For Irène
On cruelty, unfairness, and grief.
I have never cried at a piece of art, and I never thought you could, really. To me, the beauty of art was the encapsulation of the artist's feelings rather than any true empathetic reaction to their endeavor. I knew what I was supposed to feel; what the artist perhaps wanted me to feel, but I could not feel it. Instead, during my admittedly sparse museum visits, I would do what most of us do, snapping pictures of pretty landscapes and long-dead men with the occasional ‘oohhh’ and ‘ahhh’ to avoid seeming like one of those vapid young people going to a museum and taking pictures to show Instagram. I was.
I’ve always felt that museums had two contrasting motives when displaying a work. On one hand, any museum worth its acrylic will have a seemingly never-ending display of famous works from famous people. However, at least for me, the almost overwhelming amount of objectively beautiful works can work to diminish the enduring beauty of each individual piece. At the Capitoline Museum in Rome, I found myself at first starstruck with the amount of historic relics lining each and every hall. Statues and gifts dedicated to great Roman emperors like Augustus, surrounded by colossal limestone monuments in service to the gods of old. At the end, though, I found myself oddly desensitized to the beauty of our ancient human kin. If at first every statue got my complete and full attention, by the end I was essentially completing a chore of the ancient world, just waiting until it felt “okay” to walk towards the exit. I don’t think that’s wrong. Or at least, I don’t think it’s particularly uncommon.
We are blessed in the age of modern technology and convenient travel with the ability to see more of the world than our ancestors could ever dream. I’m writing this outside a laundromat in Switzerland, almost five thousand miles from the town I have spent my life in. That is a blessing my mind will never not take for granted. Air travel is simply a reality of my life, a truth that I have never not known. In much the same way that the more statues I saw, the less I gave each their proper time; the more I am entrenched in our modernity, the less I am deserving of its awesome power. I try to stay grateful, to remind myself that such access may be commonplace within my economic and national cohort, but it is far from universal even now. I know the right words, the way to sound grateful for my blessings and deserving of their rewards. But, I don’t feel it. I don’t truly feel it at all, in much the same way I do not truly feel grateful to breathe the air we breathe on the planet we live.
So, I thought my artistic psychopathy would continue until my death. That was that, I could not cry at a piece of art. This was true up until about two days ago, when to me and my nervous system's complete surprise, I started to cry uncontrollably on the third floor of the Kunsthaus Museum in Zurich, Switzerland. My eyes could not look away from a portrait of a young girl, looking innocently off the canvas surrounded by a sea of calming blues and effervescent greens.
Surrounding the canvas, and a small mob of tourists, was a large silk cloth that seemed intended to frame the frame itself. In front of the painting was a large wooden engraving about the work. This is where, to my eye's delight and my brain's horror, I found myself overwhelmed, tears arriving before I could stop them.
Her name was Irène Cahen d’Anvers, a daughter of a wealthy French Jewish family. She was eight years old at the time of the portrait, just a child in the face of a world that looked similarly uncertain as it does today. Her gaze is not one of any particular confidence or discernment. It is wholly and purely the look of a child who, much like myself, has been afforded a life of quiet luxury. Not of snobbishness, or an aristocratic glee, but of peace. A peace that every child should have in a fair world. A peace that avoids the guilt of the past, the violence of the day, and the troubles of tomorrow. Irène had, like every child does, the freedom to be a child.
Like all of us, Irène did not choose the family she was born into or the time she was brought up with. Like every adult, Irène had to make the tremendously difficult decision to bear a child of her own into a world that offered no guarantee of safety. Like our own time in history now, the winds of change could be felt from the streets and the countryside alike. A knowledge that our world was about to enter another jump wherein norms are burnt and new ones constructed, where the values that we have taken for granted are no longer granted at all. Yet, like many of us, Irène would choose to believe that the goodness of humanity would overcome any obstacle. That the fight against tyranny and violence, and against oppression and hatred, were not strong enough to pull her from the ultimate love of raising your own kin.
While the marriage that preceded the conception would not survive, Irène would raise two children. Nissim, born in 1892, and a baby girl, Beatrice, born two years later.
Nissim would join the Aéronautique Militaire, the French Air Force, during the First World War. He would die in his cockpit in September 1917 at Meurthe-et-Moselle, the frontier of the Great War.
We do not know, to my knowledge, how Irène took the news of her son’s death. Even if we did know, even if we knew exactly when she knew, what she felt, and how it changed her, we would never truly know. We would never know the fear of your son going to war, into a battlefield in which another mother’s son must kill yours or be killed himself. We will never know if hope ever surfaced within her fear, however briefly, that her motherly protection could thwart iron and prevent pain.
I think that would be my reaction. I don’t know if you can ever truly accept that the cruelty of the world, of forces outside your control and in cloakrooms outside your purview, can rip your blood away from you. It’s easier, in those moments of fear, in the silent paranoia that news of your son’s death is traveling on an inanimate notecard, to believe that everything will be fine. That is, if you even receive word—if anyone bothers to tell you. If you will even get the confirmation that your son is not writhing in the mud, with a shrapnel slowly draining him of his life. You won’t.
Beatrice, Irène’s daughter, would marry a man three years after Nissim’s death. She, herself, would give birth to two children in 1920 and 1923, just out of the shadow of what was promised to be the last Great War of humanity's existence. If Irène grew up in the sunrise of a new and unstable dawn for society, Beatrice grew up in its sunset. The monarchies and dynasties that controlled aristocratic Europe for centuries had been smashed in just over three years. After such bloodshed, both as a nation and as a sister, I like to think that Beatrice had some hope for the future. That it really was the war to end all wars, that Nissim would die not in a flood of our collective conquest but as a martyr for a new age of peace. I wonder if that hope, just like Irène’s, was built on a false pretense that could give some sense of control to the uncontrollable. I would hope it would.
As the sun rose on the post-war continent, the feeling of impending doom once again took hold of the streets of Europe like its little brother in violence before it. For a Jewish family like the d’Anvers, in particular, that fear was even more existential. The end of the first war had not, despite the hopes of many, relinquished the flame of war but instead fanned it to an uncontrollable degree. The resentment for defeat among the German people that powered the rise of the Nazi party, who blamed the world for the symphony of discontent, and the Jewish people as its conductors.
The fall of France and the surrender to the Nazis would immediately impress an existential threat for the lives of people like Irène. Her sister, Elizabeth, long since converted to Christianity, would be sent to Auschwitz after her lineage was discovered. She would die along the way.
Beatrice and her two children would die in Auschwitz themselves in 1943, away from the mother she loved and the world she knew. Nissim's family would arrive a year later, gassed along with nine hundred other souls.
Irène would survive by a mix of a legal name change in 1903 and an early conversion to Christianity. Although such circumstances did not always yield escape, as Elizabeth is proof of, Irène would survive the second Great War. She would spend the war living quietly in an apartment in Paris.
Her portrait would be looted by Nazi forces during the occupation, ripped from the Château de Chambord. It would enter the collection of Hermann Göring, commander of the Luftwaffe and a primary architect of the Holocaust. The portrait of a young girl of Jewish descent, whose grandchildren Göring had slaughtered, whose daughter was executed, whose lineage was gassed, would end up in his personal collection. I imagine that for Irène, the grief for her now lost world would be too great to even feel anything towards yet another loss of a time that no longer belonged to her. The gaze in the portrait, of naive indifference, would be unimaginable to the woman who had given her life to the world and whom the world had taken her life in return.
Irène would live to be 91, and would spend much of the fortune that her late husband had originally dedicated to Beatrice, and then to her. What else would one do? What good is a fortune meant for a daughter who is gone, and whose inheritance can never bring her back from the prison of hatred she died in? Irène would, I’m sure, have many years to think about the loss she had endured. Almost too many. The burden of loss would be saddled around her shoulders no matter how many dollars could cushion it.
I think that is why I sobbed. That the gaze of such an innocent girl, the look that so many children have, can be so pure in one moment and so naive the next. That you could never know the suffering she would endure, that she could never know. That she had no choice in where she was born, or who she loved, or what she worshipped. She simply lived. That should be enough.
My laundry is almost done. There are many tourists here in this Swiss town—almost everyone, in fact. It can feel a bit disorienting to be around so many people with whom you share such a temporal connection. They walk the streets with the same trepidation and confusion that I do. They look up “best places to eat that locals recommend, Interlaken” on Google, too. Some of them plan to have families of their own, some of them already do. And here we all are, in an unfamiliar world with an unpredictable time.
I will think of Irène Cahen d’Anvers for the rest of my life. I will remember how much I cried in front of her beauty. How deeply I wish she had been spared the life she endured. How much I would have given to trade places with that child, to shield her from her trauma with my own blood. I would give anything, but I cannot. How deeply sad that makes me.
Charlie, what a great display of sensitivity and wit.
Yup, beautiful.