A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [14]
Mia Lehmann was still struggling with her own relationship to Jewishness. Seventy-three years earlier, in a small Romanian town in the Bucovina region, she had gone to visit her mother at Yom Kippur services and had found her sitting on the ground outside the synagogue. Supporting Mia on her own, the mother could not afford to pay for her synagogue membership and so was not let in for Yom Kippur. “I don't understand this,” said eleven-year-old Mia, and she resolved to have no more to do with religion. A few years later, she learned of the kibbutz movement—people all working together in the middle of Palestine. She thought it sounded very “romantic.” Traveling to Belgium, she trained in agricultural techniques with a group that would soon leave for Palestine. But her habit of wandering off and talking to people and listening to their troubles led her to Antwerp's diamond district, where she met very poor Polish Jews. They told her their troubles. They were Communists, and they told her about the party. She fell in love with a German Jewish organizer, and joined the Communist party. In 1932, instead of being on a ship to Palestine, she was on a train to Berlin with her German Communist lover and a very different destiny.
Three-quarters of a century later, a few weeks before the seder, a small group of Communists from the old Antifa-— the Antifascist Resistance Fighters, loyal East German Communists who had opposed the Nazis—took a tour of Israel. Since 1967, the East German Communist state they supported had vilified Israel, compared Israelis to Nazis, and actively backed violent Palestinian groups. Since the demise of the GDR, many of these East Berlin Jews had gone on trips to Israel to at last see what it was about.
Traveling by bus from northern Israel to Jerusalem, they decided they must get the Palestinian point of view, and they insisted that the driver take them to an Arab village. As their bus approached the village, two teenagers ran up and threw rocks at the windows. The glass shattered into small sparkling kernels, landing in the hair and clothes of the old Communists. One rock barely missed a man's head. Hunching over protectively, Mia Lehmann thought, “I can't understand this.”
DAVID MARLOWE, a London-based Lubavitcher, came to Berlin to kosher the Kulturverein and lead the Passover seder. A hefty man with a graying scraggly beard and a rolling mumble of British English, he was an introvert who did not know four words of German and, as both Englishman and Jew, didn't like Germany very much. In addition, he hated Communism. “The Communists were worse than the Nazis,” he asserted. “The Nazis killed bodies, but the Communists killed souls. That was worse. They turned men from God.”
He was shocked to discover that Irene and other Jews at the Kulturverein were unrepentant Communists. “I don't understand,” he said to Irene one day while they were koshering the kitchen. “I thought everyone was cheering and celebrating and happy to be rid of Communism.”
“Right,” said Irene in her blunt New York English. “Then they found out they didn't have jobs anymore. They didn't like that too much.”
David, not an arguing man, gathered up the frizzy blond extremities of his beard, thought for an instant, then examined the ingredients listed on an apple juice label. To no one's surprise, he pronounced it unclean.