byNicki LeoneBack in September of 2005 I received a rather desolate-sounding email from my friend Lev Raphael, who was on a book tour in Germany for Das deutsche Geld (the German edition of his novel The German Money): “Sick of tiny hotel rooms,” he wrote. “Sick of being alone. Sick of German breakfasts. Sick of beer.” I responded as my grandmother and mother would have done. I offered to send him sweet-potato pecan bread when he returned home. Because the natural response to any complaint in my family was “here, eat something.” Interview with Lev Raphael
On the publication of My Germany: A Jewish Writer Returns to the World His Parents Escaped (Terrace Books, 2009)
Nicki: I made it to page thirty-four—the end of your mother’s brief letter—and I actually had to put the book down for a day because I couldn’t stand to read more. How were you able to bear going on with the research after reading your mother’s account of what happened to her in the Vilno Ghetto? Was there any point where you thought “I can’t go on with this?” Conversely, was there ever a moment when you found something that made you think “discovering this makes it all worth it”? Lev: The letter/memoir my mother published in 1945 about the liquidation of the Vilno Ghetto in 1943 was a stunning discovery for me on many levels, and of course it was also something to be decoded, in a way, because my Yiddish has never been very good so I went through it very slowly. And then I had to do outside research to explicate some of its references. I don’t know for sure. My speculation is that she wanted to remember what it was like to be a slave one day and free the next. I think it was also the only thing she possessed at the end of the war, given that everything she owned had been stolen from her or even destroyed. And so, it was something to hand down to her children. I did, and was only told what it was: end of discussion. I was young, and unfortunately in life, when you discover the right questions to ask them, your parents might be unable to answer. My mother did speak about certain aspects of the war, sharing some anecdotes, but it was always unexpected, which made it doubly hard for me as a kid to know what to say. These terrible stories would come out of nowhere and return there. I think there are warring or at least contradictory impulses in me: at one level I know that our lives can change in an instant, that the world can grab us in its fist and squeeze us into dust—or it can feel that way. Look at the collapse of America’s economy, look how sudden that’s been. The Polish writer Antoni Slominski described it really well: “Behind the stage of our life, concealed in the wings, great factories of suffering are at work that will visit us one day.” So I really resonated as a kid to the ranting in Portnoy’s Complaint, especially where Portnoy cries out against oppression of the Jews, “it’s all written down in history, what they have done, our illustrious neighbors who own the world and know absolutely nothing about human boundaries and limits.” You know what? I was afraid of being afraid. That’s why I made my first trip just a long weekend on the way to Brussels and Amsterdam. I didn’t think I’d be able to bear it; I thought being in Germany would feel like a nightmare. And the book charts how remarkably at home and comfortable I felt. Of course, I was lucky to have found a distant relative who I stayed with the first time, and I went with my partner. My relative helped plan my time there and make it as efficient as possible, but even without that, I felt surprisingly relaxed on tour in Germany, except for the inevitable tour fatigue that you feel in the U.S., too, which was exacerbated by being so far from home and by the constant dislocation. That was eased on the second book tour where I had three days in Munich, three in Berlin and two in Braunschweig and wasn’t as stressed. That’s certainly a possibility. But when I queried my guide further, he said the guy was likely an “Osti,” someone from the former East Germany who felt culturally inferior post-reunification. Hearing English spoken by a German shamed him, reminding him of his relative cultural deprivation. I grew up in a household where everything German, even the language, was taboo and radioactive, so to encounter anything at all that was positive while I was there was mind-blowing. The hospitality definitely made a difference, and so did seeing a country different from what I’d imagined, and really, in the end, seeing myself differently. Seeing how far I had come emotionally because being there roused my curiosity at every level. It was as much about me and my reactions, or more so, than it was about the country or the people. I felt very American, very much a tourist. Of course, it didn’t hurt that they treat writers there with real respect, as cultural figures, and ask serious questions. You’re not just author #1,007 on a conveyor belt being moved from one Barnes & Noble to another. I spoke at book stores (where they served sparkling wine!) and a museum, schools, German-American cultural centers and other different venues—and that also made the experience richer for me, not run-of-the-mill. Too true! That’s why meals play such a role in the book, because of the conversations they facilitated. And the reflections they inspired. Think of it: my mother was a slave laborer in Magdeburg for nine terrible months at the end of the war, and there I am some sixty years later, a successful author having a drink in a beautiful café after a crowded reading. It’s a scene packed with meaning. I had to be very patient. The research went in fits and starts and there were lots of dead ends where something that seemed significant by its catalogue listing turned out not to be helpful when I actually received photocopies of the documents or got PDFs of the photos. Google actually was helpful, but only to a point. Trying to find something my mother had published in a Yiddish journal in 1945 soon after the war, I got nowhere with a major Yiddish library-archive in New York until I realized I had the wrong journal title. They still didn’t have it, but I happened upon a Yiddish library in Paris; I wrote to them in French, which I’d luckily learned in school, and they had what I needed. As any researcher will tell you, happenstance is a large part of your success. It took a while, and part of the time involved was translating what the German terms meant, especially if they were abbreviations. Each time I studied something like that, I went deeper into the reality they were cataloguing, or to use a term students of the Holocaust employ, the “irreality,” a kind of hallucinatory parallel reality. How else do you describe my mother being asked, as she’s being “processed” into a concentration camp, what her address in her home city was, what her educational background was? If she’s married? What are the whereabouts of her husband? And more such questions, and then having to sign at the bottom, attesting to the fact that everything she’s answered is correct, and if she’s discovered to have lied, she will be punished. I’d rather leave that for readers to discover, if I may, since there were lots of surprises. But learning so much about them—like in detail how my father escaped death three different times—gave me infinitely more compassion for them. Do any of us feel like our parents in their late teens and twenties, if we can find something out about them, are the same people who brought us up? To me, their war years and their years in Belgium after the war were two different lives, lives that may have cast deep shadows on our home in America, but were definitely quite alien. Both my father and my mother emerge for me as individuals I never knew, couldn’t have known, obviously, but certainly never knew from what little they shared about the Holocaust and their lives before it. I was especially fascinated to discover what my father’s life was like before the war, how impoverished, and also the timeline and details of my father’s adventures during the war. Extremely. I learned enough German (and picked up more while there) to be able to get on and off of trains, buy things in stores, order meals in restaurants, read signs and schedules, understand questions at readings, and even chat with strangers. And I introduced all of my talks in Germany with some brief remarks in German which nobody expected and everyone appreciated, and that made me feel more grounded. In the U.S. I might tell a joke before speaking at a college or library or museum, but humor doesn’t always work cross-culturally, so I knew I had to do something else to not start the reading cold. In Munich, people actually applauded my intro, which was very cool. I don’t think I could have. This book comes after a few decades of questioning, exploring, and embracing being Jewish—and thirty years of publishing fiction and non-fiction about the Second Generation. I do think, however, that being a secular Jew is just a different way of being connected to one’s Jewish identity since Judaism is a culture as well as a religion. For me, though, I had to have both, or explore both. I think the Third Generation isn’t so caught up in suffering and trauma. You know, even though it didn’t happen to them, the children of survivors feel marked by their parents’ experiences. For the grandchildren, however, learning about the Holocaust is important, but it’s also about family history and the history of their people: it’s history. The memorials do both, and they also share information for all the people who haven’t encountered the Holocaust. The one that moved me the most was the giant memorial in Berlin which is hundreds of grayish slabs of stone laid out in a grid that form a kind of maze, in that the deeper you penetrate the memorial, the less city noise you hear, the fewer people you see, the taller the stones are, the more disorientated you get because the paths are off-kilter, you’re below ground level, and people cross your field of vision quickly and disappear. It’s just a taste of having your reality twisted, of being isolated and maybe even abandoned. You can feel hopeless and trapped there. Tikkun olam is the mystical concept in Judaism of repairing a broken world by the actions we perform. In a different sense, Hart Crane wrote about how he “stepped into the broken world/to trace the visionary company of love” and my book is an act of love, offered to all kinds of readers, Jewish and non-Jewish, fans of memoirs, readers of travelogues, people interested in contemporary Germany, all baby boomers dealing with a painful family past. I don’t think the human animal can ever reach that kind of perfection. And the growing food shortages connected with climate change don’t point to a peaceful future. Actually, I never expected to write it! It was going to Germany that made me see there was something there to write about, and the first thing I wrote was an article that became the preface, where I contrast riding into Magdeburg as a successful American author with my mother being brought there in a cattle car some sixty years earlier, to perform slave labor in a munitions plant. Magdeburg has the advantage for me of being the home of people I know, and it’s close to Berlin and Dresden, so if circumstances took that turn for whatever reason, yes, I could imagine spending a longer time there. Ideally, I’d most love to spend more time in Munich, which I found fascinating on many levels. And for me, being in Germany would be part and parcel of the joy of learning more of the language. It wasn’t until I got there that I really starting reflecting on having grown up in a heavily German-Jewish neighborhood in New York, and how the sound of that language is actually part of my childhood. That never crossed my mind, because it would have meant I was focusing on vengeance and that wasn’t my frame of mind when I went to Germany or when I wrote the book. However, friends in Europe, especially Holland, tell me it’s much harder growing up there as a child of Holocaust survivors, because the people who might have betrayed your family or even been involved in your persecution could actually be living right down the street. Well, some Jews can forgive, some can’t, but I don’t know how many Germans actively seek Jewish forgiveness per se. I do think many Germans have been working very hard to assimilate their terrible history through education and memorials and films and books. I’ve seen it. I think that’s having its effect despite the recrudescence of anti-Semitism there and elsewhere in Europe. So I think a lot is possible. But as I said in the book, whom would I forgive and how? How could I speak for my parents, and are the people who perpetrated evil on them even alive today? Where I have felt a connection is talking to Germans my own age or thereabouts whose parents were in some way guilty during the war and who have lived with a terrible inheritance. Sadly, she became ill just when I started publishing books, but she was proud of my writing, from my first story in second grade about a letter’s trip around the world. Her reading to me when I was little, her own voracious reading, her encouraging me to borrow as many books as I could from the library every week, and her never saying that a book was too mature for me are gifts that will last a lifetime. Without them, I wouldn’t be the writer I am today and I never would have written My Germany. And without my father opening up to me about how terribly he suffered during the war and how he survived, and letting me interview him many times, I wouldn’t have been able to finish the journey I undertook when I started this memoir.
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