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WHY A JEW LEARNS GERMAN (Originally appeared in The Baltimore Jewish Times on-line.) I’m a middle-aged man taking a language
course at a local community college. Language
study is supposed to be good for your memory—better than crossword
puzzles—but who knows if it’ll really help or not? Right
now, I’m experiencing the normal reactions. It’s
hard for me to sit still under glaring fluorescent lights for a few
evening hours twice a week. It’s strange being
a student again after decades away from school, strange to be focused
on quizzes, tests, reading assignments, “extra credit.” It’s sometimes
awkward being almost three times older than everyone else in the class,
and easily twice as old as the young instructor. But there’s a deeper incongruity than most
people experience at my age studying a language: I
am taking a German class, and I am the son of Holocaust survivors who
for most of his life has loathed everything German. I grew up in upper Manhattan in the 1950s and 1960s when
the Holocaust was not deeply woven into our cultural fabric through
books, films, courses, and public memorials. And
so life for me was lived on another planet because the bitter heart of
my family beat so differently from those of every family around me. My
parents were survivors, and in a country where wealth, success and fame
are the Trifecta, they were losers, whether I could articulate this or
not. Holocaust survivors were not treated with
the kind of reverence they now get in many quarters as their numbers
are rapidly diminishing. There was something almost shameful about
surviving, and my mother in fact often bemoaned the fact that she had
survived when her parents and younger brother had not. What
made her worthy of living when those she considered better had been
murdered? These people were the figures in the
foreground. Stretching off into a vast murky landscape of destruction
were cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents. All
swept up into the cyclone and gone without leaving any more trace than
their names. And who was to blame? The
Germans. Not surprisingly, then, everything
German was taboo and radioactive. Classical
music filled our home but Deutsche Grammaphon records were anathema. And God forbid if my parents heard of a Jew driving
a German car. Germany was steeped in
Jewish blood and it had seeped into the molecules of everything
produced in that accursed country. I knew if my
parents picked up an item in a department store–an alarm clock,
say–looked at the back and returned it to its shelf, it was likely made
in West Germany. My parents’ reports about their war
experiences were sparing brutal telegrams, sketchy experiences retold. Whether these were the only moments they felt they
could share or moments they could not bury I never knew.
I was too young to ask many questions. Whatever
narratives they told froze time and thought for me. When I was young, I actually dreaded the idea
of ever flying across Europe–what if my plane crashed over Germany
and I survived to be hospitalized there, surrounded by Them? Hearing
German in New York
spoken by anyone who was of the right age to have been a war criminal
often set my teeth on edge. Steeped in American fantasies of individual
heroism, I imagined confronting the murderer, though the German
speakers I encountered on a crosstown bus were as likely to have been
Jewish refugees as anything else. Germany itself was thus the last country in the
world I imagined myself traveling to, and in the years when I became a
published author, I dismissed glowing reports from writer friends who
had toured in Germany. “That’s great for you,” I thought, “but you’re not
Jewish.” Death and serendipity changed all that. When my mother died in 1999 after long years of
dementia, I spent a few years casting about for a way to memorialize
her in a book, following leads wherever they took me. Most
were dead ends. But registering on a Jewish
genealogy web site led me to Germany. A
man in Hamburg
had the same last name as my late mother, Klaczko, and there was a
chance we might be distant cousins. Over an exchange of emails, it
turned out that he had in-laws living in Magdeburg,
not far from Berlin. I was stunned. Magdeburg was where my mother had ended the war
as a slave laborer in Polte Fabrik, one of Germany’s
largest munitions plants. The conditions were
dangerous inside and out–factory accidents due to long shifts had her
dreaming every night of her fingers being cut off, and the Allies
bombed Magdeburg
extensively. She’d mentioned the names “Polte”
and “Magdeburg”
many times, describing how one day, with the Allies near, prisoners
woke up and found the gates unguarded. How she
left the camp and demanded shelter from a woman who gave her food and
let her sleep in a feather bed. How she met my
father at a temporary Displaced Persons camp nearby. Magdeburg was the center of Germany in my mental topography and had
far more resonance than Berlin. As a son, as an author, as a Jew, I knew I had to
go there. A long email correspondence with my
relative’s relative, Christian Laenehman led to a research trip there
which was well-organized, fruitful, and stunning; it laid the
groundwork for a memoir. I expected to be
uncomfortable, even afraid in Germany, and yet staying
with welcoming people who helped me make the most of my time there,
eating meals with them and other Germans, and doing research into the
history of Polte Fabrik, I felt strangely at home. All that stood of the Polte labor camp was a
stone gateway, fittingly enough for me, because that short trip in 2003
was only the beginning. A publisher in Berlin
soon after bought three books of mine for translation and I’ve now been
to Germany twice more on book tours, doing readings at a wide array of
venues, and discovering for myself that yes, indeed, writers are
treated differently there. We’re not disposable
producers of “content,” we’re cultural figures who are taken seriously. So seriously that I was asked a question at a
Goettingen book store I didn’t understand–in English! I
met professors, professionals, actors, journalists, students in Germany
and spent many long meals talking politics, art, and of course history. People in Germany
have been eager to know everything about my books, my family history,
but the most unexpected question came at a book store reading in Magdeburg, when
a man asked me if forgiveness was possible. At the time, all I said was yes, or how else
could I be there. But as I’ve reflected on
being in Germany,
I know that the question in fact doesn’t relate to me. Even
if I wanted to, whom would I forgive and how? No,
going to Germany, being
in Germany, having German friends and studying German hasn’t been about
forgiveness, it’s been a laying of ghosts, a letting go, a mid-life
coming-of-age. And so when I sit in my study tonight going
over a list of almost three dozen German verbs I need to know for my
next quiz, I’m not just sharpening my memory, I’m easing my mind.
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