Andrew S. Gross, John F. Kennedy Institute, Berlin—3 Nov 2010

Lev Raphael is a prize-winning pioneer in American Jewish Literature who has been publishing fiction and nonfiction about the Second Generation since 1978.  His work has been translated into nearly a dozen languages.  He is the author of 19 books.

Raphael has done hundreds of talks and readings from his work on three continents: at universities from Oxford to Georgetown; at libraries, museums, Goethe Institutes, book fairs; at synagogues and churches; and recently at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

He has been on tour in Germany for the last two weeks, reading at the Moses Mendelsohn Foundation in Dessau, the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt among other venues.

Raphael has had a diverse career:  he has been a radio talk show host, a DJ, a newspaper columnist, and an academic. Widely anthologized in the U.S. and England, his fiction and essays are assigned reading at colleges and universities across North America. 

For those of you who might be interested in learning more about him, the Michigan State University Libraries recently bought his literary papers for their archives. Raphael currently writes a column for the on-line literary magazine Bibliobuffet.com and blogs for The Huffington Post.  He also has a website,  www.levraphael.com

Mr. Raphael has remarked that he enjoys the mystery as a genre, and his first book tour in Germany was to promote the mystery The German Money, which deals with the complex lines of guilt involved in reparations.  Mystery appeals to him not only for its puzzle but its resolution.  The memoir from which he will be reading today offers a resolution—at least a provisional one—having everything to do with both the possessive and the place name in the simple but extremely revealing title:  My Germany.   It also offers another mystery.   The memoir describes how Raphael discovered, while on tour in Germany, that the second generation of survivors and perpetrators share trauma across a historical chasm (157).  This is something akin to what Dan Diner has called “negative symbiosis,” an antagonism that is also a mutuality, in the sense that the second generation is always dwarfed by the parental past, whether the parents were perpetrators or victims; and in the sense that these two groups can never think of themselves except through each other, so that Germany will always be a part of Jewish identity, and Jews a part of Germany’s history and its future (168).  Thus the possessive part of the title—My Germany—marks more than acceptance.  It is a recognition of the mystery that Germany has always been a part of Raphael’s life—in the negative—for instance in his mother’s refusal to speak in the German language, although she could do so fluently; or in his longtime refusal to buy a Braun coffee grinder, although—as Raphael was to discover on a visit to Hamburg--chances are that the coffee beans he wanted to grind were transshipped through Germany anyway (162).  Raphael’s previous visits to Germany facilitated these recognitions and freed him to write of other things.  He had to own up to Germany to stop writing about it. 

This recognition is perhaps the most personal part of this memoir, which belongs to an age that increasingly looks to the personal as a key to unlocking the past, to memory as a balm for the wounds of history.  It is in this context that Lev Raphael is not only a significant but a timely author. 

I would like to thank Elizabeth Corwin, the Cultural Attache of the American Embassy, which is sponsoring this reading; and Stefan van Zwoll of the Jewish Museum Berlin, for hosting this event.   Please join me in welcoming Lev Raphael.

  

 

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