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But it was shot at the Jewish community center in Cologne, Germany, perhaps the last place one would expect to find such an ordinary scene from Jewish life.

And that, precisely, is the photographer's point.

"What I'm trying to show is the attempt at normalcy," says Edward Serotta, whose new book "Jews, Germany, Memory" documents Jewish life in reunified Germany.

Photos from the 160-page volume are now on display at the Berkeley's Judah L. Magnes Museum — the traveling exhibit's U.S. premiere.

The Jewish writer-photographer says that though Jews in Germany are to varying degrees confused and haunted by the past, they have managed to rebuild vibrant, dignified communities steeped in tradition and rich in hope for the future.

"They really are trying," he says. "And they are slowly, slowly, slowly getting there."

Through telling anecdotes and portrayals of individuals' lives, the 48-year-old U.S.-born Serotta — who has worked for Time magazine, the Washington Post and ABC News' "Nightline" — captures how far they have already come.

In one photo, an exuberant young Dani Levi proudly displays her high grades in Dusseldorf's Itzhak Rabin School. In another, a young boy lies on the floor of a sun-filled room in Frankfurt's Jewish community center, drawing. A clown- and balloon-festooned Purim parade wends its way down a Berlin street in March 1994.

Such shots, as a recent Time magazine piece points out, evoke "the stealth of time over history."

Yet other pictures remind viewers that a Jewish life that rises from the ashes cannot emerge unsinged. There are shots of gravestones and memorials to the deceased, of Holocaust survivors who chose to remain in Germany after the war despite that country being the belly of the historic beast.

The book also explores Germany's relationship to Jews, to German-Jewish history, to its World War II past.

As signs that Germany is looking backward and inward, Serotta refers to Holocaust education in German schools, and widespread curiosity about Jews and Judaism among young Germans.

"No country has faced its past as the Germans have," he insists.

Being a Jew in Germany today, as Serotta's black-and-white photos show, means living a life of contradictions. Few call themselves German Jews but instead identify as Jews from a particular city or region.

"No Jew who lives in Germany is going to be completely at ease with living in that country," says the tall, goateed photographer, smoking thin cigarettes and blowing rings in his downtown San Francisco hotel room.

"There are problems of identification. There is guilt. There is at times self-loathing. It is difficult for them to justify to themselves why they're there. Yet, at the same time, I have a great deal of respect for the efforts they've made to rebuild Jewish life."

Few Jews living in Germany today come from its pre-Holocaust communities. Rather, they hail from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

In 1990, there were 28,000 registered Jews in Germany. Since the fall of communism in the former Soviet Union in 1991, some 25,000 Jewish immigrants from that region have streamed into Germany, exploding the Jewish population figures in city after city.

The newcomers have taxed to the limit their communities' educational and social welfare systems. But they have also brought with them a burning hunger for identity, Serotta says — fuel for Germany's Jewish cultural renaissance.

The hunger is apparent in his shots. One captures new immigrants learning Israeli folk dancing in Berlin; another shows newly arrived teenagers marking the end of Shabbat with a havdallah service.

Sitting around a table in Mackenrode in the former East Germany, immigrants sample Jewish food during a lesson on Jewish customs. An older immigrant couple clutches one another during a Chanukah dance at Berlin's Jewish Cultural Society.

"Now that the Russian Jews are coming, the Jewish community in Germany has something it didn't have a few years ago — a future," Serotta says.

The future of Europe's Jewish communities has been of interest to Serotta for some time. Born in Savannah, Ga., he graduated from the University of Tennessee and held a variety of jobs before settling full time into writing and photography in 1984.

While traveling in Central and Eastern Europe, he turned his eye toward the local Jewish communities, aiming to produce a photographic chronicle of Eastern Europe's "last Jews."

The project did not turn out as he'd imagined.

"I couldn't get any cooperation because nobody wanted to be a `last Jew,'" recalls Serotta, who recently relocated from Berlin to Vienna.

Listening to the concerns of Eastern European Jews and observing what they had achieved despite their diminished numbers, Serotta changed his perspective. Rather than focusing solely on what they had lost, he turned his gaze on what they still had — and what they had gained.

In 1991, he produced the book "Out of the Shadows," a study of Jewish life in Central Europe. Several years later came "Survival in Sarajevo," which portrays the humanitarian aid that city's Jewish community established to help their non-Jewish neighbors during the Bosnian war.

Serotta sees his latest effort as part of a trilogy.

"We've called these Jewish communities `remnant Jewish communities' and the people who live there `last Jews,'" he says. "My point is simply this: By calling them this, we denigrate them. We denigrate their efforts."