That was how my mother learned that she was Jewish. That incident in the schoolyard in 1950. Thunk. Suddenly, and without explanation. The stone that hit her was much like the stone that had hit Myriam at the same age, that one thrown by Polish children in Lodz when she went to meet her cousins for the first time. 1925 and 1950 weren’t so very far apart. For the children of Céreste, like the children of Lodz—and the children of Paris in 2019, for that matter—it was nothing more than a joke, a schoolyard taunt like any other. But for Myriam, and Lélia, and Clara, it was an interrogation.
