A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [185]
Along with most of the town, the synagogue had been torn down to build workers’ housing, but the community prayed in a fifteen-by-thirty-foot room with prewar Torahs. There were minyans every Friday night and Saturday morning. In the absence of any trained religious leader, Adolf Schultz, in his early seventies, kept the community functioning. He and most of the other Galanta Jews observed the kosher laws. Like Arnost Neufeld in Brno, Schultz almost obsessively maintained the Jewish cemetery.
FERO ALEXANDER and his wife, an orthodontist, were still committed to Bratislava. The five-story building where they had an apartment, on the slope of the castle-topped hill, had been owned by his wife's family, who had built it in 1932. In the last Slovak state Jewish property had been “Aryanized.” The “Aryans” who had been given this building were forced to turn it over to the Communist state in 1961. Now both the Alexanders and this “Aryan” family were trying to get their property back. It was one of hundreds of such cases.
The Sterns resisted emigration. Zuzana, who had visited her relatives in Israel in the 1960s and returned feeling that Czechoslovakia was her home, felt a little less certain about the Slovak Republic. But she said, “I think that it is very necessary that there are some communities in other countries.” The Sterns have always been proud of the ancient Jewish history of Slovak towns, and even if they v/ere among the few Jews left, they still felt they lived in a place with Jewish roots. They celebrated the major Jewish holidays with their closest friends, who happened to be Protestants. “It is a good thing to have some very good friends who have nothing against Jews and who are able to celebrate Jewish holidays too,” she said.
Zuzana Stern believed that by deciding against emigration in 1968, when all of their Jewish friends had left, “we just deferred the decision to another generation.” Soon their son and daughter would have to decide. To well-educated young Bratislava Jews, Israel was not nearly as tempting as such places as Vienna and Piague, which were culturally similar and close by.
Tomas Stern's father, the economics professor, was encouraging him to leave, predicting a dismal future for the new republic. But Juraj and Zuzana had no intention of leaving themselves. “This is an important place for Judaism. It had one of the great yeshivas of the 19th century,” Juraj said.
“The greatest,” argued Tomas. “But you can't have that now.”
Juraj didn't hear his son and continued, “You can't let that disappear. Bratislava is a Jewish place.”
“So you are going to sacrifice yourself for that?” Tomas asked.
Juraj did not answer.
30
In Antwerp
IT WAS FRIDAY AFTERNOON, AND YOUNG MEN AND BOYS were already appearing in the street in their Sabbath best— ever wider and furrier hats, and newer, shinier coats, and peots so exquisitely curled that they bounced with each step like party decorations. The clothing seemed to be a contest that no one was winning. At Seletsky's bookstore—where, in order of quantity, Yiddish, Hebrew, Dutch, French, German, and English books on Judaism were stacked so haphazardly that it was hard to get in the store—a Hasid was bartering with Seletsky for a set of commentaries. They were doing it in diamond-district style. Mechilem Silberman, a stout, well-fed, and happy father of five, called it “the diamond mentality.” He never liked it, which is why he converted the storefront of the family home on Simonsstraat into a silver shop. The silver trade was at least a little more genteel.
His mother, Dwora Silberman, was never happy about this decision. She visited him from Israel, where she had been living since her husband Hershl died in 1985, and she cautioned him once again about going into silver. “You can't carry silver,” she told him. If things get bad, “diamonds are a very easy thing to take with you when you flee.”
Fleeing was increasingly on her mind. Again and again, she reviewed the way her parents, the last time she saw them, had told her and Hershl to flee because