Judenstaat (6 page)

What did she know about Hans? He had no memory of his mother and father. He'd spent his first few years with an uncle who owned a tavern and who had crossed the border into Brandenburg, leaving Hans at the Chemmitz Home for Unclaimed Children.

Judit did the math in her head. So he'd been born just after Liberation. And if he'd never known his parents, they must have fled just after Judenstaat was established. Were they musicians too? “I haven't a clue,” said Hans. And they just left him with an uncle in a tavern? “It was a very nice tavern,” Hans said. “Sawdust on the floor. Clean curtains. Three solid meals a day.”

“So your parents couldn't feed you? That's why they abandoned you?”

“What makes you think they abandoned me? I tell you, I have no idea. And I couldn't care less, frankly. As far as I'm concerned, I just sprang up like a weed and kept on growing.”

There was a dizzying and rootless quality to Hans, with his big apartment two kilometers from campus in a shabby neighborhood where he piled stacks of sheet music as tall as Judit, and kept a bin of soapy water on the coal-fed heater to wash dishes. He had a sink, but most of the time, laundry soaked there. The first time Judit spent the night, they cooked canned stew on his hotplate, and she was amazed that he could anticipate such terrible food with such enthusiasm.

“You'll have to introduce me to home cooking,” he'd said. “All musicians are citizens of the world.”

Judit laughed. Hans was nearly thirty, but he sounded like an earnest schoolboy. “If you weren't a Saxon, I'd accuse you of being a Cosmopolitan.”

Hans let the comment pass. But Judit wished she could have taken it back. It had felt sophisticated to use that word, but everyone knew professors who had lost their jobs in 1968.

Still, back then, Judit was an unreconstructed Bundist. What if Hans really was a Cosmopolitan, loyal to nothing but himself? What if he didn't believe in a state with a Jewish character? Or worse yet, what if he was one of those Saxons who rewrote history and denied any Jewish claim to the land? Where were his parents during the war? Did they play a role in the Churban? Judit couldn't bring herself to ask these questions. Instead, she watched the hotplate glow as he searched for his can opener and cooked that stew right in the can. He had two spoons.

 

2

THE
textbooks Judit read in school all marked the years after Liberation with arrows bending across eastern territory into Judenstaat. Each arrow was marked with a number: three thousand, sixty thousand, eighty thousand Jews streaming into the country. Then, there were arrows that pointed outward from Judenstaat, west, to Germany: ninety thousand so-called Saxons.

Well, some of them stayed. No doubt, Hans's uncle had one of those Righteous Gentile certificates displayed in that tavern. They weren't hard to get, back then. It just took a single Jewish witness. Even now, you can still find them framed in some old Saxon-owned cafés. Borders always shift after a war. Half of the population is on the road. One might speak of justice—a rough justice—for the Muslims who choose a destiny in Pakistan or the Japanese who pull up shallow roots and leave the nations that they'd occupied, or the East Prussians who may or may not lay claim to disputed territory. Those who remain should have few expectations.

*   *   *

Saxons were just a footnote to heroic years of rebuilding: American-funded reconstruction of the Opera House, the new Parliament that rose like a white wave on a field of rubble, artful and modern Bauhaus apartment blocks, all blue and yellow like the flag, and thanks to Soviet engineering, somehow and suddenly those trolleys that would take you just about everywhere.

The night the electricity started working, everyone stayed up and filled the streets, pushing their baby carriages—everyone had babies—or in the case of Rudolph or Leonora, just strolling because Judit was not yet born. The cafés were open too. Back then, there were forty newspapers in Dresden alone, half in German, a dozen in Yiddish, the rest in languages that ranged from Russian to English to Hungarian. The Bundist Party organ,
A Home,
was still published in Yiddish in those days.

Judit read about all of this in Bruno Webber's classic book
The Battle of the Languages,
where he described debates between Leopold Stein and the Yiddishists. In 1950, all of the state-run newspapers switched to German, and mobs overturned printing presses until Soviet soldiers had to fire in the air to maintain order. After that, the other Yiddish newspapers were shut down.

Years later, who knows how, a story came out. Joseph Stalin had said to Stein during their historic Yalta meeting, “Don't give me another country full of Yiddish speakers. They're not to be trusted. Birobidjan was a disaster. We had to get rid of most of those Jews in '38.”

More widely known was Stephen Weiss's reaction when he was asked to weigh in on the matter. “Well, we could always speak Esperanto.”

*   *   *

The role of Stephen Weiss would soon be clear, as laid out in his secret manifesto. The foreigners hired to build roads, the supplies trucked from Berlin, the open borders, they were all the first step to a full invasion bankrolled by America, and there would be brutal consequences. After the espionage crisis, Leopold Stein's legendary vigor faded, month by month, and when it became clear just how deeply the Cosmopolitans had infiltrated, it would only be so long before Stein himself would be held accountable.

Judit was just two years old when Stein suffered his stroke in 1953. Her parents, like everyone in Judenstaat, could remember the moment when they heard the news, in Rudolph's case from a neighbor who stood in the courtyard, staring at the gray sunlight as though he couldn't believe the day was still a day. As for Leonora, some instinct made her turn on the radio. The two of them put Judit in a baby carriage that she was too big for, and went to the square that would be named after Stein that same year. They stood there with five thousand others, waiting for something to happen.

Stein had been attending Stalin's funeral, along with dignitaries from around the world. Afterwards, he'd been found unconscious on the floor of his hotel room. He was flown to a special hospital, accompanied by a male nurse from Odessa. Jews packed into the square between the Opera House and the smooth sandstone edifice of Parliament where a black banner draped the columns, and they watched snow drift down, big flakes that didn't melt right away.

Judit was certain she remembered snow. She also remembered that there were smears of lamplight or candlelight everywhere. She tried to catch those smears of light, but they melted on her mittens. She kept on trying. She got wet through, but neither of her parents noticed, and she didn't cry.

*   *   *

1954: Dresden suburb raided for provisions, a kindergarten burning. Fragments of newsreels document the aftermath of raids by Nazi bandits across a barren landscape. Fire boiling up in black and white. Fire spreads and turns the Elbe into a stream of dirty milk. Sandstone cliffs glow in the distance, steep, the surreal formations of the region once called Saxon Switzerland with its hidden tunnels and countless caves.

1955: Newsreel. Soviet troops stand at the ready, in persistent rain. Their fur hats are wet, and around them, black sandstone dissolves into brown streams that foam and boil into eroded crevices like brewing cauldrons. Out of the cavern creep three ghastly Saxons, raising their arms in surrender as they bow their heads. The cache of arms, glinting as the camera is thrust into the cave: explosive devices, German Lugers and assault rifles, bazookas shipped from America. The next year, Judenstaat sealed the border and began work on the Protective Rampart.

And they told Judit that one of those Saxons crossed that border and killed Hans Klemmer. Or they lied about who killed him. Or they lied about his death. The footage at the reel's end flapped with a kind of recklessness.

 

3

KORNFELD
pushed the footage back at Judit. “What can I say?”

Judit tried to keep her tone civil. “I thought you asked for a historical overview.”

“Actually, no,” said Kornfeld. “What we want is a historical reckoning.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means, what do we add up to, Judit? We can't show the face of forty years ago. We need to show where we'll be forty years from now.”

“Sorry, Oscar. That I can't tell you,” Judit said.

Kornfeld cleared his throat. Then he leaned across his desk and said in a lower voice, “They're thinking of bringing in someone. A director.”

“To direct what?”

“Interviews. Maybe work with a script.” So it was going to be another parade of Kornfeld's camp survivors speaking against a backdrop of stock footage while a ponderous voice read out the numbers on their tattoos.

But that was not the specter haunting Judit. It was the footage she'd been screening when the stranger left that note—that unmarked reel. The canister looked like a hundred other canisters.

Kornfeld misread what Judit's face was doing. “The director isn't my idea. Believe me. She's from across the border. From Germany.” Kornfeld's voice hardened. “You know this couldn't come from me.”

It wasn't like Judit to let films go uncatalogued. Yet she'd been thrown off balance then, and she might well have left it anywhere. That voice—that note—it was all bound up with the grainy images that looked so much like all the other Soviet footage from 1947 back when Leopold Stein had his beard and nothing had been reconstructed. But no—she had not seen that film before and couldn't find it now.

“You're not even listening,” said Kornfeld. “I told you, we're on a deadline and this feels more and more like it's out of my hands.” He shook his head. “I just wish you'd reconsider about video transfer. If we could work faster, they might lay off. A program like Paint Box—Sammy's work is really something. Look at this still.”

He pulled out a blurry frame from a folder and laid it down: Anton Steinsaltz and Khrushchev on a beach somewhere. She hadn't seen the original, but she could tell that cracks and white space had been smoothed away. Both men were in formal dress and sat on folding chairs, facing the ocean. Someone lurked behind them, obscured by sunlight, a shaggy figure in bathing trunks.

“Who's that?” Judit asked. “A lifeguard?”

“That, darling, is John Fitzgerald Kennedy,” said Kornfeld. He formed the words one at a time, all the while looking at her. “Do you know what that means?”

“Not really,” Judit said.

“It makes us look at Anton Steinsaltz all over again,” Kornfeld said. “That's what I mean. We think of him as a hack—or maybe some old ghetto fighter with a knife behind his back. We think of Judenstaat as closed off to the world, and here Steinsaltz is in 1961 with Kennedy.
Kennedy!
This is just the sort of thing that would make them leave us alone to do our goddamned work! And if we have the tools to polish those old images it's like—” He struggled to find the right words. “—like polishing a precious stone. In the Media Room, with those computers—”

“I get it,” Judit said. “The image looks like crap. You can tell it's been doctored. The sunlight's coming from the wrong direction. I will not fabricate. It will not happen.”

Kornfeld sat back and took his aluminum worry-balls from their mounted shelf. He rolled them between his hands. “Thank God for the Protective Rampart at least. I'll tell you, Judit, I'm all for free trade, minority rights, all that stuff, believe me. Sokolov's the only reason we have a future at all. But a German. From Berlin. Hell. Why would anyone in their right mind choose a German to direct a film about the future of the Jewish state?”

*   *   *

Judit knew Kornfeld would dismiss material about the Saxon Question. Even her mother—who had once told her not to take candy from the Saxon lady who cleaned the hallways—even Leonora said a while ago, “You know, Judi, I have to say that the Saxons show a lot more sense than a lot of Jews when it comes to voting. If it wasn't for them, Prime Minister Sokolov would never have won, what with the parasites in the provinces”—she meant the black-hats—“and now we'd be so isolated from the world, I wouldn't even be able to get a television signal.”

Leonora certainly hadn't felt that way the first time Judit had brought Hans home. Granted, that had happened far too soon, only because Hans had gotten tickets for a concert in Dresden and Leonora had called the dormitory several times and didn't believe her when she said she'd been out with friends. What friends? Evasion never worked with Leonora. Judit warned Hans that her mother was a handful, but even she was shaken when the first thing Leonora said to Hans was, “What did your parents do in the war?”

Hans replied, “I don't know, Mrs. Ginsberg.”

“Mom, he never knew his parents,” Judit said. “He's an orphan.”

“I thought you said he didn't know if his parents were alive or dead. If he's an orphan, then they're dead. So are they dead or alive?” Leonora asked, pursuing the question in a way that amazed Hans to the point of speechlessness. Since he didn't speak, she went on. “Understand, I have a number on my arm. My husband—may he rest in peace—grew up right here in Dresden, but your people shipped him to a concentration camp in Riga. I have the right to ask anything I want, Judit. Don't make that face.”

Hans did speak then. “I was told they died.”

“How?” Leonora asked.

Hans said, “I don't know. And I don't want to know.”

“What's wrong with you that you don't want to know what happened to your own mother and father?”

Hans paused. Then he said, “I think there are some things I don't have to know. I think, sometimes, when you don't know, you're free.”