepfather once again saved the day by taking them both out to dinner at Potin on Avenue Victor Hugo, using the excuse that they should try the food as Potin was catering the wedding reception. "Anne loves sole," he had whispered to me, "they make the best one in Paris." He was right. The two women both chose and devoured the sole meuniere. The next few days were calm despite the problems I had with my brother and my grandmother. My brother, who was doing his military service in Algeria, had refused to come to my wedding on the grounds that Jimmy was an American and therefore not well educated. "Marry a Frenchman," he had written, "not an American. He does not belong in our family." I had not gotten along with him since I came back to Paris from Egypt in 1947 because he resented me invading his space. My French grandmother, who also objected to my marrying Jimmy as he was not the young man of her choice, had refused to attend the wedding and had left the country for the States to visit old friends. I had loved my grandfather. Although he had died just before we came back to Paris, I remembered him quite well as we lived in Paris until I was six and left in 1939 when my father became ill, and my Egyptian grandfather, thinking that the hot Egyptian climate would help him get better, summoned us to Cairo. My brother disliked Cairo, the heat, the noise, and above all, seeing my father ill and helpless. I was too young and did not realize how seriously ill he was. Within a few weeks of our stay in Cairo, my brother who was then ten years old, wanted to leave and go back to Paris. My parents, ill advised, and despite the rumors of an impending war, sent my brother back, alone, to France to live with my French grandparents. I would not see my brother again until I was fifteen. My father died a year later. Two years after that, my mother, now a thirty-year-old widow, decided that she needed to find herself, to seek a new life and a new husband. A young child, she felt, would hamper her style; therefore, she decided that I would live with my Egyptian grandparents, and for the next five years, I never saw or heard from her. We were a large extended Jewish SephardRossant, Colette is the author of 'World in My Kitchen The Adventures of a (Mostly) French Woman America' with ISBN 9780743490283 and ISBN 0743490282.