Breaking Glasses
I used to be Jewish.
I’ve never been religious, but I’m twenty-four and living alone in Frankfurt, so I seek comfort with my people for Yom Kippur.
To secure a ticket, I present my identity papers and answer security questions at a bullet-proof gatehouse. A more intensive secondary interrogation ensues inside a light-filled atrium. By the time they ask me to prove my Judaism, I’m sufficiently alienated to consider dropping my pants – circumcised penises being extraordinary in post-war Germany.
“A letter from your Rabbi will do,” the lady says with a “keep it in your pants” attitude.
Entrance to the synagogue requires a pat down from Olympic wrestlers. They frisk only me. Everyone else strolls in.
I’m barely in the vestibule when another minder hands me a kippah, pointing to my head like I don’t know you cover your head to respect God. Not that I’ve ever worn one. Not that any God powerful enough to create the universe would expect me to wear this rag emanating dirty scalp odor.
In the segregated loft, children play tag and women gossip. Downstairs, I squeeze shoulder-to-shoulder with men mid-chanting, rocking asynchronously. I search for the Cantor or Rabbi on the crowded bimah, for a prayer book, for a guiding hand.
I’m congregated in solitary confinement.
I slip out the side door, onto the empty street sealed off by police. I walk among Frankfurters bustling before the stores close, until I arrive at the steps of the old opera house, where I eat a bratwurst and wash it down with ebbelwoi.
***
“Where are you from?” a man with a rottweiler says to me from across the dark Schaumainkai on my walk to the tram station in Sachsenhausen. All the neighbors’ rollläden are down, not even a flicker of Tagesschau visible. It’s quiet enough to carry his voice ten meters without shouting.
His head is shaved. He’s clad in studded leather. It’s peak neo-Nazi time for skull cracking, which is exactly what it sounds like, except they mostly target Turks since there aren’t enough Jews to go around.
“The United States,” I reply in my nearly accent-free German. It doesn’t occur to me to tell him I was raised half-German.
He holds the leash short, stands staring at me between the parked cars. I don’t stop, but I slow my stride.
“But you’re some kind of mix.”
“Well, I’m American. We’re all a mix of something.”
I stutter-step through an eternity of silence before the man’s laughter arrives, and he continues in the opposite direction.
Sachsenhausen vibrates with people singing Volkslieder in the kneipen. I sing along under my breath, familiar songs from fußball matches with my cousin Theo. When the revelry slips into a unified clapping, I don’t join in. I’ve never been good at keeping time.
***
“Halal is practically kosher,” I say to my cousin Leonard at the falafel joint on Broadway. He lectures me on the difference even though it’s me who schlepped uptown from my conference at the Javits.
Taking a bite, Leonard starts a debate on who lives in the more antisemitic place, wondering how I can stand the persecution in France, though I’ve never suffered the slightest persecution. I point out he runs a daily gauntlet of “From River to Sea” encampments at Columbia.
“Well, you are an under-the-radar Jew,” he says.
We’re not related by blood, but I don’t take it like that.
Our grandfather came from a long line of rabbis taught to be independent and rebellious, then estranged for being independent and rebellious.
Leonard thinks he honors the tradition by keeping kosher at home, sending his kids to kibbutz and doing medical research to end Alzheimer’s. I married a shiksa, never had kids, and wrote a novel indicting organized religion. We judge each other almost as much as we judge ourselves.
Sadly, our grandfather is dead, so he can’t adjudicate.
Leonard doesn’t know I spit in a tube. No one knows. I wasn’t proving anything, just curious about nature versus nurture. The results: 99.6% Ashkenazi from a part of Eastern Europe pocked with centuries of mass graves.
Leonard’s still haunted by the firebombing of his house when he was twelve. I call him every year on the anniversary and listen when he pours his heart out.
I keep my spit to myself.
***
Estrangement runs in my family. The men carry the dominant estrangement gene, but occasionally a recessive trait rears its head in a mother or sister.
Great uncle Chaim brought shame on the family by painting nudes. He’s no Chagall. I guess that’s reason enough for ostracism. So he changed his family name and moved to Carmel, making such a reputation for himself, the family can’t stop kvelling.
My aunt Devorah didn’t talk to her siblings for as long as it took the Jews to wander the desert. I heard stories about inheritance or using the wrong plates on Shabbos. Who knows? No one misses each other during the forty years. They reconcile when Devorah’s husband dies so maybe it was his fault all along. In any case, they reunite before they all go senile.
After making up with her siblings, Devorah stops talking to Leonard, cuts him completely out, dashing my hopes she’d learned any sort of lesson. Now Leonard’s got a whole other thing to pour his heart out about.
Me, on the other hand, I mostly avoid my dad. I make sure to be there when it counts, like his heart surgeries or IRS evasions. It’s always me bailing him out, never the other way around, which seems like as good a reason as any to become estranged. Except, I’m adopted, so I don’t have the genes for it.
***
Most everyone has retreated inside after dinner, except Dad and my maternal uncle Johann arguing politics under the wisteria arbor, oblivious to Hanna consoling my Mom, whose sobs carry through the kitchen window.
“Maybe we should call it a night,” I interject. “It’s your anniversary, Dad, remember? We brought everyone to Sevilla to celebrate.”
My father grouses to Johann, “Since his eighth birthday he’s thought he was better than me. He thinks we were wrong to bomb Hiroshima.”
Then he somehow manages to graft death onto his tirade about declining marriage rates.
“Death is nothing to fear,” Johann says. He’s the leader of his village bible study group in Dassow and organizes pilgrimages for his church to Gaststätte that once hosted Martin Luther.
“If you studied Judaism, you’d know better,” my father says. “Jews know death is the end. Only someone foolish wouldn’t be afraid, right?”
Until I saw the pale of Dad’s face in the moonlight, his hair white as flour, I’d never felt the shiver of his terror.
“Why does the end scare you?” I ask, not to alleviate his angst as much as exploit the first flicker of vulnerability in forty-two years. The wine and jet lag may have opened my first opportunity to understand him.
“I need to make the world understand.”
“Understand what?”
“People need to be led. They’re followers. I have to tell them how to live right.”
“If you make the world understand, you won’t be afraid?”
And his vulnerability vanishes.
He starts waving his finger and pontificating on another non-sequitur Johann and I can’t follow. Half-listening, I refill my wine glass, imagining all the possibilities in the worlds beyond our night sky.
***
At the crossing to Selmsdorf, my cousin Theo stands a little taller at the sight of the removed barricades. The remaining BRD/DDR guardhouses will be razed soon, too.
He promises we’ll only stay at the polterabend a few minutes to respect this guy on his team getting married. I understand the sentiment even though I’m still in college.
The energy is subdued when we arrive, inebriated celebrators seated around a very large round garden table. The bridegroom’s garbed in a kneelength leather coat like he’s cosplaying a Stasi officer except there’s a chance he was at least an informant.
I wind up stuck next to a drunk who spews dark vitriol for an hour.
The unshaven slob’s almost sliding off his chair, slouched belly stretching his t-shirt, about to piss his sweatpants between sips of warm pilsner and tugs on his cigarette. I don’t see how he cleans up for tomorrow’s wedding. I could probably use his blood for a Molotov cocktail.
He’s never met a Jew. The Wall only came down like five minutes ago, so seeing the West’s bounties held out of reach must sting after years of East German indoctrination calling it decadence.
But there’s no word, no excuse, no understanding.
When the moment comes, it’s all id, something primordial. I grab the table. Stand up. And dump it over. Biersteins and porcelain ash trays shatter on the patio. I’m yelling he’s not German, I know Germans, I’ve grown up with Germans, I’m German and Jewish, and you’re the one who doesn’t deserve to call himself German.
Theo finds me at the car. We’re like brothers, so I know this hunch in his back, trying to shrink his lanky frame to my size.
He stands between me and the incensed bridegroom, a gaggle of others gap-jawed by the garden gate.
The bridegroom puts his arm around me. He’s an enormous and moustachioed pacifist who once told me he didn’t approve of my grandfather’s hunting trophies, antlers my grandfather had come by through honest living as a forester.
“It’s my night,” he says. “You’ve spoiled it. There are other possibilities. You could have taken him aside and punched him a few times.”
“That’s not my way.”
“Help us clean up.”
“It’s not my mess.”
“You broke all our glasses.”
I reach into my wallet to throw money at the problem.
In the fraction of a second it takes to hand the bridegroom fifty Deutsche Marks, all that runs through me is this mistake I can’t undo. I’ve taken a torch to centuries of resilience.
***
I’m boarding a flight home from a conference in Newark when this yenta starts in on me. Am I married? Do I have kids? What line of work?
“Technology? You hear this, Marty?”
Marty’s mouth says “yeah” but he keeps his nose in his phone.
“This makes your mother happy?”
I’m tempted to tell her my mother isn’t Jewish.
The whole flight she’s testing my Jewishness (who’s coming to your Seder), my status (tech’s not doctoring), my fidelity (I have a niece who would be perfect for you if you weren’t married). I make sure she glimpses Hanna with our dog on my home screen.
Meanwhile, this Hasidic matriarch, not minding her kids climbing the seats and running the aisle, keeps glowering ‘cause the religious Jews sniff out my secularism like Spinones know truffles.
A blue-blazered, country-club curmudgeon streams conservative pundits without headphones. Along with a Bloody Mary, he admonishes the flight attendant to tell the people with the funny hair and hats to make their kids shut up.
I usually let things slide, especially when everyone’s confined shoulder-to-shoulder. I know futility. I’ve pushed my share of rocks uphill.
I unbuckle so I can stand over the old man.
“I really don’t want to listen to your shows. Can you please put in some headphones? And don’t be rude to the flight attendants.”
I feel his rebuttal mounting, thwarted by the flight attendant telling both of us she doesn’t want to call the captain, and the man’s wife white-knuckling his forearm.
When I sit back down, Yenta squeezes my arm and says to Marty, “Look what this nice young man did for us.”
While I’m revising the sharper things I should have said, she goes quiet. There’s a melancholy in her silence, a kind of resolution things don’t really change. She’s old enough to have lived with family who survived. Or didn’t. I only know these things through stories.
###
Georg Gerstenfeld
Georg Gerstenfeld has been an assistant editor at Narrative Magazine since 2014. His fiction has appeared in Invisible City and Blood & Bourbon. He studied English and German literature at Cornell University and lives in Napa Valley with his wife and their wackadoodle, Jake.