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By Root 586 0

people who, when blockaded from munitions in World War I, had made their own by learning how to extract nitrogen from the air, were now focusing their ingenuity on becoming rich. Economic growth became the all-important measure between the two Ger-manies. West Germany had it, and East Germany didn't. West German growth was so rapid that in the early 1960s there was a labor shortage—a need for foreign laborers, guest workers to live in Germany without citizenship and do the work that Germany needed done. These growth figures were a point of national pride for the West. Every sign of prosperity was an important benchmark. Germany had been mired for too long in ideologies. The East Germans were still stuck in one. But West Germany would be the successful new Germany, a land of material wealth. As the ruined cities were rebuilt, each one had a boulevard like the Konigsallee, the most important being the Ku'damm, because it was in West Berlin, the ultimate display case of the Federal Republic deep inside the GDR.

Protz is a German word for showiness, too many gold rings, flaunted wealth. The Israeli-born daughter of the man who took the newspaper job in Dusseldorf concluded after years of reflection that it was this flirtation with gaudiness, the Protz, that seduced. It was a dramatic contrast to the harsh life in Israel. It kept bringing German Jews back, and it held them there. Aaron and Lea Waks would go to Israel someday, but for now they had the trouser business, just as for Ron Zuriel his law practice was keeping him in Berlin.

But the Wakses and the Zuriels had distanced themselves from the fact that they were in Germany by not associating with non-Jews, by preserving their stern and critical distance from “the Germans.” When student demonstrations began erupting in Berlin in 1968, Ron Zuriel found it an encouraging sign. Here was a truly new generation of Germans rejecting their parents’ world. “They actually revolted against the attitude of their parents… they were rejecting everything institutional,” he said. This was a German movement of which he could approve. They were saying the same things about Germany that he had been saying. He even began to hope that new Germans were being made who could construct a new Germany.

But if the 1968 demonstrations reassured Ron Zuriel because a new generation was rejecting their parents, they also showed that all was not well in the new German shopping paradise. In June 1967 demonstrators had greeted Willy Brandt and the Shah of Iran in Berlin, and while they were in the opera house listening to Mozart, police attacked the student demonstrators outside, killing one. In April 1968 two Frankfurt department stores were burned, and a week later a leader of the student movement was shot by a psychopath, who hanged himself. The incident led to a week of rioting in Berlin and around West Germany in which two were killed and four hundred wounded. The new, nonideological consumer society was turning out to be an angry and violent place after all.

MOISHE WAKS, five years younger than his brother, had to wait six years before he too could move to Israel. When he finally did, he found himself feeling a bit alone in a strange land. He had Ruwen and Carmela, and a friend of Carmela's family whom Moishe had met in Germany became his only friend. He played soccer well, and that gave him an activity. It was a beginning.

Ruwen seemed very nervous during the holidays that year. As Yom Kippur approached, he warned Moishe not to go anywhere by car, saying, “They will kill you.” Moishe did not know what to think about that—the presumably Arab “they” was not explained. That evening, from his apartment near the university, he could see an almost infinite line of buses speeding by. But he had no telephone and lived alone, and he had no way of finding out what the buses might mean. The next day, Yom Kippur, he was tired of being alone and decided to visit some friends from Germany who were staying at a nearby hotel.

Moishe drove to the hotel without incident. Surely his brother was overreacting, he