Pedigree by Patrick Modiano

I was born on July 30, 1945, at 11 Allée Marguerite in Boulogne-Billancourt, to a Jewish man and a Flemish woman who had met in Paris under the Occupation. I write “Jewish” without really knowing what the word meant to my father, and because at the time it was what appeared on the identity papers. Periods of great turbulence often lead to rash encounters, with the result that I’ve never felt like a legitimate son, much less an heir.
    My mother was born in 1918 in Antwerp. She spent her childhood in a suburb of that city, between Kiel and Hoboken. Her father was a laborer, then assistant surveyor. Her maternal grandfather, Louis Bogaerts, was a dockworker; he posed for the statue of the longshoreman by Constantin Meunier that stands in front of the Antwerp city hall. I’ve kept his
loonboek
for the year 1913, in which he recorded the names of all the ships he unloaded: the
Michigan
, the
Elisabethville
, the
Santa Anna
… He died on the job, at around age sixty-five, from a fall.
    As a teenager, my mother joined the Faucons Rouges youth group. She worked for the gas company. In the evenings, she took drama classes. In 1938, she was signed by the filmmaker and producer Jan Vanderheyden to act in his Flemish “comedies.” Four films between 1938 and 1941. She was a chorus girl in music hall revues in Antwerp and Brussels; there were many German refugees among the dancers and artists. In Antwerp, she shared a small house on Horenstraat with two friends: a dancer, Joppie Van Allen, and Leon Lemmens, who was more or less the secretary and shill of a rich homosexual, the baron Jean L., and who would be killed in a bombardment in Ostend in May 1940. Her best friend was a young decorator, Lon Landau, whom she’d meet again in Brussels in 1942 wearing the yellow star.
    I’m trying to follow chronological order, for want of other reference points. In 1940, once Belgium was occupied, she lived in Brussels. She became engaged to a certain Georges Niels, who at age twenty managed a hotel, the Canterbury.The hotel restaurant was partly commandeered by officers of the Propaganda-Staffel. My mother lived in the Canterbury and met various people there. I know nothing about all those people. She worked in radio, playing in Flemish broadcasts. She was hired by a theater in Ghent. In June 1941, she was in a theatrical tour of the ports along the Atlantic and the English Channel, performing for Flemish workers of the Organisation Todt and, farther north, in Hazebrouck, for German airmen.
    She was a pretty girl with an arid heart. Her fiancé had given her a chow-chow, but she didn’t take care of it and left it with various people, as she would later do with me. The chow-chow killed itself by leaping from a window. The dog appears in two or three photos, and I have to admit that he touches me deeply and that I feel a great kinship with him.
    Georges Niel’s parents, rich hotel owners from Brussels, did not want their son to marry her. She decided to leave Belgium. The Germans intended to send her to film school in Berlin,but a young officer from the Propaganda-Staffel whom she’d met in the Canterbury got her out of that predicament by sending her to Paris, to Continental Films, a production company, run by Alfred Greven.
    She arrived in Paris in June 1942. Greven gave her a screen test at the Billancourt studios, but it wasn’t very convincing. She worked in the “dubbing” department at Continental, writing Dutch subtitles for the French films the company produced. She became the girlfriend of Aurel Bischoff, one of Greven’s assistants.
    In Paris, she lived in a room at 15 Quai de Conti, in an apartment rented by an antiques dealer from Brussels and his friend Jean de B., whom I can picture as a teenager, with a mother and sisters in a chateau in the heart of Poitou, writing fervent letters to Jean Cocteau in secret. Through Jean de B., my mother met a young German, Klaus