I am not surprised when i don’t quite understand everything when someone speaks to me in German. After all, I don’t always understand when i am spoken to in English or Hebrew. Something blanks out. But in German it is more problematic because my own replies are spoken in shy whispers and aimed usually at the floor. When I raise my head and/or speak up, I’m usually understood. After all I speak Yiddish and have been watching American WWII films with German accents for years… But that’s it, my understanding of Berlin is colored by the same things that color my difficulty with carrying on a conversation in German – I’m coming at it from a very specific direction.
Today, for instance, in the most banal of activities, shopping in a department store, I found myself imposing my Yiddish accent, my Israeli values and my American sense of commerce on everything we picked up. I hope you can imagine the details – it embarasses me to make too much fun of myself.
So I picked up a copy of “A Woman in Berlin,” a book about what it was like to live here after the war, and hope that – with a healthy dose of Marlene Dietrich’s “Black Market,” will put me on a more even keel.
In the Technical Museum, where we went for a break from the Jewish Problem I carry with me in everything I do in Berlin, we ran into an exhibit about the trains to Auschwitz.
Then I ran into my old friend, the V2 rocket, which stopped bombing London on the day I was born. That is why I spent my first day on earth in an airraid shelter. And not my second day.
Next to this exhibit were recordings by people in Berlin during the bombing of WWII. Similar to my mother’s stories, but only lasting a short time.
The fact that this particular train went to Treblinka and that where my grandmother ended her voyage, together with the fact that that particular rocket missed me, made me feel a vulnerability I had forgotten.
Our first day in Berlin was filled with self-reflection. Not only the Holocaust Memorial, a great place for children to play, and very lonely if you think about the massive loss…
but also the Phoenix statue, in Potsdammer Platz…
The Museum of Film was the hardest. Fascinating in its effects, the cinematic possibilities,
I found it problematic in many ways which I will have to wait until tomorrow to tell you about.
The bianelle tonight that included my poetry reading was pretty cool. Herzlia seems like the end of the world to me, but there were lots of people, Benny Efrat, Raquel Halfi, Rivka Bassman, Aviva Doron, etc. reading and/or somehow included.
An article about Franz Kafka and the terrible state of his papers in haaretz this weekend reminded me about a woman I met a few times who was Kafka’s girlfriend before Dora. Her name was Pua Netzer and she was a cousin of my late mother-in-law. More interested in being involved in the building of Israel than in becoming part of the literary crowd in Prague, she passed her Hebrew student Kafka over to her friend Dora. There are a few letters around from him to her, but who knows about the rest?
This whole issue reminded me of other papers lying around in Israel – Yona Wollach’s poems in the shack behind her house, Amos Kenan’s papers and letters burnt up in a freak fire, Shalom Aleichem’s papers crumbling in plastic envelopes in a safe in the Shalom Aleichem house… Who knows how many more letters and books were thrown out on the streets of Tel Aviv? We never have any room to keep things, to treasure the past…
Poetry Festival begins in Herzlia on October 5th. 9:00 p.m. Reading: Asher Reich, Rivka Basman, Aviva Doron, Yisrael Bar Cochav, and me along with a presentation of Raquel Halfi’s poetry. This takes place at the Mishkan leOmanuyot, the Artists Residence, 7 Yodfat Street. It’s in Hebrew
I can identify with those who would pay 1000 potentially dangerous prisoners for him. I find it difficult to identify with those who would use him in this way.
Jan Morris once wrote, “It’s okay to stay at home.” “Travel is not compulsory. Great minds have been fostered entirely by staying close to home. Moses never got further than the Promised Land. Da Vinci and Beethoven never left Europe. Shakespeare hardly went anywhere at all-certainly not to Elsinore or the coast of Bohemia…. Travel, which was once either a necessity or an adventure, has become very largely a commodity, and from all sides we are persuaded into thinking that it is a social requirement, too … not just a way of having a good time, but something that every self-respecting citizen ought to undertake, like a high-fiber diet, say, or a deodorant.” But Jan Morris did her traveling inside her own gender as well as in the world, and she/he wasn’t Jewish, so didn’t know about Sukkot and the wandering spirit. We, for example, will be spending every night in a different Sukka until we get to the airport on Wednesday. Sukkot is part of the lesson of flexibility and temporariness in the life of the Jew, the need not to be dependent on a specific place. We have a home, but who knows who will come in somewhere and drag us out into the street by our hair.
In this spirit we have decided to heed the advice of Leonard Cohen and, having taken Manhattan, we’ll be going off to see about taking Berlin.
I can’t keep track of all the birthday parties, weddings, engagement parties, and sukkot holidays. I buy a present, go home, remember another present, or a card, and go back, get another one, go out again… Today I got so cramped for time I thought I’d try the shop next to my office, at the Diaspora Museum. I don’t know how long it has been open but I’ve never been so desperate before to think of it. But it turned out beautifully. It may be tiny but it’s got everything a museum shop should have, including cards and books and gifts. The book store at the university has a lot of stuff, and I was there yesterday buying gifts, but the Diaspora Museum Store is ‘classy,’ if conservative.
A lot of shopping in general is going on around here lately – negotiations, promises, threats, exchanges. As long as we’re not fighting I’m happy – it’s just keeping busy and sharing attention. And there’s a lot of risk involved, like if one or two terrorists that have been free come back for a second try. A pretty young woman with a bomb strapped around her stomach and a little experience at a checkpoint.
>”How is it you haven’t commented on the Goldstone Report?” a friend wrote me today.”You seem far more absorbed in yourself than your city, your country.” In a sense it is true. I haven’t said that I believe with all my heart that we should be investigating all the aspects of “Cast Lead” on this site. I haven’t even said much about Gilad Shalit lately. But every element of my private life is interspersed with the politics and the sociology of this country. And this is true for every person living here.
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