On the balcony of the synagogue in Karlsruhe, behind a wooden railing formed of interlocking Stars of David, was a colourful assortment of ladies’ hats.

Wearing his black robe with a narrow shawl around his neck, Cantor Nautitiel was preparing some special Alsatian melodies for the Shabbat Chol HaMoed Sukkot, and when he tapped the prayer lectern, a hush descended.

However, there was one man in the front row who continued calmly talking, and his frog-like voice was so loud that all the people in the row behind could hear his every word.

‘Elie Wiesel thinks that just because he survived the Shoah means he is an expert on the question of where God was when the Jews at Auschwitz were flying to heaven through the chimneys. In 1977 I was with my older twin brother in Madison at a round-table discussion where Isaac Asimov was in a debate with Wiesel. Mr Wiesel, he said to him, just because a group was subject to extreme persecution doesn’t mean that those people were virtuous and innocent. Of course, they may have been, but persecution in itself does not prove this. Persecution only reveals the weakness of the persecuted group, and it is not outside the realms of possibility that if they had been stronger, they would have persecuted the other group.’

He had to be deaf and blind, thought Moshe Blumendorf from one row up, but the chairman of the Jewish community and Harry Cohen, who were sitting at either side of the croaker, evidently didn’t think so. They were so caught up in his story that they failed to notice the cantor’s attempt to start the service.

‘But we didn’t persecute anyone,’ protested the community chairman, causing heads to nod in agreement several rows behind him.

‘That was exactly what the future Nobel Peace Prize Winner said to Asimov,’ replied the man, turning with evident pleasure to his listeners, ‘he flicked his world-famous mop of hair to the side, gave Isaac one of his self-pitying looks and threw down the gauntlet, ‘Then please be so kind as to give me one example of when the Jews persecuted someone!’

‘Well?’ asked the chairman.

‘Well-well,’ croaked the man, ‘Asimov reminded him of the story of the Jewish king, John Hyrcanus, who conquered the kingdom of the Edom and gave the Edomites the choice of either converting to Judaism or death by the sword! Quack-quack!’

‘You don’t say! Is that true?’ was the sincere response from the chairman of der Israeli-tischen Kultusgemeinde in Karlsruhe, who was in reality pleasantly surprised.

Moshe couldn’t stand it any more and called for quiet, ‘Ruhe dort!’

But the man wasn’t for being interrupted. He copied the self-pitying motion of Wiesel, tossing his hair from his brow and parodying his voice. ‘That was obviously the only case, Mr Asimov, quack, and if the Edomites accepted Judaism, then there would have been no persecution. And do you know what Isaac Asimov said in response? I completely agree with you, Mr Wiesel! But that was also the only example of Jews being in power. One out of one is not a bad score, eh? Quack-quack-quack!’

It was only then that the cantor focused on the man who had been interrupting him ― a small red-haired man with curly ringlets and a yellow-green knitted yarmulke on his head. With his knitted yarmulke, red ringlets and red moustache, he looked like an ageing hippy who had escaped from the 1960s and forgotten to change his clothes.

He turned towards Harry, ‘Is that the gingi in the third row?’

Harry nodded and finally the cantor began to welcome the Shabbat.

Harry liked the refugee from Czechoslovakia because, on the one hand, he was a refugee, while on the other, it certainly helped that he too was small in stature. And he liked Altschul because he had spent part of his life in Wisconsin. Harry’s widowed father had a mill on the Wisconsin river, and a family of Jewish tourists with two adult twins would sometimes call on him.

The father went fishing, the mother read, and the sons told Harry about the world behind the Iron Curtain. He had thought that he’d make the Czechs happy if he put them together. Yet somehow he had managed to overlook the fact that they didn’t see eye to eye.

It happened immediately after the service.

With his pink rucksack on his back, the self-centred Moshe looked like a frog puppet from a children’s programme on German TV. It was all the same who he spoke to as long as he had the opportunity to croak on and on about himself. As soon as Harry introduced himself, he started telling him about his birth, including the address of the maternity hospital where he and his older twin, Leon, came into the world.

He described in detail the apartment in the Bronx where he lived with his parents, and related an emotional story about a girl who had hidden between some old clothes in Auschwitz during the war. Then he talked about how the twins and the parents returned to communist Czechoslovakia.

During the war, the father had been a doctor in the American army under General Patton, and after he returned to his homeland, and before they imprisoned him in the 1950s, bekleidete er hohe Stellung at the communist Ministry of Health. He was released from prison at the start of the 1960s as part of an amnesty. He was sick of the communists by then and so when the Soviets occupied Czechoslovakia in 1968, he emigrated with his mother and the twins to Wisconsin. Leon still lives there, lecturing at the university, whilst Ruben, that was the croaker’s name, had found work at a computer firm.

However, the flow of information about himself and his family was interrupted when they reached the synagogue car park. His car had a strangely sloping front which was – naturally – reminiscent of a frog. ‘A Nissan – the last triumph of the Japanese car industry,’ he said introducing his car and taking a kind of small box from his pocket.

‘It suits you,’ remarked Moshe, though Ruben failed to register the irony.

‘Nisan is the first month on the Hebrew calendar, when our dear Lord led us from the Egyptian pots to the desert. And now watch!’

He aimed the small box, which was the size of a cigarette lighter, at the car, which also croaked. ‘A remote-control lock, my boy!’ he said with childlike joy. ‘I bet you’ve never seen that in a socialist country!’ After which he got in, started the car and set off, Shabbat or no Shabbat.

Relieved that he no longer had to listen to him, Moshe caught up with Harry and the group of Americans. On their way from the Shabbat service the talk turned as usual to how the use of a car on the Shabbat was unavoidable in the USA.

‘How do you know him?’ Moshe asked Harry.

‘We’ve know each other for years now since Wisconsin.’

After his father died, he continued to work hard at the mill himself, and when he had worked the same number of years precisely to the day as his father had, he left the mill. He didn’t even try to sell it, but just set off to see the world, something which he’d always wanted to do.

In Germany he married an older Swiss convert, despite the fact that he was from a priestly family and kohanim are not allowed to marry converts, and then enlisted in the US army. They had two sons, who to Harry appeared to be the spitting image of each other, and lived on an estate in identical one-storey villas for American soldiers and employees of the occupying army. The world didn’t disappoint him and he found happiness there. The American estate was built on flat, grassy ground between street-lights and birch trees which cast shadows in the orange glow of the lights. Here the paths did not radiate out from the castle like in Karlsruhe, but from the car park. From one of these, Harry and Moshe reached a sukkah which had been built in front of a one-storey detached house – and Ruben was sitting there at a fold-out table that had already been set.

With an ornamental knife in hand for slicing the Barches, he showed Marta and Harry’s two boys the brain operation on the Barches. He then covered the Barches with a ceremonial cloth and gave the Sabbath knife to Harry to recite the Kiddush over the wine and slice the Barches.

They sat down, dipped the white bread into bowls of honey, and after a few minutes, and to Moshe’s surprise, everyone stood up and left the sukkah.

During the autumn holiday of Sukkot it is compulsory for Jews to live for seven days in makeshift dwellings to commemorate the forty years of wandering through the desert after the children of Israel had left Egypt. However, according to liberal American rabbis, it is enough just to eat a slice of bread in the sukkah, and so supper was served in the apartment. Moshe was slightly put out as that wasn’t the way things were done in Prague. Or more precisely, they did do this, but they kept the rabbis out of it. They had a good excuse for this, as a few years previously, someone from a neighbouring house had thrown bricks from a balcony at the courtyard of the Jewish community where they had a sukkah and were singing.

Ruben used the interval between leaving the sukkah and having the soup in the apartment to lecture on the theme of respecting the holidays set out by Moses three thousand years ago in the desert. He was quick to emphasize that liberalism did not prevent him from maintaining contact with the Orthodox communities. On the way to the stairs he said to Moshe, ‘Young man, I was on the boards of both the Reform and Orthodox Jewish communities. Even though I am in complete agreement with reformist Judaism, I had my wedding in an Orthodox synagogue, and when I die, I want to be buried with all the honours of the Orthodox ritual. You understand, Harry?’

‘Of course,’ nodded Harry, opening the door.

‘I’m more liberal about this than a liberal rabbi,’ continued Ruben at the ceremonially laid table. ‘To commemorate the Sukkot, which reminds us of how our teacher Moses led us by the nose for forty years across the desert ― well, my brother and I think that is the height of absurdity! Quack-quack!’

‘It was so that the generation, which the Lord had led from Egypt, would die in the desert because they had lacked the faith to conquer the Promised Land,’ said the scholarly convert Marta, placing the hot soup on the table, ‘Isn’t that right, Harry?’

‘Of course,’ nodded her husband as he disappeared into the kitchen.

‘I’d be interested to know,’ said Moshe, ‘where you can be on the boards of both the Orthodox and liberal communities at the same time.’

Since he had taken a train across the border to the free world, the Germans had listened to him with a knowing smile, but after a while he always discovered that he wearied them with his school-level German. He even bored the investigator at Schwanndorf, because apart from Wagner, he did not know the names of his Prague interrogators.

‘It’s always difficult to deal with you converts,’ said Ruben teasing Marta as she put a plate in front of him. ‘We native Jews are closer to the reprobate generation of the desert. If they had gotten their way and returned to Egypt, we wouldn’t need to ask the question of where the Lord was when his chosen people were gassed in Auschwitz.’ However, with her Swiss conscientiousness, the hostess persisted and so during the main meal he turned to Moshe. ‘In Geneva, young man,’ and then moved on to talk about the situation in Czechoslovakia.

He knew prominent dissidents who lived in exile, as well as a number of people from the Prague Jewish community who Moshe hadn’t heard of, either because they were dead or had emigrated. He also knew a number of communist officials from the 1950s who had been friends of his father before the war. They were the same people who had then thrown his father out of work and sent him to prison. It didn’t take long before he met up with them again as prisoners in the Jáchymov uranium mines.

 

Translated from the Czech by Graeme Dibble