It’s Rosh Hashanah again, but it feels like more than a year ago that I was in Berlin, at a historic building on Ryketstresse, in Prenzlauer Berg. Although the sanctuary and the Torah had been desecrated on Kristallnacht, the building stood too close to the neighboring apartment buildings to burn with the others.
Before the service began, I made my way to the front of the sanctuary, looking for a siddur. In the corner was a bench piled high with with tattered, ancient books. I turned to the rabbi and uttered the first thing I could manage.
“Are they all the same?”
The rabbi shook his head, laughing: “Of course not, on Ryketstrasse they’re all different.”
“Schau mal,” he said. “Hier ist Ma Tovu,” showing me the prayer in a tiny threadbare brown book from Prague, 1927.
Not actually ancient, the books were from before the war, from another world. They had fragile brown pages like dried leaves, with ornate Hebrew print. The German translation was on the facing page, and it took me a moment to decipher the old Gothic lettering.
Zelten, I read: tents. How goodly are your tents, Jacob, your dwelling places.
I’d spent the preceding months feeling my way around German, a process in which English had been, like training wheels, both tool and obstacle. Though useful at first, it often left me careening through something mysterious and vast.
It was an awe I knew from my encounters with Hebrew. My Hebrew existed in an unknown realm of sounds and vague associations. In Berlin last fall, German was helping me feel my way around Hebrew, to understand in a new place the prayers I learned years before, in Hebrew School. At the birthplace of the Reform movement, I felt like its poster child; Moses Mendelssohn would have been proud.
Earlier that summer, at a party, I spoke with an older fellow from the former East Germany. He was proud to speak no English and a little Russian.
“So,” he turned to me, “where is your family from?”
“Oh, I’m American,” I said, for the hundredth time that night.
“No, no,” he insisted. “I mean, before that, your ancestors.”
Such an exchange doesn’t quite pass for standard party conversation in Germany either, but unfazed, I explained, “My father’s side comes from Eastern Europe and my mother’s comes from a few places…Southern Germany, for example. They’re Jews.” He looked taken aback.
“Really?” my roommate piped up. “So you’re Jewish?”
“Yes.”
“It’s just that you don’t look Jewish,” he told me. “You could be German.”
I didn’t know what to say.
I am German! I wanted to say. If you are talking about my ancestors and my genes and the shape of my face, I am German.
Because, Nuremberg Laws aside, Judaism isn’t a race; because my German Jewish ancestors emigrated to America in the nineteenth century, at which point the assimilation of the Jews of Germany was rivaled only by those of America; because that was the nineteenth century and this the twenty-first, and I can glibly attempt things like, “Nuremberg Laws aside,” I don’t say anything.
A few weeks after Rosh Hashanah this year, I stood, inking my plate at the printmaking studio, next to a man who might be in his 70’s or 80’s. We introduced ourselves and I said my name slowly, though I didn’t think it would help; “Abigail” is both foreign and difficult to pronounce for most Germans, neither of its two “a”‘s corresponding to the German “a”‘s.
“Abigail,” he repeated immediately, not imitating my pronunciation, but rather the way it’s pronounced in Hebrew. I was stunned.
“You know my name,” I said. “My German friends can never say it.”
He laughed. “I once knew a wonderful photographer with that name, in Frankfurt, before the war. It’s a Jewish name,” he told me. “Your friends are just too young to know.”
