My heart thuds. “Do I remind you of your sister?” I ask. “Rose?”
The color drains from his face. “But how did you . . . ?” His voice trails off.
“I think I’m your great-niece,” I tell him. “I’m Rose’s granddaughter. Hope.”
“No,” he says, his voice nearly a whisper now. “No, no. That is impossible. My sister died seventy years ago.”
I shake my head. “No,” I say. “She’s still alive.”
“Non, ce n’est pas possible,” he murmurs. “It is not possible.”
“She always believed you had died,” I tell him softly.
He stares. “She is alive?” he whispers after a long pause. “You are certain?”
I nod, the words stuck behind the sudden lump in my throat.
“But how . . . how are you here? How did you find me?”
“She asked me to come to Paris to find out what happened to her family,” I say. “Your name was nowhere in the records.” I quickly explain about how the people at the memorial sent me to Olivier Berr.
“I remember him,” he says softly. “He spoke to Jacob too. A long time ago. Right after the war.”
“Jacob?” I ask.
His eyes widen. “You do not know of Jacob?”
I shake my head. “Is he another of your brothers?” I wonder why Mamie didn’t put his name down on the list.
Alain shakes his head slowly. “No,” he says. “But he was more important to Rose than anyone else in the world.”
I follow Alain into his apartment, which is small and filled with books. Dozens of teacups sit with their matching saucers on shelves and atop cabinets, a few even framed on the walls.
“My wife collected those,” Alain says, following my gaze and nodding to a shelf filled with cups and saucers, as he shuffles down the hall toward a sitting room. “I never liked them. But after she died, I could not bring myself to throw them away.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “When did she . . . ?”
“A very long time ago,” he says, looking down. We enter the sitting room, and he gestures to one of two high-backed chairs, upholstered in red velvet. I sit, and he shakily sinks into the seat opposite me. “My Anne, she was one of the few who survived Auschwitz. We used to say how lucky she was. But she could never have children, because of what they had done to her. She died at forty with a broken heart.”
“I’m so sorry,” I murmur.
“Thank you,” he says. He leans forward eagerly and stares at me with eyes that are achingly familiar. “Now, please, tell me about Rose. Forgive me; I am in shock.”
So I quickly tell him what I know: that my grandmother came to the United States in the early 1940s after marrying my grandfather, that they had one daughter, my mother. I tell him about the bakery Mamie opened on Cape Cod and how just an hour earlier, I’d stumbled upon the ashkénaze Jewish bakery on rue des Rosiers and realized how familiar so many of the pastries were.
“I always knew Rose had baking in her blood,” Alain says softly. “Our mother, she was from la Pologne. Her parents brought her here to Paris when she was just a little girl. They had a bakery, and before our mother married our father, she worked there every day. Even after our mother had children, she would still help at the bakery on the weekends and on busy evenings. Rose, she loved to go there with her. Baking is our family’s legacy.”
I shake my head. It’s incredible, I think, that I’ve been surrounded by Mamie’s family history for all my life and never known it. Every time I baked a strudel or a Star Pie, I was following a tradition that had been in our family for generations.
“But how did she escape Paris?” Alain asks, leaning forward even farther, so far that I’m beginning to fear he might fall from his chair. “We always believed she died somehow, just before the roundup.”
My heart sinks. “I don’t know,” I say. “I was hoping you would know.”
He looks confused now. “But she is still alive, you say? Can you not ask her?”
I hang my head. “She has Alzheimer’s disease,” I say. “I don’t know how to say it in French.”
I look up and Alain nods, sadness sweeping his features. “It is the same word. So she does not remember,” he whispers.
“She has never talked about the past before,” I say. “In fact, I didn’t know until just a few days ago that she was even Jewish.”