A Chosen Few

by Mark Kurlansky

  “All the Germans are doing a big business with Yiddish,” said an astonished Aizikovitch. “But the goyim don't speak the Yiddish right. They don't play the role. They don't play the soul. They play a few. I don't play a jew. I learned those songs from my grandmother.”

  At concerts and festivals of Yiddish music in Germany, thin young Germans with long blond hair would strum a guitar and sing Yiddish songs. Aizikovitch would plant his feet on the stage, and with broad gestures and wild black eyes, he would sing Yiddish in a voice trained to fill a large house. The Germans would stare at him. He was not doing it right. He was not like the other Yiddish singers.

  One night, Irene Runge, always in search of things Jewish, was in ihe audience. “I thought, ‘Geez, this guy is unbelievable.’ One song, and then they get him offstage. Then they try not to let him onstage too much. He can sing the little evenings when nobody comes.”

  Irene had been taking to some Western ways. She had a computer, a fax, a cordless telephone. She was getting really good at Western media. She cultivated relations with local reporters and foreign correspondents. She made herself available to local press as a “Jewish expert,” then consulted by telephone with her rabbi in Jerusalem to see if what she had said was correct. She loved to show off what she knew, which may have been how the Stasi tricked her. But she was a die-hard Ossi who took to the pace of the West. And now she had another idea. She could sell Mark Aizikovitch. She could make his career happen. She knew how things worked in the West. She could be a New Yorker.

  Carefully booking his appearances, she developed his image, telling him to avoid the gold chains and open shirts and keeping him away from the Yiddish programs with non-Jewish singers. Showing her fluency in both New York culture and Western-style marketing, she said, “He doesn't fit into their hippie thing. He's more Broadway, and they're somewhere in the Village. They're sitting in Washington Square singing, and he's onstage, and that's the problem. You know, they are all skinny and they don't have any voice and the guilt feeling. He comes onstage, he looks great. He's in a suit. Nobody wears a suit. They have some kind of rotten clothing… and he has a real trained voice and knows how to play with an audience, and you know that's it!”

  IRENE RUNGE'S FATHER was in his nineties when Irene became an outspoken Jewish figure. He reacted to her open display of Jewishness the way others had reacted when she revealed her Stasi ties. He was so angry, broygez, that he refused to speak to her anymore.

  Irene was virtually unemployable because of her Stasi record. Many of her friends were in the same situation. For the first two years they had temporary, state-funded jobs. After two years they went on unemployment compensation. Accidentally, the new Germany had provided them with the socialist society that the GDR had failed to provide. Now there was no Stasi to dole out privileges, and no elite. They were all earning the identical state-funded incomes. And when they wanted to do something, they all pooled their resources—“each according to his ability,” just as Marx had said.

  Irene's son, Stefan, wanted to marry a Jew and live a Jewish life. But a Jewish wife was hard to find, especially because he did not want a Westerner. Even Israelis were too Western for him. “I can't. In Germany I've tried. But I have no connection to the West.” But in some ways Stefan was not all that different from a Westerner. He had a job as an accountant. When Germany reunited, he moved to Israel. There he lived on a kibbutz, but he was soon back in Berlin. “I don't like it, but I can live better here. I have more money. I have my own apartment. I have a company and friends. In Israel I have nothing.”

  And something else had changed for him. “I can go there anytime I want. Why should I move to Israel when I can go there anytime I want?”

  Nor was Ron Zuriel leaving Berlin, where he had his law practice and his son and a married daughter with a child. But he did not exactly think of Germany as his homeland. Using the very German word Heimat, he said, “If you asked where is my home, my home, because everyone needs a home, I would say being Jewish is my home. It's a bit peculiar, but that is the only identity, the only point of identification I have, because I can't say I'm German. I have a German passport, I'm German by nationality, I'm German by culture, my mother tongue is German, but I wouldn't say that my Heimat is Germany. For me it is difficult to say.”

  He never forgot that he had saved himself once before by knowing when it was time to leave Germany, and he made this calculation: “I would say that the time to leave for a Jew, to pack the suitcases, is when the right extreme party—I would add the Republicans, for me they are also right extreme, although they try to keep up appearances—if they some way or another would be taken into a position of responsibility, join in some form a coalition or whatever, if the existing parties consider them as possible political partners, I think that would be the time a Jew should think twice if he should leave or not.”

  Helmut Kohl repeatedly said he would never accept a partnership with Republicans. Some of the local parties were less adamant. It almost happened in Hesse in the spring of 1993.

  In that sense Zuriel was always prepared to leave Germany. “Wherever I go, I take my being Jewish with me, and if I ever at my age would leave, which I certainly don't think, first thing would be to search out a Jewish community that would be my point of contact.”

  Moishe Waks remained in Berlin, and his brother remained in Israel. Ruwen, like Moishe, had offers in Germany, but he never took them. He joked that his wife would kill him if he did. Carmela had never lived in Germany and never had any interest in it. They raised their children to be Israelis. Ruwen lectured visiting Germans about the Holocaust, lectures that were included on the itinerary of many German vacation packages to Israel.

  Looking back, Ruwen was disappointed in the German Zionist movement. “In my opinion it was a big failure,” he said. “We couldn't persuade people. We could not bring to them the message. Everybody was very involved. It was very active all over Germany, but if you look at the numbers of how many went—”

  He talked of how German Jews would support Zionism, “until the moment they had to go.” His mother, Lea, still said she had no German friends and little contact with Germans, but she remained in Dusseldorf even after Aaron died. In 1991 both Lea and Moishe finally became German citizens. Nevertheless, Ruwen started shopping for an apartment to buy her in Israel. After all, she still said that she intended to move to Israel someday.

  THE JEWISH COMMUNISTS who had returned from camps, hiding, and exile to build the GDR were now living in the Germany they never wanted to live in. One said, “Had I known in 1947 what would happen after forty years, I would definitely not have come back to Germany.”

  Werner Handler remained broygez with God and quite a few people. He busied himself with the Sachsenhausen committee and went to municipal hearings to try to stop the city from removing Communist names from streets. He was trying to organize survivors abroad to stop Berlin from reverting to Prussian street names. “What kind of a message does it give to these young gangsters when they see it is Wilhelmstrasse again?”

  Werner would occasionally go to the Rykestrasse synagogue if they needed a tenth man, but he was not involved in religion. One of his daughters was interested in her Jewish background and sometimes went to the Kulturverein. The other had no interest. His wife Helle, a social worker, retired. Her program which had given money and help to pregnant women, ended with the GDR. Now Werner and Helle could travel, and they went to Israel. He was impressed by how nonreligious most Israelis were. “Even though there is the theocratic state,” he said with wonder in his voice, “you find the same attitude as I have.”

  They also visited the United States, where Jews expressed tremendous sympathy for their having endured the GDR. “Look here/’ Handler said to them. “The question is what I want to do with my life. If I think what I have to do is live decently with my family and raise my children, give them a good education and have a good living and get on in my life, then I must say I'm glad, I had a good life and I di
dn't commit any crimes. If I say that I want more in my life and look for a better future of mankind, then I must say that I feel sad that the first attempt at making an alternative society has failed. But I am not sorry that I participated in it.”

  SIKTY YEARS AFTER she set out for Palestine, Mia Lehmann got there with her friends from the Antifascist League. At last she could understand the vexing Palestinian problem with which the party had always sympathized. But she didn't really get to understand them, to listen to their troubles the way she did with everyone else, because the first Palestinian she and her friends found was throwing rocks at her bus. After the group of old-time Communists got back from Israel, they thought about what they had seen and they talked to Moti Lewy, the Israeli consul in Berlin. Israel was in peace negotiations at the time, and he explained that they might be willing to give up the Golan Heights. “No!” the antifascists muttered. They warned him not to give it up.

  To Mia Lehmann, living in the reunified Germany was living in West Germany. “I don't like it now, and I didn't like it before. I came back to have a different Germany, not a Germany like this.” But she was not despairing. She was too busy. There were two million unemployed East Germans with whom she could talk and give sympathy. And she was collecting money to send milk to Cuba, where children were going hungry because of the U.S. embargo.

  “I am always an optimist,” she said. “And I think there are enough people who don't like it. The way it is now, this country has no future. You see. The way people are so rich and other people are so poor. It can't go on forever.” She smiled cheerfully, as though she had not lived through most of this fast-paced and terrible century that had been her life.

  E P I L O G U E

  Freedom in the Marais

  “And when, in time to come, your son asks you, saying,

  ‘What does this meanT you shall say to him, ‘it was with

  a mighty hand that the Lord brought us from Egypt, the

  house of bondage.”

  EXODUS 13:14

  Two very ordinary things happen at the same time on Friday nights in the fourth arrondissement of Paris. In the fashionable Marais young Parisians—and more than a few visiting young New Yorkers —dressed in exotically cut, brightly colored evening clothes, drift by shop windows to expensive restaurants that serve modern light fare. In the Pletzl religious men dressed in black wool suits—preferably pure wool, because the Torah forbids mixing wool with linen —and dark hats, sometimes large furry shtreimels, hurry to synagogues and shtibls.

  This weekend, all this was also happening Saturday and Sunday nights because Passover began after the Sabbath ended. By Sunday, the second night of Passover, the bearded dark-suited men of the Pletzl were in a particular hurry to get home to their families. Since religious Jews cannot use transportation on a holiday, and most of them could no longer afford the Pletzl now that it was the Marais, they had a long way to walk from their home to the synagogue and back to the family seder.

  A police van with several heavily armed patrolmen was stationed in front of the synagogue on Rue Pavee. Inside, men were gathering anxiously under the long thin columns with the art nouveau tulip-shaped lamps. Daniel Altmann was intently studying a passage of Hebrew, but others were pacing, anxiously looking at a spot under the balcony where an electric clock had been discreetly placed. A few bored children were playing in the aisles.

  Finally, the cantor began chanting at 9:15 and the service was bruef. Altmann could get home quickly because he could afford to live in the Marais. It was not that long ago that he had been a young affluent single man much like the young people enjoying their weekend night. But now he hurried by them to his apartment and his family to start the Passover seder. He was a typical Orthodox part of the color of the neighborhood with his hat and beard. Only a weakness for expensive silk ties made him look slightly different from the others.

  This seemingly gradual evolution from Pletzl to Marais in the sweep of history had taken place in the flick of an eyelid. As the Marais was modernized, a nearby ancient square was bulldozed to make a parking lot and sixty tombs were accidentally discovered from the long-forgotten Frankish dynasty that had ruled the neighborhood and much of France and Germany eleven hundred years ago. But even then, Passover had been two thousand years old.

  Saturday night, the seder went on until four o'clock, but the five Allmann children had slept during the next day, and on Sunday night they were ready to do it all again. They were wound up and waiting for their father to get home. The Passover seder is for children —to teach them the meaning of freedom. To ask them questions. Challenge them. It is fun because it is a ritual in which they play a central role. They could hear their father stumbling down the long, dark hallway, which his religious observance would not permit him to light.

  Lynda was dressed in a fashionable suit for the occasion and everything was ready—past ready because it was now ten o'clock at night. Daniel put on a white smock. Seders were messy at the Altmanns”. Four times the wineglass gets filled to the brim for blessings, and little six-year-old Ariel, with bright dark eyes like his mother, invariably kicked the table as he anxiously shifted around and the wine always spilled. Daniel drank each glass in a single long gulp, leaning on his left arm. “We drink on the left side because we are free men,” he explained. When Jews were slaves in Egypt, it is supposed that they were cramped into small quarters and had to eat straight up. Now that they are free they can stretch out.

  Everything on this night is about freedom. Daniel read from the Haggadah the story of Moses and the pharaoh, of slavery in Egypt and the struggle of the Jews some 3,200 years ago—the earliest known successful slave rebellion.

  Ritual foods were placed on a platter, and before beginning, in accordance with the tradition in Lynda's native Morocco, the platter of foods was held over each person, one at a time, saying in Hebrew, “Last year we were slaves, this year we are free, next year we will be in Jerusalem.”

  The family took turns reading from the book in Hebrew, rapidly, fluently, often offering almost simultaneous translation in French. They could all read like that except one-year-old Nethen and three-year-old Naemi, who kept doing a disturbingly realistic pantomime of changing her dolls’ diapers.

  The Altmanns made their way through the prescribed ritual, each item of food a symbol of an aspect of the freedom struggle—a departure point for discussion of another aspect of the nature of freedom, God and man. The children were asked questions, and they asked other questions in response, and Daniel and Lynda tried to explain. It was a family discussion.

  Breaking off a piece of matzoh—thin, black-edged, round, charcoally handmade matzoh, not the industrial squares, but something that seemed to resemble the handmade yeastless bread that Hebrew slaves might have hastily thrown together for their flight from Egypt—Daniel turned to nine-year-old Itshac and said, “This is made with nothing but flour and water. What is in challah?”

  Itshac rubbed his yarmulke on his blond head. His fair looks came from the Ashkenazic side of the family. “Flour, water, yeast, eggs…” He was thinking.

  “What else?” asked Daniel.

  “Oil!” said Itshac.

  “That's right. Now, which of these is the richer bread?”

  “The challah.”

  “No,” Daniel explained. “The matzoh is richer. It is only flour and water, but it is all a Jew needs. It can be taken anywhere. A Jew can go with only flour and water.”

  Itshac's eyes seemed to widen with an idea. “It's freedom!”

  Lynda and Daniel expressed their pride in a quick glance at each other. “Yes, exactly!” said Daniel. “To not need anything else. Just flour and water. That is freedom. You are right!”

  A P P E N D I X

  Jewish Populations in

  Europe

  Since not all Jews register with communities and many, especially nonpracticing Jews, do not declare their origin on any document, all estimates are educated guesses. These figures have been compiled
from the works of Holocaust scholars, notably Raul Hilberg and Lucy Dawidowicz, and from the World Jewish Congress, and interviews with Jewish leaders in the various communities. Of the half dozen or so sources used there were rarely two in exact agreement on any of these figures, but there is agreement on the demographic developments that they indicate.

  1935 1945 1994

  EUROPE 9,000,000 3,000,000 4,000,000

  Germany 500,000 15,000 40,000

  Poland 3,3000,000 275,000 3,000-7,000?

  Netherlands 140,000 30,000 30,000

  Hungary 400,000 240,000 120,000

  France 340,000 250,000 650,000

  Czech lands 120,000 12,000 1,600-3,000?

  Slovak 135,000 25,000 600,-1,200?

  Belgium 90,000 20,000 41,000

  Antwerp 50,000 1,000? 20,000

  B I B L I O G R A P H Y

  EUROPEAN HISTORY

  LAQUEUR, WALTER. Europe in Our Time: AHistory, 1945-1992. New York: Viking, 1992.

  THEOLLEYRE, JEAN-Marc. Les Neo-Nazis. Paris: Temps Actuels, 1982.

  WALTERS, E. GARRISON. The Other Europe: Eastern Europe to J945. New York: Dorset Press, 1990.

  ZEMAN, Z.A.B. Pursued by a Bear: The Making of Eastern Europe. London: Chatto & Windus, 1989.

  THE END OF THE SOVIET BLOC

  GOLDFARB, JEFFREY. After the Fall: The Pursuit of Democracy in Central Europe. New York: Basic Books, 1992.

  GWERTZMAN, BERNARD, and MICHAEL T. KAUFMAN, ed. The Collapse of Communism. New York: Times Books, 1991 (an anthology of New York Times dispatches).