Read Online Every House Needs a Balcony by Rina Frank - Free Book Online

Romania.
    Once we understood that Dad was the last in line of the Franco dynasty—since our mother didn’t know how to make sons—my sister and I were riddled with guilt for cutting short this aristocratic line; so I agreed to learn French. Yosefa agreed because she wanted to learn everything.
    Because we were having private French lessons, Mom forbade us to go around looking like urchins and insisted that we had to be suitably dressed.
    So we got ourselves spruced up in the clothes we owned, washed our faces, and crossed the landing from our room to Tante Marie’s.
    Over ten lessons we learned to how to say “Bonjour,” “Comment ça va?” and “Frère Jacques,” until I rebelled and refused to continue with the lessons. Having to give up a whole hour of playtime out of only three at my disposal every afternoon between four and seven o’clock, coupled with the pungent smell of age that emanated from Tante Marie, just to learn a subject that was not included in the official school curriculum was just too much for me. Also, I had told my sister that in all the movies we went to see, they always speak English and not French, a sure sign that French was not so important a language as Tante Marie made it out to be. The lessons were discontinued. I don’t know why Tante Marie didn’t continue teaching my sister, who wanted to learn everything. She probably felt that teaching only Yosefa was too much like a private lesson, whereas having me there gave her more of a feeling of being in a classroom, which she must have missed.
    My sister never forgave me; because of me she never learned French, because of our poverty she never learned to play piano, and because of the steep streets of Haifa she didn’t know how to ride a bicycle.
    And then Ionesco arrived in Israel in search of the stimulation he hoped to find in our tiny little country. As a famous playwright, he was sure that the post-Holocaust Jewish state would provide the perfect inspiration for a new play, and the new landscapes would expose him to materials he could never have found in Europe.
    For five full days, my father took Ionesco all around Haifa step by step and on foot. Ionesco was shown the vista fromthe top of Mount Carmel, spreading down toward the sea. He saw the golden dome of the Baha’i temple, a source of pride to the city, and went down the myriad stairs and slopes that led from the Carmel to Haifa’s downtown region, while the scent of coffee (from my father, no doubt) filled the air. Together they wandered among the laborers of downtown Haifa, a complex blend of colors, languages, and people; Arabic, Romanian, Yiddish, Polish, and Turkish ruled the street. And Moroccan—a lot of Moroccan.
    And everyone was friends with everyone else, everyone went to the same place, even though they had not come from the same place, and most important of all, they were all Jews—well, apart from the Arabs, who in our eyes were also Jews.
    Ionesco was very keen to know how a nation that had lost six million of its sons had succeeded in building such a state, albeit surrounded by enemies, but a homeland nonetheless. And Dad told him that he didn’t for a minute regret having left the fleshpots of Romania, the movie house that the Communists had confiscated from him, so that his daughters could grow up as proud Jews in Israel; and it made no difference that, just for the time being, he was making his living selling cups of coffee.
    After five days, Ionesco informed Dad that all the material he had accumulated would enable him to write ten plays about Israel.
    In the end, after everything that he saw and absorbed and smelled and was impressed by in Israel, Ionesco wrotethe play The Chairs , about my aunt Lutzi and uncle Lazer’s front room. The room was described in great detail: the double bed at its end, the long table—about ten feet of heavy mahogany—with many, many chairs all