I brought them back: to the Home that is gone in the Community that has vanished, at the time of year—the anniversary of Kristallnacht—that commemorates the End. I packed them up in plastic wrap and wedged bits of cardboard between them, so they wouldn’t jostle each other in my giant burgundy suitcase. They had lived with me for almost forty years.
Buckram-bound, a thin line of faded gold leaf around the edges of the covers, a few leather-bound with just a touch of Florentine decoration, the verso of each page printed in German Gothic, recto in Hebrew, so many elderly dowagers in faded ball gowns waiting for the partners who will never come again.
All I had done for all those years was provide them a respectful bookshelf, delicate handling, the occasional dusting, perhaps even the turning of a page. They had been held deferentially by parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, greataunts and uncles. On feast days and fast days and on the Sabbath—Shabbos, they’d have said—they carefully turned the wood-pulp pages, once crisp and clear, their genteel pointer fingers moistened on the tips of their privileged pink tongues, turning the pages, speaking, mouthing, whispering or just “schlubbering” the Hebrew which they read as sibilant ‘sh” in place of the Hebrew “t”, and lots of “o” sounds,
But that time is long gone, the rituals forgotten, the suppliants dead, and the care of the books fell to me, for no better reason than that I am the last of that particular blood line. Leute so wie uns gibt es nicht mehr, an acquaintance once said to my mother. People like us don’t exist anymore. That woman was right. Her brother-in-law, Stefan Zweig, wrote Die Welt Von Gestern [The World of Yesterday.] That was a eulogy—and his own. He committed suicide in 1941.
Boxes, cupboards, crates.
Bags, pouches, sacks.
Suitcases. Ribbed, Scuffed. Held together by rope. Brass clasps popped, flattened, barely hanging on. Faded labels. Grand Hotel, Nice. Palace Hotel, Bad Kissingen. Ritz Hotel, Mayfair. Hotel Excelsior, Cairo.
Piled high at Ellis Island. On display, singly, or in heaps, at the Museum of the Jewish Heritage, in the Berlin Museum, at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C, at Yad Va’shem
In Jerusalem. Carried, dropped, abandoned. Featured in every iconic photograph.
The final Box: six feet under. In Basel. In Emerson. My father died in Switzerland in 1951, my mother, in New Jersey, in 1980.
My parents speak German to each other, French to their children, English—shakily—to shopkeepers, bank tellers, and their children’s teachers; it is the language of the outside world, the dialect of the street, of commerce, of the radio and the newspaper. (Never mind that Shakespeare and Mark Twain wrote in it. That’s a different matter.) Language is the opaque screen which separates them from me, me from them. And yet we talk a lot—in French. About books, school, food, gossip. But German infuses the air, as much as the odor of bug spray that drifts into our apartment from the “dumb waiter” shaft that hoists each tenant’s garbage to the basement every evening. God speaks in a German accent. The prayers my mother teaches me in the kitchen while beef liver is frying on the stove are inflected with German.. I learn niggunim which are based on German operettas, folk tunes, drinking songs. My father liked to quote the quip of a parrot he heard in France as my parents and siblings were trying –unsuccessfully—to stay ahead of the German invasion: “Apprenez a vos enfants de hair les soldats Allemands.” Teach your children to hate German soldiers. But my parents know better than that. They quote Schiller and Goethe and my mother sings Schubert Lieder. All stories hark back to the lost kingdom. My myth of origin is located in Halberstadt, in the state of Saxony. Halberstadt is Camelot.
By the time I’m in my mid-fifties, I determine to find it.
As in any folktale, things pop up, crumbs along the path, rings of mushrooms on the forest floor, strange lights flickering in the distance only to disappear at close range. I have to follow those elusive cues: I have no other. There is a black and white photographs of an elegant house on a large square, my great grandmother’s silver candlesticks—the “Leuchter” that cast the magical lights of Shabbos— monogrammed linens, and books. Histories of the Jews of Halberstadt in German Gothic, with minuscule notations in my father’s tiny spidery Su’tterlin hand, names of Hirsches and related Auerbachs, dates going back to the sixteenth century. Prayer books. More prayer books. Could any one family, any clan, have prayed this much?
“Weekdays began early in Halberstadt. . . .my father writes in an account of his own father.][ There were three sites where the morning service was conducted: the main synagogue [destroyed on Kristalnacht,, the Klaus and the simple minyan in the upper town. . . . .At first, three rabbis officiated [at the Klaus] , later two took up residence in the building which my great grandfather, Joseph Hirsch, refurbished. Due to this endowment, the Jewish community of Halberstadt never lost its centrality and was able to maintain its world-wide eminence.”
Every morning of my childhood, I stand outside the living room, hidden in the hallway of our railroad apartment on 97th Street and watch my father pray. As he slowly wraps the leather bands of teffilin around his arm and situates the small box—the “shel rosh” or headpiece—at the center of his forehead, I watch what appears to me a strange and incomprehensible ritual. Wrapped in his tallit he is unaware that, a common voyeur, I’m watching his intimate encounter with the intangible. I have no idea what prayer is about.
Out of the depth have I called Thee O Lord.
That’s Psalm 130, one of the three prayers I remember my father reciting. The other two are the prayer recited on the new moon—when he takes me down to Riverside Drive and says the prayer with me—and Ha tov ha maytiv, a prayer of thanksgiving he recites at the end of a festive meal.
Hidden under the staircase at the back of the lobby painted rodent grey, the tarnished brass mailboxes wear their shabbiness with quiet dignity. Twice a day the mailman fills them, and twice a day my father anticipates his arrival with a mix of dread and hope. The shaper of my father’s destiny, I wonder whether he is connected to the Ha’Shem of my father’s prayers. He will bring my father news of his undoing, or of his salvation–or no news at all. The entire temper of my father’s day rests on this imponderable question. What will the mailman bring? Will it be a letter from the Corn Exchange Bank on Broadway and 103rd Street to tell him that some funds have arrived or, conversely, that his account is overdrawn? Will there be a letter from Lloyd’s of London, or the Japhet Bank somewhere in British Mandate Palestine, that some funds will be released to him? These questions consume his life and therefore ours because his entire state of mind—and the rent–depend on the mail.
Weekdays the mailman comes twice. Even if there is disappointment there are more days of the week to hope for. But the balance of hope and despair changes after the second mail delivery on Friday. Work according to the Talmud is an action which changes the condition of something and must be suspended on the Sabbath: my father does not look at the mail until Shabbos is over. Shabbos, the day of rest, a day of release from the tyrannies of the ordinary, is, for my father a day of enslavement, a day of dislocation. It is the day when more than any other he feels most intensely, most cruelly, his loss of place, of status, of continuity. The synagogue was destroyed on Kristallnacht. He doesn’t know what has become of the Klaus.
I pack my suitcase. It is a giant burgundy cloth thing with zippers and pockets. Into it I stuff books and tapes I will be using during my six months teaching in Estonia. That remote silent Baltic state is the nearest I can get to the Eastern Front of World War I—not the famous sites captured in Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, not where Jean Gabin and Eric Von Stroheim, in the film version, negotiate class war, but the vast emptiness where I learn my father served the Kaiser: the army registry says he was in the cavalry but when I asked him once about his horse, he said he drove a car.
Estonia is where I start my quest. As a Fulbright lecturer, I attend a conference on American culture where I meet two young German scholars: too young by far to have murdered any Jews during the war, though perhaps their parents, and likely their grandparents were guilty. They are friendly and we have many interests in common. I tell them of my fears of going to their homeland. They both invite me to visit. I go. In Rostock, I see a cathedral which still bears the pockmarks of 17th century Swedish canon. In Berlin where my father went to the Technische Hochschule for a year or two, I get to stand in a classroom he might have sat in: rows upon rows of staggered seats facing a huge blackboard, a scene out of an old movie. “Show me where my parents lived,” I ask Alex, “the Schulerstrasse, near the Tiergarten.” “ It’s gone.” he tells me with a note of weariness in his voice, “levelled in the war.” Too many of my questions face the past. He is all of 32. He’s heard of other wars. But he knows that for me there is only one.
I’m nearly there.
And finally I go. It’s just 90 minutes away by train from Berlin. A man of some years and a punked up teenager greet me. I’ve had leads to the man from a woman at the Leo Baeck Library in New York. He’s old enough to have been there but we don’t talk about that. He gets to tell me that his father was the local pastor. The teenager is fluent in American English—a bit of a fake accent but she wants me to know that with her nose ring and eyebrow ring and tongue-piercing, she’s cool. It’s 2004. I want to see where my father’ s father is buried and where my parents lived. He can’t find the former but he shows me the latter. It’s the house in one of the photographs. I’m getting closer.
It’s a year later. Jutta opens the door. She becomes my Virgil. She guides me, she instructs me, she connects the dots. An astute student of Jewish history and culture, she’s the muse, the director of the Moses Mendelssohn Akademie and the Behrend Lehman Museum. She hears my questions—those I can articulate, those I can’t—and answers them compassionately, as if she were handling an injured bird.
And there’s the Klaus. A large empty room with bare walls, exposing some lathes here and there. A fit look for a space that has born witness, that has seen the dismantling, the savaging, the wanton destruction of the gorgeous synagogue across the cobbled street. From 6 to 6:45 in the morning one went to Synagogue. Then the school children went to school and the adults went to work. . . . On Friday evening and Saturday morning very early one went either to the main Synagogue or to the Klaus.”
Here it is. This is it. I’m here, in Camelot, at the very core. I walk the cobbled streets where my father walked. I cross the enormous Domplatz—Cathedral Square—where my mother strolled perhaps from her home to a milliner or to a dressmaker in town. The house is still there, pristine, polished, thanks to a couple who have restored it to how it might have been in the 1920s when my parents lived there. Large windows, elegant views of the commanding Domplatz, as big as two football fields, chandeliers, and alcoves where my parents might have displayed their buckram -bound prayer books, their silver goblets and silver turrets for the storing of besamim, the fragrant spices used in Havdalah, the ritual that ends the Sabbath.
My footfall on the cobbles, my huffing up the stairs that separate the lower town from the upper, the Jewish quarter where the Synagogue stood and where the Klaus remains, form an old melody. My father would have climbed these stairs to get from the house on the Domplatz to the Klaus. He might have visited the handsome old building attached to it where rabbis named Auerbach and Lehman, stayed, close as well as distant relations, pious men with whom he might have studied a page or two of Germara . But he would not have recognized the architectural stump across the Bakenstrasse. That is all that is left of the gorgeous Synagogue, a broken wall with mysterious recesses in it: generations of fingers touching the limestone in deep concentration? The effect of weathering on the 18th century stone? No one can tell. But I know for sure that if this remanent could speak it would, in the Germanic tones I heard as a child, and that it heard all those prayers in those prayer books I brought back. All around me here in Camelot I hear my parents’ language, They speak to me still out of the grasses that line the canal across a gravel path behind the Klaus, they whisper to me out of the trees that line the Plantage, their voices drift over the billowy clouds that gather over the distant Broken, a modest mountain range where in an old photograph I see them having a picnic with relatives visiting from Frankfurt.
The books are home now. They will never be used again.* But they will be seen, they will be safe, they will no longer need to travel, they will have come home, as much of home as is left: a site of memory.
The big burgundy suitcase I took to Estonia and in which I packed the books has ended its days in Halberstadt. It completed its last journey.
*According the Jewish practice, any document that contains the name of God must be ritually buried: it must not be thrown out in the trash.
Julia Hirsch enjoyed a long career in the English Department of Brooklyn College. For many years she wrote about the early history of the English book trade while Family Photographs ( Oxford, 1980) was about another passion of hers. In recent years both her fiction and non-fiction have focused, on the German Jewish culture she grew up in and on the trauma of migration. She visits her family’s ancestral home in Halberstadt, Germany every year.