A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [203]
AMONG YOUNGER DUTCH JEWS, as in Paris, there was a trend toward more Orthodox practices. This, too, had its roots in the Holocaust—the conviction that assimilation did not work. One Orthodox rabbi said, “In my own family, directly after the war I had an uncle who said the only solution was to assimilate. But this was not true. Even Jews who were baptized—they found them.”
Jewish culture remained ingrained in Dutch life, especially in Amsterdam, where Yiddish words belong to the popular slang in much the same way as they do in New York. Mazzel is luck, a crowd or gang is a miesjpoge, they speak of shlmeils. Amsterdam ended up with ten working synagogues and even four shtibls. Most of them had to struggle for a minyan, because so many of the Jews had moved to the flatland in the south and were no longer within walking distance for the Sabbath. Even the Esnoga began experimenting with offering a service in the south once a month.
The five-hundred-year history of Dutch Jewry was not over. In the 1990s only thirty thousand Jews remained in all of Holland— just slightly more than the population immediately after the survivors returned in the late 1940s. Survivors wanted the past to be remembered by others, but they did not want to look back on it themselves. Leo Palache said about watching television, “If I know there is something about the war, I switch off because I don't want to test myself. Where is the limit of what I can stand? I don't want to test myself. And I say if I want to know about the war, the concentration camps, I just close my eyes.”
33
In Berlin
and the
New Bananerepublik
IN NOVEMBER 1989, WHEN THE WALL OPENED UP FOLLOWING a surprise announcement, Sophie Marum, the daughter of a rabbi and a longtime Communist party member in the East, was asked if she wanted to join the thousands who were rushing across to the West for a four-decade-delayed shopping spree. “I didn't go there. I am not interested in eating something special. I don't think the things here were so bad. I like apples. I don't know why I must eat bananas.”
For a long time the Westerners had been talking about how the poor East Germans had no bananas. Their Germany was such a failure that it could not even offer its population bananas. Such was the religion of consumerism that West Germany had embraced. A society that offered bananas was better than a society that didn't. When the Wall opened, a curious rumor circulated that parts of West Berlin had become strewn with banana peels. West Germans, Helmut Kohl, and probably most of the Western alliance wanted this moment to be their dramatic triumph, with the downtrodden East Germans, in hysterical joy, bursting into the West, basking in freedom. The cameras were there to record it.
There were people who seriously believed the Ossis would be flooding in to buy bananas. They did flood in. The West German government gave each of them one hundred marks to spend (about fifty-five dollars at the time), a small price for a government to pay to assure its own version of history. According to West Berlin Mayor Walter Momper, Germans were now “the happiest people in the world.”
Ron Zuriel was happy. Still a photography enthusiast and still a Berliner, he went daily to the Wall to take pictures of the Ossis coming through. “I was happy for them. To see those faces when they came into the West and saw all those lights and the shops and all that. They came into a different world. For them it was a fantasy.”
After forty years of separation the visual differences were dazzling. The Wessis were throwing the party, and the Ossis came. Irene Runge, now a teacher of cultural anthropology at East Berlin's Humboldt University, heard that the Wall had opened, and her