Brussels 17th May 2013

Today has been one of significant ups and downs... I am not sure now whether I am satisfied with how the day went or not.

I started by walking north toward Rue Verte 3, the address of the building in which Opa and his family lived once they reached Belgium in late 1938. It was a fairly long walk (something like two miles) in the rain and I was soaked by the time I reached it. The street is in a much more modern area of town than most of the city center and, much like Klosterneuburger Strasse in Vienna, today it is a poor neighborhood inhabited primarily by Moroccan and Turkish immigrants. I could not find no. 3, so I entered a nearby hotel and asked if either man inside knew of it. One of the men went out with me (in a suit in the rain! They were both very nice) and explained that nos. 1 - 7 all referred to one building demolished only the previous month! It had housed Islamic immigrants for at least sixteen years (as long as he had worked in the hotel) and then been abandoned in the last few. He did not know if the building had stood in the late 1930s.

They also looked up the name Blanchet for me in the phone book online, as a "Mrs. Blanchet, Rue Verte 3" was listed as a reference for the Najmans on the paperwork I found yesterday at the National Archive. Alas, no Blanchets remain today on Rue Verte. C'est la vie.

I wandered my way back to the hostel to dry off, stopping on the way at a large cathedral (signs simply called it "the Cathedral," so it seemed worth a stop), very pretty and impressive.

I cooked my most ambitious meal yet when I arrived back at the hostel. I wondered what it might take to make my own pasta sauce, and recipes I found online did not look difficult, so I gave it a shot. For those who want to play the "Cook Across Europe with Mike" game, it went something like this: I bought canned whole peeled tomatoes, hand crushed them to the right consistency, grated a carrot, chopped an onion and a clove of garlic, boiled them all together and enjoyed the delicious results. I was really impressed. It tasted something like Oma's pasta sauce and the Olive Garden's mixed. So I can't be doing too badly. Protip: 1.2 kilograms of canned tomatoes makes WAY more sauce than one person needs. Again, I am really enjoying cooking and the whole thing cost me €3.83. Can't complain about that...

At 6:00 PM I headed to the Rue de la Regence to attend services at the Great Synagogue. I am starting to get a feel for the city and can navigate fairly well. I got there around 6:30 but the doors were closed, so I did what is best outside a synagogue: I loitered.

It did not take long before a passing woman looked at me suspiciously and reported me to security. A nice man in his early 30s greeted me firmly and asked what exactly I was waiting for. I told him that I would like to attend the service, and a bit about my project. I showed him my passport, and he asked me if I frequented any Jewish communities in the US. I told him that I did not, and he told me that I would not be allowed to enter tonight.

This essentially boiled down to me not being "Jewish enough." He insisted that it is a matter of security, and I understand that, certainly. But it was honestly a little hurtful to not be accepted by a community that I have felt more and more tied to as this project has progressed. It is, frankly, a disappointing commentary on our time that houses of worship of any denomination should feel the need to resort to insularity to defend themselves from perceived threats. I think for the Jews this feeling is doubly strong given both the historic and contemporary tensions that they have and do face as a group.

Anyway, he was just doing his job. I will try in Paris next Friday if I can.

Tomorrow I may either see some last tourist sites in Brussels or, more probably, hop on a train from Centraal to Ypres, the city in Flanders made famous by numerous battles in World War I memorialized in the poem In Flanders' Fields. I memorized the poem in high school for Trem's English class, and I figure it's an excuse to get outside of the city. There are hourly trains and it is a two hour ride, so it should not be too bad.

Until tomorrow!