A Chosen Few (65 page)

To Mia Lehmann, living in the reunified Germany was living in West Germany. “I don’t like it now, and I didn’t like it before. I came back to have a different Germany, not a Germany like this.” But she was not despairing. She was too busy. There were two million unemployed East Germans with whom she could talk and give sympathy. And she was collecting money to send milk to Cuba, where children were going hungry because of the U.S. embargo.

“I am always an optimist,” she said. “And I think there are enough people who don’t like it. The way it is now, this country has no future. You see. The way people are so rich and other people are so poor. It can’t go on forever.” She smiled cheerfully, as though she had not lived through most of this fast-paced and terrible century that had been her life.

Two very ordinary things happen at the same time on Friday nights in the fourth arrondissement of Paris. In the fashionable Marais young Parisians—and more than a few visiting young New Yorkers—dressed in exotically cut, brightly colored evening clothes, drift by shop windows to expensive restaurants that serve modern light fare. In the Pletzl religious men dressed in black wool suits—preferably pure wool, because the Torah forbids mixing wool with linen—and dark hats, sometimes large furry
shtreimels
, hurry to synagogues and
shtibls
.

This weekend, all this was also happening Saturday and Sunday nights because Passover began after the Sabbath ended. By Sunday, the second night of Passover, the bearded dark-suited men of the Pletzl were in a particular hurry to get home to their families. Since religious Jews cannot use transportation on a holiday, and most of them could no longer afford the Pletzl now that it was the Marais, they had a long way to walk from their home to the synagogue and back to the family seder.

A police van with several heavily armed patrolmen was stationed in front of the synagogue on Rue Pavée. Inside, men were gathering anxiously under the long thin columns with the art nouveau tulip-shaped lamps. Daniel Altmann was intently studying a passage of Hebrew, but others were pacing, anxiously looking at a spot under the balcony where an electric clock had
been discreetly placed. A few bored children were playing in the aisles.

Finally, the cantor began chanting at 9:15 and the service was brief. Altmann could get home quickly because he could afford to live in the Marais. It was not that long ago that he had been a young affluent single man much like the young people enjoying their weekend night. But now he hurried by them to his apartment and his family to start the Passover seder. He was a typical Orthodox, part of the color of the neighborhood with his hat and beard. Only a weakness for expensive silk ties made him look slightly different from the others.

This seemingly gradual evolution from Pletzl to Marais in the sweep of history had taken place in the flick of an eyelid. As the Marais was modernized, a nearby ancient square was bulldozed to make a parking lot and sixty tombs were accidentally discovered from the long-forgotten Frankish dynasty that had ruled the neighborhood and much of France and Germany eleven hundred years ago. But even then, Passover had been two thousand years old.

Saturday night, the seder went on until four o’clock, but the five Altmann children had slept during the next day, and on Sunday night they were ready to do it all again. They were wound up and waiting for their father to get home. The Passover seder is for children—to teach them the meaning of freedom. To ask them questions. Challenge them. It is fun because it is a ritual in which they play a central role. They could hear their father stumbling down the long, dark hallway, which his religious observance would not permit him to light.

Lynda was dressed in a fashionable suit for the occasion and everything was ready—past ready because it was now ten o’clock at night. Daniel put on a white smock. Seders were messy at the Altmanns’. Four times the wineglass gets filled to the brim for blessings, and little six-year-old Ariel, with bright dark eyes like his mother, invariably kicked the table as he anxiously shifted around and the wine always spilled. Daniel drank each glass in a single long gulp, leaning on his left arm. “We drink on the left side because we are free men,” he explained. When Jews were slaves in Egypt, it is supposed that they were cramped into small quarters and had to eat straight up. Now that they are free they can stretch out.

Everything on this night is about freedom. Daniel read from the Haggadah the story of Moses and the pharaoh, of slavery in Egypt
and the struggle of the Jews some 3,200 years ago—the earliest known successful slave rebellion.

Ritual foods were placed on a platter, and before beginning, in accordance with the tradition in Lynda’s native Morocco, the platter of foods was held over each person, one at a time, saying in Hebrew, “Last year we were slaves, this year we are free, next year we will be in Jerusalem.”

The family took turns reading from the book in Hebrew, rapidly, fluently, often offering almost simultaneous translation in French. They could all read like that except one-year-old Nethen and three-year-old Naemi, who kept doing a disturbingly realistic pantomime of changing her dolls’ diapers.

The Altmanns made their way through the prescribed ritual, each item of food a symbol of an aspect of the freedom struggle—a departure point for discussion of another aspect of the nature of freedom, God and man. The children were asked questions, and they asked other questions in response, and Daniel and Lynda tried to explain. It was a family discussion.

Breaking off a piece of matzoh—thin, black-edged, round, charcoally handmade matzoh, not the industrial squares, but something that seemed to resemble the handmade yeastless bread that Hebrew slaves might have hastily thrown together for their flight from Egypt—Daniel turned to nine-year-old Itshac and said, “This is made with nothing but flour and water. What is in challah?”

Itshac rubbed his yarmulke on his blond head. His fair looks came from the Ashkenazic side of the family. “Flour, water, yeast, eggs … ” He was thinking.

“What else?” asked Daniel.

“Oil!” said Itshac.

“That’s right. Now, which of these is the richer bread?”

“The challah.”

“No,” Daniel explained. “The matzoh is richer. It is only flour and water, but it is all a Jew needs. It can be taken anywhere. A Jew can go with only flour and water.”

Itshac’s eyes seemed to widen with an idea. “It’s freedom!”

Lynda and Daniel expressed their pride in a quick glance at each other. “Yes, exactly!” said Daniel. “To not need anything else. Just flour and water. That is freedom. You are right!”

Since not all Jews register with communities and many, especially nonpracticing Jews, do not declare their origin on any document, all estimates are educated guesses. These figures have been compiled from the works of Holocaust scholars, notably Raul Hilberg and Lucy Dawidowicz, and from the World Jewish Congress, and interviews with Jewish leaders in the various communities. Of the half dozen or so sources used there were rarely two in exact agreement on any of these figures, but there is agreement on the demographic developments that they indicate.