The Things with the Fetish

Imagine you have a family member that comes to your house. It´s kind of picky, as he/she -gender really does not have any relevance here - and already had some bad experience him/herself - with life, relationships and his/her own family. He/She doesn´t like your house, doesn´t like you, and even if you may be the other person in the world, he/she will not care a dime about you because the idea is to keep playing the role of the outsider no matter what and when.

The story of Jewish community in German after the war and particularly in the last three decades is complex and complicated, both in terms of human resources and conflicts, halachic challenges, perceptions and membership. For everyone coming from Israel or the USA, the difference is huge, but I suppose a Jew from Germany will feel the same about communities and traditions in the USA or France. 

Most of the people who are members of the community in Germany, do want to earn their life, have a place for the holidays, educate their children in the Jewish tradition, celebrate a Bar/Bat Mitzvah and eventually be guaranteed a place in a Jewish cemetery. Not everyone has plenty of time to play the star and conceptualize their identity. 

One of the things I always find impressive when I moved to Germany was to hear the stories of Jews coming from the Soviet Union. People who went to prison because they wanted to learn Yiddish, people who were harassed because they were Jews, no matter how high the personal status they reached. People who insisted to remain Jews no matter the challenges of being a Jew. There are not too many former communist countries whose Jews are so proud of their identity.

By attacking those humble people whose stories are worth so many good novels, someone is just following a pathway of those extremists this person is assuming she left to become herself. It´s so convenient to be an outsider in this country, talk about ´fetish´ while being oneself part of the system allowing only those funny individual people to take the floor. Claiming cancelled membership in a community does not promote you to an expert and even the less a judge in all things related to a community whose ´deep knowledge´ was acquired from newspapers or encounters in the bar around the corner. 

Playing the role of the outsider for purely personal branding reasons may work for a while, but repeating over and over again, on a highly pitched indignant voice the same empty sentences learned by heart to an audience paying you to play this role is aimed to fail. It does not take too long to figure out the intellectual kitsch. 

 

Where We Feel at Home

 ´Die Geschichte meiner Familie scheint wie ein Pendel zu sein, das langsam zurückschwingt´.

Through personal accounts and family stories, writer and journalist Maxim Leo recreated the history of his family, spread all over the world, as they escaped Nazi Germany. Wo wir zu Hause sind is a (auto)biographical account tracing his family members and their longing for the home they lost.

His parents returned to Germany after the war, in the Eastern part of Berlin, in Lichtenberg, dreaming - as many others - of building the communism. Some of his relatives were involved in building the state of Israel. Other made career and fortune in France or London. All stories are unique as sharing particular experiences. In addition to the content of the stories though, the methods used for the research can be used as an inspiration to anyone looking to remake their family tree, Jewish or not. It relates particularly to third or second generation researches, when part of the archives and testimonies were obliterated for physical and age-related reasons.

The book is rich in details about the Jewish life in Germany before and after the war and the longing of many of the German Jews for the home they were expelled from against their own will. 

Der gebrauchte Jude

 

Maxim Biller arrived from Czechoslovakia to Germany as an early teen. His Jewish Soviet-born family was forced to leave country after country in order to escape the anti-semitism and political pressures. 

´Ich bin Jude, weil ich keine Russe, Tschecke oder Deutsche sein will´. (I am Jewish, as I don´t want to be Russian, Czech or German - my translation). 

His story is a story of Jewish life in the 1980s, at a time when Jews - Jews coming to live in Germany particularly - were a rare occurrence. Those living there already in public positions - like the literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki that Biller randomly interviewed as he 24 years old - were rare and rather were introduced in a ´clean´ narrative of the post-WWII Germany. A rhetoric of the kind: You see, we don´t kill all our Jews, some of them are even allowed to return? From this perspective, there may be some Jews who accepted to be publicly used in this way.

As someone who haven´t lived in Germany those years, such an autobiographical account fills up many details about what really Jewish life meant at the time. I may not say that now it is better or things are improved, but there are different pieces of the puzzle that may come together differently. 

At the same time, the book is also a book about coming-at-age in Germany as a non-German Jew, finding your literary way and thinking at length about having - or not - a place in this complex realm. It is not a philosophical approach too, and there is a lot of Czech-alike humour that is still very useful for surviving Germany, particularly if you take your Jewish identity seriously. 

PS: On purpose I will not mention anything at all about the recent Biller-Czollek ´halachic´ debate

German Book Review: Zwischen du und ich - Between You and Me by Mirna Funk

 

After Winternähe, I couldn´t wait for the next novel by Mirna Funk. As a passive follower on social media, I watch her energy in approaching tabu topics related to Jewish life in Germany - not only antisemitism - and her intense journalistic activity. She is not the only one, but always feel good to live in a society where there are young resilient voices.

Zwischen Du und Ich - Between You and Me - her newest novel, was worth waiting for. The writing is refined and the plot development gained in complexity. The characters - both the main and the secondary - do have stronger, relatable personality. Lola, the character from Winternähe, is also worth a sentence and a bit in the new book. A hint that maybe she is thinking those books as episodes of German Jewish life?

As in Winternähe, there is a personal plan which naturally interferes with historical encounters, but what really matters this time is the individual story. Nike is a 35 years old German Jewess, who grew up in East Berlin in a secular family. She decided to take a job opportunity of organising a DAAD conference in Israeli while making her aliyah. There she will hook up with Noam, a rather fluid character, a journalist writing for Haaretz - we all know that Germans will rather care about such a reference, Gd forbid to write for, let´s say Jerusalem Post...until he left. 

Both characters are worth a novel but their match was not my best scenario. Honestly, I will not waste a bet on their chances. But what attracts them is a shared trauma and the plot is rather developed to prove how trauma attracts trauma, with all the gratuitous sexual and urologic symptoms and references. At to a certain point I will admit that, indeed, someone with a traumatic past will rather enjoy the company of someone with a shared grief but relationships are much more complex and less casual and with a healing effect too. Smart people with a traumatic past maybe will rather enjoy the company of someone with a less or absent generational suffering. But otherwise trauma ends by controlling us, our future, present and relationships and it´s hard to escape it. Rather, it adds up more along the journey which complicates the DNA structure even more.

But despite those references and failures and the exhibitionism, Zwischen Du und Ich reads very well, the mathematical kind of writing which pondered words and effects creating an unique story. I never read something like that before in German language, because no one had the easiness of doing so as Mirna Funk. It´s such a fresh writing and topic that the eventual misfits are in fact a good sign. A hope that soon, in one or two years, she will write another book. I can´t wait to.

Rating: 3.5 stars

The Strange World of The Passenger

 ´Be human!´

A Jew is on the run. He is called Otto Silbermann, has a decent amount of cash, a non-Jewish wife, a career of fighting on behalf of Germany during WWI, with a son in France with whom he is talking all the time, mostly asking him to secure an exit visa. He is robbed, told to be reasonable to understand those who don´t want to be seen talking with him. He is on the run, trying to escape to Belgium but turned back, taking a train to Berlin, another to Munich, maybe the next one to Hamburg.

The Passenger (originally published as Der Reisende) by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz is a utterly troubling intellectual experience. It is indeed a book of fiction, but the author was a witness of the infamous Kristallnacht and is inspired by the everyday interaction he witnesses. The feeling of being hunted and neglected, when not directly shamed and accused of being a Jew because born this way, on the most polite, condescending tone. That´s killing you; the polite tone of the neighbours pledging to ´please, don´t put it that way´, and understand that it´s ´against our will´ to behave differently. After all, they were in the party ´just like everyone else´. 

The writing is realistic, focused on the man on the run, Silbermann, who turned overnight into ´a swearword on 2 legs´. The ambiance, the characters he encounters and his attitude are the result of his situation. Thus, he doesn´t have too much time to reflect to his situation, he is aware of the pressure he has to cope with in order to escape. There is a crescendo of events reflected in the increased intensity of his feelings but it is the reader who is observing from afar all the changes. Silbermann, him, he has to run for his life.

Written when the author was himself on the run, The Passenger is becoming a bestseller more than eight decades after its conception. Once in a while, there are always books written by Jews or by authors who were against the Nazi regime are (re)published and are becoming suddenly the talk of everyone but by far this is one of my favorite ´discoveries´. Maybe because it sounds so close from home, so realistic thus frightening. 

I had access to the book in the audiobook format, lively narrated by Neil Hellegers.