Memoirs of a child of the past century - 5. Chapter 5 : my first son and my first job

Despite the opposition of our respective parents, Yvette and I considered ourselves ‘husband and wife’ and in June we exchanged gold rings as a sign of our oaths for life.

In early summer, Yvette became pregnant. We were delighted that our union was going to become a reality by a future birth. The baby's arrival was scheduled for the end of the year. We would certainly meet a lot of difficulties, given our own poor economic situation, but the arrival of a child was primarily going to remove, at least in part, the opposition of our families.

And meanwhile, we were lucky to find a warm support from the family in which Yvette was working, a single mother with three teenagers, who ran a well-known art gallery. Our son Philippe became the fourth child in the family and 'Mameli', the owner of the gallery, became for him a third grandmother.
Yvette had ‘several strings to her bow’. She quickly became Mameli’s assistant in the management of the gallery. She received clients in the absence of the owner and advised them in the selection of paintings, exercised sometimes her own painting talent to ‘restore’ damaged paintings. She handled all the little things that make the reputation of a gallery, for instance organizing openings by selecting with the painters the location of the paintings and ensuring that the buffet was well stocked.

Our rooms in the community at the Obstgartenstrasse were no longer big enough for 3 people. Fortunately, Mameli came again to our rescue. The gallery was located in the nerve center of Zurich, the 'Paradeplatz', the coolest place, with luxury department stores and art shops, a mix of Broadway and Greenwich Village. There was on the floor above the gallery a small apartment in which we were able to install us a few months after the birth of Philippe. It was the best solution for everyone. For us, we were very happy to have found a place for the next few years until my graduation; and for Mameli, we were there at her disposal on site to take care of the gallery.

Mameli did not own most of the paintings on display. Like most galleries, she acted primarily as a broker. The paintings of famous painters exhibited in the gallery for sale came from collectors and other galleries. I remember having admired, among others, paintings by Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. I particularly liked a small ‘Renoir’. I would gladly have bought it but its price of 600,000 Swiss francs was out of my availability (!). We were in 1953 and for the collector who bought it, it became a very good deal, for I have seen many years later in the press that he had been sold for more than 10,000,000 Swiss francs in an auction in London.

We both shared our time; Yvette, between the gallery, the concern of the household and her son and for me, between studies and military service. Our respective parents had come to accept our situation. They finally understood that we had a ‘long term’ relationship and that we were determined to raise our child together. For the wedding, however, it was another matter. The very Catholic family of Yvette could not accept that their daughter would marry a Jew.

But we must always allow time to time! My own parents completely changed their attitude with the arrival of my son and fully accepted their future daughter in law. In my case, I attach little importance to religion itself. For me, being Jewish has a different meaning than to practice the Jewish religion. I am part of an ethnic group existing for several thousand years, largely mixed throughout the ages (I am thinking for instance of the Khazars, who are the ancestors of many of the Ukrainian Jews) whose characteristics are primarily cultural, ethical and sometimes even physical.

Due to the intervention of a young parish priest whom we had met in Zurich through a theatrical group of amateur actors of which both he and I were part of, Yvette's parents finally agreed that their daughter married a Jew, but required that we should be married by a Catholic priest and that our children should be raised in that religion.

These conditions did not bother me and I accepted them easily. Neither Yvette nor I attached a great importance to the choice of the religious education of our children. As for our children, we were determined to present them, when they were old enough, the characteristics and the history of both religions, so they would be able to understand our choice and later choose themselves their own beliefs.

In Switzerland it is first necessary to be married civilly. we must attend an official ceremony and sign a document before a representative of the mayor of the city where you live. That's what we did early 1955, in the presence of my parents and in the absence of the parents of Yvette.

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We before the wedding, enjoying the morning sun

For the reigious ceremony, it was another matter. It was necessary to first obtain the consent of the bishop and sign an agreement about the religion of our children. At that time, marriage between a Catholic and a Jew couldn’t be held in the church and that's why we were married in the sacristy under the church by our friend the young priest, in the presence of the parents of Yvette and a few Catholic friends of our group.

Since then until today, we had no religious problem in our family. I respected my commitment as Yvette wanted our children to participate in the life of the parish. As a result of my marriage, I was rejected by the Jewish Orthodox community (mixed marriages were not accepted; and communities of liberal Jews didn’t yet exist), but this did not stop me from feeling deeply Jewish by my culture and my openness to the world. I owed it to the memory of all the many members of my paternal and maternal families who disappeared in the Nazi extermination camps.

Throughout my career I have had many relationships with German engineers, lawyers and businessmen. Between 1939 and 1945, most of them were small kids or were not even born yet in 1945. These relationships were almost always cordial but, with one exception, never became friendly relations.

Apart from being Jewish, I was of Latin culture, nurtured by my studies of Greek, Roman and French classical authors and far from the Germanic spirit, of which the best picture for me was the music of Wagner, with his ‘Nibelungen’ and his ‘Walkirie’. The genius of Germany, inherited from the northern mists was originally deeply alien to the Christian culture. Wotan, the German God, was above all a nocturnal hunter. He delighted in hunting with his dogs and his Shadow Warriors, a cruel God, evil, deceitful, cynical and misogynistic. For Hitler and many Germans, he was a role model.

I never returned to Diez, the birthplace of my mother. She went back there in 1975, 30 years after the end of the war. She has been very well received; everyone had forgotten the abuse suffered by my grandparents. But she had undertaken this trip with mixed feelings

But that’s enough with these gloomy memories.

Between my studies and periods of military service, I contributed to household resources with the fees I got by translating all kinds of documents in German, English, Italian and even Spanish, with a stack of
Dictionaries that I had found in the library of the ‘Poly’

At the end of each week, we tried, my wife and I, to balance the accounts of the household, but without much success. The spending was always higher than revenues. But at least we ate more than our fill; Philippe went to kindergarten and was dressed in new clothes several times each year (Yvette followed children's fashion!); and we could even go out to evening parties and to the cinema several times per month.

I not forget my political guidelines! We were in 1955. The Swiss political world was divided between the right parties in power and the left ones struggling to give voting rights to women and to get better wages for young employees and workers.

Towards the end of my studies, I participated in a union of young engineers who struggled to obtain during our first engagement after graduation a higher minimum wage, of at least 10% more than the big industry was used to paying.

The main problem after graduation was the choice of the employer. As my specialty was electronics, I wanted to choose a large company in this branch, where I could get a practical training and above all big enough so that I could have supportive references for my future career.

In this regard, I remember the painful hours spent revising my courses of electricity. It was ultimately unnecessary hours. To my great regret, among the subjects taught at Poly, the only ones I use today are ‘industrial accounting’ and the ‘psychology of human relationships’ (Transactional Analysis of Dr. Eric Berne).

At that time, such companies were not many. Most engineering graduates (we were close to 200) focused on one of them, Brown Boveri Ltd. an international company already very important (it is now ABB, occupying 124'000 people in over 100 countries). But the electronic 'communication' was not its strong point and this company didn’t interest me. Also, ‘go with the crowd 'was never one of my qualities.

In seeking an international company better suited to my interests, I found in the newspaper an ad of a company which was looking for a young engineer for the development of a remote control system of all electricity meters of a big city. You know, these meters record the consumption of electric current and charge different prices on the day and night, or during periods of high consumption, such as during meal preparation.

Not only I was hired immediately, but thanks to my participation in the union which I mentioned before, I obtained a monthly salary of 650 Swiss francs, or 50 francs more than the salary offered in the rest of the industry.

I stayed at Landis & Gyr ltd (my first employer), from October 1954 to December 1956, long enough to learn the practice as engineer. But I saw no opportunity for me in this company and ultimately the work that I was exercising seemed too monotonous.

It was 1955, the time of the 'brain drain', an outflow of highly-qualified scientists from Western Europe to the United States; I studied in the newspapers mostly offers from U.S. laboratories, but also offers anywhere which could offer me a conversion to a specialization in the fields of management and consulting.
And I had success in my search routine, even too much success!

One evening in the fall of 1956 I had before me two equally attractive proposals, one from a research institute in Minneapolis, the other from an international company looking for an assistant in industrial organization for its Swiss aluminum processing factory.

Although Minnesota was for me, too far from either the East Coast or California (where I dreamed of going), I was attracted by the salary, which was much higher than mine, and by the provision by the employer of all travel costs and installation for the whole family. I was also attracted by the difference in attitude between Europe and the United States and the offer appealed to me a lot

The factory plant manager, who was looking for an assistant in industrial organization, was located in a remote corner in the middle of the Alps, a small village named Chippis. However a comprehensive training in industrial management (timing, performance pay, selection and monitoring of workers) was also offered to me and it was exactly what I wanted.

We spent, Yvette and me, a whole night comparing the two offers. We called our respective parents and thought about our future. Yvette was expecting our second son and travel to the United States with a baby a few months old was a difficult obstacle to overcome, especially as our parents were trying to persuade us to stay.

Finally, we decided to forget the USA and to go to Chippis, and received in addition a 'cherry on the cake’: the solution of a main problem. It was impossible for us to live at that place without a car. There was no means of public transport, rail or bus, to travel to the nearest town with its shops and schools. We needed a car and I could not afford to buy one. I begged my parents to buy one and persuaded them to provide us a 'Volkswagen Beetle' in exchange for our decision not to expatriate.

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In late November 1956, after the birth of our second son Gilles (we had sought a name impossible to translate into German and it was only later we learned that there was a translation of his name there: Aegidus, meaning in old Greek 'kid, young goat '!) we left Zurich and found an apartment in a town near Chippis, in the outbuildings of a castle which appeared 'medieval ', but was built in 1903!

We had a big garden around the house, the enjoyment of tennis and swimming pool at the castle, and a flat four times bigger that in Zurich, which had not been occupied for years (we found out why during the winter. It was impossible to heat and because of its exposure above the valley was exposed to a strong north wind blowing, sometimes for weeks).

The factory consisted of two divisions, an aluminum foundry and a rolling and extrusion plant. The workers, poorly paid, were farmers and winemakers who came to work at the plant in addition to their work on the land, to earn enough for a living. They were hard men, people from the mountain, still in opposition against the Swiss-German directors of the factory.

I could not accept the policy of a performance at all costs; the contempt of management to the workers. I was trying to do my best to arbitrate disputes concerning the frenetic pace of work and the unfair remuneration.

A few examples of my work:

Foundry workers worked continuously with three teams on shifts of eight hours. Each team had to record in a notebook at the end of their work period the amount of aluminum bars that had been melted. In fact, each team contrived to produce the same number of bars, if necessary by slowing production.

One night during the shift change, obeying an order from management, I updated the book noting a larger number than the number of bars actually cast. The following team saw it and was upset. Proudly, they increased their production to cast the same number of bars that I had noted on the account of the previous team. This is an example of unfair methods of the managers of the factory that I was obliged to employ.

At a time, the workers were in open conflict with the management over an issue of pay and threatened to strike. With the personnel manager, the only member of management from the region, we met during the night shift with the future leader of the strikers. He was a simple worker just responsible for cleaning, but who was actually the chairman of the community of winemakers of Chippis and a man very influential over the other workers.

At night, people are more open and willing to talk. We managed to get along and through our mediation, wages were somewhat increased and the strike was averted.

I also have more personal memories of my stay in Chippis :

Because of my difficulties with the management, I needed to see a psychiatrist who prescribed me to distance myself, to stop work for three weeks and do each day solitary walks in the forest. The Pfynwald is a nature reserve on the banks of the river Rhone which runs through the valley.

On nearly 3 km, the Rhone is bordered by sand beaches. Small lakes are scattered in the woods and the place is ideal for swimming. Arriving at the edge of one of these lakes, I met some nudist tourists who were swimming there. I followed their example, and every day, I took advantage of my promenade to dive naked into the lake or in the river; remembering old memories of my youth. This was the best way to cure my depression !

I learned a lot during this period. I not only became a skilled engineer but also I learned an essential point about the conduct of men in the industry.

Below the 'formal' hierarchic organization, there is in any company a second hidden ‘informal’ organization. The knowledge of this structure is essential for proper human conduct.

I made it one of the cornerstones of my professional practice as a consultant. In any company in which I was asked to intervene, I first, before any other action, decrypted the contours of that ‘informal’ organization. It was the key to the success of my interventions.

After two years in Chippis, I'd had enough of the atmosphere that prevailed there, but I still have many friends among the workers who are ‘winegrowers’, who invite me from time to time during the grape harvests.
In July 1958, I signed a new contract as a management consultant for a large professional organization with over 2000 members. But this will be the subject of a next chapter.