Untitled

Leora Auslander
variations among some occupational groups. Consumers employed in the art,
architecture, design, and fashion industries (broadly defined), for example, had a
greater tendency than others to buy modernist design. Thus for example, while the
widowed mother of the industrial designer, M. Khenkine, furnished her part of
their shared apartment in Louis XVI, his studio was furnished with modern-style
goods. 24 The attraction to modernism in this group, may, I think, be accounted for
by their professional engagement with new aesthetic trends and a corresponding
interest in the up-to-dateness of the aesthetic of their everyday life. For other
consumers, art deco’s internationalist, cosmopolitan, and ahistorical associations
and aspirations clashed with their sense of their lives and their homes rooted in a
French past and French traditions. It is not surprising therefore that in those
dwellings in which the two styles were mixed, dining and living rooms tended to
be historicist, while bedrooms and studies were more often modernist. Thus, the
space in which the family’s social life transpired was anchored in the French past,
while the private space of the bedroom and the professional space of the study
would be made forward-looking. Bedrooms were essentially never seen by those
outside the family, and studies, as work spaces, had a foot outside of the domestic
sphere. It would appear that the owners of such homes expressed their acceptance
of conformity to bourgeois norms and the limits to that acceptance in these choices.
When it came to the smaller objects of interior decoration, however, Parisian
Jews became somewhat more eclectic. Japanese and Chinese sculptures were
relatively popular, as were “oriental” carpets, and some objects from North Africa
and other French colonies. Mme Joseph Cohen, for example, had something she
identified as a lamp from a mosque hanging in her front hall. 25 These non-French
objects were usually finishing touches on otherwise quite domestic interiors. The
living room of Mme Blitz is a case in point. It included:
Two big smoking chairs upholstered in beige velvet, a sofa and four smaller chairs in
the same fabric, an antique, Louis XV, chess table. A bonheur de jour in rosewood, a
Lalik [sic] vase, two paintings and one engraving, one antique glass cabinet, one nesting
table, two oriental carpets, two Chinese vases, and three pairs of curtains. 26
I would suggest that while these households remained committed to things French
for their capital-intensive acquisitions, intended to survive several generations, that
ensemble could be leavened by less expensive and more moveable goods from
other aesthetic traditions. More surprising, perhaps, is the almost complete absence
of Jewish religious objects in these households.
Very few households listed Jewish or any other non-ethnographic or decorative
religious signs, although there are interesting exceptions. Mme Omar, for example,
listed among the things that had disappeared from her apartment, the “four tables
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