A Chosen Few (6 page)

Irene Runge loved it all. Mia Lehmann found it amusing. She walked around the Kulturverein imitating a rabbi, periodically raising an index finger skyward and mockingly asking, “But is it kosher?” and then breaking into a mischievous grin. A woman volunteer with a slight Australian accent muttered, “I will never be a Lubavitcher.” Then she added, “Of course, I never thought I would be doing some of the things I’ve been doing in the past few years.”

German television crews were making the most of the search for chametz, since they were forbidden to film an actual seder. They seemed to find great visual material at the Kulturverein, zooming in on David Marlowe as he sealed off a room with tape because it was not yet kosherized. The German press loves Jewish stories as an affirmation—something positive to say about the new Germany. Yes, neo-Nazis and adolescent skinheads were roaming the streets attacking foreigners, but there were also Jews, and they were doing some kind of Jewish holiday.

The press attention was annoying to David Marlowe, in part because he was shy and did not appreciate attention, but also because German history weighed heavily on his thoughts. He felt that a new generation of Germans was trying to document the few Jews their parents had failed to kill. “What do they want with us?” he muttered. Irene Runge, on the other hand, was not shy, and she
very much appreciated the media attention. She had an instinct for the snappy quote and soon learned that such one-liners are to journalists what cookies are to bears.

One German journalist who had failed to make arrangements to cover this year’s preparations asked Irene if she would do another seder next year. “Since Jews have been doing this for about three thousand years,” she said with irritation, “we will probably do it next year.” Then she added impishly, “Unless the Mashiach comes.” One of her favorite things about the Orthodox was their adherence to the ancient belief that one day the Mashiach, the Messiah, would come. This expectation of the Messiah is at the heart of a debate about the State of Israel. Some Orthodox, even some of those living in Israel, believe that a state of Israel should not be declared until the Messiah comes. When He does come, the temple that the Romans destroyed will descend rebuilt in Jerusalem, and all Jews from around the world will return there. But in the meantime, Irene loved to joke with the Orthodox about His coming. “I hope He comes tonight so I don’t have to go to work tomorrow,” she would say at the end of a particularly hard day.

Being a Lubavitcher, imbued with the missionary spirit, David cornered whatever men were around and tried to persuade them to tie
tefillin
—two small leather boxes containing four biblical passages. The boxes have leather straps, and one box is tied tightly to one arm, while the other is tied to the forehead. Short morning prayers are recited. The strange spectacle confused Mia Lehmann’s radar for people in trouble, and with a look of real concern, as though the leather straps were a kind of desperate tourniquet, she walked up to a volunteer onto whom David had lashed the little boxes. “What’s happened to you?” she asked in a sympathetic voice.

After the cleaning was completed, five pieces of chametz, which in this case came from a cookie Marlowe had brought with him, were placed around the Kulturverein and the veteran Communists, equipped with a feather for sweeping and a lit candle, as is tradition, began the final purge, searching for the hidden pieces. Once found, the chametz was burned out on the courtyard balcony, leaving the Latin American women at the multicultural women’s group across the way to wonder what could possibly be going on.

Irene Runge and David Marlowe differed in more than their politics and personalities. Marlowe was a religious Jew, and Judaism is a deeply intellectual religion. Never is this more apparent
than in the Passover seder, where various food items are presented as symbols, each discussed, and then eaten. Questions are asked, and answers pressed for. “Why is this night different from all other nights?” has the simple response that on this night only bread without leavening is eaten. But the prescribed questions and answers are intended as only a point of departure for a discussion on the Book of Exodus, the story of Moses leading the Jews from Egypt. Among the issues to be discussed are the relationship between God and man, what it means to be a Jew, and what freedom is.

This was David Marlowe’s idea of a Passover seder. To Irene Runge, it was fun to be kosher and fun to be Orthodox, but above all it had to be a good evening in which things kept moving. None of her guests at this seder were religious. She was trying to build up a Jewish nucleus and did not want to alienate these people with religious discussions; for many of them, it would be their first seder. If a law was inconvenient, she felt, it should be dropped. The ritual washing of the hands in the middle of the seder was to be skipped. “We can’t have fifty people running to the washroom!” said Irene.

“We could carry a basin to them,” David suggested.

“There’s no room!” she shouted, as though from an uptown New York window.

“It’s not optional,” David mumbled softly. But in the end he gave in.

In addition to the difficulties involved in getting a group of volunteers with little experience in large-scale cooking to turn out a kosher meal for fifty, Irene faced the problem that David Marlowe was not only schooled in Jewish dietary laws but had once been in the catering business and had taken a course in hygiene. He searched for invisible salmonella with the same zeal with which he pursued unseen chametz. With the combined forces of science and religion at work, it was not certain that any food was edible, but somehow an odd and inelegant meal of salads, chicken soup, and prepackaged gefilte fish was produced.

The guests arrived at eightish, which seemed to Irene a reasonable hour to invite people for dinner. But David would not start until the official sunset, which was at 8:45. In the meantime he locked himself in a room dressed in his dark suit and hat and prayed, while the guests were left to roam the Kulturverein wondering what was wrong. A heavy-set woman who had survived the entire Nazi epoch in Berlin by hiding, furtively unwrapped a hard
candy and popped it into her granddaughter’s mouth, whispering in German, “Eat it quickly, it’s not kosher.”

Finally the Haggadahs, the books containing the seder ritual and the story of the flight from Egypt, were passed out to the guests in German, English, Russian, and French with accompanying He-brew. David Marlowe took his place at the head table in front of a bay window, from which the women in tights and sequin strings could be seen taking their work positions on the street one story below. Irene sat next to David so that she could translate into German as he read through the Haggadah, pausing to explain and invite questions. “We say ‘Next year in Jerusalem,’ but there is a Jerusalem we could go to this year,”—and he explained that the current State of Israel did not follow strict religious practices and so Jews must wait for the Messiah.

The seder crowd on the first night of Passover included many old-line Communists like Mia Lehmann and an East German authority on Sartre who had been born in France while his father was fighting with the Resistance. These people were strangers to religion, but they understood intellectualism and were prepared to listen to David’s explanations. The first night went fairly smoothly, in part because there were a number of German Jews present who had lived in Israel, and being fluent in Hebrew, they could lead in the singing of songs and reciting of prayers. There were some minor language problems, as when David told the participants that they should feel free to schmooze, which in Yiddish means “to chat” but in German means “to neck or make out.”

The second night, the crowd was largely Russian, including many sophisticated Muscovites such as Stanislava Mikhalskaia, an attractive young architect who could get no architectural work in Germany, and Kima Gredina, a doctor and novelist who had traded partial censorship of her books in Russia for no publication of them at all in Germany.

David carefully explained each step of the seder, while the Russians expectantly stared at their wine glasses. He recounted the Passover legend of the four sons who ask the questions—the wise, the wicked, the simple, and the unquestioning. Explaining that these were the different types of Jews, he added his own Lubavitch doctrine of a fifth son who didn’t come at all because he didn’t know this was Passover. Most of the Jews these people had ever known were of the fifth son type. But David was quick to add that “it is none of you, because you are all here.”

Irene muttered, “He’s talking too much,” fearing that people would start leaving. Unlike the first night, there were no Israelis to lead in the songs tonight—but that well-known Ukrainian actor-singer and irrepressible ham, Mark Aizikovitch, was there. He had spent the first night at a special Russian seder at Alexanderplatz, where he did not have to stick to “Dayenu” and the other Hebrew songs that he didn’t really know. The people there had been thrilled to get his standard repertoire. Tonight, with the first part of the seder over and everyone merrily eating their kosher dinner, David agreed that Aizikovitch could sing whatever he wanted. After teasing David with the opening bars of “Hello, Dolly,” Aizikovitch did a series of comic Yiddish songs. A few of the old Communists remembered the words and sang along. This music was popular in Germany.

Then David resumed reading the last stretch of the Haggadah in Hebrew.

Suddenly Aizikovitch got an idea. As an intuitive entertainer, he could see that the crowd’s interest in all this Hebrew recitation was waning. But he knew a Hebrew song that always pleased. The Russians had requested it the night before, and it had been the perfect grand finale. With no warning, Mark Aizikovitch, in his deep baritone, broke into “Hatikvah,” “The Hope,” once the an-them of Zionism and now the Israeli national anthem. How could he have known how taboo this song was to ultra-Orthodox Jews like David Marlowe? But instead of cutting Aizikovitch off, Marlowe simply burst out laughing and declared the seder finished. It was the only way to avoid the sacrilege of singing the national anthem in the middle of a seder. He was not unhappy. Given the twentieth-century history of this city, it was enough that there were Jews having a seder here at all.