A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [177]
Another infuriating experience, for those few who had managed to stay and at last had a chance to rebuild, was to be constantly told by foreign Jews that they should leave. The Israeli ambassador brought a group of Jewish students from Australia on a tour of Jewish Prague to meet Tomas Kraus. One of them asked, “Why don't you go to Israel?” Kraus had his standard answer prepared, but before he could say it, to his great satisfaction, the Israeli ambassador turned to the Australian and said, “Why don't you?”
THE COMMUNITY'S RECOGNIZED EXPERT on its historical treasures was Bedrich Nosek, who had been chief curator of the Jewish Museum until 1991, when he was able to start teaching Hebrew and Jewish studies at the university. His two sons, Marek and Michel, grew up around the Jewish community. Although their family wasn't Jewish, except for Bednch's father's maternal grandmother, they did not eat pork and they read some of their father's books. Marek, who became a lawyer and worked with one of the big American corporate firms that came in with Western capitalism, wanted very much to marry a Jew. This would restart the Jewish line that had vanished in their family five generations before. He married Elena, an Odessa concert pianist who had come to Prague for a music festival in 1985, given up her career, and stayed. When Marek met her, she was teaching piano to Rabbi Mayer's wife. Elena and Marek married and had a daughter, Anna, whose Jewish education was placed in the hands of her grandfather, Professor Nosek.
In Odessa, Elena's sister Louba, 23, separated from her young husband and came to Prague in 1992 with her four-year-old daughter. She had no skills with which to support herself and her baby, but through the Jewish Community she found work with Pavel Erdos, the Torah lifter from the Old-New Synagogue. The relationship was reminiscent of the old Soviet joke, “I pretend to work, and he pretends to pay me.” Louba's job was to act as interpreter for Erdos, translating into English for Israeli and other Jewish tourists since Erdos spoke only Czech and Russian. Louba, pressed into iridescent stretch pants, her hair frosted and fluffed, would gamely meet Israelis at the airport with the brutish Mr. Erdos and try to figure out what they were saying, all the while hoping that Erdos, whose face showed more cunning than perception, did not notice that she actually didn't speak much English.
Erdos paid her as little as possible for this service, and when tourists threatened not to pay him because he really had very little to offer them as a tour operator, he would claim that it was all because of Louba's bad translation and threaten to withhold her pay. Louba tried to earn additional money giving walking tours of the Jewish quarter based on the knowledge she had acquired from BedrTch Nosek. But it was a hard life, this new capitalism, as her parents had warned her back in Odessa. Still, Louba would point out to her parents the fresh anti-Semitic graffiti that was appearing in Odessa, in the newly independent Ukraine, including a sign that said, “Kill the Jews.” She was trying to convince them to leave, but they always replied that both of them had good pensions and would not have anything if they left.
Nosek's other son, Michel, went to a kibbutz in 1990. Then he began attending a yeshiva. He moved to Jerusalem and had himself circumcised and converted. Although he retained his Czechoslova-kian citizenship, he stayed in Jerusalem, praying three times a day, keeping strictly kosher, living a traditional Jewish life. The Noseks, five generations later, had finally become Jewish again. But not that Jewish. Far from the shriek most assimilated Jewish parents would muffle at their sons’ new hat and beard, far from Robert Altmann's criticism when Daniel had been married in the Pletzl, when BedrTch Nosek was asked how he felt about his son turning Orthodox, he simply said, “I'm very happy. I hope he will know more than I do.”
THE GREATEST THREAT to the survival of Judaism in the Czech lands was