Judenstaat (27 page)

Thus, the recent German fascist experiment in genocide was merely the expression, in complete terms, of an established dynamic. However, the distinguishing feature of German fascism was not the hatred of Jews generally, but the abolition of Jews altogether. In this, they came close to success. Yet like an overheated engine, the fascist machine spent its fuel in ways that guaranteed destruction. We are that fuel. We have survived them.

 

IV. Current Circumstances and Opportunities

At the time of this writing, survivors are dispersed throughout the globe, though we have gathered in increasing numbers in the zones of occupation here in Germany. It is clear that we can no longer serve as partners for conventional nation-states, with their flags, anthems, and armies.

The concentration of power in the United States and the Soviet Union has, to a great extent, made Nations obsolete. To be a Nation now is to have not only a common culture and landmass, but to establish a relationship with one of these two central powers. In our current landscape, no nation-state can exist unless it is, essentially, a colony.

For Americans, those colonies are a means to protect global capital. For the Soviet Union, the colonies are a means to secure borders against hostile forces and supply their own population with goods and services. In both cases, we survivors are offered an opportunity to renew and expand our historic role. We might accommodate both global capital and Soviet security by serving both interests.

We Jews will establish ourselves as a vanguard for both parties which, indeed, are only superficially in conflict. For the Soviets and the Americans, we will provide a center for world trade where resources can cross borders in both directions without calling either party's ideological principles into question. After all, we Jews are demons. Who expects demons to have principles?

We will certainly be met with revulsion and terror. That is our expectation. As survivors, we have suffered the ultimate catastrophe, all the more reason why we might deflect outrage. An irrational response from a survivor of genocide is expected, and credible. Thus, both the Soviet Union and the United States might use our irrationality to mask their own base actions.

On those terms, we will establish a haven where the following will be pretty much generally applicable:

1. Refuge for all survivors.

2. Concentration of banks and headquarters of international industries.

3. Permanent occupation by both Soviet and American forces.

4. Collective ownership of the Churban and a claim to the unique nature of our genocide.

You are horrified that we depend upon the same deep-set revulsion that inspired persecution and arguably led to genocide. Yet if we return to our own countries, certainly we return into similar conditions, and far less security. Fear of Jews is as deep-seated as fear of the dark.

Furthermore, who among us can claim a country? What is our history but a series of border-crossings, flag after irrelevant and foolish flag? The only banner for the Jews is the banner of memory. It is memory that defines us. It is memory that they fear.

As individual Churban survivors, we know that a personal response cannot move beyond vengeance. By uniting, we achieve breathtaking power. We use the very fear that we inspire to create a bridge between reason and terror, between the visible and invisible worlds. We ourselves become a monument.

A monument to what?

That is a question history will answer. Just as we believe that the very thing that makes men brothers also makes them butchers, we might also agree that the very thing that makes Jews hated makes us free. Consider where that freedom led such men as Marx, Freud, and Einstein, Jews who crossed into countries that no map could mark, and who returned to a landscape changed by their very crossing. The bridge they crossed transcends national utility. It is a bridge to the irrational, and to the future.

As survivors, we will never cease for a moment to instill in our fellow Jews the clearest possible recognition of the corruption of both East and West, and we openly declare our ends can only be attained by being hated as the cunning face of worldwide capital and the vanguard of Soviet oppression. Yet what shall we do with our freedom?

We promise this: we will refuse to hate ourselves. Let all who defy us tremble and recoil.

We have nothing to lose.

 

5

FREDERICKA
was, as she put it, “pumped” for the premiere at Parliament that night. She confided to Judit that the director of the Conrad Wolf Academy was near retirement, and if she “performed up to standard,” she'd not only fill his position but reinvent the institution as a true Center for German Media. “Watch. In a few years, we'll be the capital of Europe.”

Judit said, “I'm not from Berlin, Freddi.”

She shrugged. “Okay. But face it. We're leading parallel lives. We're even dressing alike.” She gestured towards their shoes and stockings. “I like the patterned ones too. They're a little campy, a little racy, keep you from looking like a man in a skirt. You'll move right in and make this place world-class.”

Judit looked at the stockings and wondered who'd chosen them. They looked like something a prostitute would wear. She said, “I haven't been asked to move in. I'm not sure I want to.”

“You want some turtle in charge? Oh, no you don't!” Fredericka said. “The era of the turtles is behind us now. It's the year of the hare. Don't look like that. What? You want Gluck running the museum?”

“He's welcome to it,” Judit said.

Freddi persisted. “It's really essential that we help each other now. I mean, everything's happening so fast. There are so many opportunities, and with your people pulling for you, with your connections abroad—”

“I don't have connections abroad,” Judit said. Her tone was hostile.

“I don't mean to imply anything,” said Fredericka. She seemed genuinely hurt. “I mean, with your people in Hollywood—”

“My father's family lived in Dresden for over a hundred years. My mother was born in a village in southern Poland that I can't even pronounce the name of.” Judit was overwhelmed with weariness. What she really wanted to do was ask Freddi about her own connections in Berlin, if she knew a private, inexpensive way to end a pregnancy, but such was the direction of the conversation that, instead, she said, “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to sound that way.”

“Well, you do sound that way,” Freddi said. “And I don't deserve it. I know you're under a lot of pressure, but you'll have to think differently now. Especially after the premiere. We'll be working together one way or another.”

“Who else is on the panel?” Judit asked.

“Oh, your old professor, of course,” Freddi said, happy to change the subject. “And those two old partisans—Jewish and Saxon. Very dramatic stuff, really spectacular. Don't change those stockings, sweetie,” she added. “They're spectacular too.”

*   *   *

She didn't change her stockings. But after that conversation, she felt determined to change something. She knew she ought to just go home and get some sleep, but since the film was finished, she'd had troubling dreams. She dreamed that she was buried alive, and burrowed out from underneath, and she emerged, soiled, naked, deeply embarrassed, and had the sensation that she'd given birth not to a baby but to herself, and in another country. She dreamed that there was something in the pocket of the duffle coat—the one she'd worn for years—and she couldn't remember where she'd put the coat or even why she'd worn it for so long, but she tossed everything else out of her closet, and only then remembered that she'd given that coat to a little girl in Loschwitz. Somehow, Judit had to find out what was in that pocket, which meant she had to find the girl who would take her to a room above a kosher butcher where the uncle screened footage of Stephen Weiss addressing mobs of furious survivors.

Her body was a trap, tightened by mechanisms past her understanding. Yes, Bondi could spring that trap, but then she was wide open, and sometimes, that was worse. The blocks around the dairy restaurant were slated for demolition. She'd seen the first signs a week ago, official yellow notices in German, and almost at once, enormous Yiddish
pashkevils,
and clusters of black-hats reading them. Angry neighbors packed the restaurant, and the volume of their Yiddish arguments carried through the floor into the room where Judit lay next to Bondi hours later. She was still wearing those stockings, though nothing else.

“Are you warm enough?” Bondi asked.

Judit said, “Sure,” but when he pulled her against him, she felt warmer. “I wonder,” she said, “if they're really going to knock down all their neighborhoods. I mean, where will they all go?”

“They have a history of resilience,” Bondi said.

“I know. Like cockroaches. You sound like my mother.” Judit laughed, though not happily. “You know, the other day, I tried to find that dollar I'd gotten from Chabad House. I think it's still in the pocket of my old coat, but I can't find that either. Will they knock the Chabad House down too? Or turn the dome back into a restaurant?” Without waiting for an answer, she said, “Maybe instead of all that stuff about the Soviets and the partisans, I should have made a film about the black-hats. They're the real survivors.” She sat up and hugged her knees. “Joseph, how did you learn to write in Yiddish?”

Admittedly, the question seemed to come from nowhere. Bondi said, “It's not much of a trick. A lot of people do it.” That's all he said, but now he knew she'd read his note.

Judit went on. “I got something by courier. It's all in Yiddish, and I'm having trouble getting through it. I thought maybe we could work on it together.”

“Is it a new project?” Bondi asked.

“Maybe,” Judit said. “It's Stephen Weiss's manifesto.” It was only then that she returned Bondi's frankly exploratory look, and watched it deepen and hit something hard.

He said, “What about it?”

“It came from Anna Lehmann. She seemed to think it would interest you.” Even as she said those words, Judit would have given a lot to take them back again, because Bondi got out of bed and picked up his discarded clothing. Still, helplessly, she kept on talking. “Joseph, listen, she couldn't mean anything by it.” But now he was pulling on his boxer shorts and zipping his trousers. “What's the harm in reading it?” she asked him desperately. He turned his back before he answered.

“You trust her?”

“Shouldn't I?” Judit asked.

He said, “It's a hoax.” Still with his back turned, he pulled his undershirt on, and Judit put her hands on his shoulders and felt them give a little. It was only with effort that he continued. “The manifesto's fabricated.”

Then he turned around. When she saw his face, she had to say, “How do you know?”

Bondi sat on the daybed, in his trousers and undershirt, and Judit sat beside him, still wearing only those absurd stockings, yet he was the one who seemed disarmed. She was really cold now, and she pulled the synthetic bedspread over them both.

“Don't trust Lehmann,” said Bondi. “She doesn't want what's best for you. This need of yours—to always know and know—she feeds it, Judit.” He turned under the shelter of the bedspread. “My own mother was like that,” he said. “She was the one who taught me to write Yiddish.”

Judit said, “Joseph, you don't have to tell me a thing.”

“I think I do,” Bondi said. “Or Lehmann will tell you something half-true. My mother was an editor at that magazine,
The Book Peddler.
Her father was a Yiddish poet. She was very beautiful. I was twelve when she died. She killed herself somewhere in Russia. My father never forgave her, but I did. I suppose that's a character flaw.”

“What is?” Judit asked.

“Forgiveness,” said Bondi. “I don't make a cult of her, Judit. But she cared about this country and the Jewish people in ways that cynics like Lehmann can't imagine. They're opportunists. They can't understand a woman like my mother who really did believe that there was such a thing as justice.”

Of course, that was the source of the Yiddish books in the apartment, secular writers from Warsaw and Vilna, the poet who won the Stalin Prize, the notebook with the alphabet in pencil, those carefully drawn Hebrew characters in handwriting that Judit had recognized at once, though even then she didn't know what to do with what she'd recognized. This room was Bondi's heart. He'd let her in, and now she couldn't help but ask, “Why did she do it, Joseph?”

“She found out what happened to her father,” Bondi said. “It was after the magazine shut down. She had nothing to do with her time. She was under suspicion already. She crossed the border. I only found out what happened to her when I got to Moscow. She just kept digging and digging, Judit, and when you dig, what do you find? A corpse.” His voice broke. “Her father disappeared in '51—sure—like so many others, and the government claimed he'd emigrated, crossed into Germany, that he wasn't a Bundist, he was a traitor, a Cosmopolitan like Stephen Weiss.”

Judit said, “I still don't understand. What did she find out? What happened to him? How did he die?”

“Look, I'm not like you. I don't need to read the fine print. All I know is that I always thought I'd have to think one way and feel another. Now, our country is finally going in the right direction. After forty years, we can live normal lives. If we let ourselves. We can let ourselves.” He pulled Judit down beside him and they lay back in bed. He lowered his head onto her stomach, just at the uterus, and the sensation was both erotic and clinical. “How far along now?”