“German? You’re studying German? Why is a nice Jewish girl learning German?” “So you’d ask,” I tell incredulous friends who let me know that they would never visit Germany and can’t stand to hear the language.
But I have a longer answer. I’m learning, or rather, relearning, German because I’m Jewish, not in spite of it. I also have another reason for spending my summer driving to Cupertino and sitting in a De Anza College classroom for 5 1/2 hours, five days a week, with students young enough to be my grandchildren. Golf is boring, my knees and shoulders can’t handle tennis, and my skills with a paintbrush are laughable, so I’m using my retirement to exercise the only organ that still seems to be fully functional: my brain. Sadly, by mid-July I was the only one of four “Alten” remaining in the class.
But why German? For centuries before the Third Reich, and before the birth of modern Hebrew, German was the language of my ancestors, and thanks to Moses Mendelssohn, it was the language of Jewish scholarship. And I must admit that despite my initial fear and distaste, I have a strange attraction to Germany and an interest in its history, including that of the Holocaust.
The first time I crossed into Germany during my junior year abroad, I trembled as a burly uniformed border guard who resembled Goering studied my passport. Was he going to stamp it “Jude”? But as I traveled through the country and met young people, my fears dissipated. There was something oddly familiar about the land, about the language.
Could it be that somewhere in the recesses of my brain were the roots of a language spoken by my forebears for the better part of 2,000 years? When I returned to Oberlin for my senior year, I began studying German, a language that has helped me to understand Yiddish.
Two years ago, when I embarked on a genealogical journey that took me from Berlin to my great-grandmother’s Bavarian village to the Rhineland, where Yiddish was born, I discovered another Germany. On the streets of Berlin were brass plaques commemorating those who had been murdered in the Holocaust. In the old Jewish quarter, non-Jewish musicians were performing klezmer, singing in Yiddish. In the city’s Jewish Museum, visitors from all over the world were learning about the incredible history and contributions of Germany’s Jews.
In Worms, the “Jerusalem of Europe” where Rashi taught, we picked up a map of Jewish sites from the tourist office and visited the 11th-century synagogue, where services are still held. Then in Stuttgart, we met with a genealogist who had restored the graves of my ancestors at his own expense.
We also visited Holocaust memorials and cemeteries, and I cried a lot. But I also began to see our own unfathomable loss as a tragedy for Germany, which lost many of its best scientists, rabbis, artists and musicians. And I met Germans who seemed to be atoning for the sins of their forebears.
My German next-door neighbor in Palo Alto has visited Israel twice, the second time working on a kibbutz, an undertaking not unusual for German young adults. In Europe, Israel has no better supporter than Germany.
I support Israel, but I also believe there are many ways of living a Jewish life and many places to live it. Germany is the one country in Europe where the Jewish population is actually growing, thanks to an influx of Jews from the former Soviet Union.
In Deuteronomy 23:8-9, we’re admonished: “You shall not abhor an Egyptian, for you were a stranger in his land. Children born to them may be admitted into the congregation of the Lord in the third generation.”
We discussed that passage some weeks ago in Beth Am’s Torah study group. Some said we should apply that directive to modern Germany, while others said they’re unable to make that leap, that there’s too much pain.
I’ve chosen to confront the heartache, not ignore it. By studying German and revisiting the land of my ancestors, I’m hoping to reclaim the Jewish past and compound Hitler’s defeat.
Janet Silver Ghent, former senior editor of j., is a freelance writer/editor living in Palo Alto. She can be reached at [email protected].