Exodus, Revisited

by Deborah Feldman

  Now the house where she had stood and smiled for the camera was shut down, in need of repair. The residents in that small town were all senior citizens. Erik approached a woman who was sitting on her porch in a rocking chair and tried to show her the photos we had; he asked her in Swedish if she knew anything about the role that the town had played after the war.

  The woman was older than my grandmother, seemingly senile and hard of hearing, but after several painstaking attempts she seemed to understand Erik. She explained slowly, as if struggling to recall the words, that she had been a young newlywed when they had brought the refugees here, and she pointed to a wildly overgrown meadow that began where her street ended. “They fenced them in,” she explained. “In the beginning, to make sure they weren’t sick. There was a wire fence around the whole thing. I remember seeing them behind the mesh, but I never spoke to any of them, and they didn’t speak to us. A year or so later, they were all gone, transported elsewhere.”

  So they had been confined here too, I realized, and this revelation had a bodily impact on me; it was as if stones had landed in my stomach. I wanted to cry, but I didn’t want Erik to see me and feel burdened, so I turned and walked quickly toward that overgrown meadow, as if to inspect it. At the end of the street, buried under thorny bushes and fat vines, were the rusted remains of a wire fence, intertwined among the foliage. I touched one of the metal tentacles, twisted by time and weather, and thought of that moment years ago when a similar one had ripped itself into the skin of my hand, and for a brief moment I wanted to plunge this one into my ribs, if just for a second to feel something stronger than this overpowering grief.

  * * *

  • • •

  The next morning Erik went back to work and I wandered aimlessly around his neighborhood, Södermalm. I walked up the bustling Hornsgatan, stopping at the window of Café Giffi after noticing in it many familiar pastries of my childhood set out in the glass display case. My grandmother had made those, but who had taught her how? They were certainly not traditional Hungarian confections and couldn’t have been passed down from her mother, as she’d claimed. I went inside to order a coffee and one of those round lacy cookies I remembered. They were called toscaflam here, the owner explained. They were sandwiched together with pastry cream, not dipped in chocolate as she had done.

  “Are you Jewish?” the white-haired Chinese man who owned the café asked as he brought me my coffee. I had this panicked thought that someone had informed him I might be coming, which I immediately dismissed as ridiculous.

  “Yes,” I answered in a cautious tone.

  “Are you American?” he asked, with even more enthusiasm this time.

  “Yes,” I said again.

  “I knew it! You look just like Woody Allen!”

  I look like a cantankerous old man—great, I thought.

  “You should meet Leon,” he urged. “My best customer. Comes in every day. Also Jewish.”

  “Sure,” I said, thinking that Jews must be a rare thing around here if he thought we needed to stick together.

  Leon turned out to be a garrulous and somewhat raunchy old man, a childless bachelor who still behaved as if he was in his teens, nothing like the solemn and dignified elderly people I had grown up around. He was eighty-six, exactly the same age as my grandmother. He had come to Sweden as a refugee from Berlin when he was eight years old, before the war. He’d never been married, he said, but he now regretted it. He didn’t like feminists, he informed me, as if to give me advance notice.

  “Do you remember the survivors?” I asked, trying to steer the conversation away from his obsolete political views. “When they came here after the war?”

  “Of course I do. They were impossible to ignore, although they kept very much to themselves, although I think that was mostly because they scared everyone else. They had these swollen bellies, you know.”

  “Because of the shock of sudden nutrition?”

  “I suppose. They ate a lot. They were hungry all the time. They were all trying to compulsively put on weight.”

  The photograph of my grandmother that I had found in her file at the Riksarkivet, taken only months after her liberation, had shocked me. I could barely recognize her in it, with her swollen face, her hollow, unseeing expression.

  “Did they seem sad?” I asked.

  “Sad? No!” he said with great certainty. “If anything, they seemed very strong.”

  I left the café after that, wanting that sentence to define my conversation with him. Of course my grandmother had seemed strong. It wasn’t the depressives who survived the horrors of war; it was the stoic and valiant who made it through. Of course she wouldn’t have spent much time lamenting her losses. She threw herself into skilled work, made plans for the future. She wanted to replace the family she had lost by marrying and having many children. I suppose it made sense that she would choose someone familiar for a husband, someone who spoke her native languages and came from her region, when she had lost everything else familiar in her life.

  After all, it was I who struggled with this wasteful emotion, with this useless and burdensome grief, as if in her refusal to indulge it she had simply handed it off to me, and I bore the burden in her honor. The way she had lit those candles for her murdered siblings, I kept the memory of her grief alive. I was afraid to let go even for one moment.

  * * *

  • • •

  I had pieced together from her file that the Hungarian government wouldn’t give her an identity document after the war. She had appealed over and over to the embassy in Stockholm. It was only after her influential friends in Gothenburg interceded for her that Swedish diplomatic interference ensured she finally received a piece of paper stating she was born in Hungary but that did not constitute acknowledgment of her citizenship. This had proved enough to apply for an alien’s passport, which had then allowed her application for U.S. citizenship to finally be approved, after three tries.

  It provoked me deeply, seeing evidence of her travails in this arena. It was unimaginable that someone who had just survived hell should have to be consumed for three years with the maddening process of begging for a home in any country that would take her. She had even considered immigrating to Cuba under the condition that she would only perform agricultural labor. It was written into an agreement she signed with the Cuban government. She had also stated, over and over, her intention to immigrate to Palestine. She, who had ultimately married into a fervently anti-Zionist community!

  “Everyone was a Zionist then,” Leon had told me.

  What I couldn’t understand was, what happened to that strength that she had so bravely displayed then, completely on her own, in a mad world still reeling from chaos? In the years in which I lived under her roof, I never knew her to speak her mind or advocate for her needs. This fortitude I now had evidence of had been left by the wayside in exchange for the complete self-sacrifice required by the Satmar rabbi. Was this what ultimately marked one as a survivor, then—the urge to subsume one’s identity under the heavier mantle of martyrdom for the sake of the dead?

  * * *

  • • •

  Once when I had briefly visited New Orleans on my book tour, a tall man with a T-shirt proclaiming his Native American heritage had approached me on the street in the French Quarter.

  “You’ve got dead people all around you,” he’d said to me, his face stern and serious.

  “What?” I’d said, thinking he was joking.

  “Dead people. Everywhere. They’re following you. Probably your ancestors. That’s what they’re telling me.”

  “No, you’re making a mistake,” I told him, laughing nervously. “They can’t be my ancestors. My family disowned me. I’m cut off from my community. I doubt my ancestors haven’t caught on.”

  “You’re the one who’s mistaken,” he said, glaring, the tone of his voice impatient. “They know it a
ll. But they’re still there, and they want you to know. Don’t neglect them.”

  I had looked around then at the quiet street, darkening in the early evening. Which ancestors? What were they like? And why would they bother with someone like me?

  * * *

  • • •

  In Hungary, I’d asked myself who I could hope to be if I didn’t first know the person my grandmother had hoped to become. Was this why her story seemed embedded in my own sense of self, why I felt compelled to know her dreams through mine? I had searched all my life for a magic of my own, an answer to my grandmother’s inextinguishable essence. I had sought the location of my own unbending will, the source of my strength. In myself I had found only fallibility and fear, but what I now realized I had inherited from my grandmother was the knowledge that home is an internal space you could carry inside you, that it could never be violated, even if your whole world was turned upside down. My grandmother had unwittingly taught me that to be a whole person, you did not need the certainty of blood relations or confirmed origins; you needed only your convictions. She was showing me again now, through her own story of heroic survival, that I did not need family to survive. Even when ugliness abounded and it felt like the hate of the world was directed at her, she demonstrated that the integrity of the self could never be compromised.

  Her memory modeled a true independence for me, the kind that renders you free even behind the tallest fences, because your mind is a series of doors that open outward.

  * * *

  —

  Perhaps I could have returned home right then, satisfied with the results of my undertaking. Perhaps, if I had not booked my return flight from Berlin, I might have decided to skip that last step in my journey. But deep down I must have known that setting foot on German soil was an inevitable part of this unearthing process, and not simply to follow the trail of my grandmother’s suffering, but to confront that black hole in my own consciousness, that enormous knot of pain and fear that was associated with all things emanating from the term “German.”

  Erik accompanied me to the airport. He nearly cried when we had to part, and suddenly I felt guilty for having taken advantage of his hospitality. I had failed to notice that he had developed an emotional attachment, one that I myself had not felt. Though perhaps this said less about Erik than about myself, as I hadn’t allowed myself to develop attachment in any kind of romantic situation.

  “I’m afraid I’ll never see you again,” Erik whispered.

  “In a few months, you’ll be in Stanford, where every girl will go crazy for your Scandinavian good looks,” I responded jokingly, “and trust me, you’ll be so distracted by the assortment on offer, you won’t even want to see me again.”

  He looked hurt, and I chastised myself for not simply telling him the truth, which was that I couldn’t even imagine myself deserving of such a pure man as himself, who had no baggage or trauma to hold him back, whose entire future was wide open, and in which I would only represent an unjust burden. I had a child, and I was stuck within my allotted radius, and to let Erik into my life would also mean enclosing him within my prison, both physical and psychological. So instead, I led him to believe that I wasn’t interested in a long-term relationship with him. Truthfully, I said it with conviction, but looking back I do not believe I could have possibly known how I felt, for I had clamped down on my heart for so long that it was a suffocated and bloodless pulp.

  * * *

  • • •

  Back then my romantic adventures had been dalliances in psychological power games, dances around barriers and taboos, an exploration of the dark, the forbidden, the shameful. I recalled, as the plane ascended, how only a year or so earlier I had gone on a date with a man named Otto who worked the cash register at my favorite bookstore. He was German American, very tall and broad-shouldered, with a strong nose and a jaw that broadened impossibly when he smiled. Our date ended at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge, with us pretending it was 1939, and I was a Jewish girl he found on the street.

  Afterward we were both embarrassed by what we had done—Otto for getting so carried away, and me for feeling as if it were real.

  Otto and I never saw each other again. I avoided the bookstore after that. What had I been looking for that night? It would take me years to understand it.

  * * *

  • • •

  I remembered that during my time at Sarah Lawrence, I had met a young woman who worked as a dominatrix in a Manhattan dungeon and who confided to me that she repeatedly had visits from “rabbis” from my community who wanted her to dress up as a Nazi and beat them.

  “They’re not all rabbis just because they have beards!” I said, but that anecdote stuck with me, and I mulled it over for a while. Were there really men from Williamsburg, raised by Holocaust survivors, who sought to put a face on their inherited persecutors and reexperience the pain their parents and grandparents endured? Was this simply survivor’s guilt, or was there something darker, and more erotic, in that impulse? More important, did I suffer from the same affliction?

  I had never articulated to myself a desire for pain, but I had noticed my attraction to a sense of power, both in myself and in others. Something in me was crying out for the stick, and for the chance to overpower the one who wielded it. Of course, there might have been a simpler answer—I was controlled and overpowered as a child, and here was my opportunity to relive the experience with a different ending. And yet, there was also something very seductive about the prospect of giving up my power, only to conquer it once more, tenfold. For with the return of my power came the lifeblood of the enemy that sought to rob me of it—simply by losing, he abdicated all of his own might to me.

  * * *

  —

  I landed in Vienna and headed straight to the Hauptbahnhof, where I purchased a flexible ticket to Munich. I boarded a train going in that direction and found myself sitting across from a handsome young man named Martin, fair-haired and blue-eyed, who didn’t realize that the German I was speaking to him was Yiddish. He assumed, when I used a word that he didn’t understand, that I was speaking some strange mountain dialect. I explained to him that I was American, but that my grandparents still spoke this old dialect, and at one point I asked him, innocently and offhand, if there was any anti-Semitism in Austria. His eyes widened in disbelief. “Here? Of course not! We never had anti-Semitism here. You are confusing us with the Germans.” The way he said it, with earnest conviction, made it clear he really believed that statement.

  He lived in Salzburg, and recalling suddenly the vibrant tales Gregor von Rezzori had spun around that location in that stupendous novel Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, which had impacted me like nothing so much as a wheeling blow to the head, I decided to get off there as well, and spend just the one night. On that particular evening the city was a blur of drunks and live music. There was some kind of festival going on; all the streets were closed to traffic and rowdy men in lederhosen crowded around bar tables set up in the street while waitresses in dirndls sloshed tray after tray of beer in front of them. The people seemed red-cheeked and lively; they danced in public squares and laughed boisterously and slapped each other’s backs. I moved like a morose shadow through their crowds, feeling an inexplicable weight on my back. Their happiness made me sad.

  I recalled the unforgettable voice of von Rezzori’s protagonist:

  Salzburg in the summer of 1937 was just awful. It was overrun with Jews. The worst of them had come from Germany as refugees and in spite of their luggage-laden Mercedes cars, behaved as if they were the victims of a cruel persecution and therefore had the right to hang around in hundreds at the Café Mozart, criticize everything, and get whatever they wanted faster and cheaper—if not for nothing—than anybody else. They spoke with that particular Berlin snottiness that so got on the nerves of anyone brought up in Austria, and my sharp ears could all too easily detect the background of Jew
ish slang. . . . I could have slaughtered them all.

  Of course you can be happy now, I thought sullenly as I tried to squeeze through a rowdy group in lederhosen. All the Jews are gone. It was as if every face could have been the character in Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, for if there was anything I had learned from that book, it was that anti-Semitism was a parasite that lurked even in the finest of human specimens—the question was always not if but to what extent it had wormed its way through, leaving a trail of rot in its wake.

  On a conscious level I knew that the voice in my head was being dramatic, was trying to engage not with the world around it but with the world it imagined existed simultaneously on another plane. Yet was it all those books I had recently read that had convinced me that this plane was more real, more concrete, than any banal and tangible society I might be immersed in?

  * * *

  • • •

  In my brief tour of Salzburg I would not find one memorial to the Jewish community that had once thrived here. Salzburg was the first city invaded by the Germans to have its Jews deported by Austrians who were only too happy to collaborate. The city is famed for conducting an enormous public book burning in its main square. Yet this site was now a banal tourist attraction with an ornamental fountain and horse-drawn carriages eager to ferry visitors around town. The old synagogue, now a chintzy hotel, did not even boast a small commemorative plaque. In Google searches, I discovered that Austria’s reasoning for failing to erect memorials to the Holocaust was fear of reprisal through anti-Semitic vandalism and attacks. Their answer to anti-Semitism seemed to be to appease it instead of uprooting it.