Exodus, Revisited

by Deborah Feldman

  * * *

  • • •

  Just as I thought I finally had stifled that fire, the case went to the higher courts, and on November 7, 2016, I once again attended the proceedings, fully prepared for a similar outcome. I felt proud of myself for having slept well the night before, for my dry palms and moist mouth, thinking about how far I’d come and wondering if my younger self would have been able to believe it, that I could be in the same room as a neo-Nazi and stay calm and composed.

  When the judge came back in to read the verdict, I understood his German perfectly, having become almost fluent by that point. But when the observers around me exhaled happily, I didn’t comprehend at first the language that I nevertheless understood. My brain had frozen, unable to process the practical meaning of words I had worked hard to gather into my vocabulary. I leaned over and asked another observer, “Is it a jail sentence?”

  She nodded.

  “A real one? Not on probation?”

  “A real sentence,” she answered, and I sat back in shock.

  Well, there you go, I thought. Justice for the spirit I thought I had successfully exhumed but that had still been hiding in the recesses of my heart all this time. The old flame flared briefly, then died down, and I walked back out into the crisp autumn air, knowing I was finally free. I had seen justice. Unlike Zech, I had never wanted to hold on to the past. I had wanted to run as fast as I could into the future, and by some great twist of irony, it was he who helped to release me from my compulsion.

  Marcel Zech would go on to appeal this verdict yet again, but six months later, in April 2017, the highest court would confirm it for the third and last time. I would experience this decision as more than just a gesture from a confident state, because the timing of it coincided with a decision in another, more personal story, and would become, at least in retrospect, inextricably tangled with it.

  * * *

  —

  A year into my stay in Berlin, the final letter from the bureau to which my citizenship case had been transferred had arrived, and it was a short, unequivocal rejection. Apparently it had been found that I had not submitted adequate or irrefutable proof of my great-grandfather Gustav Spielmann’s German nationality; therefore, they were going to close my case. I was disappointed but felt the matter was out of my hands. Sure, it meant that I would have to line up at the Auslanderbehörde every year, that I would have to live with the constant uncertainty and insecurity that comes with conditional and temporary residence permits and their application processes, but countless others were doing it too, and in the end there was always marriage, however unappealing. I knew I would stay, regardless of what that might take; the question was only, at what price?

  But everyone I informed of the rejection encouraged me to fight it. I did not know how, though; I did not know what steps to take. The consulate in New York was of no help, advising me to accept the decision. When I informed my German publisher, he immediately got on the phone to one of his many influential friends and explained my situation. “You need a lawyer,” the man said, and he promptly connected me with one. His name was Moris Lehner, a jurist who lived in Munich. He had extensive experience with the particular law I was trying to enlist to my advantage, and he agreed to take my case on pro bono, even though, as he informed me, these things could sometimes drag on for years. First it was simply a matter of a power of attorney as well as a letter sent to the bureau to ask for an extension. This would give us time, he explained, for the necessary further research.

  Because a book tour in major cities had already been planned following the imminent publication of Unorthodox in German, Moris suggested that we meet to go over the details after my reading in Munich, which would be held in the Jewish community center. He was looking forward to attending and learning more about my story; he said it was always nice as a lawyer to have a case that was not just dry technicalities, but a living, breathing one, whose outcome he was personally invested in.

  * * *

  • • •

  In mid-April I traveled to Munich by train, on a chilly, rainy day, emerging into the old town only a short distance from the community center, where hired Israeli security forces put us through a metal detector. I wondered out loud why they did not simply have policemen outside like the synagogues in Berlin, but Ellen, the center’s director, explained to us that the threat level was much higher than most people realized. The problem was, if the constant threats were publicized, Ellen feared that people would be too frightened to come to the center at all. So the solution had been to hire private, well-trained forces from Israel and revamp the entire security system.

  The room that evening was full, and after the reading, many joined us at the long table Ellen had set up in the restaurant, including my new lawyer, Moris Lehner. We sat at one end and I told him the little I knew about my mother’s side of the family; Ellen listened attentively. At some point, she jumped up as if she had had an epiphany.

  “I’m going to check the archives in my office right now,” she said. “If they were living in Munich, there’s no way there isn’t at least a trace of them in my digitized collection.” She scurried off into the darkened office area while the rest of us dug into our main courses.

  She returned ten minutes later with a sheaf of freshly printed papers in her hand and placed them on the table between Moris and me.

  “I found them!” she announced triumphantly. “I knew I would.”

  Indeed, she had printed an entry describing Regina Spielmann and her son, Gustav, but the information available was limited in comparison to the entries above and below it. It described her having moved to the Munich area in 1895 and having given birth in 1897 to a son who later migrated to England. It also had a long list of addresses where they had apparently lived together, addresses that Moris explained to me were all located not too far from the building we now found ourselves in, in the former Jewish quarter of the old town. The only additional information available was that Regina had apparently run a dry goods store from her home to support the family.

  It was certainly mysterious that no husband, parents, additional children, or any other relatives were listed for Regina. I found it peculiar that she had moved around so much in a small area too, as if settling had come so hard for her. Moris read the confusion on my face and patted my hand.

  “Don’t worry, Deborah!” he exclaimed. “This is a great start. I have a lot of experience with these things; I know exactly where to go with this information. Pretty soon it will all become clear.”

  Others at the table who had followed our conversation chimed in. “Yes, trust me, this community will not let you down,” a woman added, winking at me. “We won’t rest until we have the answers.”

  Her friend smiled kindly at me. “You are lucky your ancestors are from Bavaria, because Bavarian Jews are the friendliest and most helpful. We will all help you as if your ancestors are our ancestors.”

  The next day, on my way back toward Berlin, I felt filled with a kind of mysterious excitement that had become by now somewhat familiar to me, that feeling that something big was on the horizon and fast approaching.

  * * *

  —

  After Moris applied for the extension, the case was transferred to the Senate administration, perhaps as a response to the involvement of legal counsel, although I couldn’t be sure, because although my lawyer had many conversations with me over the phone about the process, I often felt confused and overwhelmed by his descriptions of the various statutes and his use of German legalese. In the following weeks I mostly put the matter out of my mind, for deep down I had already reconciled myself to failure in order to avoid disappointment, and having Moris on my side was for a while no more than a due-diligence effort, a way of telling myself that I was still trying, without investing any more emotional energy.

  So you can imagine my shock when I received that fateful phone call, the one I
warned you about at the very beginning of this story. I remember sitting in a café with another mother from my son’s school who lived in the area, chatting about future projects we wanted to work on together, when my phone vibrated with Moris’s name on the screen. I excused myself to take the call, assuming he needed a small piece of additional information and that the conversation would be over quickly.

  “Deborah,” he shouted into the phone as I picked up. “I have goose bumps all over! I can hardly believe it. In all my years as a lawyer, I have never experienced something like this.”

  I didn’t understand what was going on. “What happened?” I asked.

  “I’ve just come out of the Munich archives, where I met with the head of the institution, and you will not believe what he was able to retrieve for me, Deborah. I’m actually still a bit in shock. What an incredible story . . .”

  I could hear him yelling through wind and rain into his mobile phone, his voice quivering with excitement.

  “I don’t understand! What story, Moris?” The sudden high pitch of my voice made my friend look over at me. Is everything okay? her raised eyebrows seemed to ask. I made a face back at her, like I had no idea.

  Moris got into his car and closed the door, and now his voice was lower and clearer.

  “So, Deborah, the reason there is no father listed on your great-grandfather’ s birth certificate, or a husband listed for Regina, is that she had no husband. Your great-grandfather was an illegitimate child.”

  I breathed in sharply. This in itself was big news. An illegitimate child, or a bastard, was unheard of in my community, but we had a word for it: mamzer. Technically, the term applied solely to children of forbidden unions, which in the general sense this was not (an unmarried Jewish woman, as long as she isn’t in an incestuous relationship, cannot issue a mamzer according to the strict biblical interpretation), but of course, my community took that interpretation much further. A mamzer was the worst thing one could be, for he was permanently cut off from the Jewish nation, as were all his descendants. He could only marry another bastard, but the impurity would be inherited for ten generations to come, so basically until the end of time. In my community, I had been warned that as a woman, if I failed to keep the marital purity laws to the impossibly high standard that was asked of me, my own children could be classified as mamzerim, even if I was technically married according to religious law. This threat worked, for it was the worst fate one could imagine for one’s children, an eternal brand of impurity. Whether or not it was the case that the fate of one’s soul was permanently decided, it was surely the case that the stigma associated with even the smallest hint of doubt cast upon the purity of one’s birth would linger for not only a lifetime but many lifetimes. In the world I was raised in, such scandals were indelible regardless of what biblical texts had to say on the matter; they were proof of the unacceptable influence of contamination, an attack on the spiritual integrity of our world.

  “So Gustav was born out of wedlock,” Moris explained, but he had more to say. “And his father was, believe it or not, a Catholic! From the Austrian Empire. His name was Gustav Kollarz, so your great-grandfather was actually named after him. Deborah, I’ve made copies of all the documents Dr. Heusler was able to retrieve from the archives, and I’m going to scan and send them to you. Not everything can be easily understood, because it’s mostly handwritten in Old German script, but you will see, even just understanding ten percent will tell you a crazy story. We’ve uncovered the big family secret. Someone wanted to keep this information hidden. I think you are the first person to discover the truth.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Apologizing profusely and stumbling over my own confused explanations, I broke off the meeting with my friend and hurried home to print the files that Moris was emailing me. I spent the next hour poring over them. I learned that Regina Spielmann and Gustav Kollarz were born in the same small town in the part of the Austrian Empire that would later become southeastern Poland (Galicia). Gustav’s father, Josef, had studied and practiced veterinary medicine with Regina’s father, and as a consequence they must have known each other from birth. However, she was a young woman and he a middle-aged man of independent means, fifteen years her senior, when they ran away to Munich together to escape the judgment and condemnation of both their families. She and her illicit, upper-class, Austrian Catholic lover would move from apartment to apartment in the Jewish quarter of Munich (I counted a total of twenty addresses in the official records!), living as outcasts on the fringes of their respective societies. Gustav was nearing fifty when their son was born. He died twenty years later, and she continued to support herself and her son through her small dry goods business. She would die a few months before the Nuremburg Laws went into effect. A little more than a year later, her son would dedicate his doctoral thesis to her unvergessliche memory. Unforgettable, indeed, I thought, for I could never have imagined a woman with such bravery in my family tree. A woman who had fled her family, her religious fealties, her home country, to raise a son largely by herself, in difficult and lonely circumstances, in a time when single parenthood and illegitimacy were taboos in every society? Well, after all, I had to admit it did sound a bit familiar. We never really know what we inherit, I realized.

  So my great-grandfather was only half Jewish, I repeated to myself, and now this revelation catapulted me back into that past, when I had tortured myself with the question of my ethnic purity. What did this mean? It was all too much to process so quickly, and yet I felt my skin prickling, my hairs standing on end, for it was the discovery I had yearned for and waited for since childhood, confirmation of all my fears and hopes. I looked at the photo of my great-grandfather as a young man and wondered how much of him I carried within me. With one non-Jewish great-great-grandfather (and who knew, really, how many similar ancestral stories had managed to stay effectively hidden), I was at the very least one-sixteenth not Jewish as well. Not that it was something to be either proud or ashamed of. No, it was more like the comfort of not being one hundred percent of anything. It was as if this incompletion was a confirmation of humanness, of a personhood that superseded ethnic denominators. It was as if I had been freed from the prison of identity attribution, as if the impurity itself had rendered me pure.

  On the phone, Moris was still encouraging me: “This is good news for your case, Deborah. We can prove that your great-grandfather had German nationality after all, for although his paternity was seen as illegitimate then, it’s clear that as an Austrian, he would be considered Deutschstämmig”—of German descent—“and this will be very helpful for us, I think.”

  “I still can’t believe that I’m the first person to discover this secret,” I said. “After all, I’m not the first person to do this kind of research. That uncle of mine, Gustav’s youngest son, had all those documents and photos. Surely he must have noticed the inconsistences; surely he must have discovered their cause! But he sent me a photo of his gravestone, and it said ‘Ben Avraham’! And he wrote ‘Avraham’ into the family tree in that spot. Was he knowingly lying? Was he trying to protect the family? Or did he really not know?”

  “Oh, that’s very interesting that it says ‘Ben Avraham’ on his gravestone,” Moris responded. “Did you know that that’s the patronym used by all German Jews who convert? When they are called up to read the Torah in the synagogue, they are always addressed as son of Abraham—you know, the ultimate father, the patriarch of us all.”

  In the pile of documents Moris had sent, a story did indeed begin to reveal itself, as we studied the pages, trying to make sense of it together. A source for some of the information in his file was listed as “Gewerbeamt der Arisierungen,” Office for Aryanizations. My great-grandfather had tried to Aryanize himself; as the society he had grown up in became more and more openly and viciously anti-Semitic, he had struggled to attain Bavarian citizenship on the basis of his illegitimate father. In his app
lication, he had listed his national origins as well as those of his father as “Poland, previously Austria.” Moris had explained to me that many Austrian citizens were forced to take Polish citizenship after the fall of the empire, but that if we could prove the original claim was valid, it would work in our favor. Yet, although he was recognized by the authorities as the legal heir of Gustav Kollarz, and his father even undertook responsibility and had gone through the procedures of acknowledgment, it was chilling to read the exchange of correspondence in the protocol to his naturalization file and see that the process had stretched on for a decade.

  * * *

  • • •

  First I read his own personally handwritten summary and plea for citizenship, which ended with the sentence: “As I was born and raised here and am inextricably enmeshed with local cultural conditions, I am requesting admission to the Bavarian Federal State.”

  Then I leafed through the various testimonies he had included in his application to speak to his character and worthiness, descriptions he had given of his education, work, and military service histories. The handwriting was cramped and extremely difficult to make sense of. I came across one of the rare typed documents, dated 1928, toward the end of the struggle:

  Gustav Spielmann, a graduate economist in Munich, joined the Turner–Landsturm–Regiment, of which I was the founder, in August 1914 as a high school student and has distinguished himself through diligence and zeal, as well as his patriotic attitude towards Germany. I have come to know him as a thoroughly reliable and respectable character. I consider him a worthy and suitable candidate for Bavarian citizenship.