PARIS IN December. It’s snowing. The city blurs. Everything — sky, buildings, hedges pruned with architectural precision — is black and white and gray, except for the gilded tips of the iron fence posts. The shop windows blaze with color and imagination: pyramids of pastel macaroons; topiary Scottie dogs; impossibly high heels preparing to stride off to impossibly glamorous parties; chessboard cakes with exquisite defeated kings lying on them. We walk into churches full of candles, museums full of nativity scenes. “I’m definitely in the mood for Christmas,” I say to my husband; and he laughs. How could we not be in the mood here?
We visit one of the city’s many small museums: the Musée Nissim de Camondo. A quiet grand house in a quarter of quiet grand houses, it was built in 1914 by Count Moïse de Camondo, a banker, to house his extraordinary collection of French 18th-century decorative art. After his son, Nissim, was killed in aerial combat during World War I, the devastated count bequeathed the house and its contents to the French state as a museum, in order to “preserve in France, in a setting peculiarly appropriate to them, the finest objects I have been able to find of that decorative art which was one of the glories of France during the period that I have loved above all others.”
My husband and I walk through rooms that are peaceful and light, delicate and opulent, filled with paintings, furniture, tapestries, rugs, and porcelains. The house is a double piece of historic preservation, displaying not only the grace of the 18th century, but also the passionate and fastidious mindset of the 20th-century collector.
Then, quietly, the museum delivers a punch to the gut. In the upstairs study, on a shelf of family photographs, are pictures of the count’s daughter Béatrice, her husband, and their two children. They were all deported, and died in Auschwitz; the Camondo family was extinct, or extinguished: “éteinte.” It’s the word you use when you blow out a candle.
Suddenly the museum becomes about what can be preserved and what can’t.
And suddenly I am thinking about my mother’s Jewish family, the French cousins who also died in the camps. My mother, born and raised in Brooklyn, met them when they visited the United States in the late 1930s. “Don’t go back,” she remembered her parents pleading, as her father’s sister Germaine prepared to return to Paris. But they did go back. Some survived: young men engaged to Catholic girls and hidden somehow by the girls’ families. One escaped from a deportation train; others, more cautious and afraid they’d be shot, elected to stay on the train.
In a small room in the museum, a video tells the history of the Camondo family. There are stills of Béatrice on horseback as late as 1942, the year the family was arrested. She had believed, until it was too late, that her family would be safe. They had given so much to France: the museum, her brother’s heroic life. They were prominent, loyal citizens. They were French; surely that mattered more than whether or not they were Jewish?
I know something of this confusion, felt by many Western European Jews, about safety and assimilation and identity. Faint echoes of it were present in my family when I was growing up in America. My mother didn’t believe in or practice any religion. Neither did her parents. My father was the child of a non-observant German Lutheran. We had a Christmas tree and Easter baskets. I wouldn’t have called myself Jewish, or Lutheran, or anything at all.
Walking through the Camondo Museum, I feel a sense of connection with my own Jewishness. I don’t understand what it is. For me it’s not a religion, not a set of beliefs and practices. “Jewish” is not the name of a race or a nationality. But sometimes it boils down to a sense of solidarity about being, or having been, imperiled — not because of what you believe, but, as in all genocides, because of what others believe about you.
Leaving the museum, I am sobered and deeply moved. What we saw there was both the flowering and the unthinkable failure of modern civilization — the graces that cushion life and cannot protect against disaster. I walk out into the ravishing elegance of Paris in December. I’m still dazzled, still festive, still in the mood for Christmas. I’m also Jewish.
Joan Wickersham’s column appears regularly in the Globe. Her website is www.joanwickersham.com. 
