The End of My Addiction

Education that I was ready to take the test and requested permission for me to do so.
    Weeks passed, and an official wrote back in the usual bureaucratic way and turned us down. I didn’t accept that as an answer. I saw the chance to escape school for good, and I wasn’t ready to let it go. I called the Ministry of Education and asked for an appointment with the Minister of Education, Edgar Faure. In retrospect, I am amazed by my chutzpah; it was not at all how I usually behaved. And Edgar Faure was an exalted figure. He had been prime minister of France twice in the 1950s and had held many other positions at the highest level of government. But he was also known to write mystery novels under a pseudonym, and my parents said he had a reputation for open-mindedness, so I thought that if I managed to see him I might win him over.
    I got as far as an undersecretary. He told me, “We hear you are brilliant, but we cannot make exceptions.”
    I asked my mother to write to Faure. I had more confidence in her powers of persuasion than in my own. I looked up Faure’s home address in Who’s Who , and took my mother’s letter there myself. I rang the doorbell, thinking Faure himself might come to the door, but a small, chubby butler opened it and took the letter.
    Six days before the baccalauréat we received a letter saying I could take the exam, which I passed with honors. According to the Ministry of Education, it was the first and only time a student had passed the baccalauréat without completing the last two years of high school.

    Passing the baccalauréat wasn’t the ticket to being a musician that I had hoped. My parents were not prepared to see me spend all my time playing the piano at sixteen years of age without a thought for my future. They wanted me to enter an academic program that would prepare me for a good, worthwhile career in France or another country. They had seen democratic countries elect dictators or be conquered by them, and they had seen what people become in war. “Never again,” the leading sentiment of the immediate post–World War II years, was for them a hope, not an expectation. In such a world, my parents felt, a Jew always needed to be ready for emigration. A law degree was usually only accepted in a person’s home country, whereas a credential in architecture or engineering provided more options. A medical degree was best of all, a Jew’s passport, a highly portable credential likely to be recognized anywhere in the world.
    I resisted.
    I had spent the summer playing piano at a neighborhood restaurant, La Closerie des Lilas. It had been a fixture of the Montparnasse scene for decades, a meeting place for artists and intellectuals from Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway to Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Playing there for a few francs a night was heaven. I strung classical pieces and pop and folk songs together as the spirit moved me, or as requested by the patrons. One evening a waiter told me that the Surrealist poet Louis Aragon was requesting the first movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, and I happily complied.
    I turned sixteen that summer, but I looked older. So people in the restaurant naturally sent over drinks from time to time. I refused them all, and the restaurant staff learned to tell patrons “Thanks, but no thanks” on my behalf. Shortly after my birthday in June, however, I decided to see what liquor tasted like and I accepted a drink with a patron’s compliments. I felt no effect whatsoever, and I thought, “Is that all there is to it?” It was many years before I experimented with alcohol again.
    I would have been happy to go on playing in cafés and restaurants indefinitely. My parents did not consider that an acceptable option. They were willing to see me train as a concert pianist, however, if a good authority vouched for my potential and I devoted myself to disciplined practice.
    My piano teacher was one of the best in Paris, and other excellent musicians had praised my playing. But I had not passed the test of playing for someone who really knew the concert stage and its demands. With chutzpah that, again, rose up in me because of my desire to be a musician, I conceived the idea of writing to the great virtuoso Artur Rubinstein to ask if he would consent to see me and hear me play.
    As before, my mother wrote a letter. Although he surely received many such requests, I thought it was normal for him to respond, as he did,