INTRODUCTION, 2002
if they do it for no reason
there's no motive
if they all do it
no one knows who has done it.
—HENRYK GRYNBERG, “The Perfect Crime;’ 1989
Anti-Semitism has proven to be one of the most enduring concepts in European civilization. In a 1927 book called The Wandering Jew about the struggles of poor eastern European Jews, Viennese Jewish novelist Joseph Roth concluded that anti-Semitism would vanish from the world, ended by the Soviet Union. He wrote of anti-Semitism, “In the new Russia, it remains a disgrace. What will ultimately kill it off is public shame.” He noted virulent outbursts in Russia but dismissed them as the death struggles of dinosaurs resisting the inevitable future.
Roth even speculated that “If this process continues, the age of Zionism will have passed, along with the age of anti-Semitism— and perhaps even that of Judaism itself.”
Today the Soviet Union has been gone for a decade but anti-Semitism is still here. So for that matter, is Judaism. “The Jewish question”—I have never been certain what the question is—that Roth predicted would be put to rest with Russian leadership, has endured.
The lesson to be learned from Roth, aside from a warning to writers not to publish predictions in books, is that both Judaism and anti-Semitism have deep and permanent roots in Europe. Though Judaism is a less European idea than anti-Semitism, for many Jews, Jewish culture is European—or was.
Because of the Holocaust, Europe is no longer the most Jewish continent. It may have remained the most anti-Semitic, though Africa and Asia, with their Muslim populations are certainly vying for the title. It is difficult to be certain because anti-Semitism is more difficult to quantify than Judaism. As the nations of the former Soviet bloc struggle for acceptance in the West—admission into Western clubs such as NATO and the European Union— Jewish organizations such as the World Jewish Congress have urged that progress towards democracy in these nations be measured by the way they are treating their Jews. This is not as skewed a perspective as it at first sounds. Anti-Semitism, whether in Hungary, Germany, or France, has usually been tied to undemocratic movements. The growth of anti-Semitism in France, from the Dreyfus case to World War II collaboration, was tied to monarchists, fascists, and other groups that did not support republicanism. The Soviet Union was in principle opposed to anti-Semitism, and even outlawed its outward manifestations. But as that nation grew increasingly repressive, it also became increasingly anti-Semitic. The “anti-zionist campaign” in Poland in the late 1960s was the precursor to general repression.
But a more subtle anti-Semitism is allowed to breathe and grow even in the setting of democracy. Now in the early twenty-first century when so much urgency is given to fighting international terrorism, it is useful to remember that in the late twentieth century Jews feared Arab gunmen and bombs in Paris, Antwerp, Munich—much of western Europe. No European Jew went to a Jewish restaurant or a synagogue without calculating the risk of attack. These attacks against social organizations, restaurants, schools and synagogues were met with official statements of outrage and very little else. Almost no effort was made to capture or punish the perpetrators, even when Israeli intelligence offered information that could lead to their capture. Today when wondering how international Arab terrorism could have become so brazen, we should note that twenty years ago they were allowed to kill Jews in western Europe with impunity.
In the decade that has passed since I researched A Chosen Few, the standing in Europe of both Judaism and anti-Semitism has barely changed. This is not surprising, but what is surprising is that none of the countries about which I wrote in this book has moved one step further away from World War II. Europe, sixty vears after the Holocaust, has achieved no more closure than had Europe fifty years after. Dariusz Stola, a historian of the twentieth century at the Polish Academy of Sciences, said in a lecture delivered in June 2001 at the University of Warsaw, “The Holocaust is not a problem of the past. It is a problem of the present. I can hardly find a European country without a World War II problem from Germany, French collaboration, Swiss banks, the role of the Vatican. If you do not have problems with World War II, you are not European.”
The World War II problem, the Jewish question—these are distinctly European debates. It would have been logical to imagine that these issues had to be resolved, before the Jews would return. But in fact they returned before there was any resolution and now children, grandchildren, and even great grandchildren of survivors, live their lives half citizen and half metaphor.
The Jews have an irrefutable claim on what all Europeans want—standing as World War II victims. Everyone was either— in the words of Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg—a victim, a bystander, or a perpetrator. The worst fate has become the best status. Just as Jews have always been envied and resented for whatever they had, they are envied today for their victim status. Europeans need to show that they too, not just Jews, were the victims of World War II. The French and Dutch accomplish this with some difficulty. The Poles stubbornly fight for their victim status. Even the Germans hope that somehow Dresden gives them a chance for victim status.
The Jews of Dresden in the former East Germany have recently found their real life in Germany and their metaphorical one at cross purposes. Across the wide and curving Elbe, in the Baroque historic city center, where blackened sandstone fairies cavort from ancient rooftops, workers waddle by, clearing debris with wheelbarrows. The city is finally digging out from the famous February 13, 1945, British RAF bombing run followed the next morning with an attack by the U.S. Army Air Force. Initially, the German police claimed 18,000 dead. But in subsequent years the count has wavered between 30,000 and 130,000.
Germany fell, and with little chance for recrimination against the rest of the world, Germans have, for a half century, denounced the bombing of Dresden as cruel and unnecessary.
Before it was bombed into a rum, Dresden, the capital of Saxony, had been one of the prized centers of Germany. The old walled medieval town reached its golden age in the eighteenth century. A Protestant church with a huge dome defining the city skyline, the Frauenkirche, became the symbol of Dresden—like an Eiffel Tower or an Empire State building. Bach gave the Frauenkirche's first organ concert.
But for forty-five years after the 1945 bombing, the view across the Elbe was of the piles of stone, staircases overgrown with bushes, wall fragments silhouetted against the sky, the skeleton of one burned-out dome sticking out above overgrown rubble piles amid a huge vacant lot that had been cleared with bulldozers.
In 1949, when the Cold War began with Germany splitting into West and East, East Germany, the German Democratic Republic, found a perfect convergence of political rhetoric and economic reality. They did not have the money to completely rebuild their cities, but in leaving central Berlin with bullet holes and crumbling walls and Dresden with its charred remains, they were creating monuments to the horror the fascists had brought on the German people. Fascists were the perpetrators and Germans were the victims.
In the new East Germany, history might be rewritten, but it was never to be forgotten. Every February 13, Dresden school children were gathered in a remembrance of the bombing. Townspeople went to the remaining charred tower facing the pile of rocks that was once the Frauenkirche, and lit candles.
All this ended in 1990 along with East Germany. The West Germans, unlovingly known in the East as the Wessies, arrived with their own brand of Wiedergutmachung, making it good again. It was all so nice before the Communists and the Nazis, they said, couldn't we just put it back the way it was.
Since the reunification of Germany—that is the term always used because it has been unified before—the Wessies have been rushing into the bombed-out parts of the East such as Dresden and the center of Berlin and rebuilding, making Germany historic and lovely again and, in so doing, removing those East German reminders of unlovely history.
In Dresden alone, in the ten years following the reunification of Germany in October 1990, about $47 billion, some private and some government funds, was spent on reconstruction. Dresden's new tourist literature, in giving the history of the city, seldom offers a date between 1918, when the Saxon monarchy was abolished, and the 1945 bombing. “The Friends of Dresden” brochure to raise money for the rebuilding of the Frauenkirche, offers no date between an 1843 Wagner debut and the 1945 bombing. Photographs of the blackened rubble, some of it untouched until very recently, are readily available More difficult to find is the 1934 picture of little Nazi boys in brown shirts, all at attention for the visit of Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels to the city, or the 1944 photo of thousands of Dresdeners cheering flags of the Third Reich, the graceful arches of the fourteenth-century Augustus Bridge in the background.
A decade after reunification, Ossies and Wessies still look and think so differently that they are immediately distinguishable in a bar or on a street corner. The Ossies look defeated and the Wessies strut like conquerors. The demeanor, the body language, would betray them if the clothes and words didn't. The Ossie Jews who went back to build Communism and the Wessie Jews, who went back to earn money, along with their children, have remained even farther apart than non-Jewish Germans.
The local Ossies, even the non-Jewish ones, showed little enthusiasm for the Wessies and their billions spent rebuilding the Frauenkirche. Many viewed the project as the destruction of their anti-war and anti-fascism monument.
Other curious controversies have arisen. The Dresden castle was to be restored to its 1733 condition. But as stone fragments are fitted together and missing parts resculpted and a fresh bright layer of gilding laid on, an argument has emerged. Should it all look bright and shiny the way it did in 1733, or antique and historic the way it did in 1945 before the bombing? Should the Frauenkirche be furnished with a baroque organ, the kind of light, crisp, harpsicord-like instrument for which Bach and the other baroque composer wrote, an organ like the original installed when the church was completed in 1743, or should they install a large, grumbling nineteenth-century organ like the one that was destroyed in the 1945 bombing?
Are they restoring the eighteenth-century splendor of Dresden's golden age or simply undoing the 1945 bombing? Are they trying to remember the eighteenth century or forget the twentieth century? Are there to be no traces left of World War II?
The Dresden debate becomes more tense when discussing one of the last baroque buildings on the restoration list. In 1838, Gottfried Semper, the man who designed the Dresden Opera house and the adjacent Old Masters Picture Gallery, also designed a synagogue. The Jews prayed in Semper's baroque palace that looked like the Christians’ baroque palaces, holding services that resembled those of the Protestants, in German instead of Hebrew, on Sundays rather than Saturdays. They believed in fitting into Dresden life.
Most Dresdeners remember the synagogue being bombed in 1945 along with everything else in the center. The tourist board even noted that it could not be rebuilt like the Frauenkirche but would have to be completely reconstructed from new materials because the destruction from the bombing was so total. But in fact the reason that no wall, not even stones, remain from the synagogue is that it was not destroyed in 1945. On the night of November 9, 1938, Kristallnacht, when Jewish stores and synagogues throughout Germany were attacked, the Dresden synagogue was burned. After the mob burned the synagogue, a “civic group” cleared the ruins, an operation for which the Jewish community was forced to pay. Heinz-Joachim Aris, the current director of the Dresden Jewish Community, then a small boy, remembers his father being forced to wear a yellow star as he and other Jews were made to gather the remaining stones from the synagogue and use them to pave streets.
Of the nearly 5,000 Jews who had lived in Dresden when Hitler came to power, by 1945 all but 198 had fled or been killed or were dying in concentration camps. With the Reich rapidly disintegrating, the German government was desperate to kill the last of the Jews. On Tuesday morning, February 13, the remaining Jews received orders to report for deportation to the camps on Friday. But that evening when Dresden was destroyed, the roaring wall of fire that collapsed the beautiful Frauenkirche also destroyed Gestapo headquarters and deportation from Dresden came to an end. Aris and his family were among the 198 who survived because of the bombing.
Herbert Lappe, a Jewish engineer whose parents survived in Fngland and returned when he was three in 1949, said, “When the Dresden people remember the bombing, some of the Jews remember how they survived.” On February 13, when the city bells would ring to signal the gathering at the Frauenkirche rubble for the annual bombing memorial, Lappe's mother always refused to go.
A group of Protestants raising money for the Frauenkirche felt strongly that it would be wrong to rebuild their church and not the synagogue. They formed a “Christian-Jewish friendship group,” Lappe said. “As always happens with such groups, they were entirely Christian.” Once again the question was not what kind of synagogue the Jews of Dresden wanted but what would be the proper symbolic gesture toward this metaphoric people. The Germans wanted the Jews to have back their synagogue, even though the Jews did not want it. To the Dresden Jews, the baroque palace was a symbol of their parents’ failed experiment at assimilation. The few who still want to pray do not want to pray in German on Sunday or in a synagogue that looks like a church.
The Jews want to add something different to the cityscape, something that was not there before the bombing, and so the Jewish community commissioned a concrete block, slightly twisted, straining toward Jerusalem, with a courtyard that marks the outline of the original synagogue. This was not what the Wessies had in mind for the new Dresden.
“It is friction,” said Lappe. “It should be a needle in the town. Nothing aggressive. But people should see it and say, ‘What is this?’” At the insistence of the Jewish community, the relatively inexpensive $9.5 million building was financed mostly by the city of Dresden and the regional government of Saxony rather than by Jewish contributions. The building was dedicated on November 9, 2001, the sixty-third anniversary of Kristallnacht.
The day after the new synagogue opened, someone had drawn a swastika on one of the walls. This kind of attack on Jewish monuments and buildings by right wmg extremists has steadily increased in Germany over the past decade.
In France, though dialogue about the Nazi occupation has been fairly open for a long time—if not since the death of De Gaulle in 1970, certainly since the return of the Socialists in 1981—books, television, film and commentary continue to expose the shameful French collaboration, as though it had never been exposed before. For all its sorrow and pity, France did not have one of the worst records of Nazi-occupied countries. The Belgians and the Dutch did worse. But no one wants to write about Belgium. Understandably, the French love to write about France. So do Americans. And so they continue to expose the already well-documented French collaboration.
While France still struggles with its history of Nazi collaboration, the majority of both Jews and non-Jews there were born since the Liberation. More than half of French Jews are either from North Africa or related to North African Jews who did not directly experience the Holocaust. Today French Jews feel secure enough to do what Jews do, fight among themselves—angry arguments over such subjects as the future of Israel.
While the large French Jewish population debates endlessly, the tiny surviving Polish Jewish population remains a topic of endless debate—the Jewish question, which, in reality, is the Polish question.
Almost six decades after the Holocaust, in which three million Polish Jews were murdered, mostly on Polish soil, Poles continue to see themselves as a heroic and suffering people who have fought for freedom and endured the brutality of their neighbors— in other words, they are the victims. The Poles are undeterred by the iact that virtually no one outside of Poland sees them that way.
It is true that three million non-Jewish Poles also died in the war. The Polish three million was ten percent of the population. The Jewish three million was more than ninety percent. According to the Polish version of history, the Jews were murdered by the Germans not by the Poles and when Poles participated they were forced at gunpoint. Poles, when not victims, were bystanders, never perpetrators. This does not explain why Jews were massacred in Poland before the Germans came or after they left, nor why anti-Semitism has remained part of Polish life.
Curiously, the difference in viewpoint inside and outside Poland has created an important rift between the Jews of Poland and the Jews of America. Poles both Jewish and Christian resent the American Jewish tendency to indulge in hatred of Poles. After all, the few Jews who have remained have done so because they feel that Poland is their home and non-Jewish Poles are their friends and colleagues.
It is interesting to compare the attitude of world Jewry toward the Netherlands and Poland. Both countries were occupied by the Nazis. Both countries had organized resistance but a general population that cooperated in the removal of more than ninety percent of its Jewish population. One difference was that in Holland the Nazis could count on the help of a home-grown Nazi movement whereas there was no such movement in Poland.
And yet the few remaining Jews in Holland do not have to constantly justify their existence in their own country. Holland is not filled with Jewish tourists openly displaying contempt for the Dutch. Dutch Jewry do not have to be on a constant vigil to keep their art treasures from being removed by the world Jewish community. But the Jews of Poland must explain why they are living in their native country. The Jews of Poland, the Czech Republic, and elsewhere in central Europe must constantly fight American and Israeli Jews wishing to take their art treasures to Israel.
Poland suffers from the chronic outbreak of history. In one sense, these debates are healthy. They were never allowed until the late 1980s, when the Communist regime was losing its control of the national dialogue. In 1987, the first such national debate erupted when the Catholic press suggested that the Jews were owed some sort of compensation by the Poles for the Polish role as bystanders in the German Holocaust. Since then, at least nine other crises have occurred, including fights over the operation of Auschwitz as a historic site, and the memory of the post-war Kielce pogrom. The most recent such battle began in May 2000 when the Polish press reported that Jan Gross, a Polish Jew who had emigrated during the 1968 wave of anti-Semitism, was about to publish a book in Polish on Jedwabne.
Jedwabne was one of those pieces of Polish history that Jews knew about but of which Poles somehow had no memory. The entire Jewish community of this town, some 1,600 Jews according to Gross, were locked in a barn and massacred, not by Germans but by the local townspeople. There were not even Germans present giving orders. What happened was completely on the initiative of Poles—Poles as perpetrators.
This came as no shock to Polish Jews. Jedwabne was one of several such Polish massacres. Another took place in the nearby schtetl of Radzilow. And there may have been ten or more similar incidents, all in the same area. No one, including Jews, knows of this happening anywhere else in Poland. This was an infamously anti-Semitic area. Before the war it was the only rural stronghold of the Jew-hating National Democratic Party.
The Jews and non-Jews of Poland are well aware that there were Poles who saved Jews and resisted Nazis. There was an armed resistance, the first prisoners sent to Auschwitz were anti-Nazi Poles. Several hundred Poles were executed by the Germans for trying to help Jews. Even in Jedwabne, one of the local women, Antonina Wyrzykowska, saved seven Jews by hiding them. Rather than becoming a national hero, she was so abused that she immigrated to the U.S. She is still hated in the town because not only is she a witness to what they did but she is proof that individuals could have done something to stop it.
Poles through the debates of the 1980s and 1990s have come to accept that not all Poles were heroes. Many were bystanders. Some turned Jews in and cooperated in other ways with the German plan of genocide. But, by the year 2000, most Poles were still not ready to accept the fact that Poles had actively participated in the Holocaust, that they had been perpetrators. Dariusz Stola, searching through only what he regarded as the major dailies and weeklies of Poland, counted 270 articles on Jedwabne during the twelve months following the first news of the Gross book.
Gross's book was greeted by disturbing defenses. It was only a few hundred Jews, some said. Gross is a Jew who wrote the book at the behest of the American Jewish community that hates Poland, said others. Or why should Poles apologize for the killing of Jews when the Jews don't apologize for the killing of Poles.
Some who gave testimony for the book have been driven out of town. These witnesses said they have been waiting all these years to tell someone but no one ever asked. Konstanty Gebert, now a well-known journalist, went to the town and reported, “It is a village seething with hatred.”
After more than a year of debate, on July 10, 2001, Aleksander Kwasniewski, the Polish President, went to Jedwabne and in a ceremony that was broadcast on national television, apologized for the way Poles had acted there. He said, “It was justified by nothing. The victims were helpless and defenseless.” He asked forgiveness “in my own name and in the name of the Polish people whose consciences are shocked by this crime.”
Unfortunately he was not apologizing for the majority of Poles. Many were angered by his apology and an earlier poll had shown that only thirty-two percent of Poles were in favor of an apology. But Polish Jews see progress in their chosen homeland. Even ten years ago, it would have been unlikey to have gotten thirty-two percent in favor of an apology. “That's a third, that's huge!” said Konstanty Gebert.
At the time A Chosen Few was being researched, Gebert had taken to wearing a yarmulke when at home in his central Warsaw apartment. In those days he would not wear it on the street. Now he does. Occasionally Poles come up to him, not to abuse him, but to say how pleased they are that today a Jew is free to wear a varmulke on the streets of Poland.
Polish Jewish writer Julian Stryjkowski in a recent speech described how when growing up in Galicia he spoke only Yiddish. When he was sent off to school he was told to say when he heard his name, jestem, a Polish word meaning literally “I am.” It was the Polish way of saying “here.” This being the only Polish he knew, he would answer any question on any subject, “jestem.” The other children would laugh. Today there are some four million Jews in Europe, not quite a third of the 1935 population but a million more than in 1945. They do not always want to be symbols. Not all of them even want to live Jewish lives. But they all wish to live their lives, in what they see as their own countries, just like other Europeans. Yet they must constantly assert, jestem—here.
Breaking my own rule about making predictions, I suspect that there will always be Jews in Europe.
New York, November 2001
INTRODUCTION, 1994
In the final days of the Soviet empire, when there was little left but humor, a story circulated about two men who on a cold winter's day put up a sign, “Fish for Sale.” Immediately a huge line formed. The two fish vendors, realizing that there were far more customers than fish, angrily marched outside and shouted, “There will be no fish for Jews. All Jews go home.”
After the Jews left, the line was only a little smaller. The two men had to think of something else. The customers were stamping their feet to stay warm, but they were keeping their places. The two sheepishly emerged from their storefront forty minutes later. “I'm sorry, but we only have enough fish for party members. Everyone else go home.”
This time about two thirds of the line left. The rest continued to stand with their hats pulled down and their collars tugged up. When after another hour the fish vendors saw that no one had given up, they came out again and said, “Sorry but there will be fish only for recipients of the Order of Lenin.”
There were two Order of Lenin winners in the line. Everyone else left. The two stood there in the cold for another hour, wondering when they would get their fish. Finally the fish vendors came out and said, “I'm sorry, we really don't have any fish at all.”
The one frozen Order of Lenin winner turned to the other frozen Order of Lenin winner and said, “You see—the Jews always get the best deal.”
For all its unbelievably destructive wars, its weaponry, and its genocide—to use a word invented in this century—the end of the twentieth century is bearing some remarkable similarities to its beginning. At the turn of the century, just as stability and prosperity seemed to be within Europe's grasp, the future was menaced by the crumbling of the Russian empire and the emerging nationalism of small Balkan states. Through unification, Germany, the economic giant of Europe, had created an affluent internal market far larger than that of its neighbors.
So striking are the similarities that German chancellor Helmut Kohl angrily declared to his country's neighbors, who were nervous in the face of a newly reunited Germany, “We are in the year 1992, rot 1902.”
Another similarity is that the world's Jewish population will finish the century at about the same size as it began. In the 1930s Hitler promised that after the next war, there would be no Jews in Europe. He came extraordinarily close to achieving his goal. Before the Holocaust, Judaism was predominantly a European culture. The character of Jewish culture had become essentially European, and Jews were a significant part of Europe. This all changed with the Final Solution.
A half century later, the global Jewish population is still some three million fewer than the eighteen million Jews in 1933 when the Nazis came to power. What was once a population of almost nine million European Jews—half of world Jewry—is today four million, little more than a quarter of world Jewry. But at last it can be said with some confidence that European Jewry will continue, that the remaining Jews of Europe will not all move to the United States or Israel, as had often been suggested. There are only one million more Jews in Europe today than there were when the camps were liberated, but Paris has become a major Jewish center, traditional Jewish life is thriving in Antwerp, and Budapest has the makings of a large and diverse Jewish center. Communites in Berlin, Prague, and Amsterdam are struggling, but there are reasons for optimism. Poland, on the other hand, which started the century with one out of every five Jews in the world, seems today almost devoid of Jewish life—an historical reversal of Jewish demography comparable only to the Spanish expulsion in 1492 and the final Roman conquest of Judaea in A.D. 135.
I grew up in immigrant America. The Poles, Italians, and Irish had relatives in “the old country/’ but Jews did not. No Jew I knew did. I certainly didn't. All the relatives I knew of had either left or been killed. No one really gave much thought to the fact that American Jews lacked European relatives. It was just one of those things that made Jews different, like Saturday instead of Sunday. Jews are accustomed to the idea of being different. But while no one said it, it was generally understood that Jews did not have relatives in Europe because there were no longer Jews in Europe. People seeing my name would ask me if I had relatives in Poland. “No, I'm Jewish,” I would say as an unemotional and readily understood explanation.
But even in Poland, a few Jews are trying to breathe life into the remnants of Jewry. The question arises—is often rudely asked— why a Jew would want to live in Poland. More than three million Jews were massacred there, the survivors were subjected to pogroms and attacked on trains, and finally a new regime that had promised to end racism unleashed its “anti-Zionist” campaigns. Not only in Poland but everywhere in Europe Jews are faced with the question, often from Jewish visitors, “Why are you still here?”
I wanted to know the answer to that rude question. I also wanted to know what price had been paid and what struggles waged over the past fifty years to stay and rebuild. Not surprisingly, I found no single answer to the question. People stayed because, in spite of what anti-Semitic countrymen might claim, they were indeed Poles or Frenchmen or even Germans. Some stayed because they did not want to see the history of their Jewish community come to an end. Some sta)ed to build a new society. Some never intended to stay but couldn't get their relatives to move. Some hated the thought of moving anywhere. Some always meant to move but could not get organized to leave, and some just got too involved with their careers.
What has emerged is a half-century of European history seen through the eyes of Jews—a traumatized and damaged people's experience in rebuilding their lives in the postwar, cold war, and post-Communist eras.
The Jews who were committed to rebuilding their communities sometimes found themselves at cross-purposes with their local Zionist movement. In much the same way, this book too is in conflict with Zionism, a conflict that is inevitable but in neither case specifically intended. I have never believed that all Jews should move to Israel, and I have always been bemused by Zionists who themselves had no plans to move there. I like the idea that there are still Jews in Europe, that Amsterdam's Esnoga and Prague's Old-New Synagogue are still working synagogues and not museums. Perhaps it is just that I do not want Hitler to posthumously attain his goal.
On the other hand, I understand that many Jews and non-Jews alike view Europe's future with foreboding. This is not an optimistic moment in Europe, a continent long given to pessimism. Eastern Europe's borders are tense and the Balkans are embroiled in a shooting war. Western Europe's slowly nurtured trading bloc is suffering from rising unemployment and feels outmaneuvered by deals in the Americas and Asia. Europe is turning inward, becoming obsessed with its own internal relations, problems, and battles.
As I write this introduction, during the week leading up to the 5754th year of recorded Jewish history, the French government has moved to rewrite its constitution to facilitate laws harassing immigrants; a statue of Kaiser Wilhelm I, a symbol of German military aggression, has been installed in Koblenz; while in the south, yet another of Germany's almost daily attacks resulted in the death of four immigrants in a burned-out hostel. This incident was not uniquely German—a week later a Bangladesh man lay in critical condition after being beaten and kicked in East London. The remains of Admiral Miklos Horthy—who, although less bloody than his successor, allied Hungary with the Third Reich and initiated the persecution and massacre of thousands of Jews—were re-buried in his hometown with honors. Several government ministers attended the ceremony. The Hungarian prime minister asserted that Horthy had been a great patriot who had gained back Hungarian land, which angered the prime minister of the Slovak Republic, Vladimir Meciar—not because of Horthy's war record but because some of that regained land had been at Slovak expense. The same week, Meciar made an interesting observation of his own. Gypsies, the prime minister explained, are “socially unadaptable and mentally backward.” Later, he denied the quote but rephrased the same thought in more polite language. While these things were happening, Bosnians were openly slaughtering each other for being Croats or Serbs or Muslims.
This is what European news is like these days. Although the style of this nationalism may be particularly European, the racism and racist attacks are not. The United States, too, has seen an increase in extreme right-wing facist violence groups like the Ku Klux Klan find willing shock troops in young skinheads. What is especially worrisome about Europe, however, is that the political establishment there reacts to such activities by pandering to the extremists. Rather than ostracizing the extremists, the establishment treats them as mainstream and goes on to ostracize the victims of extremist violence by discussing the “immigrant problem/’ In reality, the problem is not immigrants but the fact that immigrants are being attacked.
Germany, whose culture I have always admired—its music, its demanding and expressive language—is a country with which I have been trying to come to terms during twenty years of visits. While I am awed by its brilliance, there is something undefmable that I fear. Germans themselves fear it as well. Today, Germany's best writers are consumed with a dread of their own country. But it is too tempting to make simplistic assumptions about Germany. One time in Cologne, while I was trying to catch a soon-departing express train to Berlin, I cut into the only moving line. As I ordered my ticket in German, I heard a British couple behind me saying, “They're still like that. They'll never learn.”
This book is not intended as an argument about where Jews ought to live. It is the story of brave and tenacious people who have rebuilt their lives in the face of incomprehensible horror and refused to be pushed out of their homes by bigots.
The Jews I write about here are an eclectic group, selected in as arbitrary a fashion as possible. My only criterion for choosing a particular community was that it had previously been decimated by the Holocaust. In those communities I sought out Jews of any kind—the more varied, the better. I spoke with tailors, bakers, and butchers—I did not want only prominent people. But two people I interviewed are well-known political activists: one has an international literary reputation. A few are well-known leaders in their communities, because such people, after all, are highly representative of European Jews. There are atheists, Yom Kippur Jews, and Hasids. Any Jew in Europe is a representative of European Jewry.
Wherever possible, I have tried to verify facts, and while most of the stories seemed truthful, there were a few rare interviews that I eliminated because the stories did not check out. Though some of the material in this book is derived from my own eyewit-nessing in the late 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, most of the stories here are of people's lives as they told them to me. It is true that all people tend to remember their lives in selective and self-serving ways; nevertheless, I have confidence in their essential truth. Where there is dialogue, I was either present or I reproduced it as it was related to me by a participant. Scenes that I did not witness were described to me by those who did.
I avoided people who would not let me use their names, although I respected some requests to leave out the names of or information about certain relatives.
Verifying stories and probing for truth was particularly difficult with camp survivors, who often went into tremendous but selective detail about their camp experiences, even though I did not ask them. Survivors often have a despairing sense that no one can possibly understand them, and I think that to some extent they are right. The more I learn about the Holocaust, the less I understand it. When radio correspondent Edward R. Murrow was reporting on the liberation of Buchenwald, one of the emaciated survivors went up to him and asked him if he intended to write about what he saw. The survivor, a Frenchman who had formerly worked for the news agency Havas, told him, “To write about this, you must have been here at least two years, and after that… you don't want to write anymore.”
But people did continue with their lives—damaged people whose psyches were wounded in ways that go beyond the comprehension of the rest of us had the strength and courage to rebuild, remarry, and raise children. Because of them, Jewry today has a future in Europe, and Hitler, at last, has been defeated.
Paris, October 1994
P R O L O G U E
“Afterward Moses and Aaron went and said to Pharaoh
Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: Let my people go
that they may celebrate a festival for me in the wilderness”
-EXODUS 5:1
A loud thumping noise at the head table shook the plastic wine cups but failed to silence the die-hard old Communists. It was a rabbinical gesture—a long fluid arm motion resembling the straightening of an egret's neck, ending in a palm-down whack on the table. Orthodox rabbis do this at the reading stand when they want to silence the synagogue. Irene Runge had been accused of numerous things in the past year, but being an Orthodox rabbi was not one of them. Still, having seen the gesture, she thought she would give it a try. As former East Berlin drifted in the post-Communist era, there was something enviable about the authority wielded by an Orthodox rabbi.
In East Berlin the Passover dinner, the seder, was being offered in a government-subsidized cultural center off the Oranienburger-strasse for fifteen marks per person—a bargain, considering that the official Jewish Community over in West Berlin was charging fifty marks. The East Berlin seder was strictly kosher—to the satisfaction of Irene, the hostess. A lifelong Communist, she had lost her position at Humboldt University after the collapse of the Communist state for having ties to the East German secret police, the infamous Stasi. The seder was to be supervised by a religious leader, long-bearded and behatted, a virulent anti-Communist religious traditionalist from the ultra-Orthodox Lubavitcher sect. He was to bring together fifty atheists—a blend of committed German Communists and Russian immigrants who had never been exposed to any religion—in the recitation of praise to God, while outside in the cool spring night, a dozen prostitutes stood in tights and glittery string bikinis, plying their trade in the newly capitalist East Berlin.
The prostitutes were happy to see the neighborhood getting more foot traffic and the Communist thought it was a “lovely evening,” although a few of the Russians wished there was more singing. To the English Lubavitcher, just the fact that Jews were still having seders in Berlin was a victory.
This was Berlin almost a half-century after it was bombed into rubble. Berlin, the haunted city, still had a wall running through it. But it was no longer white concrete covered with colorful graffiti. The wall had become invisible. There was still never any doubt here or anywhere else in Berlin as to whether you were in the East or the West.
This seder was held in East Berlin, in an old central Berlin neighborhood that had once been the home of impoverished Ostjuden, with synagogues, kosher shops, brothels, and cabarets. The neighborhood—the buildings, but not the residents—had survived the war. Now it seemed earmarked for gentrification. Slightly chic little bars with a West Berlin slickness were starting to open. The prostitutes had come out on the street. The Oranienburger-strasse, famous for its large synagogue that was just now being repaired from Allied bombings, had long been a red-light district, but since prostitution does not exist in a Communist state, it was kept judiciously indoors. Now the prostitutes stood off the curb every night dressed in oddly colored tights, sequined strings, and blond wigs that looked like doll hair. Here, West Berliners in BMWs could cruise for prostitutes more discreetly than they could by walking the clean modern Ku'damm in the West, where all their friends and colleagues coming back from the movies might see them.
East Berliners called West Berliners Wessis, and the Wessis called the East Berliners Ossis, and neither term was meant to express fondness. At this point there still wasn't much question of the East Berlin Jews mixing with the West Berlin Jews, whom they referred to as “the millionaires.” There were only a few hundred East Berlin Jews, and there were a few thousand in West Berlin. Both groups’ ranks were being swollen by Russian Jews. The new unified Germany had opened its gates to welcome—even help finance—any Soviet Jews who wanted to immigrate, a fact that many Russians discovered when they came to Germany to buy goods for the black market in Russia. Thousands of Jews, along with half-Jews and would-be Jews, were now coming to Germany to escape anti-Semitism.
In Germany they received housing and a living allowance. Between 1991 and 1993, Germany had given permission for 25,000 Soviet Jews to immigrate, and with less than half arrived, the Berlin Jewish Community was already 70 percent Russian. For the first time in half a century, there were more than just a small handful of Jews in Berlin.
Many of these Russian Jews would have preferred to go to the United States, but Germany welcomed them and the United States didn't. They spoke little English or German but, in the presence of Americans, they would sporadically blurt out geographical information on the northeastern United States. “Ocean Parkway,” a man from Leningrad who spoke no other words of English asserted for no apparent reason, to which a Muscovite woman responded with the well-pronounced but not entirely accurate assertion, “New Haven, Connecticut—250 kilometers from New York City.” A woman from Odessa smiled approvingly, though she had no geographical data to add.
The East Germans were still groping around, looking for a place in the new unified Germany. “New unified Germany” was a Wessi concept. To many Ossis, it was simply the newly expanded West Germany. The change was particularly difficult for people who felt that they had had a place in the old German Democratic Republic. Irene Runge felt certain enough of her place to freely acknowledge her vague links to the Stasi; for this act of candor she had been fired from her university post.
Sympathetic East Berliners would now say to Irene, “I understand. You had to cooperate. They tried to blackmail you, didn't they?” Over and over again she would explain that no one blackmailed her—“I thought it was the right thing to do.”
After the fall of East Germany, it was discovered that about a half-million East Germans had contributed to Stasi files. These Stasi revelations had cost people like Irene not only their jobs but some of their friends. Still, the old-line Communists understood. Mia Lehmann, 84, said, “If you believed in your country and a government agent said, ‘This is for the good of the country/wouldn't you cooperate?” Many people might answer negatively to that question, but among Irene's circle were many who had said yes. In the last years of the German Democratic Republic, Irene had grown increasingly disenchanted with the government and, at the same time, increasingly interested in Judaism. After the GDR collapsed, she had no job, no party, no country really, but she did have the Jewish Cultural Association, or Judische Kulturverein, which she had created. She was also a paid member of the Jewish Community, but that was mainly Wessis. If not for the American movies and her unshakable determination that “Wessis make better popcorn,” she wouldn't go over there at all. At her Kulturverein she gathered a small group of the kind of people she had always been around, Jewish Communists.
Unlike the Jewish Community, the Kulturverein was something she could run herself. She liked running things, holding them together with her own wild charisma and whimsy, shouting in her harsh Berlin German or her harsh New York English. She had been born in Washington Heights, New York, where many leftist Jewish families had taken refuge from the Third Reich. Most of the Jews at her Berlin Kulturverein had lived part of their life somewhere else. That was how they or their parents had survived.
These days, Irene's lifetime beliefs earned her only the contempt of the Wessis. There was no more party, no more Stasi, no more inside line. But she did have an ultra-Orthodox rabbi in Jerusalem who called her every Friday and before every Jewish holiday and gave her religious instructions and holiday wishes. Then there were the Lubavitch Hasidim, who had been quick to come to the aid of this little East Berlin community. Lubavitchers are a sect of the Hasidic movement, a more-than-two-hundred-year-old current from Eastern Europe that takes a more spiritual, less intellectual approach to strict observance of Jewish laws and customs. Unlike other Jews, the Lubavitchers have a missionary zeal of near Christian proportions for searching out secular Jews and bringing them back to religion. This has made them unpopular in some Jewish communities, but since the collapse of Communism, they have found fertile ground in Eastern Europe, where Jews for the first time in their lives are trying to learn about Judaism. A West German journalist who happened to be Jewish telephoned Irene to ask about her Passover plans, and as she started describing the event, he asked, “What is your thing for Lubavitchers?”
She explained, “They are poor people without pretension, and they are easy to relate to.” In other words, they act like Ossis, not Wessis.
In 1989, Irene had gone to Brooklyn to see Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the white-bearded Rebbe who at almost 90 was leader of the Lubavitchers. Schneerson, who regularly predicted the coming of the Messiah and according to some of his followers was himself the Messiah, told Irene to get money and help from the official West German Jewish Community. Irene patiently pointed out that he was talking about West Germany, but she was in East Germany. What did this New York rabbi know about Germany? She patiently explained, “But Rebbe, I am in East Berlin, you know. I mean, there's the wall.”
‘Yes, yes, yes. I know,” replied the Rebbe in his Yiddish-inflected English. “But this will not stay. It will change. Everything will change.” Seven months later, to the amazement of almost everyone but Schneerson, the wall came down.
Now, for several weeks before Passover, Irene, who had never kept a kosher kitchen in her life, boasted to everyone she could find, in and out of the press, that her seder would be extremely Orthodox and strictly kosher. She took to wishing everyone she saw a “kosher Passover.” Only a few years before, she had thought that keeping kosher meant not eating pork. But she had recently learned a great deal about not mixing meat and dairy, eating only fish with scales, looking for the right seals on kosher meat that guaranteed the animal had been properly slaughtered, not eating eggs with blood spots, and even more obscure things, such as cutting off pieces of apple rather than biting into the fruit whole.
She was not going to give up the Japanese sushi restaurants she looked forward to on her visits abroad, but she loved the mystique of orthodoxy. She had been an orthodox Communist, and now she would have Orthodox Judaism. Except for one thing: She was an atheist. She took up a ritual but not a religion. Even her son Stefan, who had himself circumcised and started going to synagogue, said that he had no religious feelings.
Most of the events held at the Kulturverein were not religious. A week before Passover, Irene provided an evening for a group of non-Jewish party organizers from various local Social Democrat offices around West Germany. These dozen or so Wessis at the Kulturverein made the difference between east and west apparent. They were expensively dressed, with a clear preference for the color gray, which befitted their reserved gestures and soft voices— in dramatic contrast to Irene, with her multicolored oval eyeglasses, her close-cropped blond hair, her perennial oversized plaid jacket on her small feisty frame, and her enthusiastic voice never much softer than a shout. And to Mia Lehmann, whose kind and interested face revealed something determined around the lips and jawline, and whose aged and quivering voice shook with passion for her beliefs. Before the evening started, Mia had sat down to talk to a woman who had been helping with the food. Mia, who had a radar that always led her to people with troubles, noticed that the woman looked depressed, and she found out that like two million other people in the former GDR, her job had been eliminated. It had happened only the day before, and the woman was very upset.
Mia, slightly stooped with age, stood up at the Social Democrats’ meeting and in simple language told them that these were bad times for Germany. She had seen bad times before, she said, but she had never doubted that a better society could be built. Now if they all worked together, a better Germany could still be built.
Her directness and emotion left the West Germans awkwardly examining the toes of their shoes. They suffered from the uneasiness that progressive Germans often feel when they are around Jews. A thin Social Democrat with gray glasses and a gray suit stood up and made a speech in which he called Jews “a certain group” and referred to the Holocaust only as “a special experience.”
Meanwhile, two young Orthodox Jews from Switzerland had arrived. They were hard to ignore because they were both very tall and one of them was enormously fat. These days, Jews from the West were forever dropping by the Kulturverein to help out. The contribution that these two made was to point out that a mezuzah marking the front doorway was not enough. They would send Irene enough mezuzahs for every doorway in the Kulturverein. “Fine, fine,” Irene told them, slightly harried but glad to take in whatever orthodoxy came her way.
The evening was saved by Mark Aizikovitch, a burly black-bearded Ukrainian Jew. With his rich baritone voice and large comic black eyes, he worked the crowd with robust Yiddish and Russian songs until they twitched. Then here and there fingers and toes started tapping. Aizikovitch did not stop trilling, dipping, mugging, and growling until the guests were actually out-and-out clapping to the music.
Aizikovitch was finding life difficult in Germany, where everyone acted as though the name Mark Aizikovitch meant nothing. But Mark Aizikovitch had built a reputation in the Soviet Union for singing everything from electric rock to opera. The Germans were definitely not interested in Soviet rock. What seemed to sell best here were the old Yiddish songs he had learned in his childhood in the Ukrainian town of Poltava. Yiddish singing had become a fad in Germany, and Aizikovitch had an edge over the non-Yiddish-speaking German non-Jews who were doing it. Everything Jewish was hot in Germany these days. When the Jewish Community over in West Berlin offered courses in Hebrew, more non-Jews signed up than Jews. The Hebrew course that the Kul-turverein offered had a higher ratio of Jews, but a large number of gentiles regularly participated in events.
Mia Lehmann was still struggling with her own relationship to Jewishness. Seventy-three years earlier, in a small Romanian town in the Bucovina region, she had gone to visit her mother at Yom Kippur services and had found her sitting on the ground outside the synagogue. Supporting Mia on her own, the mother could not afford to pay for her synagogue membership and so was not let in for Yom Kippur. “I don't understand this,” said eleven-year-old Mia, and she resolved to have no more to do with religion. A few years later, she learned of the kibbutz movement—people all working together in the middle of Palestine. She thought it sounded very “romantic.” Traveling to Belgium, she trained in agricultural techniques with a group that would soon leave for Palestine. But her habit of wandering off and talking to people and listening to their troubles led her to Antwerp's diamond district, where she met very poor Polish Jews. They told her their troubles. They were Communists, and they told her about the party. She fell in love with a German Jewish organizer, and joined the Communist party. In 1932, instead of being on a ship to Palestine, she was on a train to Berlin with her German Communist lover and a very different destiny.
Three-quarters of a century later, a few weeks before the seder, a small group of Communists from the old Antifa-— the Antifascist Resistance Fighters, loyal East German Communists who had opposed the Nazis—took a tour of Israel. Since 1967, the East German Communist state they supported had vilified Israel, compared Israelis to Nazis, and actively backed violent Palestinian groups. Since the demise of the GDR, many of these East Berlin Jews had gone on trips to Israel to at last see what it was about.
Traveling by bus from northern Israel to Jerusalem, they decided they must get the Palestinian point of view, and they insisted that the driver take them to an Arab village. As their bus approached the village, two teenagers ran up and threw rocks at the windows. The glass shattered into small sparkling kernels, landing in the hair and clothes of the old Communists. One rock barely missed a man's head. Hunching over protectively, Mia Lehmann thought, “I can't understand this.”
DAVID MARLOWE, a London-based Lubavitcher, came to Berlin to kosher the Kulturverein and lead the Passover seder. A hefty man with a graying scraggly beard and a rolling mumble of British English, he was an introvert who did not know four words of German and, as both Englishman and Jew, didn't like Germany very much. In addition, he hated Communism. “The Communists were worse than the Nazis,” he asserted. “The Nazis killed bodies, but the Communists killed souls. That was worse. They turned men from God.”
He was shocked to discover that Irene and other Jews at the Kulturverein were unrepentant Communists. “I don't understand,” he said to Irene one day while they were koshering the kitchen. “I thought everyone was cheering and celebrating and happy to be rid of Communism.”
“Right,” said Irene in her blunt New York English. “Then they found out they didn't have jobs anymore. They didn't like that too much.”
David, not an arguing man, gathered up the frizzy blond extremities of his beard, thought for an instant, then examined the ingredients listed on an apple juice label. To no one's surprise, he pronounced it unclean. Koshering the Kulturverein was a major undertaking. The dark prewar building consisted of several bright rooms that served a variety of functions—office, lounge, library, meeting room, dining room—with simple modern furniture.
While David Marlowe was koshering the kitchen, Mark Aizikovitch was wandering around the Kulturverein learning new songs. He had agreed to sing at the seder, but he was perplexed to find that his repertoire was not satisfactory. He had to learn seder songs, Hebrew songs like “Dayenu,” which means “It would have been enough” and recounts all the miracles God performed so that Moses could lead the Jews from Egyptian slavery. Aizikovitch didn't know such songs, and he didn't understand why he could not do his usual performance—something like the one he had done for the Social Democrats. In spite of his Yiddish background, he didn't really know what a seder was.
While Aizikovitch paced around the Kulturverein singing “Dayenu” with a confused expression on his animate face, the search for chametz was on. Chametz is a Hebrew word meaning “leavening,” which is strictly forbidden during the Passover period. It is not enough to eat matzoh, the cracker-like unleavened Passover substitute for bread. Not only must there be no bread in the house, there must be no trace of chametz, not even a barely visible bread crumb. The day before Passover, the house must be completely cleaned of chametz before there are three stars in the sky (or would be if Berlin ever had a clear April night). Although few households are scattered with bread crumbs or bits of mold and yeast, the Orthodox so extensively clean for Passover that chametz seems to be an imaginary creature that only they can see. Everything had to be scrubbed. Appliances and shelves had to be lined with foil or paper. Pots and utensils had to be boiled. Wooden tools could not be used, because chametz could be lurking in the grain.
Irene Runge loved it all. Mia Lehmann found it amusing. She walked around the Kulturverein imitating a rabbi, periodically raising an index finger skyward and mockingly asking, “But is it kosher?” and then breaking into a mischievous grin. A woman volunteer with a slight Australian accent muttered, “I will never be a Lubavitcher.” Then she added, “Of course, I never thought I would be doing some of the things I've been doing in the past few years.”
German television crews were making the most of the search for chametz, since they were forbidden to film an actual seder. They seemed to find great visual material at the Kulturverein, zooming in on David Marlowe as he sealed off a room with tape because it was not yet kosherized. The German press loves Jewish stories as an affirmation—something positive to say about the new Germany. Yes, neo-Nazis and adolescent skinheads were roaming the streets attacking foreigners, but there were also Jews, and they were doing some kind of Jewish holiday.
The press attention was annoying to David Marlowe, in part because he was shy and did not appreciate attention, but also because German history weighed heavily on his thoughts. He felt that a new generation of Germans was trying to document the few Jews their parents had failed to kill. “What do they want with us?” he muttered. Irene Runge, on the other hand, was not shy, and she very much appreciated the media attention. She had an instinct for the snappy quote and soon learned that such one-liners are to journalists what cookies are to bears.
One German journalist who had failed to make arrangements to cover this year's preparations asked Irene if she would do another seder next year. “Since Jews have been doing this for about three thousand years,” she said with irritation, “we will probably do it next year.” Then she added impishly, “Unless the Mashiach comes.” One of her favorite things about the Orthodox was their adherence to the ancient belief that one day the Mashiach, the Messiah, would come. This expectation of the Messiah is at the heart of a debate about the State of Israel. Some Orthodox, even some of those living in Israel, believe that a state of Israel should not be declared until the Messiah comes. When He does come, the temple that the Romans destroyed will descend rebuilt in Jerusalem, and all Jews from around the world will return there. But in the meantime, Irene loved to joke with the Orthodox about His coming. “I hope He comes tonight so I don't have to go to work tomorrow,” she would say at the end of a particularly hard day.
Being a Lubavitcher, imbued with the missionary spirit, David cornered whatever men were around and tried to persuade them to he tefilhn—two small leather boxes containing four biblical passages. The boxes have leather straps, and one box is tied tightly to one arm, while the other is tied to the forehead. Short morning prayers are recited. The strange spectacle confused Mia Leh-mann's radar for people in trouble, and with a look of real concern, as though the leather straps were a kind of desperate tourniquet, she walked up to a volunteer onto whom David had lashed the little boxes. “What's happened to you?” she asked in a sympathetic voice.
After the cleaning was completed, five pieces of chametz, which in this case came from a cookie Marlowe had brought with him, were placed around the Kulturverein and the veteran Communists, equipped with a feather for sweeping and a lit candle, as is tradition, began the final purge, searching for the hidden pieces. Once found, the chametz was burned out on the courtyard balcony, leaving the Latin American women at the multicultural women's group across the way to wonder what could possibly be going on.
Irene Runge and David Marlowe differed in more than their politics and personalities. Marlowe was a religious Jew, and Judaism is a deeply intellectual religion. Never is this more apparent than in the Passover seder, where various food items are presented as symbols, each discussed, and then eaten. Questions are asked, and answers pressed for. “Why is this night different from all other nights?” has the simple response that on this night only bread without leavening is eaten. But the prescribed questions and answers are intended as only a point of departure for a discussion on the Book of Exodus, the story of Moses leading the Jews from Egypt. Among the issues to be discussed are the relationship between God and man, what it means to be a Jew, and what freedom is.
This was David Marlowe's idea of a Passover seder. To Irene Runge, it was fun to be kosher and fun to be Orthodox, but above all it had to be a good evening in which things kept moving. None of her guests at this seder were religious. She was trying to build up a Jewish nucleus and did not want to alienate these people with religious discussions; for many of them, it would be their first seder. If a law was inconvenient, she felt, it should be dropped. The ritual washing of the hands in the middle of the seder was to be skipped. “We can't have fifty people running to the washroom!” said Irene.
“We could carry a basin to them,” David suggested.
“There's no room!” she shouted, as though from an uptown New York window.
“It's not optional,” David mumbled softly. But in the end he gave in.
In addition to the difficulties involved in getting a group of volunteers with little experience in large-scale cooking to turn out a kosher meal for fifty, Irene faced the problem that David Marlowe was not only schooled in Jewish dietary laws but had once been in the catering business and had taken a course in hygiene. He searched for invisible salmonella with the same zeal with which he pursued unseen chametz. With the combined forces of science and religion at work, it was not certain that any food was edible, but somehow an odd and inelegant meal of salads, chicken soup, and prepackaged gefilte fish was produced.
The guests arrived at eightish, which seemed to Irene a reasonable hour to invite people for dinner. But David would not start until the official sunset, which was at 8:45. In the meantime he locked himself in a room dressed in his dark suit and hat and prayed, while the guests were left to roam the Kulturverein wondering what was wrong. A heavy-set woman who had survived the entire Nazi epoch in Berlin by hiding, furtively unwrapped a hard candy and popped it into her granddaughter's mouth, whispering in German, “Eat it quickly, it's not kosher.”
Finally the Haggadahs, the books containing the seder ritual and the story of the flight from Egypt, were passed out to the guests in German, English, Russian, and French with accompanying Hebrew. David Marlowe took his place at the head table in front of a bay window, from which the women in tights and sequin strings could be seen taking their work positions on the street one story below. Irene sat next to David so that she could translate into German as he read through the Haggadah, pausing to explain and invite questions. “We say ‘Next year in Jerusalem,’ but there is a Jerusalem we could go to this year, “—and he explained that the current State of Israel did not follow strict religious practices and so Jews must wait for the Messiah.
The seder crowd on the first night of Passover included many old-line Communists like Mia Lehmann and an East German authority on Sartre who had been born in France while his father was fighting with the Resistance. These people were strangers to religion, but they understood intellectualism and were prepared to listen to David's explanations. The first night went fairly smoothly, in part because there were a number of German Jews present who had lived in Israel, and being fluent in Hebrew, they could lead in the singing of songs and reciting of prayers. There were some minor language problems, as when David told the participants that they should feel free to schmooze, which in Yiddish means “to chat” but in German means “to neck or make out.”
The second night, the crowd was largely Russian, including many sophisticated Muscovites such as Stanislava Mikhalskaia, an attractive young architect who could get no architectural work in Germany, and Kima Gredina, a doctor and novelist who had traded partial censorship of her books in Russia for no publication of them at all in Germany.
David carefully explained each step of the seder, while the Russians expectantly stared at their wine glasses. He recounted the Passover legend of the four sons who ask the questions—the wise, the wicked, the simple, and the unquestioning. Explaining that these were the different types of Jews, he added his own Lubavitch doctrine of a fifth son who didn't come at all because he didn't know this was Passover. Most of the Jews these people had ever known were of the fifth son type. But David was quick to add that “it is none of you, because you are all here.”
Irene muttered, “He's talking too much,” fearing that people would start leaving. Unlike the first night, there were no Israelis to lead in the songs tonight—but that well-known Ukrainian actor-singer and irrepressible ham, Mark Aizikovitch, was there. He had spent the first night at a special Russian seder at Alexanderplatz, where he did not have to stick to “Dayenu” and the other Hebrew songs that he didn't really know. The people there had been thrilled to get his standard repertoire. Tonight, with the first part of the seder over and everyone merrily eating their kosher dinner, David agreed that Aizikovitch could sing whatever he wanted. After teasing David with the opening bars of “Hello, Dolly,” Aizikovitch did a series of comic Yiddish songs. A few of the old Communists remembered the words and sang along. This music was popular in Germany.
Then David resumed reading the last stretch of the Haggadah in Hebrew.
Suddenly Aizikovitch got an idea. As an intuitive entertainer, he could see that the crowd's interest in all this Hebrew recitation was waning. But he knew a Hebrew song that always pleased. The Russians had requested it the night before, and it had been the perfect grand finale. With no warning, Mark Aizikovitch, in his deep baritone, broke into “Hatikvah,” “The Hope,” once the anthem of Zionism and now the Israeli national anthem. How could he have known how taboo this song was to ultra-Orthodox Jews like David Marlowe? But instead of cutting Aizikovitch off, Marlowe simply burst out laughing and declared the seder finished. It was the only way to avoid the sacrilege of singing the national anthem in the middle of a seder. He was not unhappy. Given the twentieth-century history of this city, it was enough that there were Jews having a seder here at all.