A Chosen Few (5 page)

Many of these Russian Jews would have preferred to go to the United States, but Germany welcomed them and the United States didn’t. They spoke little English or German but, in the presence of Americans, they would sporadically blurt out geographical information on the northeastern United States. “Ocean Parkway,” a man from Leningrad who spoke no other words of English asserted for no apparent reason, to which a Muscovite woman responded with the well-pronounced but not entirely accurate assertion, “New Haven, Connecticut—250 kilometers from New York City.” A woman from Odessa smiled approvingly, though she had no geographical data to add.

The East Germans were still groping around, looking for a place in the new unified Germany. “New unified Germany” was a
Wessi
concept. To many
Ossis
, it was simply the newly expanded West Germany. The change was particularly difficult for people who felt that they had had a place in the old German Democratic Republic. Irene Runge felt certain enough of her place to freely acknowledge her vague links to the Stasi; for this act of candor she had been fired from her university post.

Sympathetic East Berliners would now say to Irene, “I understand. You had to cooperate. They tried to blackmail you, didn’t they?” Over and over again she would explain that no one blackmailed her—“I thought it was the right thing to do.”

After the fall of East Germany, it was discovered that about a half-million East Germans had contributed to Stasi files. These Stasi revelations had cost people like Irene not only their jobs but some of their friends. Still, the old-line Communists understood. Mia Lehmann, 84, said, “If you believed in your country and a government agent said, ‘This is for the good of the country,’ wouldn’t you cooperate?” Many people might answer negatively to that question, but among Irene’s circle were many who had said
yes. In the last years of the German Democratic Republic, Irene had grown increasingly disenchanted with the government and, at the same time, increasingly interested in Judaism. After the GDR collapsed, she had no job, no party, no country really, but she did have the Jewish Cultural Association, or Jüdische Kulturverein, which she had created. She was also a paid member of the Jewish Community, but that was mainly
Wessis
. If not for the American movies and her unshakable determination that “
Wessis
make better popcorn,” she wouldn’t go over there at all. At her Kulturverein she gathered a small group of the kind of people she had always been around, Jewish Communists.

Unlike the Jewish Community, the Kulturverein was something she could run herself. She liked running things, holding them together with her own wild charisma and whimsy, shouting in her harsh Berlin German or her harsh New York English. She had been born in Washington Heights, New York, where many leftist Jewish families had taken refuge from the Third Reich. Most of the Jews at her Berlin Kulturverein had lived part of their life somewhere else. That was how they or their parents had survived.

These days, Irene’s lifetime beliefs earned her only the contempt of the
Wessis
. There was no more party, no more Stasi, no more inside line. But she did have an ultra-Orthodox rabbi in Jerusalem who called her every Friday and before every Jewish holiday and gave her religious instructions and holiday wishes. Then there were the Lubavitch Hasidim, who had been quick to come to the aid of this little East Berlin community. Lubavitchers are a sect of the Hasidic movement, a more-than-two-hundred-year-old current from Eastern Europe that takes a more spiritual, less intellectual approach to strict observance of Jewish laws and customs. Unlike other Jews, the Lubavitchers have a missionary zeal of near Christian proportions for searching out secular Jews and bringing them back to religion. This has made them unpopular in some Jewish communities, but since the collapse of Communism, they have found fertile ground in Eastern Europe, where Jews for the first time in their lives are trying to learn about Judaism. A West German journalist who happened to be Jewish telephoned Irene to ask about her Passover plans, and as she started describing the event, he asked, “What is your thing for Lubavitchers?”

She explained, “They are poor people without pretension, and they are easy to relate to.” In other words, they act like
Ossis
, not
Wessis
.

In 1989, Irene had gone to Brooklyn to see Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the white-bearded Rebbe who at almost 90 was leader of the Lubavitchers. Schneerson, who regularly predicted the coming of the Messiah and according to some of his followers was himself the Messiah, told Irene to get money and help from the official West German Jewish Community. Irene patiently pointed out that he was talking about West Germany, but she was in East Germany. What did this New York rabbi know about Germany? She patiently explained, “But Rebbe, I am in
East
Berlin, you know. I mean, there’s the wall.”

“Yes, yes, yes. I know,” replied the Rebbe in his Yiddish-inflected English. “But this will not stay. It will change. Everything will change.” Seven months later, to the amazement of almost everyone but Schneerson, the wall came down.

Now, for several weeks before Passover, Irene, who had never kept a kosher kitchen in her life, boasted to everyone she could find, in and out of the press, that her seder would be extremely Orthodox and strictly kosher. She took to wishing everyone she saw a “kosher Passover.” Only a few years before, she had thought that keeping kosher meant not eating pork. But she had recently learned a great deal about not mixing meat and dairy, eating only fish with scales, looking for the right seals on kosher meat that guaranteed the animal had been properly slaughtered, not eating eggs with blood spots, and even more obscure things, such as cutting off pieces of apple rather than biting into the fruit whole.

She was not going to give up the Japanese sushi restaurants she looked forward to on her visits abroad, but she loved the mystique of orthodoxy. She had been an orthodox Communist, and now she would have Orthodox Judaism. Except for one thing: She was an atheist. She took up a ritual but not a religion. Even her son Stefan, who had himself circumcised and started going to synagogue, said that he had no religious feelings.

Most of the events held at the Kulturverein were not religious. A week before Passover, Irene provided an evening for a group of non-Jewish party organizers from various local Social Democrat offices around West Germany. These dozen or so
Wessis
at the Kulturverein made the difference between east and west apparent. They were expensively dressed, with a clear preference for the color gray, which befitted their reserved gestures and soft voices—in dramatic contrast to Irene, with her multicolored oval eyeglasses, her close-cropped blond hair, her perennial oversized
plaid jacket on her small feisty frame, and her enthusiastic voice never much softer than a shout. And to Mia Lehmann, whose kind and interested face revealed something determined around the lips and jawline, and whose aged and quivering voice shook with passion for her beliefs. Before the evening started, Mia had sat down to talk to a woman who had been helping with the food. Mia, who had a radar that always led her to people with troubles, noticed that the woman looked depressed, and she found out that like two million other people in the former GDR, her job had been eliminated. It had happened only the day before, and the woman was very upset.

Mia, slightly stooped with age, stood up at the Social Democrats’ meeting and in simple language told them that these were bad times for Germany. She had seen bad times before, she said, but she had never doubted that a better society could be built. Now if they all worked together, a better Germany could still be built.

Her directness and emotion left the West Germans awkwardly examining the toes of their shoes. They suffered from the uneasiness that progressive Germans often feel when they are around Jews. A thin Social Democrat with gray glasses and a gray suit stood up and made a speech in which he called Jews “a certain group” and referred to the Holocaust only as “a special experience.”

Meanwhile, two young Orthodox Jews from Switzerland had arrived. They were hard to ignore because they were both very tall and one of them was enormously fat. These days, Jews from the West were forever dropping by the Kulturverein to help out. The contribution that these two made was to point out that a mezuzah marking the front doorway was not enough. They would send Irene enough mezuzahs for every doorway in the Kulturverein. “Fine, fine,” Irene told them, slightly harried but glad to take in whatever orthodoxy came her way.

The evening was saved by Mark Aizikovitch, a burly black-bearded Ukrainian Jew. With his rich baritone voice and large comic black eyes, he worked the crowd with robust Yiddish and Russian songs until they twitched. Then here and there fingers and toes started tapping. Aizikovitch did not stop trilling, dipping, mugging, and growling until the guests were actually out-and-out clapping to the music.

Aizikovitch was finding life difficult in Germany, where everyone acted as though the name Mark Aizikovitch meant nothing. But Mark Aizikovitch had built a reputation in the Soviet Union
for singing everything from electric rock to opera. The Germans were definitely not interested in Soviet rock. What seemed to sell best here were the old Yiddish songs he had learned in his childhood in the Ukrainian town of Poltava. Yiddish singing had become a fad in Germany, and Aizikovitch had an edge over the non-Yiddish-speaking German non-Jews who were doing it. Everything Jewish was hot in Germany these days. When the Jewish Community over in West Berlin offered courses in Hebrew, more non-Jews signed up than Jews. The Hebrew course that the Kul-turverein offered had a higher ratio of Jews, but a large number of gentiles regularly participated in events.

Mia Lehmann was still struggling with her own relationship to Jewishness. Seventy-three years earlier, in a small Romanian town in the Bucovina region, she had gone to visit her mother at Yom Kippur services and had found her sitting on the ground outside the synagogue. Supporting Mia on her own, the mother could not afford to pay for her synagogue membership and so was not let in for Yom Kippur. “I don’t understand this,” said eleven-year-old Mia, and she resolved to have no more to do with religion. A few years later, she learned of the kibbutz movement—people all working together in the middle of Palestine. She thought it sounded very “romantic.” Traveling to Belgium, she trained in agricultural techniques with a group that would soon leave for Palestine. But her habit of wandering off and talking to people and listening to their troubles led her to Antwerp’s diamond district, where she met very poor Polish Jews. They told her their troubles. They were Communists, and they told her about the party. She fell in love with a German Jewish organizer, and joined the Communist party. In 1932, instead of being on a ship to Palestine, she was on a train to Berlin with her German Communist lover and a very different destiny.

Three-quarters of a century later, a few weeks before the seder, a small group of Communists from the old Antifa—the Antifascist Resistance Fighters, loyal East German Communists who had opposed the Nazis—took a tour of Israel. Since 1967, the East German Communist state they supported had vilified Israel, compared Israelis to Nazis, and actively backed violent Palestinian groups. Since the demise of the GDR, many of these East Berlin Jews had gone on trips to Israel to at last see what it was about.

Traveling by bus from northern Israel to Jerusalem, they decided they must get the Palestinian point of view, and they insisted that
the driver take them to an Arab village. As their bus approached the village, two teenagers ran up and threw rocks at the windows. The glass shattered into small sparkling kernels, landing in the hair and clothes of the old Communists. One rock barely missed a man’s head. Hunching over protectively, Mia Lehmann thought, “I can’t understand this.”

D
AVID
M
ARLOWE
, a London-based Lubavitcher, came to Berlin to kosher the Kulturverein and lead the Passover seder. A hefty man with a graying scraggly beard and a rolling mumble of British English, he was an introvert who did not know four words of German and, as both Englishman and Jew, didn’t like Germany very much. In addition, he hated Communism. “The Communists were worse than the Nazis,” he asserted. “The Nazis killed bodies, but the Communists killed souls. That was worse. They turned men from God.”

He was shocked to discover that Irene and other Jews at the Kulturverein were unrepentant Communists. “I don’t understand,” he said to Irene one day while they were koshering the kitchen. “I thought everyone was cheering and celebrating and happy to be rid of Communism.”

“Right,” said Irene in her blunt New York English. “Then they found out they didn’t have jobs anymore. They didn’t like
that
too much.”

David, not an arguing man, gathered up the frizzy blond extremities of his beard, thought for an instant, then examined the ingredients listed on an apple juice label. To no one’s surprise, he pronounced it unclean. Koshering the Kulturverein was a major undertaking. The dark prewar building consisted of several bright rooms that served a variety of functions—office, lounge, library, meeting room, dining room—with simple modern furniture.

While David Marlowe was koshering the kitchen, Mark Aizikovitch was wandering around the Kulturverein learning new songs. He had agreed to sing at the seder, but he was perplexed to find that his repertoire was not satisfactory. He had to learn seder songs, Hebrew songs like “Dayenu,” which means “It would have been enough” and recounts all the miracles God performed so that Moses could lead the Jews from Egyptian slavery. Aizikovitch didn’t know such songs, and he didn’t understand why he could not do his usual performance—something like the one he had
done for the Social Democrats. In spite of his Yiddish background, he didn’t really know what a seder was.

While Aizikovitch paced around the Kulturverein singing “Dayenu” with a confused expression on his animate face, the search for chametz was on.
Chametz
is a Hebrew word meaning “leavening,” which is strictly forbidden during the Passover period. It is not enough to eat matzoh, the cracker-like unleavened Passover substitute for bread. Not only must there be no bread in the house, there must be no trace of chametz, not even a barely visible bread crumb. The day before Passover, the house must be completely cleaned of chametz before there are three stars in the sky (or would be if Berlin ever had a clear April night). Although few households are scattered with bread crumbs or bits of mold and yeast, the Orthodox so extensively clean for Passover that chametz seems to be an imaginary creature that only they can see. Everything had to be scrubbed. Appliances and shelves had to be lined with foil or paper. Pots and utensils had to be boiled. Wooden tools could not be used, because chametz could be lurking in the grain.