My days began to fill with more and more warm moments, fits of laughter, stirrings of happiness. As these moments accumulated, the strange and threatening aspects of life in this new world began to fade in comparison, the people around me came into crystalline and tender focus, and I felt, for the first time in my life, loving and optimistic toward the society I was surrounded by.
* * *
—
Around this time I began to run into some trouble with the pile of bureaucracy that the application for an Aufenthaltstitel, or residence permit, consisted of, something I would be occupied with for the majority of that first year. Each time I showed up in that waiting room in House C, Floor 2, I felt as if I was begging for permission to stay, and when I did so it was as if the angry ghost of my grandmother rose within me like some outraged poltergeist. I felt humiliated and disgusted as I subjugated myself in a country that had once perpetrated the ultimate subjugation against my ancestors. It was the unflappable support of my new friends that gave me the strength I needed to see the process through to the end. Eventually, the publisher would enlist the help of his partner to intimidate the clerk in charge of my case—all it would take was his suit and his aristocratic surname to make all the obstacles to my receiving an Aufenthaltstitel magically disappear. But that would happen nine months after my arrival, and until then, there were many painful visits.
Of course, I was humbled when I lined up at the biweekly market at the Landwehr Canal to get my falafel with all the toppings for 1.75 euros and chatted with the affable seller, whose origins were in Ramallah but who had been born and raised in a refugee camp in Lebanon. I was struck with sadness upon learning that although his grandparents had been the ones to lose their homes, he still experienced the world as a refugee two generations later. He was hoping to get permanent residence in Germany; having long since given up on building a life in familiar territory, he would settle for any place willing to accept him. His circumstances stood in sharp contrast to my own.
For someone like me, raised by Holocaust survivors and deeply aware of the unique agony that comes with displacement, I felt a compassion tangled up with guilt, unease, and self-consciousness. On the other hand, this man who served me my falafel was trying to see me as a human being and not the enemy. At least that’s the way it felt when he went out of his way to smile and joke with me as he rolled up the laffa bread. This dynamic that existed between “us” and “them” is one that only “we” were fully aware of, and I was suddenly and perpetually conscious of it in Europe. Neither of us, not me the Jew nor him the Palestinian, had ever been perceived as our simple and individual selves outside of our charged bubble—for among the rest of the world, the conversation about how we related to each other was firmly mired in our political identities and all their associated implications. It struck me as the height of irony that we could only be human to each other. Indeed, the most surprising of my experiences as an American Jew in Berlin were my interactions with Palestinians, a segment of the population that I had not previously encountered in real life. A taxi driver who overheard my son speaking about a Jewish holiday told me his family were also Palestinian refugees who had ended up in Germany. Upon seeing my nervousness he assured me, “Eighty percent of Palestinians just want peace. They don’t hate Jews. It’s Hamas that betrays us.”
* * *
—
In early April, during the Easter break, I traveled with Isaac and the film crew to Israel for two weeks, as we were planning on shooting some scenes there. It was my very first time in Israel, and after the experiences of the last few years, I approached the trip with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. I had not forgotten what that Israeli Jew had said to me two months earlier, about how Jews like me were relics of the diaspora, a dying breed destined to be overtaken by a new kind of Jew, empowered, self-satisfied, and best of all, freed from the psychological complexes imposed by an inheritance of oppression and victimization. I wondered if my experience in Israel would reflect these stinging accusations tenfold, if I would be made to feel like some pitiable and pitiful specimen of inferior breeding. Even in the small and closeted society I had grown up in, I had seen how judgmental and hierarchical Jews could be to one another. Now I was filled with vague unease at the prospect of immersing myself in a magnified version of such a society.
* * *
• • •
After extensive questioning at the airport, we exited into the golden afternoon light of Tel Aviv, and it was at first delightful to walk among the stone edifices, burnished by age, and to glimpse the blue waves of the Mediterranean, with a sun that hovered directly above it like I had first glimpsed in California. My first impression of this port city was not all that different from my impressions of port cities I had visited before on the islands of Greece and Italy. There is something about metropolitan life on a waterfront that seems to resemble nothing so much as itself.
On our first morning, as we headed to the café across the square to get coffee and breakfast, I could see a change in Isaac, for he was relaxed and forward in his interactions with café personnel, spontaneous and friendly with strangers at the next table, and I realized that for him, being surrounded by Jews clearly did mean something, even though we had never discussed it after that first and last conversation before moving to Berlin. Now he seemed to relax and take it for granted that he was in a country where everyone was just like him, where he could behave accordingly. Seeing his new carefree spirit, I felt a sudden, sharp pain that in my life choices I was depriving him of the one thing I had ceased to value, which I had extrapolated to be universally valueless.
* * *
• • •
Those first few days were very lovely ones; we sought out pretty beaches and narrow streets bursting with flowers; we ate familiar food and laughed loudly and no one looked around to see what the fuss was about. Even I started to feel a little different. It was having an effect on me, this homogeneity, this new and strange feeling of being, for the very first time in a long while, exactly the same.
The moment that feeling went from being pleasant to being discomfiting was on the first day of Passover. I had already seen how in the grocery stores they had covered the aisles of forbidden foods with thick brown paper, as the law dictated, but it’s difficult for me to describe my outsize shock and outrage when I sat in a non-kosher restaurant with other secular Jews and was told I could not order anything with bread. It was as if I had landed within those old and familiar walls that I had struggled to scale; I felt as if I had fallen backward in time. How patronizing was the state in its assumption that basic Orthodox precepts applied to all Jews no matter their individual perspectives or choices; how invasive its unwillingness to tolerate dissent. The waiter seemed surprised and uncertain in the face of my indignation and apologized profusely, explaining that serving me bread meant risking a large fine for the restaurant, and that it had nothing to do with his personal beliefs. I explained that I was American and that it was simply a shock for me to be in a secular and non-kosher environment and still somehow be subject to regulations I viewed as obsolete and ludicrous. It wasn’t about the bread. It was about the theocracy, I told him.
* * *
• • •
By the time my first week in Israel had come to an end, it had become clear to me not only that the authorities I had struggled to free myself from enjoyed, as a result of sharp shifts in demographic proportions, ever-increasing power in this country, but also that despite the exemptions still enjoyed by the comparatively diminishing secular population, there was something not only relieving but also dreadfully confining about being surrounded solely by people with the same ethnic identity. How could I cultivate harchavos hada’as—the broadening of perspective my grandfather had termed the key to personal bliss—in such a narrow, limiting environment?
I no longer felt intimidated by that Israeli who had derided my status as an exile Jew; now I pitied hi
m instead, trapped within the small frame of a shallow social pool, prevented from realizing and cultivating a connection to the world that was conducive to growth and development. I wasn’t an exile Jew, I realized, as I made my way to the Kotel (the Western Wall) and was relegated to the women’s section in the back, as I was spit on in the streets of Jerusalem even though I was modestly dressed. If anything, it was Israel where I felt most exiled, exiled from my true self, exiled from the courage and enlightenment of the diaspora heritage, alienated from the diversity of the Jewish experience.
I realized that I missed Berlin in a way I had never missed a place before. I wanted to go home, and I say this deliberately because I had never before felt that burning desire to go back from whence I had come. Never, not once. Not when I had left my community, not when I had left Manhattan, and not when I had left New England. But now I felt this new and foreign yearning: to return.
When I landed in Berlin, I dropped my suitcase in my apartment, and moments later I was sitting on the bench in front of Café Espera, face turned up to the sun, sipping a lemonade. And who should walk by but the poet, whose gentle manner I had been missing those last two weeks. A short while later, the brown-haired student with an elated smile and a spring in her step joined us, and by early evening we had all been reunited again, sitting there in our magical circle under the streaky golden sun. Before night had fallen I knew, with stunning certainty, that I would never leave Berlin.
* * *
—
They say that Berlin has two faces, to coincide with the two seasons: the long, gray, gloomy, all-encompassing winter and the gorgeous, delicate, tender weeks of a truncated and precious summer. During my visits to Berlin prior to the move, I had only encountered Berlin’s Schokoladenseite; I had formed impressions of life there as it existed through the tonal filters of long, light-filled days, of lazy, violet-hued evenings and cool, invigorating nights. I had seen everything in full bloom; I had witnessed the collective good mood of a people freed to celebrate, connect, and relax in public spaces and on green fields; I had watched enviously the carefree faces of young people riding bikes into a strong breeze, the short sleeves of their T-shirts fluttering in the wind.
I had not been adequately prepared for winter in Berlin, which was the season that marked my arrival as a resident. I had lived through winters before, naturally—after all, I was well acquainted with the balanced four-season year that marks life on the northeast coast of the United States—but I had experienced them very differently there. Winters as I recall them in America were dramatic, with big, open skies, crisp, cold winds, and pale golden sunlight that seemed almost brighter than summer light despite imparting a fraction of its heat. I have memories of repeated snowfalls, the new piling up on the old, the air often filled with thick and robust white flakes that retained their crystalline shape even as they landed on the wool of my coat or rested on my hair. I remember the way the sounds of life were muffled by this temporary mantle, the otherworldly pink-toned light that set in just after the snows stopped, and the inevitable high and clear blue sky that followed the next morning, the sun reflecting brilliantly off the white-blanketed ground. I had never experienced winter as a particularly dark or dreary time; like the other seasons, it had its pros and cons, but it was no more lacking in color and spectacle than any other. Never did winter envelop me in permanent, lifeless gray the way Berlin would in its notoriously rude welcome.
In Berlin, I had to reconcile myself to an apathetic and noncommittal winter that I would learn could begin as early as October and last until May. Yet the majority of that time was not marked by invigoratingly clear, cold days but by damp chill and dim light, by an atmosphere that spanned a narrow spectrum between needlelike rains and stinging mists that seemed to hover almost perpetually in the air; it was marked by the ever-present thick, dense cloud cover, which seemed to hug the roofs of the buildings, giving me the impression that we were all trapped under some giant, suffocating tent. Worst of all were the moods of the people, the way they squabbled with one another on public transport or heckled one another in the streets, the way civil servants and public office employees grumbled and waitresses rolled their eyes.
So it is natural that my early months in Berlin were filled with suppressed panic: partly because of my fear of having made an uninformed and possibly regrettable decision combined with my auxiliary fear of having to admit that such might be true, and partly because of the culture shock that came into play on so many levels. Then, right around the time that I had started to relax into the buffer of my new and small community, the sun came out. First for only a little at a time: I remember five brilliantly sunny days in February, which, although it was still cold, we spent sitting outside. The awning of Espera was pulled back, and we huddled under jackets and blankets, practically drunk with joy at the bright light, so much so that I can’t even remember feeling the cold. But it wasn’t until my return from Israel in mid-April that the spring began in earnest. When the trees lining the island strip in the middle of the teeming Sonnenallee began to unfurl their leaves, and the shops selling plants and flowers lined up their wares on the street, and balconies were bedecked in bloom-filled pots, and the building facades suddenly exploded with grapevines and trailing ivy, then it became clear to me just what a transformation this city performed each year in its procession toward summer, almost like the changing of costumes between scenes of a play.
In those months, as the city came to life around me, something new came to life within me as well. I cannot attribute this process to any one specific thing; rather, it was an accumulation of factors: I purchased a used bike for cheap on Kleinanzeigen (the classifieds) and began to venture out of my Kiez via its pedals. I explored various neighborhoods, parks, and lakes with friends. In July, when Isaac flew to visit his father as we had originally agreed in the terms of our new arrangement, my priorities shifted temporarily from the everyday responsibilities of a young single mother, and I became, for a moment, like the others around me, young and carefree in Berlin, with the intoxicating and delusional conviction that the summer would last forever. In the evenings, we clustered around tables on the pavement of Sonnenallee, in front of an ancient and accordingly shabby but cozy pub called Kindl Stuben, cigarette smoke from the nicotine-dependent among us converging into streams above our heads. We drank and talked until the early hours of the next morning, at which point I pedaled the few blocks home and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep that I would emerge from, suddenly and quickly, at around noon, when the sun pierced through the thick curtains and warmed the room past comfortable temperatures.
Now we spent the early afternoon hours in front of Espera recovering from the night before. When the sun became too intense, we moved to the shade of the massive trees at Treptower Park with a book or two and some apples. In the early evening, when my apartment was cooler and dimmer, I sat for a few hours at my big dining room table, which belonged, like everything else in my should-have-been-temporary apartment, to the subletter, and I wrote. Not for a deadline, not something I had contractually promised or that someone was expecting, but just for me. It was as if I was experimenting again with my inner voice, seeing if it felt brave enough to emerge once more in this new space.
* * *
—
On the third of August I fell in love. Just like that, by accident; there isn’t really more to tell, because in the end, every love story is the same, ordinary, universal. We say that love is about being your best self with the other, but before I had had no real self to put forth; I had performed one that was appropriate to the person and the situation instead, hoping that through the other person I would be given the gift, however ephemeral, of a projected self. But now it was as if not only could I be myself with this new person, but I actually had a self to be.
It was the first time I embarked on a love affair with someone who lived in the same city, and for me this was a clear sign that I had finally ceased my endles
s striving in the direction of “away,” that I had found my menuchas hanefesh, my bodily peace. Bit by bit, Berlin became hallowed by the conventional acts of passion; every street corner at which we kissed, each café where we shared a cigarette and a glass of wine, every small location in which we conspired together, became branded, as if forever, by the memory of the experience. Even in the moments when we were apart, I would bike through my neighborhood and its adjoining ones, and the immediacy of each shared moment, of each caress and tender gaze, jumped out at me like some marvelous decoupage, like a mille-feuille of accumulated short-term memories stacked upon one another like layers of semitransparent film. As if it hadn’t been enough to encounter Berlin in its sublime summer attire, now I saw it through the supplemental lens of romantic euphoria, and I fell in love with the city precisely for being the place where I had, for the first time in my life, experienced such a simple human happiness.
Exodus, Revisited Page 28
