The reissue of the Volkswagen Beetle has stimulated a baby-boomer nostalgia. Everyone, it seems, learned to shift or fell in love the first time or made a maiden cross-country pilgrimage in a VW.
But although Gerhard Schroeder’s Germany hardly resembles Hitler’s Third Reich, the bubble-shaped cars remind me of my family’s 11th commandment: “Don’t buy German.”
My Brooklyn-born parents never warned, “Trust only Jews.” Our relatives had escaped Eastern Europe’s pogroms decades ahead of Kristallnacht. During the Johnson administration, my parents migrated to the suburbs and enrolled us in public schools. I invited kids with names like Brosnahan and Candelli to my barbecues, where Dad flipped cheeseburgers on the backyard grill.
So in the evening, when I memorized Hebrew vocabulary words or did my homework, you’d be more likely to hear me hum “It’s a Small World” than “Tradition.”
Still, when Mom led me door to door to hawk Girl Scout cookies, it was with the Jewish neighbors that she stopped to trade gossip and recipes. It was easy to absorb my parents’ values. Watching Mom roll rugelach dough, I learned about circumcising boys and burying the dead. Observing her stuff cabbage, I understood to send thank you cards and pay cash.
And helping her float matzah balls, I grasped the evil of all things German.
But once I reached adolescence, my parents’ mistrust of non-Jews seemed as provincial to me as the payes and tzitzit worn by the men in their old Brooklyn neighborhood. “Date Jews,” they instructed, so I would walk to the corner, claiming to meet a girlfriend, where my Catholic beau would drive up to scoop me away.
Then in college, a friend offered to teach me to drive standard on her Bug. Sliding behind the wheel, I imagined how my Orthodox-bred father must have felt the first time he ordered a BLT.
But now, having reached the age my parents were when I shifted that first VW, my memories of rebellion seem gauzy compared with the sense of right and wrong I learned before puberty.
So instead of fantasizing test driving a Beetle, I’ve been remembering myself at 10, lighting the candles on my family’s chanukiah, and turning down the neighbor’s invitation to trim her tree. And instead of imagining myself driving this little retro auto, I’ve been thinking about separating milk from dairy.
At the San Francisco German Lutheran church where my synagogue rented a sanctuary, I met a Jewish man in his 80s.
“I sing here,” he told me, “German lieder.” He had exited Germany in 1939 after incarceration at Dachau, and had immigrated to San Francisco via Shanghai. Now, he said, he summers in Germany.
“Isn’t that difficult?” I asked.
“No,” he smiled. “It’s a different Germany now.”
And I decided, if I can chant Hebrew in a German church alongside a man with a number tattooed on his arm, then I can rewrite my parents’ 11th commandment.
I can remember the dead without boycotting German cars. I can honor the survivors without shuddering at the image of a German holiday.
Because if “Don’t buy German” was the medium, “Never forget the Shoah” was surely the message.
And never forgetting is the best way I know to honor my father and mother.