This is a small story from the history of (my) life and it is a summary answer to anyone who asks me why I am in love with Paris and why I feel an obligation and need to visit it again and again and again.
In the summer of 1947, one of the heaviest bombs the city had ever seen hit Paris. My mother (to be) and grandmother, feeling suffocated in their small, modest apartment on Rue Vieille Du Temple in the old Jewish quarter of Paris, decided, out of habit, to go on a vacation to the seaside as part of the famous French “vacances.” They stocked up on the phone numbers of small, cheap hotels and began a hopeless round of phone calls in an attempt to get a room for the 90th minute.
An almost impossible task at this time of year. After receiving dozens of negative responses, one of the calls led to a tiny boarding house in the town of Courseulles-sur-Mer in Normandy, run by my (future) father and mother. But what could be done, the place was already fully booked for this time of year many months in advance.
In retrospect, my father was able to tell me that during that scorching summer, he had been forced to return empty-handed previous inquiries from hundreds of French people who wanted to stay in his small, sympathetic guesthouse on exactly the same dates. However, my mother’s voice and the kindness of her request won my father’s heart, and through a strong and inexplicable intuition, he responded positively to the desperate phone call, even though the guesthouse was completely full: “The place is indeed full, but come and we’ll somehow manage.” And indeed, they got along beyond all imagination – a few months later, the two were married in a lucky marriage, and a few years later, after they “made aliyah,” I was born in Jerusalem, also in a lucky marriage.
This is the time, then, to say thank you to my parents and especially to Paris, which made sure to raise the temperature, for me personally at least, at exactly the right time and in the right amount. I really don't want to try to think about what would have happened if the temperature hadn't soared in Paris in the late summer of that fateful and decisive year for me.