How To Begin An Affair

[Anne] Sinclair hosted [Dominique] Strauss-Kahn, then the president of France’s finance commission, on her monthly special in 1989. Both of them were still married, but Sinclair’s husband [Ivan] Levaï was working five days a week on a radio show in a faraway province. Strauss-Kahn asked her to lunch at a Parisian power restaurant, where they discussed their childhoods and Judaism (*) while he loosened the knot of his tie, asking, 'How come we never met each other earlier in our lives?' Unlike most of his seductions, with Sinclair, Strauss-Kahn was patient, and it was she...who eventually broke down, sending him a love letter. They were married a year later in a ceremony so private that they requested a waiver from the government as a promise that photographs wouldn’t find their way into the press. (Levaï, who has said with some regret that 'Elie Wiesel told me that when one has as beautiful a wife as Anne, one must stay near her', has nevertheless claimed the breakup with Sinclair was amicable.)

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Her commitment to Judaism had deepened, and when her father passed away, she even decided that she would recite the Mourner’s Kaddish, or the Prayer for the Dead, for him. 'My father did not have a son, so I took on the responsibility,' she has said. 'Every day for a year, I visited the synagogue to recite the Kaddish, accompanied by my mother.' According to friends, she always wanted to prove that, more than 75 years after Léon Blum became France’s first Jewish prime minister, the French would again be willing to elect a Jew. Such a thing was worth the sacrifice, because it would make for une formidable revanche sur l’histoire - a revenge on history.

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