I decided to gloss over the father reference and interrupted her ream of apologies: “It’s exactly that kind of mindless comment that makes up prejudice. Do you see that? You can’t just say stuff like that. You have to think about what you’re saying.”
“Yes, yes, you are right.” She put her hand on my forearm. “Please, I apologize. I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean to say anything against Harry.”
“It’s not about Harry. You can’t generalize like that about anybody or any group of people. You have to think about what you’re saying.”
Inexperienced as I was in dealing with prejudice, I nevertheless felt that she had responded in a way that seemed genuine and made me hope she had learned something. The crack in our friendship was glued, but it would remain, like a crack that stays visible in a beautiful vase. I was on guard, and my trust in her was never 100 percent again. Many years later we drifted apart; our lifestyles had become too divergent, and our friendship had been too intimate to be scaled down to a more casual relationship. I still mourn the loss of that friendship, because Susanne, of all my friends, knew me the longest.
IN CONTRAST, ANOTHER FRIENDSHIP ENDED WITH NO IFS OR buts. By the time I was living with Harry, I had known Corinna for a few years. She and I had met studying French in Paris during the summer of 1982. We became inseparable to the point where she slept over in my dorm room, even though the nuns who ran the dormitory forbade it. She would spend the night so that we could stay out until the nuns’ midnight curfew and she wouldn’t have to travel back to where she was boarding, with an ambassador’s widow, in another part of town. Corinna was from the Stuttgart area and very much an upper-society daughter, out on the marriage circuit, always sizing up potential boyfriends as potential husbands. When she did get married two years later, I was her maid of honor.
After our time in Paris, our friendship was a long-distance one. I was in Munich, and she was back at her parents’ house, close to Stuttgart. Later, after she married and moved up north, I would travel to visit her. She was keen for me to get married and eyed my relationship with Harry accordingly. I had been open with all my friends about the hurdle of the Jewish/non-Jewish issue—it added to the romance, for one, but it also was exactly the kind of predicament you mull over with friends. With Corinna I had been less open about it, maybe because she was in such a hurry to marry everyone off and I wasn’t.
In 1987, as I put the wheels in motion to apply to graduate school in the United States, we talked on the phone and she quizzed me about the future, and whether Harry and I were going to get married. I said yes, we would.
“And what are you doing about the religion?” she asked.
“I might convert,” I replied.
“Oh, come on,” she said. “Why can’t those shitty Jews for once convert to our religion?”
As with the previous anti-Semitic incident with Susanne, I was too stunned in that moment to react, shocked that someone otherwise quite secular should utter such a deep-seated religious prejudice. Somehow I ended that call, but I did not waver on what I needed to do. I wrote her a letter, as we were in the habit of writing letters to each other more so than talking on the phone. I pointed out how bigoted her remark had been, and said I expected my friends to be tolerant and accepting of other cultures, to question but ultimately support my choices.
I did not receive the profuse apology I expected. On the contrary, in her reply she stood by what she had said, not admitting the prejudice and arguing that it was her right and duty as a friend to challenge my choices. But it wasn’t about challenging my choices. It was about the ancient predicament of Christianity—the Jews withholding confirmation of the new belief in Jesus as the Messiah by not converting—the root of anti-Semitism in the Western world.
I did not reply to her letter. There was nothing to reply to. There was no point in getting into a back-and-forth. Either she would recognize her mistake and regret it, or she wouldn’t. Clearly, she didn’t. I never heard from her again. It was a clean break, and there was no emotional residue, no lingering regret for me. I was already well on my way to becoming part of a minority.
SHEET OF ICE
LIKE ANY BIG DECISION IN LIFE, MY DECISION TO convert was a gradual one, one that I never actually made. Instead, it grew over time.
As I learned more about Judaism, I learned that the mother determines who is Jewish and who is not. Harry being who he was, I knew he would never have non-Jewish children.
One winter night, he and I had been visiting a friend in one part of town and were driving home late. It had been a pleasant evening, and we were both in a romantic mood. My head was resting by his neck, where I could breathe in his Paco Rabanne scent, which was best at night when it had become his: warm and homey. We were driving on Munich’s beltway, the Mittlerer Ring, and Harry was keeping an eye on the road while I was snuggling.
Suddenly, the street turned into a sheet of ice. It had rained, and the thin layer of water had frozen. The car started skidding. We pulled apart, peering at the glistening pavement. Thankfully, we were the only car on the four-lane street. But then a construction site loomed in the dark, and Harry would have to slalom around the traffic cones and blinking lights, or we would land in the ditch beyond.
We had to take a left-hand curve to avoid the ditch, but our car’s behind was swinging to the right, aiming for it.
“Don’t worry. Here’s how we do this,” Harry said, still calm. “See, you have to steer the opposite way from the direction you’re trying to go.” He was driving right into the construction hole.
I clapped my hands to my eyes, bracing for impact. For a moment we hovered; then I felt the car’s behind swing to the left and we slid through the curve. Harry cranked the steering wheel to the right, and we were propelled straight ahead along the narrow path between the ditch and the opposite lane of traffic.
Harry let the car slide forward, but the next row of cones was beckoning, warning of another curve, this time to the right.
“You know,” he said, as we were gliding along and he had no control of the car, “we can get married in a civil ceremony. You don’t have to convert.”
“Hmm. Really?”
“But then we can’t have kids,” he said.
“You don’t want to have kids?”
He didn’t have time to answer, as we were about to crash into the cones. He did the countersteering maneuver again, trying to spin us through this curve. This time, the maneuver swung our behind a little too much and we hit something with the rear. Harry steered furiously the other way. The car swerved, the right rear tire bumping the curb of the sidewalk and sending us off straight toward the opposite lane of traffic. A truck was traveling toward us, but there were still two lanes to cross. Harry cranked the steering wheel around again and propelled us toward the lane we should be in.
The car kept zigzagging on the ice. Now we were heading for a red traffic light.
“I can’t stop the car,” Harry muttered in between steering this way and that. “Hitting the brake will send us flying.”
The red traffic light slipped over us as we slid into the intersection. I scanned it in all directions. No cars in sight.
“We’re okay as long as nobody comes,” I said.
“Okay, we can’t stop now; we’d be in the middle, and getting started again would be tough. We’ll keep going,” Harry said, and he gave it a little gas.
We had two icy lanes to ourselves now, no construction cones in sight. We were on ice, but we were sailing along. We both exhaled, still watching the street, which shone like patent leather under the streetlights.
Harry squeezed my thigh for a moment, before gripping the steering wheel again. He said, “I wouldn’t mind having kids, but it’s not an absolute must. I just know that you’re the woman for me.”
“Well, for me, having kids is a must. If I can’t have my own, I’ll adopt.”
“Then we can’t have kids until you’ve converted.”
“Right. But we can g
et married.”
“We can.”
Thus, the plan was hatched, on ice, as we were barreling toward a future in another country. If I got accepted at one of the graduate programs I had applied to in the United States, we would get married so that Harry could come along as a student spouse. We would be able to get married-student housing, and he would be able to work. We would be legitimate. He was twenty-seven, and I was twenty-four. I wanted to go to graduate school and then work a few years. We were in no hurry to have kids. We could tackle my conversion later.
FAIT ACCOMPLI II
HARRY AND I WERE NEVER FORMALLY ENGAGED, partly because engagements were not a big deal in our circles. People did not waste time getting engaged—they got married, if they did at all. Harry also never asked me to marry him, unless you want to count our talk about marriage while skidding on an icy road as a proposal. He didn’t need to. It was clear to both of us that that would be the course of events.
Along with going through the exams for my master’s degree during the winter of 1987, I had taken the GRE at the US McGraw military base early one Saturday morning. I had run to and from registrars’ offices to produce American-style transcripts of all my university certificates; I’d had professors write recommendations. I applied to five graduate programs in international relations in the United States. Rejections started landing in my mother’s mailbox (still my official address) in March, to the point that my mother started getting worried about me. I had no plan B. America had to work out. And then the one acceptance arrived from the University of Chicago, along with a half-tuition scholarship. The decision was made. Chicago it would be.
I had to confirm by March 15. A day or two after I had sent the confirmation letter, Harry and I went for dinner in a Yugoslavian restaurant, a favorite neighborhood place two blocks from our apartment in Prinzregentenstraße. This was 1988, a few years before the Bosnian War. There still was a Yugoslavia, and Yugoslavian restaurants. One did not have to differentiate between Serbian and Bosnian. Yugoslav restaurants were a staple in Germany, along with Greek and Italian ones. People said, “Let’s go to the Greek,” or, “Let’s go to the Yugoslav.”
So there we sat, at the Yugoslav, planning our move to Chicago, the immigration formalities, and the fact that we would now have to get married for all this to happen.
“You’re sure you want to leave all this behind you?” I asked. We had discussed this before, of course. That he needed to get away from his father, do his own thing. Most days his frustration at being kept on a short leash, at having to fight for every little innovation he wanted to try, was at a boiling point by the time he came home from work. I usually had a bath running for him and would send him straight to the tub to relax and wash off some of that anger before our evening together. But I still had to ask because he was going to leave behind a nice nest.
“What do you mean?” he shot back. “I have no choice. We can’t make it here as a couple. And my dad will never let me run the store.”
“I’m just asking to make sure you won’t have any regrets.”
“I won’t have any regrets.”
So we went on planning and spread out the University of Chicago campus map to decide which married-student housing building might suit us.
At some point, we looked at each other over the map and the sizzling, oniony cevapcici and one of us said, “This must mean we’re engaged,” and the other one nodded.
Now we had to tell the rest of the world and, most important, his parents.
JUMPING OVER THE SHADOW
I MET HARRY’S PARENTS FOR THE FIRST TIME ON A warm day in April 1988, a few days after Harry had told them that he was going to marry me and move to the United States.
As Harry and I arrived together, I remembered the first time I had been in that house, for that party of one hundred people when Harry had held my hand. Still, I felt like I was treading on forbidden ground as we made our way from the garden gate to the house. Harry’s mom appeared in the doorway. She was on the portly side and tall for a woman of her generation, about five foot seven. Her hair, dyed a reddish blond, was in a curly updo, and she was wearing a somewhat formal navy blue dress.
“Na, dass ich Sie auch mal kennenlerne,” she said to me, extending her hand. Well, that I should also get a chance to meet you. A slight reproach was built into her greeting, as if I were some member of royalty who had finally granted her an audience. But her pale blue eyes were warm and protruded slightly, like those of Harry’s brother.
I handed her the bouquet of white roses we had brought.
“Oh, thank you. How beautiful!” She pressed them to her chest like a prize. “Come on in, come on in.” She led the way into the darker hall and on into the living room, where the door to the terrace stood open. Harry’s father was neither by the door nor in the house to greet us, and I didn’t mind. One at a time, I figured.
“Harry, why don’t you offer our guest something to drink?” she said, gesturing for me to sit down on a sofa while she opened the sideboard in the adjacent dining room to find a vase. That “our” made me stiffen—as if Harry were part of this household and not mine.
“Come,” Harry said to me, extending his hand. I followed him to the fridge that stood outside the kitchen door in the hallway. Harry swung open its door, and we looked at shelves stocked with Coke cans; little Perrier bottles and big bottles of noncarbonated water; and cartons of orange, multivitamin, and apple juice. We stood there, side by side, contemplating the bounty for a moment, the cold of the fridge blowing at us. I reached for a Perrier and handed it to Harry, who briefly squeezed my other hand, and then he went into the kitchen to get a glass. I leaned against the doorpost.
The kitchen was a small room with avocado-colored cabinets reaching to the ceiling. Schnitzels were sizzling in a big pan on the stove next to two pots whose lids were putt-putting like steam engines.
“It smells good,” I said to his mother as she passed me. “Can I help with something?”
“Oh, don’t you worry,” she said. “Harry can help me with this. You’re the guest. Why don’t you go and find my husband and tell him to get ready for dinner? He’s in the garden.”
I threw Harry a questioning look as he handed me the glass of water. Dread rose in me at the thought of meeting my future father-in-law by myself, without any introduction. Harry nodded back Stay where you are. He was about to open a can of Coke. “Will you give me a hand with this?” his mother asked him, holding a pot with steaming liquid and indicating he should hold a sieve over the sink.
“Chaim should be outside on the terrace,” she said to me over her shoulder while potatoes tumbled into the sieve Harry was balancing over the sink, arching backward to avoid the rising steam. Harry rolled his eyes at me—he was clearly stuck, and I might as well go find his father, as his mother wanted me to.
My glass of Perrier in one hand, I took a deep breath and made my way back through the living room and stepped out onto the terrace. It was a warm spring evening. Sparrows were chirping in the trees. A man was stooping over the flower bed that surrounded the terrace, pulling winter’s debris from the rosebushes. He hadn’t heard me, and for a few seconds I watched as he clipped off dead branches and tossed them into a heap on the lawn beyond, the grass still scraggly from months under the snow. His well-worn work pants were held up by suspenders, their Y shape crossing over a thick cotton shirt on a broad back.
He kept working, picking up a rake to work some of the mulch under the roses.
Coming up behind him but keeping my distance, I said, a bit loudly, “Guten Abend, Herr Gendler.”
He turned around slowly, resting one hand on the rake, and contemplated me for a moment, before he said, “Guten Abend. Sie müssen meine schmutzigen Hände entschuldigen. Ich habe da gerade . . .” Good evening. You must excuse my dirty hands. I’ve been . . .
He did not finish the sentence, as it was obvious he had been doing garden work. He spoke with the gravity that suited what must have been a hea
vy heart. He used the formal address Sie, just as I had, the difference being that a younger person is supposed to address an older person using formal speech, especially at a first meeting, whereas an older person could address a younger one using the informal du. That would have invited a more intimate relationship, something neither of us was ready for.
He put the rake aside and started wiping his hands on a rag that hung over a bucket. He was about the same height as his wife, not quite as tall as I was. His face was clean-shaven, with the comfortable grooves of someone who’s in his sixties but looks ten years younger. His complexion had the healthy glow of someone who eats well and is active. I could see Harry had his eyes: deep brown with a touch of olive, the outer corners dipping down a tad. And he had his father’s hair: the thick, straight hairline across a low forehead, the curls tight and dark, peppered with silver in his father’s case.
I sipped from my glass. The awkwardness was palpable now. What could I say? I’m sorry my love for your son has wrecked your life? What could he say to me? I don’t care how nice a girl you might be, I don’t want you in my family? Maybe I could say that, maybe he could say that, but that would have to be after we had dined together, after we had said enough unimportant things for our tongues to be oiled and our inhibitions to be lowered.
So we exchanged pleasantries. I said something about the roses, and he replied how the frost that winter hadn’t hurt them much, and that he wasn’t much of a gardener. I noticed a cot set up under one of the fruit trees beyond the terrace. I made a remark about that, and he replied that yes, he liked to snooze outside after coming home from work, if it was warm enough. When we ran out of pleasantries, he excused himself to go upstairs and change into a shirt and tie.
Jumping Over Shadows Page 10
