A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [107]
Then suddenly in 1967 came a big boost to the Zionist cause— the Six-Day War. It was more a boost in sympathy than in actual numbers. Of twenty thousand Jews in West Germany, four hundred were members of the Zionist Youth movement. Only twenty actually went to Israel at the time of the war, and most of those did not stay. Yet it was a record year for German Zionism. Ruwen volunteered and stayed permanently in Israel. His parents had to sign papers to give him permission. Moishe was too young to go. Aaron could not even attempt to conceal his pride in his son who had volunteered for Israel. Lea jutted her jaw and wore a stiff face of approval as she sent her son off to a faraway war. She wasn't supposed to think of it that way. She had raised her sons to speak Hebrew and be Israeli. She had no choice but to approve of what Ruwen was doing.
The war turned out to last only a matter of days, but Ruwen was sent to work on a kibbutz run by the German Zionist movement near the Lebanese border. After two months he returned to Dusseldorf, a hero in the Jewish Community, no longer confined to stairwells, giving talks about his experiences in the city's major halls and meeting places to Jews and non-Jews. After several months, he returned to Israel, and soon he was running into many of his friends from Germany who had also decided to emigrate. But time passes swiftly in Israel, and to Israelis the war was already long over by then. The Germans lost their sense of purpose and, a few at a time, went back to Germany. Only Ruwen stayed to make his life as an Israeli. He married Carmela, an Iraqi Jew who had lived in Israel since she was a small child.
Aaron and Lea may have had their hearts in Israel, but their pants store was in Dusseldorf. Every year, while they preached Zionism, their lives became more deeply entrenched in West Germany and the German economic miracle. The store was prospering, and they had a large apartment on a wide rebuilt boulevard near the center of the city, not far from the birthplace of Heinrich Heine, the Jewish poet who a century earlier had written passionate verses of his love for Germany.
And others, like Lea's parents, were returning from Israel. One German Jewish family that had lived in Israel since Hitler came to power moved to Dusseldorf over the sad protests of their two Israeli-born children. In Tel Aviv this family of four had lived in one room of a four-room, four-family house with a common kitchen and bathroom. Educated people, the father worked small teaching jobs and his wife was a maid. In 1953 they were evicted from the house and were about to move to a distant housing project in a slum. Instead, to their children's great chagrin, they moved to Dusseldorf, where he worked as an editor on the Jewish newspaper and lived in an apartment in the center of town. He had a love of the language and culture, and in truth it was the country where he was most at home. Still, no one in this family loved Germany the way Heine had. They loved German literature and no doubt knew Heine's famous verse, “O Deutschland, meine feme Liebe” but to them, for the past twenty years in exile, Germany had been not a far-off love but a horror they had escaped. Now it was simply a place where they could have a good job and a decent apartment. Israel had not offered that.
DUSSELDORF, like all West German cities, was being rebuilt with a modern opulence it had never before seen. Within walking distance from the Wakses’ was the Konigsallee, where trees were planted and rococo bridges built over a little dark canal. Both sides were lined with cafes and shops, where enormous quantities of money could be spent on anything with a label on it. Nothing creative or original was being offered, only status name brands, so that West Germans could spend their money and display their wealth.
West Germans embraced materialism with the same set-jawed determination with which they had done everything else. The