A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [122]
But in 1968 she saw most of the other Jewish families in her building and community pack and leave. Although she was only 20, her parents were already in their sixties and she could not bear to leave them. Her father, with whom she was especially close, candidly stated that he did not think he would live much longer if she left. Then, too, Zuzana believed in the diaspora. For her, it had become Jewish life: “I think Jews need to have communities in other places in the world.”
Within six months following the Soviet invasion, her Jewish world had vanished from Nitra. In what had been a building of six Jewish families, only the Simkos remained. Most of the Jewish people who had been clustered in the apartments near the synagogue left. The few Jews who stayed were mostly party members, though many of them were soon ousted from the party. Almost no one of Zuzana's age was left. Nitras nine centuries of traditional Judaism, which had even survived the Nazis and Stalin, this time had finally been extinguished.
At the time of the invasion Fero Alexander had been performing folk music in Budapest. In between performances he heard on the radio that there was shooting in Bratislava and Prague. The Alexanders were a musical family, and Fero played violin in a Slovak folk group, while his brother Juraj, born in Theresienstadt, was a concert cellist. Born in 1948, Fero was one of the few boys of his generation to be bar mitzvahed in Bratislava. But with the changes of the Dubcek era, he had been able to participate in a lively new youth group for Jews of his age in Bratislava.
Fero and his folk music group went back to Bratislava while there were still tanks on the street. But he was to soon find that all his friends had left. Out of the fifty or sixty Jews his age who had taken part in the Jewish youth movement, not one stayed. The only remaining rabbi in Bratislava also left. But the Alexander family stayed. Fero's brother Juraj did not want to leave because he had been hired to play in the cello section of the Slovak Chamber Orchestra. Juraj and Fero reasoned that their parents were aging and felt too old to start a new life. Fero pictured them sad and alone, the way some of the other people of their generation soon would be.
The rabbi was gone and all his friends had also left. The Jewish community consisted largely of lonely older people whose children had emigrated. This was the fate from which he had saved his parents. But soon these deserted older people were smiling, showing everybody photographs of their families in foreign lands. They seemed so proud when showing the pictures. The photos were usually in color—the first color snapshots most of them had seen. Fero imagined his family proudly showing snapshots of him in his new home somewhere and silently wondered if he had not made a mistake.
Urban renewal hit Bratislava like a bombing. A wide modern bridge was built across the Danube, connected by a new highway that cut a gash a hundred yards wide through the frilly historic old center. The bridge landed in Bratislava exactly where the old Jewish section of town had been before the war. To government planners, it had just been an abandoned neighborhood. The synagogue was no longer used and could also be torn down to make way for the new thoroughfare. Bratislava no longer had a Jewish quarter, nor did it have enough Jews to fill one.
IN KARLSRUHE a debate had gone on between Martin MandPs parents. Like many Jews from the prewar Czech lands, Martin's father had grown up with a German education. Since he had been raised as an ethnic German and since West German policy in any case was to be open to Jews, they would have few difficulties acquiring the normally elusive German citizenship. Martin's father wanted