And After the Fire

by Lauren Belfer

  Although her parents had tried to shelter her from anti-Jewish hostility, she was aware it existed. Her brothers told her about the wider world. She knew that Jews were not granted citizenship in Prussia, and that certain professions were closed to them. She was familiar with the oppressive regulations governing every aspect of life for the Jews of Berlin. Aware, too, of the recurring outbreaks of violence against Jews. These injustices were part of the fabric of daily life. At least she’d never felt personally threatened.

  Now she confronted something she’d known all along, but never focused on: because of her father’s many services to the king, the monarch had granted her father and his family special privileges and protections. These had shielded her.

  A knock at the door.

  She slipped the cantata into the top drawer of the desk. “Entrez,” she called.

  The door opened. Samuel. Her bashert. Her soul mate. She tried to put her concerns aside.

  “Ma chérie,” Samuel said.

  How handsome he was. He forever surprised her, merely by his presence. Thick black hair. Brown eyes. He strode across the music room and wrapped her in a hug, lifting her off her feet. She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him once, twice, three times across his cheeks. His freshly shaven skin felt soft against her lips.

  “I’ve brought a drawing of our library stamp,” he said.

  They’d been working on the stamp together, seeking to combine their initials with elegance and grace. The library stamp represented their future . . . the children they would have, and the children of their children, their library of books and music passing from generation to generation.

  Samuel took out the drawing the artist had done based on their sketches. “You see, our initials close together, almost merged but not completely.”

  “Yes.” The stamp was precisely what they’d envisioned. But her thoughts were elsewhere.

  “You seem worried, my dear.”

  “No.”

  “Truly?”

  Already he could read her moods. “I must show you what Monsieur Bach has given me today.” She led him to the desk. “First, an unusual composition for our wedding.”

  He read the title. “Heart, my heart, be at peace . . . that’s exactly how I feel about you.”

  She felt herself blushing, so she turned quickly to the next piece. “Also this.”

  “The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book One. Extraordinary.”

  “Yes.”

  “As soon as the stamp is prepared, we’ll officially begin our library with this masterpiece.” When she didn’t reply, he said, “What’s disturbing you, my dearest?”

  Their library stamp would never adorn the cantata for Exaudi.

  “What is it?”

  “Monsieur Bach brought another composition. A church cantata by his father.”

  She gave him the autograph. He studied it. His expression turned hard.

  “Have you ever seen such—I don’t even know what to call it.”

  “Yes, I’m sorry to say, I have seen such things.”

  “Why did he bring this to me?” She felt as if their years together had been a lie. “Is he punishing me for being myself?”

  “Punishing you?” Samuel reflected. “I don’t think he wants to punish you.”

  “What then?”

  “He admires you. Loves you, even. I’ve seen how he looks at you—not in a lewd way. With respect. He’s ill. He must see the end of his life at hand. What would happen to this music, if you didn’t have it? Who could he give it to?”

  Sara didn’t respond, remembering her many conversations with her teacher. Even when she was young, he’d spoken to her as if she were an adult and an equal. During their lessons, he’d paid her compliments only after she’d earned them. His praise was always genuine.

  “How would we feel if he hadn’t given it to you? If it were performed after his death and were to provide an angry preacher a powerful way to breed contempt and possibly even incite violence?”

  “If that’s what he was thinking, why didn’t he tell me?”

  “He must not have known the words to explain, or couldn’t bring himself to say the words. Because he cares for you.”

  Wilhelm Friedemann Bach. Her teacher. She felt bound to him in trust and affection. Yet so much had remained unspoken between them. The realization was heartbreaking.

  “He’s a good man,” Samuel said.

  Yes, Sara thought. Her teacher was a good man.

  She leaned her head against Samuel’s shoulder, and he embraced her.

  Chapter 10

  At 4:15 on Sunday morning, Dan sat at the kitchen table, sipping coffee. As usual, he’d woken up at 4:00, feeling alert. If he lay in bed, the demons came back, the terrible memories, so he got up, made coffee, and read or worked downstairs, trying not to disturb Becky.

  The kitchen was cheerful. At least that was the word Julie had used to describe it. Yellow walls, white cabinets, yellow-and-white checked curtains, Becky’s artwork (he tried to keep it updated) covering the refrigerator. He’d never particularly noticed the décor until he began to spend the early mornings here. He tried to convince himself that the room was indeed cheerful, and that’s how he should feel as he sat here, but each day cheerful turned into dismal once more.

  This morning, accompanied by his laptop computer and a variety of German dictionaries and reference works, he was preparing a translation of the libretto from the cantata that Susanna Kessler had brought him. He’d grasped the gist of it in his office, but now he needed to do the hard slog of getting every detail correct. The process was made more difficult because the meaning of certain German words had evolved over the centuries, and he needed to reconstruct the meaning of the words in Bach’s day. For the biblical references, he kept in mind that Bach and his contemporaries had used Bibles that retained Martin Luther’s sixteenth-century wording but updated its spellings. Over the years, he’d been asked to vet countless academic articles that made the basic mistake of using the modern, heavily revised version of the Luther Bible that was published in 1984 (or worse, using a modern Bible in English), rendering many scholarly conclusions incorrect.

  As part of his research, he also wanted to find out where the libretto came from, and if possible, confirm that it had existed in the eighteenth century and was available for Bach to use.

  So, the first line, Wir das Joch nicht tragen können, an allusion to Acts 15:10.

  For a quick start, he put the line, surrounded by quotation marks, into Google.

  Nothing.

  Next line. Doch nicht auf der Halse wollen. Also an allusion to Acts 15:10.

  He tried this exact phrase in Google, too. No results. He repeated the process through the first aria. When he reached the first recitative, he decided that the time had come for more coffee.

  A few years ago, for their anniversary, Julie had treated them to a technologically advanced espresso maker that ground coffee beans, made coffee, and heated milk. It was an extravagance he enjoyed every day. The grinding of the beans was loud but had never yet awakened Becky. The aroma was fantastic, like a pure nectar of coffee, and he inhaled it greedily.

  Fortified with his second cup, he returned to the kitchen table.

  He considered the German text for the first recitative phrase in the cantata, So ist’s auch unsere Schuld, daß wir sie nicht todschlagen. “We are at fault for not striking them dead.”

  Who had written this bit of inflammatory rhetoric? Hope triumphing over experience once again, he typed, So ist’s auch unsere Schuld, surrounded by quotation marks, into Google.

  A handful of hits came up. According to Google, at least, the phrase appeared in Martin Luther’s infamous 1543 treatise, On the Jews and Their Lies.

  Was this possible? Dan didn’t believe it. He checked the Weimarer Ausgabe, the standard scholarly edition of Luther’s works, available digitized online. On the Jews and Their Lies was printed within volume 53 of the collection. He skimmed through Luther’s appa
lling screed. Although some branches of Lutheranism had repudiated this work, his own branch, the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, had not done so, as far as Dan knew.

  And there it was, at lines 8–12 on page 522: So ist’s auch unsere Schuld, daß wir . . . sie nicht todschlagen. “We are at fault for . . . not striking them dead.”

  The cantata’s second recitative read, Ihre Synagogen mit Feuer anstecke und, was nicht verbrennen will, mit Erden überhäufe. “Burn their synagogues and bury anything that doesn’t burn.”

  This he found on page 523, at lines 1–3.

  Later that day, Dan sat in his Granville church with Becky and waited for the service to begin. She should have been downstairs attending Sunday school, but after Julie’s death, Becky had asked to stay at the service with him, and he allowed it. She was quiet. She followed along, sang the hymns, and took a nap when she was bored.

  “Blessed are they that gather in the name of the Lord,” Pastor Mansholt intoned from the entryway, before the introit. Dan and Becky stood. “We offer our prayer to God . . .” Pastor Mansholt processed past them in his robes of white, his face serene.

  This church was smaller and simpler in design than the Church of the Holy Shepherd in New York. No soaring Gothic columns here, no pipe organ or stained glass, merely rows of plain, hard pews, an electronic organ, and clear, leaded glass.

  “The Lord be with you,” the pastor chanted.

  “And also with you,” the rest of the congregation responded.

  Dan was shaken by his Luther discovery of early this morning. As the service followed its usual course, with its prayers and hymns, Dan’s thoughts wandered to the cantata and to Susanna Kessler. She was a Jew. She didn’t believe in Jesus. He’d always been taught that, therefore, according to the historical doctrines of his church, she was going to hell. Not a figurative or metaphorical hell, but an actual, burning, punishing hell. The unbelieving shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire, according to Revelation 21:8.

  Dan wasn’t sure how many people in his church still accepted this as true. He did suspect, however, that in addition to entrenched prejudice, this up-to-then-traditional teaching had contributed during the Nazi era to the indifference that many otherwise upstanding European Christians had felt toward the rounding up of Jews. If those millions of Jews who hadn’t converted to Christianity were going to hell anyway, what was the point of risking one’s own life to fight for their survival on earth? Alas, not many voices were raised to try to protect those Jews who had converted, either.

  Dan and Becky joined the congregation in standing to sing the Lutheran versification of the Nicene Creed. We all believe in one True God . . .

  Dan had grown up in a small town in Wisconsin, in a family that belonged to the most conservative of the larger Lutheran denominations in America. His father worked at a hardware store that served the farmers in the surrounding area, and he rose to be store manager. His mother took care of the children at home and volunteered at church, the center of their lives. To an outsider, the religious beliefs Dan grew up with might appear oppressive, but for an insider, the church put everything into a God-given slot and presented a world that made sense.

  This was also a narrow world, which saw life in terms of black and white, either/or. With us or against us. Jew them down, cheap as a Jew—these were commonly used phrases. Jews, Dan’s childhood pastor explained to his congregation each year at Easter, had murdered our Lord and Savior, and ever since, Jews had continued to bring down condemnation on themselves by refusing to accept Jesus as the Messiah.

  Was this still preached? Dan hadn’t heard Pastor Mansholt express this view, and he didn’t know what was said in Protestant churches elsewhere. Presumably in Catholic churches the teachings had changed after the Second Vatican Council’s Nostra Aetate in 1965, but of course Protestant churches by definition didn’t look to the Vatican for guidance.

  Dan couldn’t recall even meeting a Jew until he went to graduate school at Yale. Now he had many Jewish friends and colleagues. He was ashamed to realize, though, that before his discovery this morning—of Luther’s hatred of Jews placed into a Bach cantata—the fate that his conservative religion had in store for Jews had been only abstract to him. He’d heard the doctrines repeated in church and in his parochial schools, but he hadn’t reflected on their meaning.

  He supposed that like many of his fellow parishioners, he’d cherry-picked his religion, choosing which beliefs and practices to take seriously and ignoring the rest. Meeting Susanna Kessler also seemed somehow to make the fate of Jews concrete and particular—this singular individual, who’d approached him in a church basement and spent an afternoon in his office, she was the one who’d supposedly be burning in hell, she was the one who would have been shot, gassed, or starved to death if she’d been in Europe during World War II.

  Pastor Mansholt went to the lectern. Becky knew what this meant, and making a pillow with her hands, she rested her head against Dan’s arm. “Brothers and sisters in Christ, as the Lord tells us in Psalm 139, ‘For you created my inmost being . . .’ ”

  Dan hated the New International Version of the Bible, which had taken all the poetry out of the text. In his mind, he heard the King James Version:

  For thou hast possessed my reins:

  Thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb.

  I will praise thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

  Becky closed her eyes.

  “‘You knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made,’” the pastor continued with the NIV. “My dear friends, could our Lord be any clearer in the value He places on life, especially on the lives of the helpless unborn?”

  The word unborn caught Dan’s attention, and he concentrated on what the minister was telling them—instructing them, because a sermon was supposed to expound upon the true Word of the Lord.

  “A Holocaust taking place in this country, a Holocaust of the unborn,” Pastor Mansholt said. “The Lord requires us to make our communities our front line as we fight the sacred battle for life . . .”

  Dan thought: Who in God’s name was Pastor Mansholt to speak of a Holocaust, and to proclaim what the Lord wanted concerning the unborn? If Julie had heeded science instead of Pastor Mansholt’s religion, she’d be here with him and Becky today. She’d be alive. Wouldn’t the Lord have wanted that?

  Julie had received a diagnosis of breast cancer when she was twenty-five, during the fourth year of their marriage, just when they were thinking about having children. She had surgery and chemotherapy and went into remission. The experts advised them not to have children. After five years had passed cancer-free, however, Julie wanted a baby. Dan did, too. So they took a risk—or rather, they put their faith in God. They were blessed with Becky. Julie’s cancer did not return.

  When Becky was five and still the cancer did not return, Julie wanted another child. Again her doctor said no, the rush of hormones could bring the cancer back. You have a wonderful daughter. Don’t tempt chance, the doctor said.

  It’s not chance, Julie said. We’re in God’s hands.

  God’s hands. She convinced Dan. Her confidence convinced him. She became pregnant the first month—a sure sign of God’s love and protection, she said. Dan couldn’t disagree. But at three months, she discovered a lump under her left arm and another in her left breast.

  A series of excellent physicians at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center discussed with them the issues of chemotherapy during pregnancy. Some therapeutic agents appeared not to harm the fetus, one physician said. Consider having an abortion, another said, ever so gently. Then you can do the full course of chemotherapy, with stronger medications.

  God will provide, Julie said. She wouldn’t consider an abortion. She would never choose between herself and the new life within her. Dan begged her to have an abortion. God would understand. Just this once. The life of the mother: that’s always the exception. The legal ex
ception, Julie said. Not God’s exception. Dan fought with her, the worst fights they’d ever had: do the abortion, take the full course of therapy with the stronger medications, save your life. So Becky will have a mother. So we can grow old together. What about your responsibility to Becky and me? Doesn’t God value that?

  God would never condone abortion, she said.

  How do you know what God would or wouldn’t condone? he asked. How can any of us truly know God’s will?

  We have proof, she said: God has let us conceive this child.

  Dan couldn’t force her. So Dan, too, put his faith in God. She took the chemotherapy that was supposed to be well tolerated during pregnancy. Groups formed here at the church to pray for her.

  Pastor Mansholt continued from the pulpit, “We cannot compromise. Compromise is the temptation of the Devil.”

  By the time she’d carried the baby to eight months, Julie was dying. She was kept alive by technology, only to serve the fetus within her. Seeing the baby in distress, the doctors opted for a caesarean three weeks early.

  Their son weighed five pounds, nine ounces, and was perfect in every way except that his heart had stopped beating. The Lord had taken him home, as the saying went. Who are we to question the ways of the Lord? They named him Martin, after Julie’s father. Pastor Mansholt came to the hospital and prayed over Martin’s body. Suffer the little children to come unto me.

  Dan remembered holding his newborn son. He felt again the small, perfect body resting upon his arm, pressed against his chest. Martin’s soft head, with its blond fuzz, nestled in the palm of his hand. The gray-blue eyes, frozen open. The eyelashes, full and pale. The tiny, perfect feet. Dan sensed that Martin had been alive moments before. His skin was still warm. At that moment, Dan decided that Julie was right not to have aborted him. And yet . . . Dan wanted it both ways, wanted it all ways, wanted it his way—to have his son and his wife, both.