a cattle dealer, had three children, of which Hertzel Naftaly Rubinstein, Helena’s father, was the eldest.
The family came from Dukla, a little town in the Carpathians. That’s where Hertzel was born in 1840, and where he married Augusta Gitel Silberfeld, his cousin on his mother’s side. Gitel was born in 1844, and was the ninth child of nineteen, of whom over half died before the age of twenty. Her father, Salomon Zale Silberfeld, had been a moneylender; Helena’s eagerness for social promotion transformed him into a ‘banker’.
The year before Helena’s birth, Hertzel and Gitel Rubinstein settled in Kraków at 14 Szeroka Street, a narrow red stone building. As the family expanded – of the couple’s fifteen children, only eight daughters would survive – they moved house frequently, but always stayed in the vicinity of Joszefa Street. That’s where Hertzel Rubinstein ran a sort of bazaar, selling a bit of everything: eggs and preserves, huge barrels filled with herring, jars of pickles, candles, wheat and barley in bulk, kerosene. Walking in, the smell of brine and oil was overwhelming. Hertzel did not make a good living from his store but he did his best to feed his family. ‘Jews didn’t have an easy time of it in those days, we were people of very modest means, with virtually no money,’ Helena would confess, much later on, in a rare moment of candour about her early years.6
The house where she was born stood close to five of Kazimierz’s seven synagogues: the High synagogue, the Old synagogue, Popper’s, Remuh, and Kupa. It was also near the mikveh, a ritual bathhouse where women went to cleanse themselves at the end of the week. The days were governed by the times for worship, the seasons and the holy days. Every morning and evening, Helena would hear the prayers and chants as they rose towards the heavens.
Her district was a labyrinth of paved streets, flanked on either side by large, balconied houses of wood or stone. It was home to all manner of shops, printing presses, newspapers, banks, cafés, markets, wedding houses, schools, cemeteries, and a hospital. On the shopfronts, names were written in Polish and Yiddish. Between the Miodowa, Dajwor, Wawrzynca, Bartosza and Joszefa streets and Nowy Square, prosperity and poverty lived side by side, as did culture and ignorance, religion and profanity.
Rabbis with payot in long black coats walked past pious Jews in fur hats and bearded Hasidim wearing belted caftans over trousers tucked into boots. Notables in their top hats ceremoniously greeted old men in velvet skullcaps as they scurried past with their sacred leather-bound tomes beneath their arms. Women in wigs, their heads covered with a stole or an embroidered bonnet, shooed away little boys with caps pulled down over their curls. Gaunt students clustered outside their yeshivot, endlessly debating a paragraph from the Talmud.
In the summer everyone lived outdoors in the street, or kept their windows wide open. From her bedroom, Helena could hear weeping, arguments, matrons shouting to each other from balconies where laundry was hung out to dry and the cries of waterbearers calling to their customers. Carts filled with bricks or hay, drawn by skeletal horses, regularly blocked the road, forcing everyone to make a detour.
Yentas, or busybodies, sprawled on tiny folding chairs, gossiped malevolently about their neighbours and scolded the small children chasing each other along the passageways between the courtyards. Pedlars displayed their wares on trestles piled high with precariously balanced treasures – old clothes, worn shoes, umbrellas, prayer shawls, books, phylacteries, and menorahs. Craftsmen repaired broken furniture in the street, while young girls went to fill their buckets at the fountain. From early morning, the neighbourhood buzzed with people at work, from cobblers, fishmongers and pawnbrokers to an old woman on her balcony embroidering trousseaus for the rich.
In the poorest areas, there were cries and insults, people shouting out in Yiddish, Polish, and German; crates were unloaded in the dust, and the streets ran ankle deep with refuse while buckets of dirty water were poured out onto the pavement. The stench of rotting fruit, cat’s urine, smoked meat, onions, cumin, salted cucumbers and offal wafted on the thick air. In winter, the temperature could drop to thirty below, and icy gusts heaped snowdrifts along the pavements. The pitiless cold gripped you body and soul, walls rotted from the damp, and a leaden grey sky hung over the city. When the snow melted, the streets filled with a muddy slush that ruined shoes and skirt hems.
Helena Rubinstein always preferred to keep silent about that chapter of her life, as if she were ashamed of it. She preferred to talk about Planty botanical gardens or St Anne’s Church. She would rather chat away about the aristocrats’ stately homes where she dreamed of being a guest and would later claim she had been. Depending on her mood, she might describe Kraków as a cultured, elegant city, or merely dreary and provincial. The reality lies somewhere in between, although the city boasts an abundance of medieval and gothic monuments – the royal castle of Wawel; the tomb of the Polish kings, which overlooks the city; the ramparts of the old town surrounded by the Botanical Gardens; St Mary’s Basilica; St Catherine’s Church; and the observatory. And the grandiose central marketplace, the Rynek, common to all Polish cities, with its famous Cloth Hall.
Whenever she could, Helena would leave Kazimierz behind to head down Stradom Street, then Grodska Street, to stroll past the stalls beneath the arcades. Here there were no Jews in greatcoats, or gossiping housewives, or wretched street urchins. The men sported top hats and bowlers; the women wore fine milliners’ creations.
Young Helena admired the displays on the stalls as if she wanted to learn them by heart. She hadn’t a single zloty in her purse, but she dreamed of being able, someday, to buy lace and silk and fur, diamonds and pearls and crystal. When she was rich she would strut about like these distinguished Polish women strolling around the square wrapped in their pelisses, or travel like the ladies she glimpsed in fine carriages pulled by elegant horses – instead of going everywhere on foot, through the mud, dragging her sisters behind her, as she had to do now.
Very early on, Helena mastered the art of transforming the episodes of her life, embellishing or blurring facts as she saw fit. Her imagination knew no bounds, so much so that it is difficult to know where the truth lies. She was more of a fabricator than a liar. She would spend her entire life painstakingly stitching together her personal legend, indifferent to any contradictions in her story.
And yet the reality is infinitely more interesting than the story she stubbornly enhanced. She may have wanted to deny it, but the fact remains that she came from these dark streets, these impoverished alleyways, these poorly paved courtyards with their prayer houses and cheders – an entire Jewish world that seemed immutable, rooted in the shtetls and ghettos of Galicia, Poland, or Ukraine, and which has vanished forever.
The harsh environment where she spent the first twenty-four years of her life inspired her with the passion to leave it behind. It was where she found her strength of character, her courage, and her adaptability, like any emigrant who makes a new life elsewhere.
But she was an impoverished Jewish woman, born in Poland at the end of the nineteenth century.
This meant that she was a nobody.
NOTES
1 Helena’s year of birth is controversial; it is found in different sources as both 1870 and 1872. The latter is given by Patrick O’Higgins in his book, Madame: An Intimate Biography of Helena Rubinstein, Viking Press, 1971.
2 Photocopies of Helena Rubinstein’s 1922 passport (www.ancestry.com).
3 Rubinstein, Helena, My Life for Beauty, op. cit.
