My Spontaneous Birthday

Two tournaments in half a week in Bordeaux took a mental and physical toll on me, so once I wrapped up my last semifinal match on my birthday, May 3^rd, I was ready to head back to Paris. On a whim when I arrived in Paris, I decided to join my friend who I stayed with in Bordeaux, over in Strasbourg where he was playing a club match the following day. He invited me over to his host family’s home where I spent the evening of my birthday getting to know them and having a few celebratory drinks. As I arrived at their apartment, I passed Hasidic Jews chatting in the stairwell and nearly every unit had name plaques in both French and Hebrew. In fact, the host family’s apartment happened to be one of these units and I learned later they are Sephardic Jews. Despite their darker complexion, the family still had all the enlarged Jewish physical features. To the best of my recollection, this was the first time I had gotten to know Sephardic Jews and to be in their house made me feel at home. I’m not sure if it was the mezuzahs on every doorway or the constant banter between family members that made me comfortable in their home, however despite the language barrier, I felt closer with them than anyone I’ve spent time with while in France.

Our evening consisted of drinking gin and tonics while playing Jenga and bonding over our love for afro-house music. Even though I was the only non-French speaker, the host family made a point to include me in conversations, translating their soliloquys to me as one person after the other shared anecdotes. By the end of the evening, I was starting to understand their conversations, but it was the next day at brunch when I was able to fully understand their conversations. Since I wasn’t playing a club match on Sunday, the host family invited me over to their home again for brunch (around noon). Since all the morning trains were sold out, I decided it might be fun to go there again and get to know the family even more. Served for brunch was a cheese board, baguettes, butter, avocado toast, and chocolate cake. In addition to the same family, I was with the night before, there was a family friend (another Sephardic Jew) and their grandma who was born in Morocco. I must add that it was very fun seeing the interactions between generations. Despite not speaking French, I could understand almost the entire brunch… the family dynamics were identical to those of my family and other Jewish families I’ve been around.

Obviously, I loved the cheeses (from right to left: camembert, brie, truffle reblochon, munster Crmitage, comte. They were all thoroughly surprised with how much I enjoyed all the cheeses and was willing to try the stinky ones. I must say, the cheeses were some of the bests I’ve had of each variety, especially the comte. After trying all the delicious cheeses, I was coaxed into trying the chocolate cake. I grabbed the end slice and was immediately given shit for eating the “dry butt” of the cake which they continued to joke about the rest of the meal in French. Little did they know I was able to understand all the dirty jokes they were making about me, which I was internally beaming about.

I have the utmost gratitude to their family for inviting me to share my birthday with them and to celebrate with me when I didn’t have any plans in Paris. It was such a wonderful coincidence that they were Jewish which made me enjoy my time in Strasbourg immensely.