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.”
