using everything in her power to overcome the limited existence to which her station in life might otherwise have condemned her.
Nature had given her every asset for success: boldness, energy, obstinacy, and intelligence. All she needed now was luck, and she promised herself she would push that luck. She knew there would be obstacles to overcome, but she believed in her destiny and refused to let herself down.
NOTES
1 Charles-Roux, Edmonde, 1957.
2 Rubinstein, Helena, My Life for Beauty, op. cit.
3 ibid.
She was born Chaja Rubinstein, the eldest daughter of Hertzel Naftaly Rubinstein and Augusta Gitel Silberfeld, on 25 December 1872, under the sign of Capricorn.1 She so despised her first name that she changed it as soon as she left the country: on the passenger list of the Prinz Regent Luitpold she was registered as Helena Juliet Rubinstein, aged twenty.
Four years younger than she really was: that was her way of thumbing her nose at the passage of time. She would always lie about her age and tell untruths about other details of her life with equal aplomb. Her earliest passports stated 1880 as the year of her birth.2 Administrative bodies were not very particular at the time, and besides, she did look ten years younger. ‘I’ve always thought a woman owed it to herself to treat the subject of her age with ambiguity,’ she dictated for the opening pages of her autobiography at the ripe old age of ninety-three.3
Her place of birth, Kazimierz, was founded in 1335 by the Polish King Kazimir III as a separate fortified city next to Kraków, the capital. One hundred and fifty years later, all Kraków’s Jews were ordered to live inside its walls. Over the centuries, the Jewish town of Kazimierz expanded alongside the Christian capital of Kraków, and benefited from varying degrees of protection from Polish sovereigns. Hertzel Rubinstein often told his daughter that in those days there was a fair amount of cultural cross-fertilisation with the rest of Europe. Jews came to the city from France, England, Italy, Spain and Bohemia, fleeing persecution.
The political situation, however, was unstable. Coveted by its neighbours, Poland was constantly invaded. In 1772, a first partition divided Poland (then part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) into three territories: Austria annexed an area containing the two major cities Kraków and Lemberg and called it Galicia, while the rest of the union was divided between Russia to the east and Prussia to the west and north. A second partition took place in 1793. A third, two years later, destroyed the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth once and for all. In 1815, the Congress of Vienna created a fourth division, the Congress Kingdom of Poland, while Kraków, of which Kazimierz was now a suburb, was made an autonomous republic until the middle of the century. The city preserved its Polish heritage but, as with all of Galicia, remained a dependency of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Torn apart, Poland still refused to submit. Successive revolts for independence were met with bloody repression, which only served to intensify the nationalist movement. At the same time, waves of political emigrants left Poland, most of them headed for France – a brilliant community of painters, writers, musicians, and aristocrats for whom nostalgia served as artistic inspiration. Among them were Frédéric Chopin and poet Adam Mickiewicz. Many of the country’s great masterpieces were created outside Poland.
Austria-Hungary claimed to be a civilised nation that allowed its subjects to live in peace. The fate of the Jews was somewhat more tolerable there than elsewhere. In 1822, when the walls of Kazimierz were demolished, the richest and most determined Jews settled in the Christian district. In 1867, Emperor Franz Josef finally granted them full rights. When Helena was born, Galicia, and all of Poland along with it, was in the feverish throes of modernisation. Railways, factories, and apartment buildings were being built, cities were expanding and streets were being widened, paved with stones and fitted with streetlamps and gutters.
With 26,000 Jews, a quarter of its population, Kraków became an important centre for Judaism. Synagogues and religious schools – yeshivot and cheders – were built. Increasing numbers of young people attended secondary school and university, breaking down social barriers. Jewish officials were elected. Galicia’s Jewish doctors, lawyers, dentists, writers, poets, actors and musicians outnumbered Poles and Ukrainians in their respective professions.
Well-to-do families lived in the centre of town, in vast townhouses like those of the Catholics, filled with books, paintings, mirrors, tapestries and expensive furniture. The Orthodox community and poor Jews – who were often one and the same – stayed behind in Kazimierz. This was the case for Hertzel Rubinstein and his family. In spite of the economic boom, the vast majority of Jews still lived in poverty in Galicia, particularly in the countryside. In town, the artisans, tailors, carpenters, milliners, jewellers, and opticians fared somewhat better. But most importantly, assimilation was under way. The Jewish elite was becoming Polish.
However, anti-Semitism was by no means a thing of the past. As a child, Helena lay in bed and heard the adults talk in hushed voices about the pogroms. They described everything in detail: shtetls burned to the ground, synagogues desecrated, houses destroyed, mothers and daughters raped, babies thrown alive into the flames, old men forced to whip their peers, fathers massacred with pitchforks by Polish peasants, impaled by Ukrainian bayonets, scythed by Cossack sabres. Bloody nightmares haunted the sleep of the Rubinstein sisters: men hanging from their hands, shreds of flesh torn off, eyes gouged and tongues ripped out, heads cut off for soldiers to kick around.
Those Jews who could left in waves for less hostile countries. Between 1881 and 1914, 300,000 fled slaughter, war and poverty, emigrating to America or to Australia. Among them were Gitel’s three brothers – John, Bernhard, and Louis Silberfeld – to whom Helena would eventually be sent.
Kraków was also an intellectual centre with theatres, publishing houses, literary salons, concert halls, and secret societies. There was the Jagiellonian University, the second oldest in Central Europe; Helena liked to tell a story of how she studied medicine there for a few months, before being forced to drop out because she couldn’t stand the sight of blood.
In reality, she didn’t even finish secondary school.4 She attended the Jewish school in Kazimierz but at the age of sixteen, as was customary for girls of her social class, she had to end her studies. She did so reluctantly because she liked learning.
She had a quick intellect and a thirst for knowledge. Her favourite subjects were mathematics, literature, and history, particularly that of her country. She felt Polish to the depths of her soul.
And Jewish too. It couldn’t be any other way with such a pious, well-respected family. Both branches of her family, the Rubinsteins and the Silberfelds, boasted several rabbis, wise men, scholars, and men of the Book. Her father’s side could trace their lineage back to the famous Rashi of Troyes, one of the most famous authors of commentary on the Bible and the Talmud.5 Salomon Rubinstein,
