My Childhood in Paris, part 1 The Paris of the 1920s had cobblestone streets and horse-drawn carriages delivering milk in glass bottles with the cream on top \u2014 reserved for my father for his caf\u00e9 au lait. Coal was thrown down a chute at the base of our apartment building, and blocks of ice were hauled up the stairs on men\u2019s shoulders and delivered into our aptly named iceboxes.
\nWhen my grandmother called my father to say that a redheaded girl had been born, he just hung up, disappointed. He had hoped for a boy. My mother called me Natasha, after her favorite character in Tolstoy\u2019s War and Peace.
\nIt was the custom to hire a wetnurse to breastfeed babies so that the mother could get back to her normal life. My niania (nanny) was Russian, so that was my first language. I had milk brothers and sisters, the children who she had nursed. This created a special bond, and I remained friends with my milk sister, whose name was also Natacha (the French spelling of my name).
\nMy niania was Russian Orthodox, so she took me to church on Sundays. I have a strong memory of burning incense and hearing Gregorian chants. I prayed to baby Jesus on my knees every night. My Jewish mother never found out. Perhaps my love of icons comes from that time.
\nAll the children I knew had governesses. It was thought that children were better off being raised by professionals than parents. When I was 3 years old and fluent in Russian, my niania disappeared without an explanation, and Fr\u00e4ulein Margo appeared. She spoke only German, so I was suddenly bereft of my usual caregiver and left in the hands of someone I could not communicate with. That was the point, to speed up my language acquisition. It worked, and within a short period of time, I was fluent in German. At Christmastime, Margo dressed up as Santa Claus and gave me a burlap sack full of oranges from Palestine \u2014 a rare delicacy \u2014 and walnuts. I also got a stick to be beaten with when I disobeyed, which happened quite a bit. A German friend of mine also remembers a stick being part of her Christmas package.
\nWhen I was age 5, the scenario was replayed: This time it was the fr\u00e4ulein who disappeared, and Madame Michelle arrived on the scene to teach me French. By the time I was 6, I was fluent in three languages: a good beginning to my education according to my parents.
\nI can\u2019t imagine how traumatic it must have been as a young child to be suddenly abandoned and confronted with a new person with whom I could not communicate. These kinds of traumas often have repercussions later in life \u2014 the fear of abandonment has resurfaced in my life repeatedly.
\nI had just two toys: a doll and a little toy car. No one had the proliferation of toys that my children later possessed. For my birthday, my mother invited her friends, and I performed for them \u2014 reciting poetry or singing. There were no other children invited.
\nWe bathed once a week but used a bidet every day. No one had ever seen a shower; hair was washed once a month and rinsed with rainwater gathered into buckets sitting on our balcony. Mother had chamomile tea and lemon added to the water to make my hair shiny.
\nWhen I was 6, I attended a lyc\u00e9e, with separate entrances for boys and girls. We all wore unattractive beige uniforms. I remember having to stand in line to enter the classroom and the classes being very large. We each had our own desk with a lid. I learned to write with a fountain pen that I dipped into an inkwell. We made slanted lines and circles for pages and pages on lined workbooks to perfect our penmanship.
\nLater that year, a brother appeared unannounced. My governess said that he was brought by a stork; the cook said she found him in a cabbage. My mother said he came out of her belly \u2014 the most unlikely of all the stories. I resented my brother. He was a beautiful baby, blonde and chubby, but mostly he was a boy. While he was admired and the center of attention, I stood on the periphery \u2014 a skinny, redheaded, freckled, invisible, sullen child. It wasn\u2019t until we were adults that we became friends.
\n“My Childhood in Paris” will continue in my next column. Natasha Josefowitz taught the first course in the U.S. on women in management and is the author of 20 books. She lives at the White Sands in La Jolla.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My Childhood in Paris, part 1 The Paris of the 1920s had cobblestone streets and horse-drawn carriages delivering milk in glass bottles with the cream on top \u2014 reserved for my father for his caf\u00e9 au lait. Coal was thrown down a chute at the base of our apartment building, and blocks of ice were […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":726,"featured_media":264968,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"11560","_seopress_titles_title":"DOING IT BETTER: My childhood in Paris, part 1","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[11560,11552],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-264967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-la-jolla-village-news","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/726"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264967"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264967\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/264968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}