Judenstaat (11 page)

September 1951: A riveter is obscured by his overalls. His hard-hat fits badly. He turns off the machine, smiles at the camera, and rolls up his sleeve to show his tattooed number from the camps. His neighbor does the same. Before the not-so-steady camera, worker after worker reveals his number, and they're held up in a line. The camera pulls in so close that the numbers dissolve into an abstraction. What was the point of that unfocused close-up? Probably there was no point. But she won't leave it on the cutting-room floor.

November 1950: The first car to be manufactured in the country, the homely Yekke, rolls out of the factory in Zwickau with great fanfare. It is compact, and its body is made of a special lightweight compound developed in Sweden. Leopold Stein climbs inside; he's too big for the cabin, and his knees are visible over the steering column. He turns the ignition and drives it out of the factory. It is only with effort that the car manages to break the ribbon draped across the door of the garage.

June 1948: A filmed performance of the National Anthem written by Hanns Eisler, the cynical composer who had come to Judenstaat to write a vicious song cycle about the funny little Jewish state. He never left.

“May fortune and peace be granted

to Judenstaat our monument.

All the world is yearning for peace.

Give the nations your hand.”

The choir performs outdoors, with scaffolding and half-constructed landmarks all over a packed square on the fifth anniversary of Liberation Day. They sing below the Stripes and Star, dressed, as was the fashion of the time, in concentration camp uniforms with red neckerchiefs to honor Soviet liberators.

Much later—1960: More amateur footage, eight-millimeter, surely taken by the father of one of the children in a Youth Group choir as they sing the “Hymn of the Ghetto Partisans,” one of the few Yiddish songs that Bundist children learned by rote:

“
Never say that you have reached the final road

Though the lead-gray clouds conceal blue skies above.

The hour that we've longed for now draws near.

Our steps proclaim like drum-beats: We are here!”

WE ARE HERE
: The Credo of the Bund. We aren't going anywhere. We turn death into life. That's what it means, to live in Judenstaat.

Judit herself had sung that hymn with far more vigor than she'd ever sung the National Anthem. She'd even taught it to Hans. She'd hoped to teach it to her children, just as she'd assumed Hans would teach them to play instruments. She had imagined songs for each of the three girls with distinctly pitched voices: a flute, a clarinet, an oboe.

Judit had been pregnant when she'd edited
Monument.
Maybe her determination to include the images had been driven by sheer happiness, a generosity verging on arrogance that made her certain that the Russians took those pictures with the best intentions. She'd fought hard to include them, those excruciating Chelmno corpses, the girls in the Dresden trench. A few weeks later, the midwife couldn't find a heartbeat. She'd sent her for a sonogram, which estimated that the baby had stopped growing at week sixteen. Judit had counted backwards and had landed on the date she'd finished
Monument.

Did Shaindel sing the song of the Ghetto Partisans? Certainly not. Loschwitz girls never sang at all because their voices would carry through walls and seduce the men who pored over their volumes of the Talmud. Shaindel was maybe eight years old, just the age that their first daughter would have been.

 

4

BEFORE
Judit could even get past Mr. Rosenblatt at the front gate, he told her to go straight to Kornfeld's office. She found him waiting in the hall, and he threw his arms around her and laughed, “Judit, why didn't you tell me?”

She wriggled out of his embrace. “Tell you what?”

“That's she's on the project. This is going to save us! When I heard the news last night, I thought, Judit's behind it. I should have known you had a card up your sleeve, sweetheart.”

Kornfeld was so effusive and looked so diminished and vulnerable away from his desk that Judit felt more embarrassed than confused. She did need to admit that she had no idea what he was talking about.

“Anna Lehmann. Your own Anna Lehmann has signed on as historical consultant,” Kornfeld said. “You're telling me you didn't know?”

“I'm telling you I didn't know,” Judit said.

“But you're in touch with her. She recommended you for this job, didn't she?”

“Ten years ago,” said Judit, but Kornfeld still insisted that she had to be responsible. Now that Lehmann was a player, things would really start moving, and there'd be no more talk about involvement from across the border. He walked Judit back to his office, all the while chattering about what Lehmann would bring to the project, her air of authority, her wide-ranging connections.

“I didn't speak with her personally,” Kornfeld said. “Not yet. She's over in Moscow right this minute, meeting with important people. They're releasing all kinds of information there, and we might even have something to show the public by the end of December. You know—a preview.”

Judit felt dizzy. She did suspect that she might have something to do with Professor Lehmann's involvement. It was certainly on the strength of Lehmann's recommendation that the National Museum had hired her at all, and when Hans died, she'd gotten a note from Lehmann, a very affectionate and sympathetic letter written in Yiddish with an invitation to “
visit an old woman in Leipzig who remembers fondly the little girl with the big eyes who never turned down a cup of tea from her professor.
”

She hadn't kept track of Anna Lehmann's career. She hadn't kept track of anyone's career. She'd just kept working. Yet it didn't surprise her that Lehmann had kept track of that work and found a way to interfere—“interfere” was the only word she could think of. That interference angered and flattered her in equal measure.

*   *   *

Judit had met Anna Lehmann a year after Hans, and the encounter had made her reconsider the direction of her career. When Judit enrolled at the university, she'd assumed she'd be an archeologist, but the National Parks had become controversial. Some professors dismissed the digs as “state-sponsored boosterism,” and an angry minority asked pointed questions during lectures that challenged the patriotism of the instructors. The history department was even worse. The best professors lost their jobs in 1968, and the only ones left gave dry lectures on the Golden Age of Ashkenaz or Bundist ideology and its relation to the Churban, and it was always assumed that there was a Stasi plant in the auditorium.

In short, the academic world was in upheaval. Times were changing, and no one knew what direction things would take. Judit entered the graduate program in library science, hoping to stay out of that disgusting conversation. Still, when she was accepted into Lehmann's famous seminar on historical analysis, she was so surprised, and the seat was so coveted, she couldn't turn it down.

Anna Lehmann had seemed very old back then. She must have been sixty, maybe. Everyone called her Grandmother Professor. The seminar was held in her home in the center of Leipzig, a pretty house with flower boxes in the windows. She had once lived with another lady, a specialist in old instruments who was the only one permitted to touch the organ in the community hall that used to be Saint Thomas's Church, the instrument that had been played by Bach. Her portrait was on the mantle, and her tuning fork was on a piano no one played.

Lehmann was fluent in most European languages, but specialized in Russian, and also a strange form of Hebrew that was developed at the turn of the century in the Rothschild colony in Palestine. Her three-volume study of the failed experiment had taken fifteen years to write. Back in the '50s, she'd published articles on the Soviet Autonomous Region of Birobidjan and had gotten into trouble with the censors, and the very fact that she had been kept on after '68 spoke to both the importance of her work, and also her enduring reputation.

The other students in the seminar dismissed Judit as “the librarian,” but for reasons no one understood, Lehmann cultivated her and even allowed her access to her Palestine materials, which were kept not in the campus library, but in a steamer trunk in her own study.

It was while poring over the photographs and documents in Lehmann's trunk that Judit learned that history, like archeology, was something she could rub between her fingers. The photographs from the years before the Great War were yellow, cracked, and exceedingly immediate: bearded men wearing weird knickers, girls in knickers too, and knotted head-scarves. They looked sun-struck and terrified. They carried spades in their hands. Judit leafed through diaries in Cyrillic, bound in leather stained with rain or even blood for all she knew. Exotic flowers were pressed between their pages.

There were a hundred reasons why the Rothschild colony disappeared: the war, the climate, T.E. Lawrence and the promises the British made to Syria and Jordan, even the Russian Revolution. Yet Anna Lehmann's own argument—one that gained currency—was that the messianic element doomed the project from the start. “Messianic” wasn't even her name for it. It was their own. Palestine Jews believed that in returning to the land mentioned in the scriptures, they would become the agents of their own salvation.

“Are you the agents of your own salvation? Are you Biblical prophets?” Lehmann addressed the eight students who sat on plush little stools and a big couch in her living room sipping tea from Meissen china. She was a big woman who wore a housedress like a length of wallpaper. Her steel-gray hair was cut in the shape of a bowl. Really, there was nothing grandmotherly about her.

“No, Grandmother Professor,” they all replied.

“Good,” she said. “Don't be. Biblical prophets make terrible historians. They never bother with the past, and they always mistake the present for the future. Now sharpen your swords, boys and girls. Beat them into plowshares. Harvest what we've sown and bring it back to Grandmother Professor.” That meant they should write papers, and read them out loud in the seminar.

Judit volunteered to present her paper first. It had been based on public records she had found in Leipzig's town hall, and she'd spent long hours writing out requests and waiting for documents and missed a chance to hear Hans perform in a string quartet. He said he understood, but she could tell it mattered to him. All that work had to be worth the sacrifice.

She'd transcribed columns of names and figures into her notebook, and the resulting five-page paper was so dense with information that Professor Lehmann stopped her after half a page and said, “Again, Ginsberg. Slowly this time.” She did her best to slow down. Then Professor Lehmann said to her, “That won't do.”

“What won't do?” Judit was startled. She'd been expecting praise. In fact, the other seven students were no less surprised.

“This reading of the facts. It won't do. The information,” Lehmann said, “is certainly correct. The names of the contractors, are, no doubt, accurate, as are the figures. Nor do I doubt that the contracts were given to those with American connections, as you imply.”

“She doesn't come right out and claim it,” said the student who had volunteered to read his paper next.

“As you imply,” Lehmann continued, addressing Judit. “And it's very likely that people surrounding Stephen Weiss were hardly choirboys, as we all know.”

The mention of Weiss changed the temperature of the room. This was 1974, after all, and times had changed to the point where one might talk about Americans in a way that showed sophistication, but never Stephen Weiss. Never like that.

Now, Anna Lehmann turned to the other students. She said, “What Miss Ginsberg has written is an excellent example of the difference between ideology and history. Deductive reasoning begins with a principle and marshals evidence to justify that principle. In this case, the principle would be Bundist orthodoxy.”

Judit bristled. The hair on her arms and head literally spiked out like porcupine quills.

“You seem insulted,” said Professor Lehmann. “Yet of course, five years ago, that would have been the highest praise.” She smiled a little with her sour, badly lipsticked mouth, but that smile didn't touch the rest of her face. “Never begin with a principle, boys and girls. Or you'll end up being the agents of your own salvation, and we all know where that leads. Clear your heads of all that nonsense.”

How could it be nonsense? Judit had grown up with principles. She had been taught that corrupt motives lead to corrupt results. Judit's research had confirmed that contracts given by the Cultural Ministry in 1949 had benefited a handful of stockholders in New York. That wasn't ideology. It was just true.

Lehmann, in her uncanny way, addressed what Judit left unspoken. “Why do we seek the truth? Not to pass judgment, surely. We can no more pass judgment on a fact than we can pass judgment on the weather. When we pass judgment on the weather, we call that ‘small talk.' I suspect, Ginsberg, that you don't think much of small talk.”

Judit was silent, but her thoughts were grim. Also, her heart was pounding.

“Now, it's far more interesting to take those speculators on their own terms. Were they doing something wrong? They lived in an age of speculation. They lived in their own ideological atmosphere with their own set of principles, and it is far more interesting to define those principles. Name them.”

“Alright,” said Judit. “They're called greed.”

Lehmann turned to the other students. “Surely you children haven't lost your imaginations entirely. Surely you haven't smoked so much marijuana”—Lehmann's great joke was that her students all smoked too much marijuana—“that you're incapable of fixing one thought to another.”