Berlin In The Promised Land

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A conference was held in Berlin on September 21^st 1939 at which the long-term future of Jewry was duscussed…..In Berlin on April 29^th, 1945, Adolf Hitler dictated his political testament….Hitler decided to die in Berlin so as not “to fall into the hands of the enemy….”    – The Holocaust, by Martin Gilbert

                                               

An ice-cold winter had been blessing Jerusalem for an unusually long time, conspiring with my old case of sciatica and a new case of bronchitis to keep me home for several months with my feet up, in my tipped-back old armchair.

I knew time was passing me by, carrying on without me, but I really wasn’t grieved. I had my recliner, I had my phone. I had my coffee, and laptop, and email. The trees out our living room windows —the big, tall, graceful old tree at the center, surrounded by a congregation of other, smaller trees–were providing us this year, more so than usual, with New England-style seasons– the scene filling my eyes, changing endlessly, minute by minute. Lacking not for travel and entertainment, I could therefore sit in that spot for hours without getting restless. (I’m typing there now, in fact, computer on lap.) Dry, gray tree branches waving wildly in the wind, whispering and whining…Rain in shining sheets and torrents, plunging down like knives….Utterly withered, shriveled-up dry leaves—so recently yellow and violet and velvety orange—now turned to dust yet holding on tight, inexplicably, to the limbs that bore them, until at last, taking flight, they vanish into an empty white sky. The leaves return, reborn as buds in spring, green and young and innocent of winter, as do the doves, cooing and nesting, and noisy woodpeckers. Arrogant, strutting, screeching black crows with sharp, cunning eyes. Long-tailed green parrots. Cawing blackbirds with pretty orange beaks and matching claws…Tiny and elegant, silvery-emerald hummingbirds, standing vertically on thin air, and many other half-glimpsed winged things.

And I had things to read. Uncounted hours slipped by as I, tipped back in my easy chair, sat engrossed by “A Crash Course in Jewish History,” by Rabbi Ken Spiro, and pulled out from my shelves some of the other books from my personal trove of Holocaust literature. Passing through the incomprehensible brutality of 1930s’ and 40s’ prewar Europe, I was struck harder now—more so than during previous readings–by the parallels with pre-war Europe in all the “isolated incidents” of anti-Semitism then taking place —it was 2019–in countries around the world. “The Yellow Star,” for example, S.B. Unsdorfer’s autobiographical Holocaust account published in 1961, opens with the following passage:

Who knew when the Second World War really started? Did it start on September 3, 1939? Did it begin with Hitler’s rise to power, or on the last day of World War I?  Nobody could tell, least of all a boy of fourteen whose only care in the world was to make progress in school, and to beat his pals in sports and games. But when one afternoon [in Hungary], in the late summer of 1939, I was attending our weekly Youth Club and we were suddenly surrounded by a mob of wild drunkards who beat us and kicked us out of our club rooms with a chorus of “Out with the Jews!” I knew that a war was on. No gun had yet been fired anywhere, no rifle raised—but I knew I was a Jew and had been beaten for it.

Hadn’t we, in our times, in a variety of nations, already seen such incidents on innumerable occasions? My inner voice reassured me that it wasn’t the same…for this reason…and that reason…and above all because now, of course, Israel is run by our own Jewish government.

In Crash Course in Jewish History, we learn that in 1879, a 19^th century German thinker by the name of Wilhem Marr, who coined the term anti-Semitism and later laid much of the ideological groundwork for Hitler’s future Nazi dogma, declared:

There is no stopping them. Is there no clear sign that the twilight of the Jews is setting in? No. Jewry’s control of society and politics, as well as its domination of religious and ecclesiastical thought, is still in the process of its development….We have amongst us a flexible, tenacious, intelligent foreign tribe that knows how to bring abstract reality into play in many different ways. Not individual Jews but the Jewish spirit and Jewish consciousness have overpowered the world. All this is the consequence of a cultural history so unique in its way, so grand, that everyday polemic can achieve nothing against it. With the entire force of its armies, the proud Roman Empire did not achieve that which Semitism has achieved in the West, particularly in Germany.

Hitler’s understanding of the role of the Jews in the world, writes Rabbi Spiro,

[was], in fact, the traditional Jewish understanding.  When the Jews accepted the Torah on Mt. Sinai, they became the Chosen People, whose role and responsibility was to bring a G-d-given code of morality into the world….Hitler believed that before monotheism and the Jewish ethical vision came along, the world operated according to the laws of nature and evolution. The strong survived and the weak perished…There is no mercy…Hitler regarded this as natural and correct. But in a world operating according to a Divinely ordained ethical system, such a system emasculated the strong. In Hitler’s eyes, the Jews were to blame.

In Mein Kampf, Rabbi Spiro informs us, Hitler wrote:

Conscience is a Jewish invention. It is a blemish, like circumcision.

And Robert Wistrich, another major prewar architect of Germany’s Nazi ideology, declared in Hitler’s Apocalypse:

If only one country, for whatever reason, tolerates a Jewish family in it, that family will become the germ center for fresh Jewish sedition. [Even} if one little Jewish boy survives without any Jewish education, with no synagogue and no Hebrew school, it is in his soul.  Even if there had never been a synagogue or a Jewish School or an Old Testament, the Jewish spirit would still exert its influence. It has been there from the beginning and there is no Jew, not a single one, who does not personify it.

                                                               *

Months turned into a year, and a year became two. The Covid 19 pandemic had kept me and the world at home, but now we were being freleased. My granddaughter ‘s Bais Yaakov graduation in Beitar Ilit was coming up, with a big post-Pesach hatzagah in honor of the entire 7^th grade. Was I well enough to attend? my daughter wondered. If so, she said, maybe I could get a new dress in honor of the occasion?

Having never been a skilled or clever shopper, I’m rarely motivated to go through the agony of trying things on in dressing room cubicles, and  now all the more so, now that I’d grown old. Endeared to my recliner by the usual array of existential questions at this stage of life, I would have preferred to find something in my closet. But once upon a time, I, too, had been a teenager, and remembered: it’s a mother’s—and grandmother’s—responsibility to look as pretty as possible, especially when the child’s peers are around. We mustn’t embarrass our descendants.

So I aroused myself and got up from the chair.

*

Gazing out absentmindedly through the Jerusalem light-rail’s windows at the passing scenes,  I was heading for a particular shoe store when I realized how many of the sights and stores and landmarks along the once-familiar  route were now new to me.  Had I really been out of circulation so long? Disembarking on Rechov King George, I found indeed that entire blocks had undergone transformative facelifts since I’d last ventured downtown. Artfully modernized and skillfully renovated to catch up with the times, even the historic old Mahane Yehuda shuk had been reimagined and recreated as a cool, totally with-it restaurant district.

That shoe store didn’t exist anymore.

I called my daughter and she said we could make an outing of it. She’d drive in from Beitar that night and take me shopping at the Ramot mall.

A few hours later, carried upwards like a little stick figure on the mall’s towering central escalator, I tipped back my head and lifted my eyes, whereupon my entire field of vision was instantly taken over by a huge movie screen overhead. Two giant faces in close-up—a cooly handsome young dude and a drop-dead gorgeous  young woman–were engaging in some kind of enticingly romantic cat-and-mouse interplay, filling my captive brain as I rose toward the mall’s upper floor. All we saw were bare, nubile shoulders and the two faces, in sunglasses –the dark-haired, Semitic-looking male in sly pursuit of a Nordic-looking, sultry blonde. She was turning and turning and turning away from him in a manner at once evasive and inviting.

It was an advertisement, yet I didn’t know for what. (Sunglasses?) We were being seduced by the advertiser’s flattering implication that as sophisticated, savvy shoppers, stylish and smart, of course we were in the know, and didn’t need to be told what the large but modestly displayed brand name, CAROL LEMKE, referred to. And if in fact we didn’t know…well…maybe our attention really wasn’t worth catching anyway, in which case we’d have to find out by ourselves where in the mall we could get hold of the product, whatever it was. The whole story played out for  perhaps five long, luxurious seconds., whereupon another headline appeared silently on an otherwise empty screen, also in large but tastefully understated font, and which again could speak for itself as the last word  in glamour and elegance. The advertiser trusted  apparently, that we New Jews would certainly understand the why and the where of this word, too,  without further explanation:

                                                              B E R L I N

*

Soon I was back in my armchair, alive and traveling, in flight from our insane forgetfulness. At home I could gaze out the window at my tree, and take refuge in the Creation.

When a German company’s ingenious business savvy can seduce us in our own Land, then it’s we ourselves who expose our essence to destruction.

That we grant entry to Berlin as a pacesetter in the Holy City–and are so slavishly eager to partake of its stylish amorality–served for me as a landmark, like the adolescent boy’s in The Yellow Star. 

October 7^th was still two years away but I knew the war was on. I was a Jew, and had been beaten for it.

                                                                       

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Sarah Shapiro’s newest book is An Audience of One, and Other Stories [Mosaica/Feldheim]. “Berlin in the Promised Land” appeared first in Times of Israel