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14.11.01: À La Place St. Georges, rue Notre Dame de Lorette / rue St. Georges I'm becoming quite a fan of the 9e. It's not a glamorous or trendy part of town, but it is somehow very emblematic -- tough and well-worn, without looking dowdy. Alot of this feeling probably has to do with going semi-regularly to the library of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, tucked behind one in the endless row of grand-ish doors on a small-ish street. This is an organization most famous for setting out to "civilize" the Jews of the Ottoman Empire by teaching them French (from which all things civilized follow, of course). For my purposes, they've got a pleasant workspace, and a reasonable collection of obscure works on various aspects of Jewish languages, things like a very odd handbook for Jews learning French, prefaced in German, written by the Grand Rabbi of Algiers in 1908 -- and everything in Hebrew script. Just down the road from the AIU is the Place St. Georges, with its métro stop cut into the rising hillside and statue plunked in the middle of the road to create a strange roundabout. It's also got a two-story café, although I stuck to the ground floor on this particular post-AIU vist to read a little more Yiddish.
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