Early life

Reich was born in Paris, France in 1960. His mother was French. His father was a Hungarian Jew, a lone survivor of Auschwitz and Dachau who became a Stateless Refugee of the United Nations while still a teenager, and for most of his life remained a fugitive Juif errant.

In 1961, Reich’s father was apprehended while carrying out an armed jewellery heist in Düsseldorf,* West-Germany. He was sentenced to 12-years in a North Rhine-Westphalia Penitentiary, an institution that had also been used as a detention centre by the Nazis.

• * “24. November: Ein spektakulärer Raubüberfall auf einen Juwelier in Düsseldorf endet nach nur 26 Minuten mit der Festnahme der schwer bewaffneten Täter. Die mit Maschinenpistolen bewaffneten Männer hatten bei dem Überfall auf der Königsallee, auf der zu dieser Zeit reger Verkehr herrschte, Schmuck für 4 Millionen DM erbeutet. Sie bedrohten sowohl die Angestellten des Schmuckhändlers wie auch Passanten mit ihren Waffen Nachdem die Einsatzleitstelle die Taxizentrale in die Fahndung nach dem Fluchtfahrzeug der Räuber einschaltet, kommen aus den Reihen der 440 Düsseldorfer Funktaxis Hinweise auf den Wagen, so dass die Polizei gezielt die Verfolgung aufnehmen und die Täter festnehmen kann. Bei den Tätern handelt es sich um vier Franzosen, die eigens für Raubüberfälle nach Düsseldorf übergesiedelt waren.” 

— https://www.polizeigeschichte-infopool.de/geschichte-polizeibehörden-a-g/düsseldorf/

Reich was one year old, and for a time remained in southern France with his mother who, a couple of years later, made off to seek a new life in the United States, leaving him in the care of her parents in Paris. These were ordinary people of modest means and, in about 1964, they in turn handed him over to his maternal great-grandmother who dwelled in a concierge lodge on the Champs-Élysées. The young charge proved too much for the old lady, so that in time she contacted his father in his German prison to warn him of his son being at risk from the French social services, and it followed that Reich was smuggled across the border to Belgium by friends of his father’s, avoiding the orphanage by a matter of hours.

Reich remained in Belgium for the next 10 years, mostly in and around Brussels, in the early days being frequently moved, passed from guardian to guardian. Most of these ‘guardians’ belonged to the same circle as his incarcerated father, on that account hardly qualified as ‘respectable’ citizens; but none failed to afford him safe shelter, so that Reich never lacked anything nor, in all that time, was he exposed to abuse or danger.

Come 1967, Reich’s father – who would officially remain a Stateless Refugee of the United Nations for the rest of his life – won on humanitarian grounds the right to be transferred from Germany to Belgium to complete his sentence, so that Reich – now seven years of age – met him for the first time in the visiting room of a Brussels prison.

A year later, having served nearly two-thirds of his prison term, Reich’s father was freed. 

Reich never saw his mother again, but would learn years later that she had returned to France sometime in the 1970’s.

Now in the care of a man he could call ‘father’, a man now become the first constant in his life, Reich spent the next six years or so in various boarding schools, every now and then going ‘home’ for weekends or on foreign holidays with his father.        

These are years during which he came across many good things, and learnt about being a Jew, and the Holocaust, and living outside the law as well as being an “Alien”, as he was labelled in print in his Belgian trimesterly-renewable Residence Permit. It is also the time when the French authorities – while affirming his citizenship – denied him a passport or any form of identity document, thus frustrating his father’s endeavours to normalise his legal status. As he was underage and born out of wedlock, the French deemed the law dictated that it fell upon his mother alone to authorize the issue of such documents, or, as they would insist later, to fill out a Declaration of Emancipation so that he could request these documents of his own volition. For all the years Reich lived in Belgium, this state of affairs called for his father to procure him false identity documents as a means to allow him to travel abroad.

Reich’s time in Belgium ended as it began: fleeing, although this time in the opposite direction.

He was fifteen. The previous year, his father had made his escape from Belgium in the aftermath of a botched hustle; the latter was now a wanted man across Europe. Reich was left behind in a Brussels apartment to continue his school studies. For a time, the Belgian police had sought to track down the father by stalking the son. This proved futile and, eventually, holding that Reich was an underage ‘Alien’ with no legal guardian, documents or clear means of support, the Belgian authorities withheld the renewal of his residence permit, transforming him into an ‘Illegal Alien’. He was given a month to leave Belgium, which he accomplished over the 1976 Christmas holidays – on hearing of his predicament the French Consulate in Brussels reviewed their previously rigid stance to issue him a temporary 15-day passport allowing him to cross the border back to France; for this they charged him the full price of a new 5-year passport.

In this manner sixteen-year-old Reich moved to Paris to stay with his fugitive father, the latter’s partner and their 3-year-old son. After a 15-day interlude, he returned to living undocumented – the French, while now fully aware of his precarious circumstances, continued to deny him identity papers even now he was back ‘home’, citing his mother’s parental and legal responsibilities once again.

Reich was now back in France, without school certificates or much else to show for his ten years spent in Belgium.

To reside in his home country in hiding with his wanted father while still needing fake documents to move about or travel made for an awkward period. But it only lasted a few months, until events led to the family having to disperse again, so that Reich ended up staying behind in Paris, by himself once again. On this occasion, free from school obligations or police interest, he used the opportunity to read a great deal, mostly history and literature.

Then, chance brought more unanticipated events. Towards the end of 1977, Reich’s father returned to Paris from London while on his way to Portugal and let it be known that he was planning to go on an extended “working holiday” to Israel.

This, for Reich, seemed an opportunity to discover a new and potentially more generous environment.

In early 1978, still some months short of his eighteenth birthday, Reich landed in Israel as the holder of a genuine, brand new, 5-year valid French passport; he had yet to reach majority, but useful contacts and discerning donations had at long last put paid to the authorities’ previously immutable regulations. Soon, his father’s family of three joined him in Tel Aviv and everyone moved into a pleasant apartment until, come the end of his father’s “working holiday”, Reich decided to remain in Israel; before returning to Europe, his father presented him with a three months pre-paid rented flat as a you’re-your-own-man-now parting gift. It was in a rough part of town, Reich had no family in Israel, but was wanting for nothing.

In 1978, Israel was still reeling from the near existential catastrophe of the Kippur War five years earlier, although Reich was hardly aware of such things when he got there. 

Israel was a place to like. Hospitable and young. Peopled from all horizons – Mizrahi, Sephardi, Ashkenazy, Beta Israel and Sabra Jews. All hues and tongues in one nation. Girls and boys standing poised. Boys and girls bearing guns, equal, free, smiling proud. It felt uncharted, yet safe and good. Everything France and Belgium were not. Easy living in the sun. Reich was impressed, bewildered at being welcomed, comforted to meet youths with stories to tell not too unlike his own, feeling awkward for not needing to lie to most everybody. He shortly applied for Israeli citizenship, in next to no time was granted identity documents, and for a while contemplated settling there.

For all her colours and proud youth, Israel was no easy Garden of Eden. Her brief history was shaped and kept by wars and battles, with no end in sight. Reich’s father had commented on this: “The world will never accept the sight of Jews bearing arms to defend themselves.” Whether these words resonated sufficiently with Reich to contribute to his decision to leave Israel is hardly something he mused over at the time; but he left, two full years after discovering her. All the appeal of hospitality and safety and warm sunshine had no hold on him. At his age, it resembled the end of the road; too much comfort. He could only inhabit one province at a time, and his was raw and too wild for the sun to set upon it. Israel was a great find, so much more advantageous than most of what he knew, still, the unknown seemed more enticing and full of promise. This was his mindset when he returned to Europe, briefly stopping first in Portugal, then France and visiting Belgium before heading to London, England.

London was meant to serve as a traveller’s stopover on the way to Brazil or maybe the United States; instead, in many ways it turned out the end of a journey. Reich found much to like in London, keeping him there long enough that by 1983 he took the idea of opening a restaurant into serious consideration. But some tidings poison the body and throw the mind off track.

Early that year, at around the time his father passed away after a short illness, the French decided that for all their erstwhile unhelpfulness, he nevertheless owed them one full year of mandatory military service, and sentenced him to prison for not turning up to serve before his twenty-second birthday. The loss of his father proved hard – the man was his only anchor to the world and much remained unspoken between them. All the same, to be branded insoumis and convicted for it proved somewhat more disruptive.

Like all male French citizens of that era, Reich was aware of his looming military obligation, but had long resolved never to serve for a country that had steadfastly denied him assistance as a child and teenager, as if set on punishing the motherless son for his Stateless criminal father’s sins. If ever he was to serve in an army, it would be Israel’s. In the event, Reich had already started the process of seeking an exemption from soldiering for France, but it emerged he had missed the deadline for doing this by some months, and subsequent letters to the Army or visits to London’s French Embassy and Consulate found little sympathy. Rather, they warned he could be arrested, and dismissed his offer to renounce his French nationality as a means to terminate his troubled association with France; his being born in France to a French mother rendered such course of action a legal impossibility.

By this time, France hardly featured in Reich’s thoughts – he had no family he knew there and had spent no more than a year in Paris since his fourth birthday – so this affair ought not to have mattered. But he held a French passport – and no other – which was due to expire, and would now never be renewed unless he surrendered to the French authorities.   

This meant that once again – albeit as an adult now – he could wind up an undocumented ‘Alien’ in a foreign country. While not bringing the present to a full stop, this altered the future, narrowed it down to a few options: he could call on favours from his late father’s former associates to be supplied with fake identity documents, and hereafter live as a criminal; he could go to France looking at prison time and hope for the best; he could return to Israel before his passport ran out and settle there; or he could stay in London and apply for British citizenship, which given the time this would take, even if successful, entailed becoming passport-less and so stranded in England for some years to come.

Reich had just begun to write at this time, discovered he liked writing. This was the province his mind inhabited now, a landscape vast and unhindered enough for a wild explorer. Enticing and full of promise. This is where he wished to be. So, he opted to stay in London, and to write, in English, thereby to move beyond France and Belgium and criminals and lies and makeshift arrangements from the past.

Initially, the decision looked propitious, the horizon bright. Projects were read, some were accepted and a few even thrived. Ideas were bountiful, the mind exuberant and alive with dreams of better things to come. At long last, Reich had found direction, a haven of sorts even. 

But mistakes were made. The solitary pursuit of writing affords no protection against the actuality of serving masters, Reich learned. Poor judgment, a defiant spirit, unapologetic self-belief and an in equal parts natural and learned distrust of authority made a poor combination for success amidst Le Beau Monde of London. Mistakes were made, the most serious of which, Reich would come to think, was to entrust his uncompleted first novel to some self-appointed “reference point for outlaw culture” outfit, a London publisher whose owner would in the fullness of time be awarded France’s Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres for his contributions to French and Francophone culture.

And so this ends. There never was any plan.