Marcel Reff, a boilermaker who won the title "Best Craftsman of France," was the father of writer, poet and singer Sylvie Reff, a friend of Claude Vigée. As for me, I was considered at the time to be "a delicate and gentle little Jewish boy." This is how Sylvie Reff's grandmother used to designate me to her family members when she saw me riding my bicycle like a fireball over the tiny stone bridge straddling the Red Brook (Rothbaechel) in front of her little half-timbered house on the way home from school. The latter, of ancient construction, stood on the bank of the stream, not far from the washhouse, in a corner of the village known as "s'Baechel-Michels'," "The Michel of the stream." Yes, in the eyes of the ancestor of the "Michel of the Brook," I was simply "is fîns' nett's Juddebièwel." I alone constituted a separate social class in the Jewish nomenclature of the old Protestant ladies of Bischwiller. After the vigil at the cemetery, home to the graves of those who are now forever living, we would visit and have dinner at Sylvie and her parents' home, in the old cottage on the Rothbaechel stream, well warmed under the snow falling in big flakes. The three cats were jumping from chair to chair and frolicking under the table. Outside, all around, the wavering shadows of the large oaks and acacias in Diaconate Park, the dead industries at the foot of the huge protuberances formed by the brick chimneys, the dance of the snowy fruit trees in the surrounding small orchards.