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.
4 Author’s interview with Litka Goldberg-Fasse, Helena Rubinstein’s second cousin, June 2009.
5 Alfred Silberfeld, genealogist.
6 O’Higgins, Madame, op. cit.
Helena, Pauline, Rosa, Regina, Stella, Ceska, Manka and Erna Rubinstein: the litany of their names sounds like a nursery rhyme. They were all pretty dark-haired young women with milky white skin. The eldest and youngest were ten years apart. The atmosphere was always lively in their huge, gas-lit house: they would fight over a ribbon, a scarf; they would prance in front of the mirror. The centre of this den of females was Gitel Rubinstein: model mother and housewife, who performed miracles to make sure her family had everything they needed. Given her husband’s erratic temperament, she was often lacking housekeeping money. Gitel sighed at the thought of her brothers and sisters who lived comfortably in Kraków, Vienna, Antwerp and beyond.
There were the things they had inherited: finely carved furniture, mirrors, silver chandeliers, linen in the wardrobes and an abundance of books. But they had to skimp on everything else – soap, bread, candles, servants. So many mouths to feed were a burden on their meagre income.
Eight daughters. Eight treasures. But also eight dowries.
Each one would have to be married, to a good match, if possible. This occupied Gitel’s thoughts as soon as each was born. She was a good woman, plump with childbirth, and she wore a wig styled in the chignon customary for Orthodox Jewish wives. She scrupulously observed all the commandments of her faith, but that did not mean neglecting appearances, which counted as much as the purity of one’s soul. She taught the little girls to sew their shirts and to knit and embroider, all things Gitel excelled at, and she made the patterns for their dresses and coats herself. Above all, she taught them the art of good grooming. She showed them how to