A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [216]
Carefully booking his appearances, she developed his image, telling him to avoid the gold chains and open shirts and keeping him away from the Yiddish programs with non-Jewish singers. Showing her fluency in both New York culture and Western-style marketing, she said, “He doesn't fit into their hippie thing. He's more Broadway, and they're somewhere in the Village. They're sitting in Washington Square singing, and he's onstage, and that's the problem. You know, they are all skinny and they don't have any voice and the guilt feeling. He comes onstage, he looks great. He's in a suit. Nobody wears a suit. They have some kind of rotten clothing… and he has a real trained voice and knows how to play with an audience, and you know that's it!”
IRENE RUNGE'S FATHER was in his nineties when Irene became an outspoken Jewish figure. He reacted to her open display of Jewishness the way others had reacted when she revealed her Stasi ties. He was so angry, broygez, that he refused to speak to her anymore.
Irene was virtually unemployable because of her Stasi record. Many of her friends were in the same situation. For the first two years they had temporary, state-funded jobs. After two years they went on unemployment compensation. Accidentally, the new Germany had provided them with the socialist society that the GDR had failed to provide. Now there was no Stasi to dole out privileges, and no elite. They were all earning the identical state-funded incomes. And when they wanted to do something, they all pooled their resources—“each according to his ability,” just as Marx had said.
Irene's son, Stefan, wanted to marry a Jew and live a Jewish life. But a Jewish wife was hard to find, especially because he did not want a Westerner. Even Israelis were too Western for him. “I can't. In Germany I've tried. But I have no connection to the West.” But in some ways Stefan was not all that different from a Westerner. He had a job as an accountant. When Germany reunited, he moved to Israel. There he lived on a kibbutz, but he was soon back in Berlin. “I don't like it, but I can live better here. I have more money. I have my own apartment. I have a company and friends. In Israel I have nothing.”
And something else had changed for him. “I can go there anytime I want. Why should I move to Israel when I can go there anytime I want?”
Nor was Ron Zuriel leaving Berlin, where he had his law practice and his son and a married daughter with a child. But he did not exactly think of Germany as his homeland. Using the very German word Heimat, he said, “If you asked where is my home, my home, because everyone needs a home, I would say being Jewish is my home. It's a bit peculiar, but that is the only identity, the only point of identification I have, because I can't say I'm German. I have a German passport, I'm German by nationality, I'm German by culture, my mother tongue is German, but I wouldn't say that my Heimat is Germany. For me it is difficult to say.”
He never forgot that he had saved himself once before by knowing when it was time to leave Germany, and he made this calculation: “I would say that the time to leave for a Jew, to pack the suitcases, is when the right extreme party—I would add the Republicans, for me they are also right extreme, although they try to keep up appearances—if they some way or another would be taken into a position of responsibility, join in some form a coalition or whatever, if the existing parties consider them as possible political partners, I think that would be the time a Jew should think twice