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A crowd at one of Alex’s fashion shows.
Two years later, Drew Pearson, an American journalist and anti-communist campaigner, organised what would become known as the Friendship Train. This was literally a train, filled with $40 million – $500 million today – worth of donated food and similar supplies that the train collected from American citizens during the course of its much publicised journey from Los Angeles to New York. The train was then shipped to Europe – France and Italy primarily – and was written about by the American media as a charitable effort to help the poor and humiliated European countries, which of course it was. But Pearson had an alternative political motive for sending the Friendship Train, which was that he feared that France in particular was now vulnerable to communism. This gesture from America would, it was hoped, remind France of the benevolence of its capitalist friends. It was a kind gesture, but one with a definite political edge. France promptly responded in kind.
The Merci Train was sent to the United States in 1949 and consisted of forty-nine boxcars filled with donations from French individuals and companies as thank yous to the American people, and each boxcar went to a different American state.[fn1] The gratitude the French people felt was real, but what they chose to send the Americans shows something was going on here beyond mere thankfulness. Church bells, French art, First World War souvenirs were all offered, all of which were very nice, but possibly not that useful to, say, families in North Dakota. And as with the Petit Théâtre, there were certainly no references in the Merci Train to the occupation and the Resistance.[10] Instead it was a proud statement of France’s cultural dominance and endurance, emphasising the country’s glorious military past with mementoes from the First World War as opposed to the more recent one, and souvenirs from French industries, such as art, automobiles and fashion. France was undoubtedly grateful for the supplies America had sent, but it would not be treated as a grovelling peasant, thankful for crumbs. Ironically, France was a lot less bothered by the Friendship Train’s ulterior motive – to save the country from communism – than it was by its more euphemistic purpose, which was to help a poor, struggling country. The Merci Train shows that even if France itself was still barely on its knees in 1949, the country had lost none of its pride.
To represent French fashion, Lelong repeated his Petit Théâtre initiative and commissioned what the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York described as ‘the most talented and well-known fashion designers of the time to create mini masterpieces’.[11] Alex was again one of those designers, and today his doll is in the Metropolitan Museum: she was wearing a beautiful full-length burnished blue dress with black piping around the neck and short sleeves, a cream blouse beneath, a black belt around the waist and black stripes at the bottom, and an elegant straw bonnet, with more black piping and long black ribbon.[fn2] Alex’s inclusions in the Petit Théâtre and Merci Train were undoubtedly an honour, but they also show how France had been forced to change in the past half-decade, even if it couldn’t acknowledge it openly. The former Polish refugee who arrived without a penny and unable to speak the language, whom France had tried to have killed only a few years earlier, was now seen as an integral part of the country’s grandeur. Alex had been deeply hurt by France’s refusal to naturalise him before the war; after the war, when he was considered an essential component to the country’s sense of pride, he had his validation.
By the time Alex contributed to the Merci Train, he had fully resurrected his fashion house. This effort began in 1945 when he sold a painting by the Jewish artist Chaïm Soutine[12] – which he’d bought before the war and stashed away during it, probably with a friend – for 200,000 francs. From that sale he was able to rent a room on rue Jean Goujon, just behind the extremely posh Avenue Montaigne, which he turned into his new couture salon. In his memoir Alex claims that Imre Partos and Christian Dior helped him decorate his salon, which is certainly possible as Dior was building his own salon around the corner on the Avenue Montaigne, after spending the war designing for Lelong’s label. Two years later Dior would launch his New Look collection, which would both establish his name as the greatest designer of his era and confirm at last that Paris had regained its position as the capital of haute couture.
Alex had the kind of salon he’d dreamed of since he was a teenager, and he filled the room with what he had managed to save of his small art collection, including paintings by his beloved friend Kisling. One thing he did not have, however, was material for making clothes.
It was hard for all designers to obtain fabrics in France after the war, and part of the reason Lelong originally commissioned the designers to make clothes for miniature mannequins was that they wouldn’t need as much fabric as for actual models. Alex worked so hard – cobbling together whatever scraps of material he could find, asking friends abroad and almost certainly his sister to send over whatever fabrics they could, raising money, coming up with the designs, making them and finding the models – that the night before his show he collapsed with exhaustion. So Lelong, as eager as Alex for this show to be a success, stepped in and presented it for him.
Lelong and Alex shared a connection that went beyond an ambition for the French fashion industry: both were suspected of collaboration. Lelong saved the fashion industry from being relocated to Germany, but his success ultimately worked against him as it suggested to some that he was not to be trusted. Surely, they said, an innocent Frenchman could not work with the Germans as successfully as he did.[13] Alex, who himself was the subject of whispers because of his alliance with General Perré, became one of Lelong’s more vocal defenders, insistently reassuring any sceptical designers of his innocence.
Alex knew some regarded him with suspicion, but this did not put him off dabbling in shadowy ambiguity. He himself believed, he writes in his memoir, that Lelong ‘was guilty of much’ during the war, although there has never been any evidence he was guilty of anything. Nonetheless, Alex also believed Lelong was worth defending because ‘my real concern was to get my couture business relaunched’.
Lelong was not the only suspected collaborator Alex worked with. Serge Lifar was one of the greatest ballet dancers of the twentieth century and for three decades was the director of the Paris Opera Ballet, including during the war. After Paris was liberated he was tried and condemned as a collaborator and banned from the stage. Alex, however, took it upon himself to defend him and asked a journalist friend on Nice-Matin to write a piece in defence of Lifar.
His friend was astonished, asking Alex how he, of all people, could ask him to do such a thing.
‘Don’t think I am asking for the pleasure of it. I don’t have a choice,’ Alex replied.
Of course, Alex did have a choice, but Lifar had commissioned him to make costumes for his ballet, for the career-saving sum of 500,000 francs. At this point, the theatre was pretty much the only place where a designer could make money as few private citizens could afford couture, and Lifar’s commission was a lifeline. Once again, Alex was looking out for himself, and he won: Lifar was able to stage his ballet and Alex finally got his company off the ground by making the costumes, with the assistance of his old friend Imre Partos.
When I first read these stories I was astonished, because the image of Alex working with known collaborators was definitely not the Alex his family knew. After all, at the same time Alex was defending Lelong he was instructing his little sister to hunt down Émile Best with a gun. Once in the 1960s, when my father was with Alex at his office, a German museum called him and asked, in careful French, if they could borrow a painting. My father watched Alex’s face turning red as he listened. At last he spoke: ‘As long as there is breath in my body, no painting of mine will ever be hung in your country!’ he shouted back in German and slammed down the phone. In the 1980s, at a fancy cocktail party in Paris, Alex was introduced to someone he describes in his memoir a
s ‘Austria’s Consul General’.
‘Come join us, Alex, you speak German so well,’ a mutual friend said.
‘Not German – Yiddish,’ Alex replied loudly.
‘A chilled silence fell over the elegant room,’ Alex writes. ‘I planted myself before the consul general: “You killed my father,” I said. “He was a soldier in your army in 1914. He was gassed in Italy, on the Piava. He died from it. And now you have a Nazi president, Waldheim.[14] Have you no shame?”’
Even in the 1990s, when Alex was in his eighties and I would visit him in Paris, he would regularly hiss ‘Collaborator!’ at various galleries and businesses we walked past that, he swore, had sold out the Jews sixty years ago.
But by then, Alex had the luxury of being safe, established and secure. In the war period and its immediate aftermath, his life-saving pragmatism took precedence over his loyalty to a greater cause, and he worked with suspected and convicted ‘collabos’ when he needed their help, during the war (Perré) and immediately after (Lelong, who was probably innocent; Lifar, who definitely was not). Once he was reestablished, he would rather spit on such people than talk to them, but he didn’t deny his past alliances, faithfully recording them in his memoir. He might not have been entirely open about some things, but he didn’t lie about what he’d had to do to survive. He was passionately proud of being Jewish, but his ultimate cause was himself, and this is why he not only survived but would, very soon, become more successful than even he could have imagined.
The most popular credible theories for Jewish social mobility boil down to four arguments: there is a Jewish tradition of valuing education; Judaism itself encourages Jews to work hard because it is a religion that emphasises achievements in the current life as opposed to waiting for rewards in the afterlife; Jews tend to work, and succeed, in areas that have long been heavily Jewish, such as fashion, banking and the arts; and there is something specific to the way Jews are marginalised that encourages them to succeed. The first two theories aren’t relevant in regards to Alex, because he barely went to school and was not observant.
The third one is more pertinent, given how many of Alex’s art friends were Jewish, although it also raises the question why certain industries were and still are so popular with Jews. In his book about how Hollywood was founded by eastern European Jews, An Empire of Their Own,[15] Neal Gabler suggests that the movie business appealed to Jews because it allowed them to create an idealised view of America, even while American society denied them admission. American golf clubs might not allow Jews as members, but Jewish producers could make movies set in fancy country clubs. Connected to this was the practical consideration that movie-making was a job Jews could actually do, because ‘there were none of the impediments imposed by loftier professions and more firmly entrenched businesses to keep Jews and other undesirables out’. Both of these points are equally relevant to Jewish immigrants in Europe who worked in the arts, like Alex: they were able to get into that industry, and, once in, they could celebrate the beauty of a country they loved even if it had, at best, ambivalent feelings towards them. Anyone who works in a business like fashion and fine art is someone who needs to be surrounded by beauty. It is not that surprising that eastern European Jewish immigrants, who had experienced so much ugliness in their lives, might crave a corrective.
The last theory, about the way Jews are marginalised, strikes me as being especially relevant to Alex. All minorities are, in different ways, marginalised, but Alex’s specific experiences, ones that were common to countless Jews of his generation, unquestionably shaped his ambition. He was from the generation that lost ties – by choice or force – with traditional shtetl life, only then to be rejected by the country in which he’d been born. He then emigrated to another country, France, where he was reluctantly accepted, and then very much not. These events, in which he was repeatedly punished by the worlds in which he lived, encouraged Alex’s strong individualism. It also, as Paul Burstein writes in his essay on Jewish success, created a marginality that made Jews like Alex ‘sceptical of conventional ideas and stimulated creativity that led to intellectual eminence and, often, economic success.’ I suspect this is partly why financial industries have also attracted so many Jews, as Donald Trump has eagerly pointed out. Jews over the centuries experienced enormous losses, over and over again, as their businesses and homes were taken from them simply because they were Jewish. Cash, something they could hold on to and hide, was a form of protection. Even Jews like myself who live in comparatively peaceful times grow up listening to stories of our parents’ and grandparents’ state-sanctioned bankruptcies, and so the idea of suddenly having nothing always feels very real. Money, like beauty, can feel like a protection against that, and certainly Henri and Alex felt like that. So did my father. He grew up seeing his parents often fretting and arguing over money, always feeling like they were on the verge of destitution. My father wanted a different life, and to provide a different kind of life for his family, so he went into banking, and he was then able to look after his parents and his children, which was the point. He hardly ever wears a yarmulke, and he definitely never counted Trump’s money, but by going into banking he adhered to a Jewish tradition as much as Alex did by going into the arts. He, like Henri and Alex, worked extremely hard, not because Jews are naturally hard workers, but because they are raised to believe they have to work twice as hard to get ahead, because they will never be entirely accepted. I doubt if my father ever consciously thought like that, but his parents did and they imbued that work ethic in him, and Alex and Henri definitely believed that. It was only by working all the time, Alex thought, that he would get anywhere.
Alex realised early on that there was no point in following rules, because the rules were made to work against him. He had learned definitively during the war that he always had to help himself, and if that meant defending suspected collaborators who would be beneficial to his career, or screaming at them in the middle of a cocktail party, he would do so without hesitation or fear. He didn’t care what anyone thought of him.
Alex’s acceptance and then fierce rejection of collaborationists reflects how his war experiences shaped him. Like Henri, he believed that the world would turn against the Jews again, and this led to what Howard Sachar describes as the Jewish immigrant’s ‘drive for entrepreneurial success’.[16] But Alex’s reaction to this sense of threat was the opposite to that of his older brother. Whereas Henri wanted to blend in and be unnoticed, Alex believed that the way to face this threat was not to hide but to stand out and fight, showing the world that the Jews, or at least this Jew, could not be pushed around.
This made Alex unusual, in terms of Jewish social mobility. Contrary to some ugly generalisations about Jewish success, there isn’t something inherent in Jews that leads to success. If there were, then the most Jewish Jews would be the most successful, and clearly that is not the case: studies have repeatedly shown that Reform Jews earn more than Orthodox ones, and there aren’t many high-profile ultra-Orthodox Jews in mainstream public life. Henri had been right from the start: assimilation leads to greater success for Jews. It contributed to Jews passing as Caucasians in a way they didn’t before the twentieth century, and this in turn has helped their social mobility.
Alex was definitely not Orthodox, neither was he entirely assimilated. Unlike Henri, he never tried to be seen as French, because he learned from the war that true assimilation was a delusion – ultimately, he would always be seen as a Jew, and so he defined himself first and foremost as that instead of letting other people do it for him. His experiences – rather than any genetic tendencies – shaped his approach to the outside world and his ambition in it, and it just so happened that his unusual approach worked for him. He consciously hugged his Yiddish accent close and he loathed Germany, refusing to visit the country ever – that Sonia could speak fluent German, and continued to do so after the war, was yet another count against her in Alex’s eyes.
As angry as he was at Germany, he was more furious at France for having betrayed him. Yet he never considered living somewhere else. Maybe he thought it would be too hard to start another business elsewhere, maybe he didn’t want to leave Henri. I suspect there was a part of him that simply needed to triumph over France as a form of revenge on it. They couldn’t throw him out during the war, and he would not be chased out afterwards. But this meant that for the rest of his life, he stayed in a country that he loved dearly but had hurt him worse than any single person. He loved France, and he never forgave it.
Wounded by the French, and long ago abandoned by Poland, Alex became a very vocal supporter of Israel (another common reaction among Jews of his generation, also borne from experience). He and Henri bought Chaya an apartment in Haifa, and they visited her there often. Photos show them grinning happily in a Jewish homeland none of them could have imagined when they all lived in Chrzanow. ‘Israel is the realization of all my dreams, a dream come true after the worst atrocities which humanity has ever known. No one can doubt that Israel will become a leading country in developmental potential and the light of the Middle East,’ he wrote. This prediction was a rare instance of Alex being overly optimistic, but such uncharacteristic sunny hopefulness is a testament to how shocked he was by what had happened to him and his family in France, and how much he hoped – had to hope – that the new Jewish state would protect them all forever. When, as a Jewish designer, he was invited to Israel shortly after the country was admitted to the United Nations in 1949, to s
how his collection in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, he was so overcome that when writing about the trip thirty years later he lapsed into near hysteria, describing how much the invite meant to him as a Jewish couturier, and how much Israel meant to all Jews. Because of Israel, he wrote, all Jewish children will now have a ‘beautiful, happy, rich’ childhood, the opposite of the one endured by him.
