A Chosen Few (64 page)

T
HE NUMBER OF
J
EWS
in Germany suddenly increased. After reunification there were 30,000, and then the German government approved permission for 25,000 Soviet Jews to be distributed in all the major areas of Germany, welcomed, offered temporary housing and language lessons, and given a home in Germany. But it was not always clear why these Russians had come. When asked their reasons, they consistently said that it was because Berlin had nice weather. No one else had ever thought so.

Boris Kruglikov, 33, had been a railroad engineer until Mikhail Gorbachev came to power. Realizing the opportunities presented by glasnost, he started selling radios and VCRs on the Russian black market. Soon this business became legal. In 1991, on an electronics-buying trip to Germany, he learned about the program for Jews and immigrated to Germany with his wife. He had originally hoped to move on to the United States, but decided to remain in Germany. “The social services are good. I was told they are not good in the United States,” he explained.

Stanislava Mikhalskaia was born in Moscow in 1963. In 1990 she learned that her mother, who had been adopted by a Russian family, was originally the daughter of two Jews. Shortly after that a friend of hers went to Germany and told her about the new law. The Soviet Union had just survived a coup d’état attempt, and the future was looking uncertain and frightening. Since she now was Jewish, she applied, after first marrying her non-Jewish boyfriend. They both moved to Berlin. In Moscow they had both been successful
professionals with large apartments, a car, and a country home. In Berlin they moved into a fifty-square-foot room in an immigrant hostel. Eventually, they were able to find a small apartment, and Stanislava hoped to resume her profession as architect in time. But Germany worried her. “Germans are against foreigners, and now I think it is not a good country for Jews.” Still, like most Russian Jews in Germany, she planned to stay. Economic and political problems were steadily worsening in Russia.

Most of the Russian Jews arrived with excellent credentials but no skills. They were engineers, doctors, and scientists—but they somehow did not qualify for any work in the West. Their stories were not always convincing. One who spent time with coffee and cakes at the Kulturverein claimed to be a psychologist researching the creativity of left-handed people. He admitted that he did not exactly have a degree in psychology but he was, in fact, himself left-handed. Eugeni Elizatov, 34, from Turkmenia, claimed to be a matchmaker. In traditional Judaism marriages are arranged by a
shadkhan
whose business it was to know many families and bring together good matches. This looked to Elizatov to be a promising business in Berlin, because there were many Jews hoping to find Jewish mates. But he did not really know how to be a
shadkhan
according to Jewish law, because he didn’t know Jewish law. He said that his parents had both been Jewish, but they had given him no Jewish education. To offer his services to East Berlin Jews, he simply took their names and then tried to find an eligible woman in Leningrad who wanted to move to Germany. Not surprisingly, his clients had little confidence in this process, and in his first two years in Germany he did not make a single match, not even one for himself. His wife had divorced him before he moved.

Whatever their motives for coming, the Jewish communities around Germany welcomed the Russian Jews, and most of them tried to participate in their communities. By 1994, 70 percent of the nine thousand members of the Berlin Jewish Community were Russian. Few of the Russians knew anything about Judaism, but Jewish communities offered them courses in religion and Hebrew that, like all Jewish programs offered in Germany, were widely attended by German non-Jews. In fact, they outnumbered the Russians.

German Jews suspected that not all of these Russian immigrants were Jewish. A rumored figure was that 30 percent were non-Jews who had lied for papers. Considering that there were still Jews wanting to leave the former Soviet Union and that the 25,000
quota was already filled, with no assurances that any more would be allowed in, the Community was deeply disturbed by this. But there was little they could do. They did not want to rigorously interrogate each applicant because they understood how difficult it would be for Soviet Jews to prove their Jewishness after seventy years of Communism.

When Mark Aizikovitch came to Berlin, he discovered to his surprise a great local interest in traditional Yiddish songs. He had grown up hearing Yiddish in the Ukrainian town of Poltava. The few religious Jews there had died off and been given traditional funerals, as had his father, but when his mother died in 1985, he did not know how to say kaddish for her. He went to the few elderly men left in the neighborhood, but none of them knew either. Aizikovitch had received formal theatrical training, played Chekhov, and sang opera. But when times changed, he learned that the money was in folk rock, and he performed with a Ukrainian rock group called the Philharmonica. When he immigrated to Berlin with a non-Jewish wife and two children to support, he could see that no one was interested in Russian folk rock. Speaking no German, he had few possibilities in theater. But this great interest in the Yiddish folk songs of his childhood gave him his opportunity.

“All the Germans are doing a big business with Yiddish,” said an astonished Aizikovitch. “But the goyim don’t speak the Yiddish right. They don’t play the role. They don’t play the soul. They play a Jew. I don’t play a Jew. I learned those songs from my grandmother.”

At concerts and festivals of Yiddish music in Germany, thin young Germans with long blond hair would strum a guitar and sing Yiddish songs. Aizikovitch would plant his feet on the stage, and with broad gestures and wild black eyes, he would sing Yiddish in a voice trained to fill a large house. The Germans would stare at him. He was not doing it right. He was not like the other Yiddish singers.

One night, Irene Runge, always in search of things Jewish, was in the audience. “I thought, ‘Geez, this guy is unbelievable.’ One song, and then they get him offstage. Then they try not to let him onstage too much. He can sing the little evenings when nobody comes.”

Irene had been taking to some Western ways. She had a computer, a fax, a cordless telephone. She was getting really good at Western media. She cultivated relations with local reporters and
foreign correspondents. She made herself available to local press as a “Jewish expert,” then consulted by telephone with her rabbi in Jerusalem to see if what she had said was correct. She loved to show off what she knew, which may have been how the Stasi tricked her. But she was a die-hard
Ossi
who took to the pace of the West. And now she had another idea. She could sell Mark Aizikovitch. She could make his career happen. She knew how things worked in the West. She could be a New Yorker.

Carefully booking his appearances, she developed his image, telling him to avoid the gold chains and open shirts and keeping him away from the Yiddish programs with non-Jewish singers. Showing her fluency in both New York culture and Western-style marketing, she said, “He doesn’t fit into their hippie thing. He’s more Broadway, and they’re somewhere in the Village. They’re sitting in Washington Square singing, and he’s onstage, and that’s the problem. You know, they are all skinny and they don’t have any voice and the guilt feeling. He comes onstage, he looks great. He’s in a suit. Nobody wears a suit. They have some kind of rotten clothing … and he has a real trained voice and knows how to play with an audience, and you know that’s it!”

I
RENE
R
UNGE’S FATHER
was in his nineties when Irene became an outspoken Jewish figure. He reacted to her open display of Jewishness the way others had reacted when she revealed her Stasi ties. He was so angry,
broygez
, that he refused to speak to her anymore.

Irene was virtually unemployable because of her Stasi record. Many of her friends were in the same situation. For the first two years they had temporary, state-funded jobs. After two years they went on unemployment compensation. Accidentally, the new Germany had provided them with the socialist society that the GDR had failed to provide. Now there was no Stasi to dole out privileges, and no elite. They were all earning the identical state-funded incomes. And when they wanted to do something, they all pooled their resources—“each according to his ability,” just as Marx had said.

Irene’s son, Stefan, wanted to marry a Jew and live a Jewish life. But a Jewish wife was hard to find, especially because he did not want a Westerner. Even Israelis were too Western for him. “I can’t. In Germany I’ve tried. But I have no connection to the West.” But
in some ways Stefan was not all that different from a Westerner. He had a job as an accountant. When Germany reunited, he moved to Israel. There he lived on a kibbutz, but he was soon back in Berlin. “I don’t like it, but I can live better here. I have more money. I have my own apartment. I have a company and friends. In Israel I have nothing.”

And something else had changed for him. “I can go there anytime I want. Why should I move to Israel when I can go there anytime I want?”

Nor was Ron Zuriel leaving Berlin, where he had his law practice and his son and a married daughter with a child. But he did not exactly think of Germany as his homeland. Using the very German word
Heimat
, he said, “If you asked where is my home, my home, because everyone needs a home, I would say being Jewish is my home. It’s a bit peculiar, but that is the only identity, the only point of identification I have, because I can’t say I’m German. I have a German passport, I’m German by nationality, I’m German by culture, my mother tongue is German, but I wouldn’t say that my
Heimat
is Germany. For me it is difficult to say.”

He never forgot that he had saved himself once before by knowing when it was time to leave Germany, and he made this calculation: “I would say that the time to leave for a Jew, to pack the suitcases, is when the right extreme party—I would add the Republicans, for me they are also right extreme, although they try to keep up appearances—if they some way or another would be taken into a position of responsibility, join in some form a coalition or whatever, if the existing parties consider them as possible political partners, I think that would be the time a Jew should think twice if he should leave or not.”

Helmut Kohl repeatedly said he would never accept a partnership with Republicans. Some of the local parties were less adamant. It almost happened in Hesse in the spring of 1993.

In that sense Zuriel was always prepared to leave Germany. “Wherever I go, I take my being Jewish with me, and if I ever at my age would leave, which I certainly don’t think, first thing would be to search out a Jewish community that would be my point of contact.”

Moishe Waks remained in Berlin, and his brother remained in Israel. Ruwen, like Moishe, had offers in Germany, but he never took them. He joked that his wife would kill him if he did.
Carmela had never lived in Germany and never had any interest in it. They raised their children to be Israelis. Ruwen lectured visiting Germans about the Holocaust, lectures that were included on the itinerary of many German vacation packages to Israel.

Looking back, Ruwen was disappointed in the German Zionist movement. “In my opinion it was a big failure,” he said. “We couldn’t persuade people. We could not bring to them the message. Everybody was very involved. It was very active all over Germany, but if you look at the numbers of how many went—”

He talked of how German Jews would support Zionism, “until the moment they had to go.” His mother, Lea, still said she had no German friends and little contact with Germans, but she remained in Düsseldorf even after Aaron died. In 1991 both Lea and Moishe finally became German citizens. Nevertheless, Ruwen started shopping for an apartment to buy her in Israel. After all, she still said that she intended to move to Israel someday.

T
HE
J
EWISH
C
OMMUNISTS
who had returned from camps, hiding, and exile to build the GDR were now living in the Germany they never wanted to live in. One said, “Had I known in 1947 what would happen after forty years, I would definitely not have come back to Germany.”

Werner Händler remained
broygez
with God and quite a few people. He busied himself with the Sachsenhausen committee and went to municipal hearings to try to stop the city from removing Communist names from streets. He was trying to organize survivors abroad to stop Berlin from reverting to Prussian street names. “What kind of a message does it give to these young gangsters when they see it is Wilhelmstrasse again?”

Werner would occasionally go to the Rykestrasse synagogue if they needed a tenth man, but he was not involved in religion. One of his daughters was interested in her Jewish background and sometimes went to the Kulturverein. The other had no interest. His wife Helle, a social worker, retired. Her program which had given money and help to pregnant women, ended with the GDR. Now Werner and Helle could travel, and they went to Israel. He was impressed by how nonreligious most Israelis were. “Even though there is the theocratic state,” he said with wonder in his voice, “you find the same attitude as I have.”

They also visited the United States, where Jews expressed
tremendous sympathy for their having endured the GDR. “Look here,” Händler said to them. “The question is what I want to do with my life. If I think what I have to do is live decently with my family and raise my children, give them a good education and have a good living and get on in my life, then I must say I’m glad, I had a good life and I didn’t commit any crimes. If I say that I want more in my life and look for a better future of mankind, then I must say that I feel sad that the first attempt at making an alternative society has failed. But I am not sorry that I participated in it.”

S
IXTY YEARS AFTER
she set out for Palestine, Mia Lehmann got there with her friends from the Antifascist League. At last she could understand the vexing Palestinian problem with which the party had always sympathized. But she didn’t really get to understand them, to listen to their troubles the way she did with everyone else, because the first Palestinian she and her friends found was throwing rocks at her bus. After the group of old-time Communists got back from Israel, they thought about what they had seen and they talked to Moti Lewy, the Israeli consul in Berlin. Israel was in peace negotiations at the time, and he explained that they might be willing to give up the Golan Heights. “No!” the antifascists muttered. They warned him not to give it up.