My father, Jules-Xavier Halbwachs

December 27, 2021 was the 60th anniversary of the death of my father. I am quite sure that he is totally forgotten by anybody alive, and this is as  good an occasion as any for me to say a few words about him, for the very few of you who could possibly be interested in my origins. 

I was thirteen when he died of a heart-attack (in my mother’s arms) and he was 61. He was not married to my mother, but had a wife and family of his own. His name was Jules-Xavier Halbwachs and he was a distant cousin of Maurice Halbwachs, the great sociologist of “collective memory,” a name which Al, my husband, an alumnus of the University of Chicago, spoke only with bright eyes and a voice penetrated with awe, such was the memory left by the French sociologist. I have noticed over the decades that this name has become ever more prestigious, in the United States even more than in France. And it is'nt mine. Zut!

When Alsace was annexed by Germany after the 1870 war, Maurice’s branch of the family moved to Reims, in order to stay French, the branch of my father stayed on the spot, in Alsace. They were both of old Alsatian stock and, by background and education, bourgeois, although not capitalist-wealthy. Jules-Xavier’s father and grandfather were both in succession directors of the large textile factory of Buhl, in the Valley of the Lauch, near Mulhouse.

Of his grandfather, I know only one thing: when my father was a little boy of ten, that would have been 1910, they used to go together in a horse-drawn taxi every Sunday afternoon to his aunt for tea. One time, his grandfather fell asleep during the trip. When they arrived, my father pushed his grandfather, saying: “Grandpa! We’ve arrived!” the grandfather didn’t move, he gave him a bigger push and the old man tipped forward and collapsed on the floor, he was dead. My father had caught a little glimpse of the future, of his own death. 

After his studies in Mulhouse and Strasbourg, Jules-Xavier was hired by Agence Havas which had been the world’s first news agency, founded in 1835, and had expanded powerfully to englobe the sectors of advertising and of travel. During WWII, in 1940, Agence Havas was moved to Clermont-Ferrand and Vichy and Jules-Xavier with it. The press agency was taken over by the regime of Maréchal Pétain and made into the French Office for Information (OFI), which intensely collaborated with the regime. Posted in Clermont-Ferrand, Jules-Xavier was, besides pursuing his job (the nature of which is unknown to me), active in the Resistance, in the Maquis de l’Allier, with the function of “maréchal des logis-chef” (my source for this being his obituary...) After the war, the press agency was scissioned off from the agency and replaced by the newly created Agence France-Presse. Agence Havas was nationalized and remained a major advertising and travel agency.  

In 1945, Jules-Xavier was put in charge of the branch of Agence Havas - advertising and travel - in the Haut-Rhin département (the Southern half of Alsace), in Mulhouse. This is how he came to hire my mother as an office-clerk on April 17, 1947, the day of his 47th birthday. She was his birthday gift. A year later, when I announced my intention to join the fun of the world, there was no paroxysm of joy from any quarters. Decades later, I have come to suspect that he tried to get rid of me - and of my mother - through an interesting scheme (see below).

 
It didn’t work, and the affair ran its full course, unto death. I knew him well, and during the last four-five years, I saw him almost daily, after school. He was a pillar of the society of Mulhouse, a medium-sized, but historically remarkable city, for centuries an independent, free republic, a refuge for French Protestants, allied with the Swiss cantons until 1798, when it was forced to join France by an economic blockade, one of the earliest cities of the Industrial Revolution on the Continent, first textiles, then mechanical constructions, then potash mines, the cradle of some of the biggest French fortunes - Schlumberger, L’Oréal... 


He was a church-going, façade Catholic, and his wife was the president of the local Caritas organisation. He was also very active culturally, especially in the preservation of Alsatian language and culture. He wrote, and performed in, a satiric radio-show every Sunday morning, he was a president of the Alsatian Theater of Mulhouse (together with his friend Lucien Dreyfus.) He also presided the Herren’Owa (gentlemen’s evening), a traditional local institution which put on a musical revue every year around Mardi Gras, played by men only, and for an audience of men only. I remember (from the program) one year when they put on a take off on The Merry Widow mixed with Cuban Missile Crisis; in which Fidel Castro was Danilo and there was a character called 'Sürkrüt-Chef," "choucroute-chef," meaning Khrushchev...) This was not at all a louche affair, reputable burgers gleefully participated in drags and the mayor and municipal council were in attendance...


He was an afficionado of Greece where he went on cruises once or twice a year - this was the 1950s - and he took every winter a cruise to the Canary Islands (all for free, thanks to his travel agency). He spent much time in Switzerland, which is next doors to Mulhouse - in the chic places, on the Bürgenstock, in Lugano and Wengen and Zermatt. Usually, he would take along a couple of friends or two. On one memorable occasion, he took my Latin teacher, Jeanne Stehlé, s’Schànnele and her husband, dr Paul, along to Greece and somewhere at sea confessed to them his paternity. After they came back, I was puzzled by the sudden interest and sollicitude Schànnele took to me, I was eleven at the time. When my mother told me, I realized how much differently you were treated when you belonged to the “better classes," when you had the "good connections." 


He was a member of all the gastronomical associations, oenological associations, cultural associations, etc. and had free tickets to all the plays, concerts, operas, manifestations, exhibitions, fairs, etc. (Mulhouse has a municipal theater which is a downscaled copy of La Scala, at that time it had a full opera season, with an orchestra, chorus, ensemble and ballet). Restaurants begged for his clientele. He led the good life, the epitome of a provincial Alsatian bourgeois life. He was a tall and imposing man, and more than ten years after his death, people who had no idea of my connection to him, or even that I knew him, remembered him for his “distinction.” He had a beautiful, trained, dark basso voice, and he would sing to me arias, like Sarastro, or Mephisto...

Now about the scheme:
When the scandal of my mother’s pregnancy broke, my grandmother was visited by a mysterious nun (my grandfather was out of the house). The nun told her that, in consideration of the good religious reputation of her - my grandmother’s - family, the Church was making her the favor of an offer: she, the nun, would take my mother, as soon as possible, to a convent in Italy, where she would finish her pregnancy, while preparing herself to become a missionary nun in China. When I was born, I would be put up for adoption in Italy, and my mother would be put on a boat to sail off to China. (Notice that I was born in November 1948 and that my mother would have arrived in China right in time for the Chinese Revolution.) My grandmother retorqued to the nun that this was completely out of the question.

It took me several decades - long after the death of my mother - and after some scandals came to light in Italy and other countries - to realize that I would probably not have been given up for adoption, but that there were baby-hungry couples, maybe even one particular couple, waiting for me in Italy, who would simulate pregnancy in expectation of my arrival. There was a system in place of providing fake medical statements, fake declarations to the authorities, etc. I would not have come cheap.

There were, then and later, in Alsace and elsewhere, a great many young unmarried women of working-class or peasant background, like my mother, who found themselves pregnant and the Church was not moved to come up with such extravagant proposals to “help” them out. As for the so-called “religiosity” of my grandmother’s family, it was bunk, my grandmother hardly ever went to church (although it is true that a maiden aunt of hers had made a large gift to a congregation). Who else but my father could have had the connections to call on the help of the Church at that level?

I have often been musing about what life could have been, had the scheme worked out... I would no doubt have been an adulated little Italian Queen-of-the-World only child of well-to-do, deeply religious parents, maybe in Milan, or, who knows, in very Catholic Bergamo... By 1968, when I was twenty, I would inevitably have rebelled and maybe I would have become a Maoist... My parents would have been appalled and would have revealed to me that I was not their daughter after all... I would have gone to Mao's China to look for my mother, etc.

Meanwhile, my mother would have landed in China in time for the triumph of the Revolution and the proclamation of the People’s Republic, she would have fled from her convent and, inevitably, married a Chinese Communist...

I say “inevitably,” basing myself on precedent: her first love, during WWII, had been one François Horovitz, a young Jewish immigrant from Szombathély, Hungary, who was with the French Forces of the Interior, specifically the detachment around the Communist Resistance hero, Colonel Fabien. Fabien was killed, with half a dozen other people, in an explosion which blew up the town hall of my mother’s home village of Habsheim, my mother and François being a few hundred meters away when it happened.  (See her brush with history.)

My father had three children, all dead now. Until the death of my mother, I knew my half-sister, Marthe, fairly well. She used to play at the Théâtre Alsacien. She was a horror of hypocrisy, snobbery and mendacity. She was nick-named “le Naja.” But she was fun. My older half-brother, Schangi (Jean), was a lawyer, the younger one, Pierrot, was killed young in a car-crash with his wife. 


My father never recognized me - which would have been impossible anyway according to the French laws of the time: a married man could not recognize a child born in adultery. I was well into my twenties, and he had been long dead, when the laws were changed. Nor did I inherit anything from him. He contributed very modestly to my upbringing and this contribution ceased with his death. My mother sometimes seemed to believe that he had made a will, which he had confided to his close friend, a lawyer, and that the lawyer may have made it disappear, as a favor to my father’s family.

It was discovered, after his death, that he had syphoned off part of the health and social insurance payments of his employees in order to pay for his new apartment, and these included my mother’s. He was in fact giving to her, for my upbringing, only what he was stealing from her on the other hand. A few days before he died, he told my mother that he had just made the last payment on his apartment, and that now he could relax... His death was a psychologically devastating blow to my mother and to me, I had my first menstruations on the day of his funeral. When we learned about his embezzlement, the shock was almost as big, the other way. The story of the will was dubious, but the embezzlement was real. From age fifteen on, I absolutely despised him.Ever more so as, a few years later, when my mother got ill with breast cancer - she died in 1970, when I was 21 - it became apparent how minimal her health coverage was (as against what she had paid for...). After I told this many years later to Al, he was so appalled that he never again let me speak a single good word about him, and I cannot blame him. But the other feelings, of course, could not be put to rest, either.

On the other hand, Al, who was a pragmatist, was less shocked by the Church's Italian-Chinese scheme, which he found to be "a creative solution," of the kind he liked. The madder the better! The only thing that mattered was that I had not been aborted. "I am sure I would have found you anyway!"

^{In the garden, in Habsheim, 1956}