I sold off most of my furniture, and what I could not sell I gave to Richard, who I knew would make good use of it. I can’t deny the fear that began to accumulate as I rid myself rapidly of the possessions I had worked so hard to acquire in the last five years, as concrete proof of the new life that I had built for myself on the outside. Who would do something as crazy as starting over from scratch twice in one lifetime, let alone twice in one decade? Nonetheless, I arranged it with Markus that the few possessions I would have shipped through the postal service would be addressed to him; he would pick them up from customs and drive the boxes from Frankfurt to Berlin. We had settled into a pleasant friendship, and I was happy that I would get to see him again when he delivered my things.
* * *
—
We left New York in the midst of a freak blizzard and arrived in Berlin on November 30, 2014, early on a gray Sunday morning. As the taxi pulled up in front of the entrance to the apartment complex, I was surprised to see that the street I lived on had Arabic writing on every shop window. I had planted us smack in the middle of the most Muslim neighborhood in the city; our new home overlooked the raucous, multicultural Sonnenallee. In my entire apartment complex, I soon learned, I was one of very few non-Muslim residents. As Markus and I unloaded my boxes in the hallway one day shortly after my arrival, my neighbors inquired about my origins. When I said I was from New York, their guard suddenly dropped. “New York, you said?” one of them replied. “Well, in that case, welcome! We own the Turkish grocery store next door. Come by if you need anything.” Being American seemed the least of many possible evils. I knew enough not to share any other clues. As I started settling in, I found myself in intimate dealings with my neighbors; the man who ran the print shop on my corner where I would compile my documents for the Behörden, the authorities; the vendors in the markets; the shops where one could get a falafel for lunch on the cheap. I rested on the safety of my Americanness, on the international image of New York as a melting pot where it was often hard to isolate ethnic identities from one another. Perhaps they looked at me, assumed that at some point I had had a Middle Eastern ancestor, and satisfied themselves with that.
Like all newcomers, I lined up at the Bezirksamt, the district office, in order to “report myself.” I had learned that in Germany one was constantly required to do this—everything required an Anmeldung, a registration. Although circumstances are obviously very changed since then, it felt vaguely disturbing to me that the language used for this was the same that was used back then, when the government was keeping tabs on undesirables instead of merely distributing tax ID numbers. For I had heard the German word Anmeldung as a child, and for me it would forever be associated with the Gestapo, the way the word Achtung spoken by the recorded voice on the metro would only remind me of the Appellplatz in Primo Levi’s invocations of Auschwitz. Luckily, in time this negative association would fade, for as I would delve deeper into this new yet familiar language in the process of making it my own, my total perception of this vocabulary would encompass the role it had played not just in the Holocaust, but in the whole history of the German language, its inseparability from the language of my childhood and the history of my own origins. I would begin to see the relationship between the two vocabularies as some kind of macabre yet beautiful dance, my one opportunity to find a connecting bridge to a familiar world. After all, I would not be the first: most notably it had been Paul Celan who had remodeled the language and made it his own, and as a result it seemed to me that the rending of the German language that had occurred as a result of the Shoah had broken it down into elementary particles that could be shifted into new and radical permutations. In a sense, the German of today was a new language for everyone speaking it.
At the Bezirksamt, no one spoke a word of English, and I was glad I had taken the time to fully convert my native Yiddish into a somewhat fluent German before I had left the States. I handed the woman on the other side of the desk all the necessary documents and she entered my information into her computer. She glanced over to me and asked, “What’s your religion?”
“Excuse me?” I said, wondering if I’d misheard.
“Your religion. You have to divulge it to the state.”
“Um, okay. Well, I’m Jewish.”
She pursed her lips. “Hmm, sorry, that’s not an option you can choose.”
“What?” I asked, thinking it was a joke.
“It’s not on the list.” She turned the computer screen toward me. On it was a long list of different religions, including various sects of Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and even Zoroastrianism. But nowhere on that list was there any kind of Jewish option.
I giggled uncomfortably. “Um, it’s kind of ironic that this is happening, do you realize that? I’m one hundred percent Jewish; this is the only option I have, sorry.” As the words emerged I couldn’t help but be reminded of my grandmother’s argument all those years ago. She must have convinced me after all.
“Well, I’ll just put in atheist, then,” the woman said, her fingers already clacking away on the keyboard.
I opened my mouth to protest, then shut it. I wanted my confirmation of registration even more than I wanted to give her a lecture. When she handed me my stamped certificate a moment later, I was relieved to put the process behind me but was left wondering at the fact that the woman behind the desk was so clearly unequipped to handle the matter of a “Jewish” resident; I would have thought that the workers in the office would have at least had some sensitivity training.
* * *
• • •
A huge chunk of my childhood education had consisted of teachings on anti-Semitism. World history as it was taught in the Satmar community put Jewish suffering in sharp relief: the developments of human industry and exploration faded to the background, and the saga of humanity came to sound like one long crusade against Jesus killers.
Although the Manhattan Jewish day school my son attended during his preschool years had rigorous security procedures, I never felt I was endangering him by making him a target, as I would if I sent him to a Jewish school in Berlin or took him to synagogue for services.
The local authorities were quick to demand that Isaac attend the local district school as soon as he arrived, but the one in question, Rütli, had an entire page in Wikipedia that was enough to warn me against it. Isaac would have a hard enough time adjusting to the new language. I would not drop his sheltered mind into the fire.
I toured the various Europa schools in Berlin but was most smitten with one in particular, which struck me as diverse in the way that I was used to, not in the way diverse had come to mean here, as a euphemism for a large Arabic population. In this school, there were children of every religion, color, and national origin, but of course I was informed that the waitlist for applications was two years long, and there was no chance of a midyear acceptance. But the assistant principal who tried to dismiss me did not know who she was talking to after all, for I showed up there every day and waited outside the office until they took my application. Then I called every day for three weeks to check on its progress, at which point the principal himself sighed into the phone and capitulated. “Fine,” he said, “you can bring your son on Monday and have him enrolled.”
Once Isaac had started school, where he seemed to settle in remarkably quickly, my practical obligations subsided somewhat. I had been consumed in the first few weeks after arrival by the basic tasks involved in starting somewhere new, the opening of a bank account, the unpacking, the enrolling, and so on, but now that most of that had been accomplished, I was left reeling, wondering what was to follow. Sure, in two months I would have to show up at the Ausländerbehörde (immigration office) to extend my automatic ninety-day visa, but that still seemed far off, and already on the day of my arrival I had received official confirmation from the Bundesverwaltungsamt that my citizenship reclamation case had been accepted. I was not so much worr
ied about the tangible challenges involved in integrating myself emotionally into this city. Around this time I chose a place that would become a kind of early garrison for me, a place through which I would come to know this city and it would come to know me, and that place was a café.
Café life in Europe has always been and still remains vastly different from its counterpart in the States, in my view. This is primarily visible in the way Europeans insist on drinking their coffee and eating their meals outdoors at all hours of the day, in all seasons, regardless of the weather. I had been flabbergasted in Paris by the way people had huddled outside under plastic tents when it rained, warming themselves poorly under the heat of braziers. In Berlin, people rarely rushed in and out for their morning coffee or a quick sandwich the way they did in New York. Instead they lingered, often for hours, nursing a cigarette or leafing through a newspaper; some sat in a corner with a book and a cold, empty coffee cup for what seemed like an entire day; others congregated in huddles outside, chatting or watching people walk by. The café a few doors away from me that now became my fortress within the urban jungle of Neukölln was called Espera, Spanish for “wait,” a tongue-in-cheek reference to its location at a bus stop. Often one could combine one’s wait for the bus with a coffee and a cigarette or a croissant on one of its fruit-box stools under a burgundy awning.
I began to use the perch of Espera to view the world around me, to bring it into a more familiar and comfortable focus. It was there that I would build my first friendships in the city, with people who, like me, came to the café for their daily dose of caffeine and socializing, artists with unusual work schedules, students and interns subsisting on minimal incomes, and older intellectuals who discussed politics and the changing face of the neighborhood, the city, the world. The café became for me a miniature universe, a kind of multidirectional crossroads for the many varieties of residents who would spend a small part of their day there before continuing on. Even though in those months you could say I sat perfectly still, I felt as if each day my sense of the city was deepening. I was doing once again what I had done in Manhattan. I was simply and quietly observing, letting it all wash over me, waiting for the city to tell me its story.
* * *
—
Two days after the Charlie Hebdo terrorists in Paris were caught and killed, I sat at the rain-splattered window in Espera, reading the reports in the newspaper, and an Israeli man asked if the seat next to me was taken. “Shalom!” I said. “Sure, you can sit here. I’m Jewish too.”
“My condolences,” he responded dryly.
“I guess you mean that in light of recent events.” He grimaced in response as he set down his coffee next to me. I asked him how long he had been living in Berlin and what it was like for him.
“I’m going back to Israel soon,” he said. “I’m not like you guys, you know,” he added with a smirk, only half-kidding. “I’m the new breed of Jew. You’re the exile Jew. Just that difference in perspective radically alters the way you see yourself in the context of surroundings like these.”
We joked about the Jewish tendency to create a hierarchy even within our own relatively small sphere. But after he left, I pondered that phrase “exile Jew.” He was saying people like me were still stuck in the diaspora, unable to make the conscious choice to liberate ourselves. It was like a form of Stockholm syndrome; we stuck purposefully to our displaced origins, probably more for the comfort of familiarity than for any other reason. I had heard that the Israelis in Berlin, of which there were many, didn’t often mix with us so-called exile Jews precisely because of this distinction. To them, Jews like us were a mystery: our entire worldview was so distant from their own as to be not only incomprehensible but also of a nature that fated us to be permanently divided. The truth is that the non-Israeli Jews I know in this city do behave differently: they struggle to make their Jewishness inconspicuous in public, only embracing their identity during the moments they spend among their own. Israelis, on the other hand, wear their Jewishness like casual dress; they act completely comfortable and unselfconscious about their poor, Hebrew-accented German and the various other details that betray their origins at first glance. Was it all because they had a home to go back to? I had always felt the need to dispense with the identifying markers of Jewishness, and now more than ever I wanted to overcome these signifiers and blend in. I liked it when people couldn’t trace my accent or deduce from my looks where I came from, and therefore what kind of person I might be. But perhaps I had assessed my own drives incorrectly—perhaps the man was right, and it was just an extreme form of Stockholm syndrome that had drawn me to this city, my desire to embrace my status as an outsider exactly how I had been programmed to.
* * *
• • •
After the terrorist attacks in Paris, I saw my move to Berlin in a whole new light. My sense of anxiety heightened, but the knowledge that I was on the front lines of a new wave of anti-Semitism, and the corresponding one of European nationalism, tore into my previous convictions that the move had been the right decision for us. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the news. When I was invited by friends to attend Shabbat services in a liberal synagogue, I declined. It seemed obvious that one did not ask for trouble by showing up at synagogues and kosher supermarkets.
Choosing to live here at a time like this might be crazy, I thought, but I was here for many reasons, some more complicated or irrational than others. And I would heartily defend my right to be here, both politically and spiritually. In the wake of the attacks, I was reminded of the question Claude Lanzmann posed to Benjamin Murmelstein in his film The Last of the Unjust. He pointed out that Murmelstein had a clear way out of the Nazi sphere of power, yet chose more than once to return instead of becoming a refugee like so many others. “Why would you want to stay?” Lanzmann asks him. At first, Murmelstein denies that he had real options, but eventually he admits to a desire to see all of it through to the end, and to do what he could as the only world he had ever known went down in flames. I thought of the Israeli I had met at Espera, who had been smug with the knowledge that he would be going home soon. Perhaps I would be safer elsewhere, but a part of me wanted to be here for last farewells, as it were.
* * *
• • •
A large part of the chaos and confusion that marked my early months as a Berlin resident can be attributed to my own inner turmoil and self-doubt. It was as if my fear of having made the wrong decision in coming here was reflected back to me in the actions and statements of others I came in contact with. Perhaps I was even unconsciously searching for confirmation of this suspicion, wanting Berlin itself to prove to me that the old voice in my head, now raging like an infuriated drunk, was right after all. For if I regarded my move honestly, it was an illogical and unfounded step, on paper a move in a backward direction toward the past and its problems, which the people who raised me had struggled to escape. Perhaps the only factor that kept me within the frame of sanity in that first year was the quiet assurance in the pit of my stomach that stood firm and unwavering despite the onslaught, an assurance as insuperable as it was irrational, which insisted that if I simply waited patiently, all would be revealed to me in time.
This “gut voice,” as one might call it, was not new. It was the same voice that had guided me through the often senseless and arbitrarily imposed restrictions, both physical and psychological, of my childhood and adolescence, and it had traveled with me through those five years of transition in the States. In the process, it had grown stronger, firmer, and even more implacable. Now it seemed to freeze me in place. It was the only reason I did not flee, but I also did not venture too far past my neighborhood.
Had you been walking down Sonnenallee in those days it is highly likely you might have glimpsed me at the window of Café Espera, or huddled on a bench outside with my New Yorker magazine, the subscription to which I had transferred to my new address and which consequently arrived three
weeks delayed. Perhaps you would have spotted me in conversation with some of the neighboring residents I had struck up tentative friendships with: a student from the former East Germany who spoke fluent English, a poet and musician who was so anti-capitalist as to refuse to participate in the society he was now forced to live in, a young psychotherapist and part-time DJ who had sorrowfully abandoned the radical left-wing views of his youth in the kind of slow resignation that is often forced upon us by adulthood, and a former editor who was now running his own independent publishing house and who could often be found smoking while reading the reviews of his authors that appeared in the national newspapers. Interestingly, this group of people was interconnected: the poet was published by the editor, the editor was the next-door neighbor and friend of the psychotherapist, who in turn had applied for the position of roommate at the home of the student, thereby striking up a friendship. We could often be found in a group formation in front of the café, and occasionally other friends of friends would be pulled into the circle, writers and translators of the publishing house, colleagues or associates of the others, and my own paltry circle of acquaintances in Berlin as well. Benyamin, who had now become a fixture in my world, a kind of stalwart of solace because of his intimate knowledge of my past and his ability to understand what I was going through, became one of them. After school, Isaac would often join us for a hot chocolate and a snack, and when the café inevitably closed, we more often than not simply changed locations. My apartment was outfitted with an enormous formal dining room, which I regarded as a shame not to use. We cooked large dinners in the underequipped kitchen and served them up on the giant oak table against the backdrop of raucous Sonnenallee evenings, the flashing lights of shop signs and sirens streaking across the darkness pressing up against the enormous windows. In the evenings as I put Isaac to bed, there would be people congregated in my living room drinking beer and speaking in hushed tones or smoking cigarettes on my balcony, and this was a form of benefaction; this was the feeling of being constantly surrounded by people I cared about, who seemed to care about me too, regardless of my probably obvious discombobulation. Slowly, without me realizing it, this began to create an emotional buffer, a cushion of security that allowed me to relax.
Exodus, Revisited Page 27
