A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [13]
She was not going to give up the Japanese sushi restaurants she looked forward to on her visits abroad, but she loved the mystique of orthodoxy. She had been an orthodox Communist, and now she would have Orthodox Judaism. Except for one thing: She was an atheist. She took up a ritual but not a religion. Even her son Stefan, who had himself circumcised and started going to synagogue, said that he had no religious feelings.
Most of the events held at the Kulturverein were not religious. A week before Passover, Irene provided an evening for a group of non-Jewish party organizers from various local Social Democrat offices around West Germany. These dozen or so Wessis at the Kulturverein made the difference between east and west apparent. They were expensively dressed, with a clear preference for the color gray, which befitted their reserved gestures and soft voices— in dramatic contrast to Irene, with her multicolored oval eyeglasses, her close-cropped blond hair, her perennial oversized plaid jacket on her small feisty frame, and her enthusiastic voice never much softer than a shout. And to Mia Lehmann, whose kind and interested face revealed something determined around the lips and jawline, and whose aged and quivering voice shook with passion for her beliefs. Before the evening started, Mia had sat down to talk to a woman who had been helping with the food. Mia, who had a radar that always led her to people with troubles, noticed that the woman looked depressed, and she found out that like two million other people in the former GDR, her job had been eliminated. It had happened only the day before, and the woman was very upset.
Mia, slightly stooped with age, stood up at the Social Democrats’ meeting and in simple language told them that these were bad times for Germany. She had seen bad times before, she said, but she had never doubted that a better society could be built. Now if they all worked together, a better Germany could still be built.
Her directness and emotion left the West Germans awkwardly examining the toes of their shoes. They suffered from the uneasiness that progressive Germans often feel when they are around Jews. A thin Social Democrat with gray glasses and a gray suit stood up and made a speech in which he called Jews “a certain group” and referred to the Holocaust only as “a special experience.”
Meanwhile, two young Orthodox Jews from Switzerland had arrived. They were hard to ignore because they were both very tall and one of them was enormously fat. These days, Jews from the West were forever dropping by the Kulturverein to help out. The contribution that these two made was to point out that a mezuzah marking the front doorway was not enough. They would send Irene enough mezuzahs for every doorway in the Kulturverein. “Fine, fine,” Irene told them, slightly harried but glad to take in whatever orthodoxy came her way.
The evening was saved by Mark Aizikovitch, a burly black-bearded Ukrainian Jew. With his rich baritone voice and large comic black eyes, he worked the crowd with robust Yiddish and Russian songs until they twitched. Then here and there fingers and toes started tapping. Aizikovitch did not stop trilling, dipping, mugging, and growling until the guests were actually out-and-out clapping to the music.
Aizikovitch was finding life difficult in Germany, where everyone acted as though the name Mark Aizikovitch meant nothing. But Mark Aizikovitch