A Chosen Few (53 page)

Another infuriating experience, for those few who had managed to stay and at last had a chance to rebuild, was to be constantly told by foreign Jews that they should leave. The Israeli ambassador brought a group of Jewish students from Australia on a tour of Jewish Prague to meet Tomás Kraus. One of them asked, “Why don’t you go to Israel?” Kraus had his standard answer prepared, but before he could say it, to his great satisfaction, the Israeli ambassador turned to the Australian and said, “Why don’t you?”

T
HE
C
OMMUNITY’S RECOGNIZED EXPERT
on its historical treasures was Bedrǐch Nosek, who had been chief curator of the Jewish Museum until 1991, when he was able to start teaching Hebrew and Jewish studies at the university. His two sons, Marek and Michel, grew up around the Jewish community. Although their family wasn’t Jewish, except for Bedrǐch’s father’s maternal grandmother, they did not eat pork and they read some of their father’s books. Marek, who became a lawyer and worked with one of the big American corporate firms that came in with Western capitalism, wanted very much to marry a Jew. This would restart the Jewish line that had vanished in their family five generations before. He married Elena, an Odessa concert pianist who had come to Prague for a music festival in 1985, given up her career, and stayed. When Marek met her, she was teaching piano to Rabbi Mayer’s wife. Elena and Marek married and had a daughter, Anna, whose Jewish education was placed in the hands of her grandfather, Professor Nosek.

In Odessa, Elena’s sister Louba, 23, separated from her young husband and came to Prague in 1992 with her four-year-old daughter. She had no skills with which to support herself and her baby, but through the Jewish Community she found work with
Pavel Erdos, the Torah lifter from the Old-New Synagogue. The relationship was reminiscent of the old Soviet joke, “I pretend to work, and he pretends to pay me.” Louba’s job was to act as interpretor for Erdos, translating into English for Israeli and other Jewish tourists since Erdos spoke only Czech and Russian. Louba, pressed into iridescent stretch pants, her hair frosted and fluffed, would gamely meet Israelis at the airport with the brutish Mr. Erdos and try to figure out what they were saying, all the while hoping that Erdos, whose face showed more cunning than perception, did not notice that she actually didn’t speak much English.

Erdos paid her as little as possible for this service, and when tourists threatened not to pay him because he really had very little to offer them as a tour operator, he would claim that it was all because of Louba’s bad translation and threaten to withhold her pay. Louba tried to earn additional money giving walking tours of the Jewish quarter based on the knowledge she had acquired from Bedrǐch Nosek. But it was a hard life, this new capitalism, as her parents had warned her back in Odessa. Still, Louba would point out to her parents the fresh anti-Semitic graffiti that was appearing in Odessa, in the newly independent Ukraine, including a sign that said, “Kill the Jews.” She was trying to convince them to leave, but they always replied that both of them had good pensions and would not have anything if they left.

Nosek’s other son, Michel, went to a kibbutz in 1990. Then he began attending a yeshiva. He moved to Jerusalem and had himself circumcised and converted. Although he retained his Czechoslovakian citizenship, he stayed in Jerusalem, praying three times a day, keeping strictly kosher, living a traditional Jewish life. The Noseks, five generations later, had finally become Jewish again. But not that Jewish. Far from the shriek most assimilated Jewish parents would muffle at their sons’ new hat and beard, far from Robert Altmann’s criticism when Daniel had been married in the Pletzl, when Bedrǐch Nosek was asked how he felt about his son turning Orthodox, he simply said, “I’m very happy. I hope he will know more than I do.”

T
HE GREATEST THREAT
to the survival of Judaism in the Czech lands was intermarriage. Even if someone was determined to find a Jewish mate, unless they left the country the odds were against it. In addition to the one thousand Jews in the Prague community,
there may have been another thousand in Prague who did not have a Jewish identity and a few thousand more in all of Bohemia and Moravia. The majority of the Prague community were elderly, and their children had left. The Feuerlichts were still a Jewish family, but their children were in Australia and Israel. Only Viktor Feuerlicht and his wife remained in Czechoslovakia. Some family lines were already ending. Karol Wassermann’s wife was a Protestant, and they had no children.

Zuzana Skálová was skeptical about mixed marriages. Her sister Eva had married a non-Jew and to the distress of their parents was raising their children without any Jewish background. Zuzana was still hoping to find a Jew to marry. She estimated that there were about fifty Jews her age in Prague. The community was very heavily weighted with the war generation. But her world expanded in 1991 when she got a banking job that enabled her to travel frequently for the first time in her life. About mixed marriages she said, “I think that it’s not a major problem. But I am sure that it’s easier to have a Jewish partner because there are many problems that can arise in a mixed marriage.” Breaking into an earthy laugh, she added, “I have to organize some competitions with foreign participants.”

A
FTER THE
V
ELVET
R
EVOLUTION
, the name of Victory Street in Brno was once again changed back to Masaryk. In December 1990, eighty thousand people shoved into the little square at the head of the street to see their new president, Václav Havel.

Martin Mandl for the first time became active in the Brno Jewish Community, which was now down to three hundred people. He wanted to resuscitate Jewish life in his town, the Moravian capital where he would always live and to which he was passionately attached. He was now very happy that his parents had not settled in West Germany after 1968. “I wouldn’t want to be a German,” he said.

He liked showing people around his town. According to Mandl, when in Brno, there are two things that one must see. Next door to the music conservatory was a nineteenth-century house with eagles sculpted on the corners. It had been the home of Brno’s great twentieth-century composer, Leoš Janáček. But what excited Mandl even more was a certain vacant lot that had been taken over by tall weeds. This was the garden where Gregor Mendel discovered
the theory of genetics. The garden had spent years overgrown and forgotten because Trofim Lysenko, who with Stalin’s backing had taken over scientific dialogue in the Soviet Union, had declared genetics “a bourgeois science.” Wasn’t the notion that innate qualities were coded into genes at birth a contradiction in the egalitarian society? Gregor Mendel was not to be honored in the Soviet era.

Mandl looked at the forgotten lot and marveled at the absurdity of being a scientist at all in such a system. He had wanted to be a doctor, but he could not get into medical school. His mother had limited his future when she resigned her party membership after the invasion. You had to choose your degree of collaboration. He had studied chemistry and biology in Bratislava, where he met his future wife.

Their home was filled with good music, the walls were covered with the work of Czech painters, and the shelves were filled with good books. Friends of Martin’s sister, Milana, had smuggled Jewish books in German to her. But even several years after the Velvet Revolution there were still few books on Jewish subjects in the Czech language. It was a major event when, in 1989, the first Czech edition of Leon Uris’s
Exodus
was published. The Mandl family read it together.

The three-hundred-person Jewish Community was held together by the cantor, Arnošt Neufeld, whose father had also been a cantor. Neufeld’s face and thick, gray beard were so classically Semitic that his blue eyes seemed startling. His wife converted to Judaism, and their two daughters were raised to be Jewish, but only inside the home. Both daughters married non-Jews but kept a few customs such as separate meat and dairy dishes.

As cantor, Neufeld had drawn a salary from the Communist state that was continued after the revolution. But the Community had a double burden: the state had returned all its property but had cut all state subsidies. The theory was that the Community could earn its own money from the property. But the property included forty-six Jewish cemeteries scattered throughout southern Moravia and thirty buildings, most of which had either been abandoned or used for storage. Not only did the property not earn income, most of it would cost money to restore. The only income-earner was a building with a television station, which started paying rent. About thirty new people had become active Jews after the Velvet Revolution. Many of them were people like
Milana Mandl—in their forties and educated in the liberal days of Dubček.

Brno’s discreet synagogue with its plain exterior was still operating on Friday nights and Saturday mornings. On a major holiday it could get thirty people. But this included non-Jews, more and more of whom had been showing up for services since the revolution. Some explained that they were Christians interested in the Jewish roots of their religion. Others seemed to think they were making an anti-Communist statement.

Neufeld restored the Jewish cemetery, and occasional mourners still turned up on the now well-trimmed tree-lined grounds to place a stone on a grave. The coffins were made from unstained, untreated wood, according to Jewish law. The dead were still buried in the traditional white smocks, with a small sachet of soil from Israel placed under the head. But it was getting increasingly difficult to find Jews for the funerals, and Jewish law states that the body must be prepared by Jews.

“I worry about what will happen when I am gone,” Neufeld often confided to Martin Mandl. Mandl wondered, too, because neither he nor anyone else in town had the knowledge to take Neufeld’s place. Two people from Brno went to study in Israel, and it was hoped they would be back in a few years.

In 1992, Brno had its first open Community Passover seder since Dubček. It was the first seder Martin Mandl had ever been to. With the same natural enthusiasm with which he dragged people to the Janáček house, he was trying to learn and teach his two children. Both he and his wife wanted their children to have a Jewish education, although they would have to convert if they wanted to be Jews. When their bright and serious daughter, Veronika, was 13, they sent her to Israel for one month. Before she went, she did not think of herself as Jewish, but after one month in summer camp she was not only ready to convert but, like her aunt twenty-four years earlier, was ready to move there. It was almost useless for Martin to talk to her about building Jewish life in Brno because there was only one other Jew of her age in town. “I like being Jewish,” said Veronika, “And in Czechoslovakia there are not a lot of Jews. Jewish holidays are very sad here. In Israel they are a lot of fun.”

“This is what the Israelis teach,” said Martin with a tone of resignation. “You must leave here. You must go back to Israel. No matter what you are doing, Europe is only tragedy. For two thousand
years it has been only tragedy for Jews. You must leave. That is what we keep hearing from Israel.”

But Mandl did not think that way. Not now. Not after all those years of compromise and patience. “For twenty years a great source of information was the Voice of America in Czech,” he said. “About fifteen years ago I heard a commentator say, ‘During the next twenty or thirty years, all Jewish life in Czechoslovakia will die.’ And I thought, yes, that’s right. But since ’89, it’s not certain. It’s a question. But we must help ourselves.”

Even without conversions or a high birthrate the Jewish population has kept growing. New Jews seemed to get unearthed in the society. In 1992 there were officially one thousand Jews in Prague. By 1994, without any Jews moving to Prague, the official list had grown to thirteen hundred.

O
ne of the most traveled paths in the new Slovak Republic must certainly have been the one between the dining-room table and the coffee table in the Bratislava living room of Zuzana Šimko Stern. This was the path she paced on Thursday afternoons after reading that week’s edition of
Zmena
.

Zmena
means “change,” and it was the name of one of the many new Slovak newspapers born in post-Communist liberty. When Juraj Stern came home on Thursdays, his wife had already read the weekly
Zmena
and was pacing, ready to report that week’s assortment of nebulous anti-Semitic innuendo.
Zmena
was not one of those flagrant neo-Nazi-printed-in-the-U.S.A. hate tabloids. It was respectable in appearance and tone, with a staff of recognized journalists who wrote in Slovak, a linguistic cousin of Czech, in a well-crafted style that appeared to be targeting educated readers.

The Sterns were possibly the handsomest couple in Bratislava. They both crackled with energy. She had obsidian black eyes that glowed a wondrous anger as she told of the latest outrage she had heard or seen in fast-changing Bratislava. Juraj was small, fit, fine-featured and so charged that he could not seem to bear to be motionless, in spite of a painful back ailment.