How does one go about becoming Jean-Paul Sartres “non-god son”?
John Gerassi: My father, Fernando Gerassi, and my mother, Stepha Awdykowicz, had been involved in the Spanish Revolution. My father, a Sephardic Jew, was an artist who had lived in Spain at the time. He was working on the Revolution, a General in the Republican Army, when he decided he could not in good conscience bring a child into this world because he knew the Second World War was coming. This was in ’31; his presience was amazing. He sent my mother to France for an abortion. She had had six previous abortions and wanted a child very badly; so badly in fact that she took the occasion to lie to him, to say that it was too late, that the doctor said it was too late. By July [31 July 1931] they were all in France at a café, La Closerie des Lilas, across from the Clinique Tarnier — today it’s a VD clinic, but in those days it was a birth clinic. So my father, [Andre] Breton, [Marc] Chagall, and [Joan] Miro were all drinking there and every now and then my father would rush upstairs to
