The narrow street ahead is the Rue des Rosiers, the street of the rosebushes. What it usually smells like is frying chickpeas, cumin, and warm bread. This is the Pletzl. It's Yiddish for little place, and it has been the heart of Jewish Paris since the twelve hundreds. Almost nothing in this city is older than this community's claim to these few blocks.
It was never a quiet claim. Medieval kings expelled the Jews of France again and again. The expulsions had a strange habit of arriving whenever the Crown was drowning in debts to Jewish lenders. Philip the Fair threw them out in thirteen oh-six and confiscated everything they owned, which cleared his debts wonderfully. Each time, eventually, the community came back. In the late eighteen hundreds, a wave of Ashkenazi families arrived from Eastern Europe and filled these blocks with bakeries, delis, and tailor shops. Two of those storefronts are still going. The bright yellow one has been run by the Finkelsztajn family since nineteen for
ty-six. The blue one is covered in mosaic tile laid in the early thirties — officially protected, like a cathedral, except this monument sells pastrami.
Then came the summer of nineteen forty-two, when French police swept Jewish Paris and arrested about thirteen thousand people in two days. Four thousand of them were children. Streets like this one went quiet. Around the corner, a school wall car
