A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [178]
Zuzana Skalova was skeptical about mixed marriages. Her sister Eva had married a non-Jew and to the distress of their parents was raising their children without any Jewish background. Zuzana was still hoping to find a Jew to marry. She estimated that there were about fifty Jews her age in Prague. The community was very heavily weighted with the war generation. But her world expanded in 1991 when she got a banking job that enabled her to travel frequently for the first time in her life. About mixed marriages she said, “I think that it's not a major problem. But I am sure that it's easier to have a Jewish partner because there are many problems that can arise in a mixed marriage.” Breaking into an earthy laugh, she added, “I have to organize some competitions with foreign participants.”
AFTER THE VELVET REVOLUTION, the name of Victory Street in Brno was once again changed back to Masaryk. In December 1990, eighty thousand people shoved into the little square at the head of the street to see their new president, Vaclav Havel.
Martin Mandl for the first time became active in the Brno Jewish Community, which was now down to three hundred people. He wanted to resuscitate Jewish life in his town, the Moravian capital where he would always live and to which he was passionately attached. He was now very happy that his parents had not settled in West Germany after 1968. “I wouldn't want to be a German,” he said.
He liked showing people around his town. According to Mandl, when in Brno, there are two things that one must see. Next door to the music conservatory was a nineteenth-century house with eagles sculpted on the corners. It had been the home of Brno's great twentieth-century composer, Leos Janacek. But what excited Mandl even more was a certain vacant lot that had been taken over by tall weeds. This was the garden where Gregor Mendel discovered the theory of genetics. The garden had spent years overgrown and forgotten because Trofim Lysenko, who with Stalin's backing had taken over scientific dialogue in the Soviet Union, had declared genetics “a bourgeois science.” Wasn't the notion that innate qualities were coded into genes at birth a contradiction in the egalitarian society? Gregor Mendel was not to be honored in the Soviet era.
Mandl looked at the forgotten lot and marveled at the absurdity of being a scientist at all in such a system. He had wanted to be a doctor, but he could not get into medical school. His mother had limited his future when she resigned her party membership after the invasion. You had to choose your degree of collaboration. He had studied chemistry and biology in Bratislava, where he met his future wife.
Their home was filled with good music, the walls were covered with the work of Czech painters, and the shelves were filled with good books. Friends of Martin's sister, Milana, had smuggled Jewish books in German to her. But even several years after the Velvet Revolution there were still few books on Jewish subjects in the C,?;ech language. It was a major event when, in 1989, the first C,?;ech edition of Leon Uris's Exodus was published. The Mandl family read it together.
The three-hundred-person Jewish Community was held together by the cantor, ArnoSt Neufeld, whose father had also been a cantor. Neufeld's face and thick, gray beard were so classically Semitic that his blue eyes seemed startling. His wife converted to Judaism, and their