A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [218]
To Mia Lehmann, living in the reunified Germany was living in West Germany. “I don't like it now, and I didn't like it before. I came back to have a different Germany, not a Germany like this.” But she was not despairing. She was too busy. There were two million unemployed East Germans with whom she could talk and give sympathy. And she was collecting money to send milk to Cuba, where children were going hungry because of the U.S. embargo.
“I am always an optimist,” she said. “And I think there are enough people who don't like it. The way it is now, this country has no future. You see. The way people are so rich and other people are so poor. It can't go on forever.” She smiled cheerfully, as though she had not lived through most of this fast-paced and terrible century that had been her life.
E P I L O G U E
Freedom in the Marais
“And when, in time to come, your son asks you, saying,
‘What does this meanT you shall say to him, ‘it was with
a mighty hand that the Lord brought us from Egypt, the
house of bondage.”
EXODUS 13:14
Two very ordinary things happen at the same time on Friday nights in the fourth arrondissement of Paris. In the fashionable Marais young Parisians—and more than a few visiting young New Yorkers —dressed in exotically cut, brightly colored evening clothes, drift by shop windows to expensive restaurants that serve modern light fare. In the Pletzl religious men dressed in black wool suits—preferably pure wool, because the Torah forbids mixing wool with linen —and dark hats, sometimes large furry shtreimels, hurry to synagogues and shtibls.
This weekend, all this was also happening Saturday and Sunday nights because Passover began after the Sabbath ended. By Sunday, the second night of Passover, the bearded dark-suited men of the Pletzl were in a particular hurry to get home to their families. Since religious Jews cannot use transportation on a holiday, and most of them could no longer afford the Pletzl now that it was the Marais, they had a long way to walk from their home to the synagogue and back to the family seder.
A police van with several heavily armed patrolmen was stationed in front of the synagogue on Rue Pavee. Inside, men were gathering anxiously under the long thin columns with the art nouveau tulip-shaped lamps. Daniel Altmann was intently studying a passage of Hebrew, but others were pacing, anxiously looking at a spot under the balcony where an electric clock had been discreetly placed. A few bored children were playing in the aisles.
Finally, the cantor began chanting at 9:15 and the service was bruef. Altmann could get home quickly because he could afford to live in the Marais. It was not that long ago that he had been a young affluent single man much like the young people enjoying their weekend night. But now he hurried by them to his apartment and his family to start the Passover seder. He was a typical Orthodox part of the color of the neighborhood with his hat and beard. Only a weakness for expensive silk ties made him look slightly different from the others.
This seemingly gradual evolution from Pletzl to Marais in the sweep of history had taken place in the flick of an eyelid. As the Marais was modernized, a nearby ancient square was bulldozed to make a parking lot and sixty tombs were accidentally discovered from the long-forgotten Frankish dynasty that had ruled the neighborhood and much of France and Germany eleven hundred years ago. But even then, Passover had been two thousand years old.
Saturday night, the seder went on until four o'clock, but the five Allmann children had slept during the next day, and on Sunday night they were ready to do it all again. They were wound up and waiting for their father to get home. The Passover seder is for children —to teach them the meaning of freedom.