1929-1930 Paris I was sent to Paris on a double assignment: as a cultural correspondent to write .feature articles, but also to work/or the Ullstein News Service. In Jerusalem I had been my own master; in Paris I had to keep strenuous office hours. For several months, when we were short of staff, I was on night duty from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. and from 4 a.m. to 8 a.m. This schedule confronted me with the problem whether it was preferable to go to bed at midnight and be woken up at 3.15 by the shriek of the alarm clock, or not to go to bed at all. But it also provided the opportunity to become familiar with aspects of Paris which belong to a vanished epoque. In between the strenuous office hours and night shifts, I wrote on an average two feature articles per month
for the Vossische Zeitung, the Ullsteins' most venerable liberal daily, roughly comparable to the Manchester Guardian
of the period. I wrote about surrealist films (Bunuel's classic Un Chien Andalou had just come out), and about
the Pitoefs' theatre; about the fantastic scandal of the Gazette du Franc and the fantastic disappearance of the
White Russian General Kutiepof (who had been kidnapped by the GPU-a fact which, as a good Progressive, I refused
to believe). I also wrote about the Piccolis' famous marionette theatre which for a while I frequented as a hobby;
about spring in Paris, the first French talkies, Maeterlinck's latest book, and the Duc de Broglie's theory of
matter-waves which won him the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1929. |
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