Underground in Berlin (3 page)

My father was certainly interested in jurisprudence and the philosophy of law, but he hated the daily routine of a lawyer’s life, and was useless as a businessman. He would sometimes leave the room when a client got on his nerves, slamming the door behind him and telling my mother, ‘You go and deal with him; this is
your
practice.’

On the other hand, he loved to amuse a large social gathering with accounts of curious incidents from his working life. For instance, he told the tale of the client who, in great agitation, showed him a summons to appear in court on a certain day. ‘Look at that, Dr Jalowicz, look at that!’ he kept saying as he pointed to the date. Only when the client explained that it was Yom Kippur did my father understand the problem. ‘It’s Puderbeutel’s doing!’ the client lamented. Puderbeutel was the name of his adversary in the case concerned, and he was convinced that the villain had meant to hit him where it hurt by ensuring that he would have to offend against the Jewish holy day by appearing in court.

My father also liked to tell the story of the old Jewish woman who came to see him in order to ask whether a man is supposed to beat his wife. Even as she spoke she was beginning to remove her clothes to show him the evidence of conjugal violence. ‘No, no, don’t do that!’ he had said, horrified.

His clients also included non-Jewish members of the working class, like the man who came to ask a question; he stammered, but my father made out, with difficulty, that the matter concerned someone whose gold teeth had been removed after he had died in hospital. With care and great tact, he asked which of the man’s loved ones had been so shamefully mistreated. ‘Doesn’t have to be a loved one, does it?’ inquired the man, annoyed. He was a pall-bearer, and wanted to lodge a complaint against the Virchow hospital, which was delivering corpses deprived of their gold teeth to the cemeteries. In the opinion of my father’s client, it was the pall-bearers’ right to supplement their meagre income by robbing the bodies themselves.

My grandparents on my mother’s side had both died before I was born. After that, my aunt Grete took over the apartment at 44 Rosenthaler Strasse. She gave dinner parties there for the whole family circle on the major Jewish holidays, and every year our unforgettable Seder evenings took place in her huge dining room.

As far back as I can remember, my great-aunt Doris presided over the company, as the eldest member of the family. She always wore grey silk, with a ribbon round her neck, and the expression on her face reminded me of a bulldog. Doris Schapiro had once been a very rich woman, and had fled from Russia to Berlin before the revolution. Her daughter Sylvia Asarch, who had a similar story behind her, was always present at these gatherings as well.

There were not many children in the family – apart from me, only my cousins Kurt-Leo and Hanna-Ruth. That made Uncle Arthur all the more important to us. A very amusing man, and fond of children, Arthur was an extraordinary bundle of contradictions. Even his outward appearance was unusual. The Egers were usually short and either fat or thin, but Arthur towered at least a head above them all. The others had nondescript dark hair; Arthur’s was fiery red. He differed from the rest of the family in mindset as well, being both a communist and a passionately Orthodox Jew. He used to send his sister Grete, with whom he sometimes stayed, nearly crazy with his religious notions and practices. Professionally, Arthur traded in joke and novelty articles. For a while he had a shop in Münzstrasse, later he ran a market stall, but his projects regularly led to bankruptcy.

On Jewish holidays there was bound to be trouble with him. When everyone else had arrived at Rosenthaler Strasse after the religious service, and were waiting for the festive meal to be served, he invariably arrived last. At the time, family members used to say, ‘Ah, well, Arthur’s closing the
shul
again,’ referring to the synagogue, and with a punning reference to
Schule
, school. He always met more acquaintances outside the synagogue and would talk to them for hours.

But when, on a Seder evening, he spoke of the exodus of the Jews from Egypt, he did so with such deep and serious feeling that he might have been there himself. And every time the standard liturgy continued after the meal, he looked a little paler, and announced with credible alarm, ‘The Seder cannot go on; thieves have broken in and stolen the
afikaumon
.’ The word meant a special piece of matzo that we children had hidden. If we brought it out, we were rewarded with something sweet – that was the custom.

Long before I went to school, Arthur tried to teach me the Hebrew alphabet. That, too, was in line with an old Jewish custom. My father used to tell me how, when he was a little boy sitting on his grandfather’s lap, the old man had told him, ‘My boy, now you are three years old, and I don’t want you learning your German alphabet first and then our own sacred letters, but the other way round.’

However, Arthur’s way of going about my lessons infuriated my mother. The first that he drew for me was
, the Hebrew letter H. Arthur told me, ‘Look at that, my child, that’s H, and you say
hi
. Now repeat it:
hi
.’

Of course I showed it proudly to my parents. ‘See that? It’s a
hi
.’

‘Where did you learn such nonsense?’ they said at once. For pronouncing the letter
hi
instead of
hey
was an older usage, regarded as outmoded and inelegant, something that they did not want me to learn.

Arthur was constantly at odds with Aunt Grete. For instance, he liked to drink tea with a great many sugar lumps in it, which she thought wasteful. But whenever she protested, Arthur, adding lump after lump to his cup, quoted a silly advertising slogan claiming that the body needed sugar for nourishment:

Sometimes he declaimed the rhyme like a small child reciting a verse and then getting stuck; at other times he assumed the manner of a ham actor. My stern, dour Aunt Grete kept begging him to stop it – until even she burst out laughing. By then he would have more than ten lumps of sugar in his tea.

When I was about ten years old, I saw him sitting at the table a day or so after Pessach, putting a piece of matzo on top of a piece of bread, and repeating over and over again, with a silly giggle, ‘Chometz and matzo’, leavened and unleavened bread. No sensible person would still be eating unleavened bread after the Pessach festival,
*
but he made a joke out of it. It was then I realised that Arthur was acting a part, only you never knew where his joking ended and he was serious again.

The apartment in Rosenthaler Strasse was also the scene of many family stories that were told only surreptitiously. One of them was about my aunt Ella, and happened when I was still a small child.

At the turn of the century she had been sent for a few months to Boldera near Riga, where one of the Wolkowyski family’s country estates lay. She must have been a pretty, amusing young woman then, and it was high time for her to marry. In Riga she met Max Klaczko, and they married soon after that. It was only later that she realised he was a terrible psychopath, always grumbling and finding fault, a man who would make her life hell.

Ella and Max Klaczko once came to visit in Berlin, bringing their daughter Edit. While Ella was happy to be back in her familiar childhood surroundings in Rosenthaler Strasse, her husband went off on his own to see the city. One evening in the year 1926 he stayed out for a long time. When the family had begun worrying about him, the doorbell rang. A police officer stood there, and told Ella, with the usual set expression of sympathy, ‘It is my sad duty to inform you that your husband has had a fatal accident in crossing the road near the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church.’

The story goes that Ella uttered a cry of joy, flung her arms round the policeman and performed such a wild dance with him that he could hardly keep his footing. After that, he had to be paid handsomely to keep his mouth shut – while he kept assuring everyone that he was not corrupt. Even Uncle Arthur, who had been broke all his life, offered, ‘Shall I contribute something? It’s a tidy sum.’

A few days later, Ella Klaczko could feature as the perfect example of a grieving widow, not just to outward appearance but in her general attitude. And indeed, her situation was wretched; her husband left her his typewriter shop in Riga, and nothing else but debts. All Ella possessed were a few typewriters, with which she opened a typing and translation bureau in her apartment.

My mother often told me about the delicious things she had eaten when she, too, went to spend a few months on the Boldera estate. Sometimes we went to a Russian delicatessen in Charlottenburg. I always loved to go shopping for these good things. Particularly choice tea came in boxes with gold decoration and a strange inscription. ‘Why is there a back-to-front R here?’ My mother explained that it was a
, pronounced ‘ja’, which means yes in German. So I got to know the Russian alphabet.

We sometimes bought sugared
klyukva
, cranberries, thickly covered in icing sugar. You nibbled them while drinking tea. Or
kil’ki –
sprats in oil – and grilled peas, with a slightly smoked flavour. I don’t know whether all these things really tasted so good, or whether I was just enchanted by their exotic aspect. My mother told me how in her own childhood she could tell from the smell in the front hall of the apartment whether visitors from Russia had come. The smell of Russian leather given off by their heavy coats could be picked up even in the stairwell; it evoked that special, intense French perfume
Cuir de Russie
. She felt those odours were promising – they promised that soon there would be delicatessen to eat. Our relations from Riga also brought us special delicacies from there, for instance
kalkun
, stuffed turkey. My mother waxed enthusiastic because it reminded her of her childhood, and I liked the taste too.