Yvonne Joseph de Salomon, An Introduction

I interviewed Yvonne in a suburb outside of Washington, DC. Luck and geography were on my side as she had recently moved from Geneva to live with her daughter Andree in Maryland. I spent most of the late morning and afternoon with Andree and Yvonne, interviewing a mother and daughter whose life experiences could not be more different.

In this first excerpt, Yvonne remembers her early years in France.
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My full name is Yvonne Yolande Joseph Salomon. I was born January 29, 1917 in Sarreguemines, France.

(The names of your parents?)

Camille Joseph, and my mother, Claire Levy.

(Can you tell me about your childhood in France?)

With my parents and me, lived my great-aunt. She was my mother’s aunt. She had raised her from birth. My maternal grandparents died very young, so my mother was raised by her mother’s sister. They lived in Reichshoffen, a small town, between Haguenau and Strasbourg.

They were Orthodox people. They had a lot of children, of course. And when they arrived in Niederbronn, another Orthodox widower, he was from the neighborhood—I wouldn’t make you write the other name: Gundershoffen! They seem to have only mile-long names. He was a widower. He spent his whole life in Brazil. He was supposed to be very wealthy. He needed—he wanted to establish his residence in Niederbronn. For that he had to have a woman living, a Jewish woman living in the same apartment, and he did. And for that he had first to marry her. An Orthodox cannot have an unmarried woman at his place. So after asking around, he went to my great-grandfather and introduced himself and said that he’s looking for somebody to look after him and wants to marry one of his daughters. My great-grandfather asked him which one. He said it doesn’t matter.

(chuckles) After this romantic beginning, he told my great-grandfather, “Ask your daughters who wants to be my wife.” There were three of them left, the others were gone and married. Finally my aunt Sophie decided, with her sisters, that she was going to try it. She told her father that she was going to do it.

Her father told Alexander Dreyfuss that one of them had decided. So he came and my aunt asked something unheard of. She wanted to talk to that man. So she told him that she agrees to look after him and his belongings, his place, on one condition. She wants to take her niece along, and she wants him to name her niece the only inheritor of his fortune. Because they were very poor people.

He said, “All right.” He agreed to everything. “All right.” My aunt was born in 1854. So she must have been in her—my mother was born in 1890. She was a baby, or very small, when my great-aunt married. So my great-aunt was already aged. But he agreed. He didn’t have any children or any family, so he didn’t mind who was going to inherit his fortune afterwards. That was how my great-aunt married. Alexander Dreyfuss lived for several years. And my great-aunt stayed with my mother all the time, and when my mother was an age to be married, she had the visit of the usual shadchen, how do you call it?

(Matchmaker?)

Matchmakers, yes. A funny thing, she—they proposed one man from Haguenau who was also looking for a wife, but she heard that he had a glass eye, and she said no, she couldn’t. OK. Many years later, we were invited to an engagement party for my cousin, and that girl my cousin was going to marry was the daughter of that man! So he would have been related to us anyway! (laughs) But that is a different story.

So my parents were married.

(So they were introduced by a—?)

Yes, a matchmaker, yes. As it was customary at the time. It was not easy for my mother, because my father married her because she had good dowry. And she was a very pretty girl—good-looking. I wouldn’t say “pretty,” but very good-looking girl. She was taller than my father. My father was a very good-looking boy, man. He was already about thirty years old. My mother was nine years younger. She knew that she would have to work in my father’s place. My father was a butcher. So no joke. There was another thing who was no joke: my father’s mother! (chuckles) My grandparents on my father’s side had seven children, five girls and two boys. The two boys, nobody asked them what they wanted to do. They were told. “Your father is a butcher. You will be butchers.”

With the older one, who was not my father, he became a butcher, but he never did anything. He was lazy and just didn’t want to work.

My father was more obedient. He had a stormy youth. They had a lot of fun, the boys in Sarreguemines and the community. They had a good youth. My mother knew that she was to work in the store on top of all her duties, like making a home for her husband, she had also to work with him at the store. At that time, my grandfather had already died, so my grandmother was leading the store, and my father was doing the manual work.

(It was a kosher butchery?)

No. It was not strictly kosher. We had one side kosher, kosher meat, beef and veal, and the other side was pork. But for kosher conception, that doesn’t exist. There were two butchers of that kind in Sarreguemines. The other one was Simon Stern. They had the same thing. There was one strictly kosher family in Sarreguemines. That was all, so they didn’t buy their meat at our place nor at Mr. Stern’s place, but for everybody else, it was OK. Nobody took it very seriously.

My mother told me sometimes about the beginnings of her stay at that place with my grandmother sitting on the throne by the cashiers and ordering everybody. One day, a customer told my grandmother, in front of my mother, “Well, your young lady is doing very well, isn’t she?” And my grandmother answered, “She will never amount to anything!” So that was what my mother needed. “Aha! We’ll see.” And that was the beginning of—she became much better than her mother-in-law, she inherited the place. She never did anything my father could find—what do you say, minimizing him. She always said, “I have to ask the patron.” The “patron” is the Big Boss in French. The patron thought it over, and after two or three days, he gave his answer. “I have decided …” And it was exactly what my mother had said. And my mother said, “You are wonderful! Nobody could have thought of that!” He never noticed. But he always gave us as his answer what my mother had suggested.

Everybody knew about that but my father.

Transcript by Sandy Adler, Adler Enterprises LLC.