Shopping in Copenhagen

I don’t shop. I hate shopping for clothes. Having the ugliest body in all of Texas, or maybe the World, I wear ten-year-old spaghetti-stained blouses and avoid looking in the mirror. When I go to the mall to buy new clothes, I can’t find anything to conceal my bulging tunny. I always end up in the housewares department admiring elegant dishes.

At home I resist the temptation to buy Royal Doulton, even if decorated with little periwinkles. In Denmark I found Royal Copenhagen.

I inherited a broken set of Royal Copenhagen china from my late, unlamented mother-in-law. Unable to love her, I loved her blue and white dishes, a version of Dresden’s “onion” pattern.

When my mother-in-law and her husband left Denmark to go to Chicago, her mother-in-law gave her a complete service for twelve, including platters, bowls, and little sauce dishes. Wally’s mother used them every day and managed to smash all the cups and saucers and most of the serving pieces. I inherited eight plates (some of them chipped), a long dish, a little square dish, and a charming leaf-shaped dish.

On the walking street in Copenhagen, I found the porcelain factory’s outlet shop. I took the little (two-person) elevator up to the third floor where “seconds” were for sale at a quarter of what they cost at Marshall Field’s in Chicago. I bought eight cups and saucers.

That should have ended my shopping.

Another day, without any destination in mind, I walked leisurely along a narrow canyon of a street in the oldest part of Copenhagen. Through centuries of paving and re-paving, the level of the street was several feet higher than the shops. I stopped beside a narrow building and looked down into a window filled with blue and white Royal Copenhagen dishes.

I stepped down into the shop and was met by the shop owner, who told me he specialized in antique blue and white Royal Copenhagen. This tiny, elderly man looked like an antique himself, with thick glasses and whips of white hair. I could not resist. I bought a bowl and several little pitchers to take home as gifts.

I asked the man his name, and as I filled out the traveler’s checks for Mr. Rosenberg, I commented, “That looks like a Jewish name.”

“Of course”
“Were you here before World War II?”
“Yes”
“What did you do?”
“I left, of course.”
“And after the war you came back?”
“Yes. This is my home.”

Germans occupied Denmark for four years during World War II. When they started to round up Jews for deportation to death camps, the Danes smuggled their Jewish friends across the narrow channel to Sweden. The Nazis captured very few Jews in Denmark.

Which reminds me of Niels Bohr and one of the most amazing stories of World War II. I’ll tell you next week.