By Rebecca E. Rogers
Jacqueline Rogers (maiden name Ragner) arrived in State College with Thomas Hunton Rogers in 1961 when the University hired my father to teach fiction writing in the English department. A Frenchwoman born in Gascony in 1924, she had fled occupied France in 1941 with her mother and younger sister, her American father having already left for the United States. By the early 1960s, she had earned a doctorate in French literature at the university of Iowa and had begun a teaching career at Iowa and then the University of Chicago. When our family moved to 502 East Foster in 1967, she was working part-time teaching French at the University while raising her two children. Our move to the Highlands (not a term we heard in those days) was a big deal for all of us: a new school and new playground, new friends and neighbors, easy walking distance from the campus, a big corner house with two small yards (that my father would later transform into flower beds). Less apparent to me as a child was the way this location, which my parents lived in until their deaths (our mother in 2005 and father in 2007), allowed my mother to develop her commitment to all things French. Here she had the room and the means to gather people around a shared love of the French language, French culture or French cuisine. The house was conveniently located for friends and colleagues to stop by, chat a bit in French and share a drink.
These occasions were important to my mother once the French department decided they no longer wanted “housewives” teaching in the department. But my mother wasn’t the sort of milk and cookies stay-at-home-mom that might imply. She devoted her life to maintaining contacts with her friends and family in France, writing dozens of letters a week, and keeping abreast of French literature and cultural life, preferably over tea or a drink following her afternoon nap.
My mother steadfastly pursued her mission to transmit a love of the French language, culture and literature to all those she loved, but also to all those she encountered. The butcher at Temple Market, like the bakers who eventually set up shop in the 1970s, knew what she was looking for in a cut of beef or a crusty baguette and tried to live up to her expectations. At Weis market, however, her efforts to learn “What’s fresh?” from the fruit and vegetable guy or girl met with complete incomprehension. The fact she chatted with everyone about what was on sale or the reason why she was looking for good gruyère––but certainly not the result of the latest football game––was a source of considerable discomfort to her daughters. Within the family she sought to institute breakfast conversations in French which was not a great success. My sister and I grew up a little embarrassed by my mother’s insistence on certain Old-World customs, such as shaking hands when you entered our house (or at the least saying hello Mrs. Rogers). Even more embarrassing were her efforts to have teenage friends practice their French with her. Still, in retrospect, it was remarkable the tenacity with which she pursued her efforts to maintain a range of connections with France despite her permanent exile in central Pennsylvania. Every French visitor to the university came to our house and many remained life-long friends. My sister and I learned from her example, the importance of maintaining ties. We also grew up speaking French and enjoying French food, which definitely set us apart from most of our peers.
Marguerite Desclaux (French great-aunt visiting from Paris) and my mother, Jacqueline
Rogers (1974).
Within the community, near and far, my mother saw herself as a French cultural ambassador. Once her part-time teaching job was terminated, she kept her hand in teaching, both children and adults. She believed in active pedagogies anchored in real-life experiences: kids learned French playing games and listening to the American turned-French crooner Joe Dassin, as well as her childhood favorite Charles Trenet, a singer from the 1930s. It wasn’t apparent from the outside that grammar played much of a role in these lessons. Her adult students, like neighbor Ron Filippelli, sipped sherry, discussed French authors and politics and parléd français. Learning French was more about understanding French culture and the fine art of living than mastering conjugations.
When Lucie Heymann, a French teacher and friend of novelist André Gide, and her daughter Isabelle Armitage moved to State College in the 1970s, my mother enthusiastically participated with them in the creation of the State College branch of the Alliance Française. Mostly this meant continuing a well-established practice of French boosterism, organizing events to celebrate French traditions—around Bastille Day in particular––taking groups to see French movies on campus, or the organization of benefit concerts of French music. In our home Chopin rarely rang out from the upright piano in our living room, but art historian and Francophile George Mauner would provide stimulating improvisations on French songs, both real and made-up; our favorite as kids riffed on the words “formidabble patessery” pronounced with an exaggerated US accent. Manya Mauner and my mother would smile at our enthusiasm and discuss, more quietly, upcoming trips to Paris or the latest issue of Le Nouvel Observateur. On July 14, she would hang out on our front porch the French flag her great-aunt had made upon the Liberation of Paris in 1944. To her great distress it was stolen one summer, only to reappear miraculously weeks later—the act of a prankster who may have realized how bereft my mother was losing this family heirloom. (an event so large it was written up in the Centre Daily Times).
of George Wellwarth, comp lit professor who lived three doors down) and Susie Rogers
(1971).
For Francophiles and exiled Frenchmen and women she represented France and a certain type of European culture. Much like an eighteenth-century salonnière, she opened our living and dining room to those who shared her love of France or her experience of exile from European or French culture. But she shared her enthusiasm and knowledge without a hint of intellectual arrogance. And all were welcome, from the avant-garde novelist Alain Robbe Grillet, who attended one of her cocktail parties when he came to town, to Lucette O’Neill and Margaret Cornhill, both French teachers at the high school, who came regularly for tea. She was passionately interested in issues of translation and keeping abreast of how the French language was changing. She peppered our French visitors and relatives with questions and asked travelers to bring back her favorite magazines and her adored black licorice tablets––cachous (an investment of about 75 cents). For Epiphany (la fête des rois) on January 6, my mother joined forces with similarly exiled Anne-Marie Lallement, a mathematics professor at the university, to make a galette des rois, a delicious almond-filled puff pastry. The red and yellow brick house at 502 East Foster Avenue reverberated over the decades to the sounds of French and franglais. My father’s garden, and his novelist’s ability to tell a story was one side of the story of the family home but my mother’s quiet diligence to maintain the flames of French culture was an equally strong strand that brought together a Francophile community in the heart of the Highlands.
Rebecca E. Rogers was won over to all things French, has become a historian of France, married a Frenchman and has lived her adult life in France. Recently retired from Université Paris Cité, she dedicated her book, From the Salon to the Schoolroom, to her mother, Jacqueline Rogers (Penn State University Press, 2005). Email her at: Rebecca.rogers@u-paris.fr