by Pam Jenoff
They thought him odd, he knew. A lone single man who came to shul every Friday night and Saturday was an anomaly among the younger Jews of their once-affluent section of Berlin. The Reform movement had caught on like wildfire, and most young people attended the more modern temple across town, if they went anywhere. Still others, like his brother Jake, went to the Jewish social club on Reisstrasse, where they did not worship at all, but instead had a meal and then debated politics over schnapps and cigarettes late into the night.
Sol pictured his twin brother’s face as he made his way down the aisle. Jake, who had shaved his beard to a tiny goatee and trim mustache, was too busy for shul. He traveled in a wide circle of friends, many of whom were non-Jews, and spent long hours at his job at the ministry. Of course, he never explained his lack of observance that way. The Sabbath, Jake said, had traditionally been home-based—it was only in diaspora that Jews had felt the need to come together at the synagogue each week. It was infuriating the way he did that, tried to find nuggets from the Talmud to support his modern views, while ignoring wholesale so much of what the holy text required. But Jake had always done what he wanted, and so each Friday he joined their mother for the Sabbath dinner, making conversation with the handful of guests she assembled, before disappearing to the social club or for drinks with God knows who.
What, Sol wondered, fingering the edge of his tallis, would their father have thought of Jake’s lifestyle? But even if he was still alive, Sol likely would not have known. Max Rosenberg had seldom been home and, when he was, had kept his thoughts to himself. Born penniless in a shtetl in Bohemia, Max had spent every waking hour of his life working, building from a single tiny hardware store to a chain, third biggest in Berlin. He had gone to shul dutifully each week when he was in town, not out of a sense of religious obligation but in order to keep the goodwill and patronage of his Jewish customers. No, their father would not have approved of Sol’s own observant lifestyle, with its focus on books and study rather than earning money, any more than he would have agreed with Jake’s social high jinks.
As the rabbi began to chant, a faint scuffling noise came from the rear of the sanctuary. Sol’s eyes darted to the back of the room where a group of men, recent immigrants from the east, shuffled in, clad in work clothes that were crude and worn despite their best efforts to wash the factory dirt from their collars and cuffs. The newcomers had arrived in greater numbers and frequency in recent years, owing to the violence that had worsened under the earlier czarist regime, the harsh economic conditions exacerbated by the war and its aftermath. Their faces still bore the scars of what they had seen, the permanently fixed haggard expressions more telling than anything they could say in their accented Yiddish. Sol doubted that their lives here, living in cramped apartments, often two families to a single room, and working long hours in the factories for little pay, could be any less harsh than in the Pale. But the workers accepted each word or gesture like food offered to a starving man. Berlin’s treatment of its Jews, in Sol’s estimation, was far from perfect, more of a shove than an embrace. But to the immigrants, the city was worlds away from the barbarism of the shtetls from which they hailed, a haven. Here in modern Berlin, they were safe.
An hour later when the prayers had ended, Sol stepped outside, lowering the brim of his hat and raising the collar of his overcoat against the now-frigid March air. He fought the urge for a cigarette, stopped in equal parts by his desire to avoid his mother’s scowl when she smelled the smoke on his breath and the fact that it was Shabbes. The streets were emptier now, and the few passersby moved swiftly, heads low to the wind. Sol paused at the corner to fish some coins from his pocket for the homeless man who sat against a building, a one-legged veteran he had seen there before. The man had to eat, after all, even on the Sabbath.
Walking, his thoughts returned to his father once more. Sol recalled Max as a shadowy figure from his childhood, coming home from work late at night, gone on mysterious travels for weeks at a time. Max worked feverishly, and after he died from an unnamed illness at the age of fifty-seven, Sol often wondered if all of the work had killed him. But the gamble paid off in the pecuniary sense of the word—by the time Max was found slumped over his desk, he was president of a prosperous business and had left his beloved Dora with the comfortable house on Rosenthaler Strasse and what he thought would be more than enough money to see her through her days. It would have been, too, had their mother, naive to begin with and numb with grief, not fallen prey to an investment scam that left her not a year after he had died with a fraction of what he had put away.
Twenty minutes later, Sol entered the house. As he took off his boots in the entranceway, he winced at the sound of laughter that erupted from the dining room. Even as a child, he had felt like his mother’s dinner parties were an affront to the quiet dignity of the Sabbath.
“Sol?” his mother called, hearing the door. He cringed. Usually by the time he arrived home from shul, dessert had been served and the wine-tinged conversation was noisy enough that he could sneak up the back stairs unnoticed. Reluctantly, he walked into the dining room.
His brother was still there, he noted instantly. Sol was surprised. Jake should have been long gone to meet his friends by now. But today he lingered, leaning back, running his hand through hair uncovered by a yarmulke, showing no inclination toward leaving. Then, scanning the guests, he saw the reason Jake was still there: a dark-haired young woman, seated beside him, talking animatedly.
Then she turned toward Sol, and as he saw her face he froze. It was the salesgirl from the department store.
No, it wasn’t, he realized, taking a closer look, his heart still pounding. The resemblance was striking, though. She had the same dark eyes and curved nose, the same full lips and quick smile. But her hair was styled in a short, sleek bob, and there was something about her lipstick and rouge that Sol found garish, her sweater tight and immodest, a style that he knew his girl would never wear.
Still, Sol was intrigued. Jake had never brought a girl to dinner before. Who was she: a secretary from the ministry? But she looked nothing like the dour, frumpy women he’d seen leaving the government building the one time he met Jake outside his office. Perhaps she worked at one of the brokerage houses for the bankers who came in every day from the elegant suburb of Grunewald by bus, the Roaring Moses it was called because of the large number of Jews who rode it. Or maybe she was an artist or performer or didn’t work at all. With Jake, it was hard to say; he traveled easily through myriad groups, slipping from one mantle to the next seemingly without effort. Even as he disdained his brother’s lifestyle, though, there was a part of Sol that secretly wished Jake might for once sweep him up and take him along on the magic carpet ride that was his social life.
“Sit down,” Sol’s mother urged. He peered longingly down the table, wishing that he could squeeze past the others and find a seat down by Jake and the girl, but the guests were packed elbow to elbow and so he reluctantly pulled up the only available chair, a low-backed wooden one, and slid into the space his mother indicated beside her.
Sol studied the remnants of dinner that littered the table, crumbs scattered across the lace tablecloth and fine china. On the surface his mother’s weekly gatherings had not changed—there had been savory chicken with spaetzle, he could tell from the lingering aroma, delicious chocolate tortes for dessert. Only one who had been there years earlier before the war might notice that the cuts of meat were leaner, the wine not so expensive. The dishes, casseroles and stews, were designed to stretch the expensive ingredients, to hide amidst the gravy and starch the fact that there was less.
The guests themselves were changed too—in earlier years, none would have been caught wearing anything but the latest fashion. Now if he looked closely he could see a bit of hand darning at Frau Leifler’s collar, a scuff on the toe of Herr Mittel’s dress shoe where the leather had worn thin. No one, it seemed, had been exempt from the economic hardship that followed the war.
Jak
e caught Sol’s gaze and raised a hand in a wave that was friendlier than their relationship might warrant, designed for the benefit of the other guests. Sol did not return the gesture, but nodded and then looked away. He could remember a time when they had once been, if not close, at least not as distant as they had become since their lives took such different paths.
Sol surveyed the room. The house had always been Dora’s; even when Max was alive, there was little of their father in the floral upholstery, the too-ornate furnishings. Now, with the passage of the years, there was an unmistakable wornness to it all. The wallpaper had faded and the carpets were frayed at the edges and there was a tarnish to the lamps that no amount of polishing could remove.
Sol’s eyes dropped to the mantelpiece. Between the silver candlesticks and the framed photograph of his parents as young newlyweds, now yellow with age, sat a glass-domed clock. It had been a gift from their father to their mother, brought back from a business trip to the south when Sol was a small child. The timepiece was their mother’s most prized possession; not only was it a memento of her long-departed husband, but it was one of the few gifts picked with thought and care during their marriage by the otherwise preoccupied Max. Dora forbade the maid from even dusting it, insisting on doing it herself each week with a special chamois cloth.
His thoughts were interrupted by rising voices across the table and he lowered his gaze to Herr Mittel, who was engaged in heated debate with a guest Sol did not recognize. The conversation had descended into politics, a debate on why Germany lost the war, what would have happened if it had won. Almost four years after the armistice, it was a popular topic, the speculation seemingly endless.
Inwardly, Sol bristled. Who else here but he had fought and nearly died in the trenches? “If the Jews …” Herr Mittel began. Then he stopped, as though he had forgotten for a moment where he was. Clearing his throat, he continued. “That is, if the foreign populations had fought instead of allying with their interests abroad.”
Sol’s anger rose to full boil. The Jews had fought hard alongside the rest of the German men. One survey he’d read at the Gemeinde said more Jews had fought for Germany than any other minority, that twelve thousand had died. But that report had been buried, not published at the “request” of a government ministry, and so the myth persisted. He looked down the table at Jake, wondering if his brother would correct Herr Mittel. Jake, who worked at the foreign ministry now, knew the older man was wrong. But Jake did not respond. No, of course not—defending the fact that the Jews had served would only point out that he himself had not, make him look cowardly in front of the girl.
Realizing no one else would speak up, Sol opened his mouth to say something, but his mother placed her hand over his, warning him to be silent. It was not politics or even fear on her part—she simply did not want one of her guests to feel unwelcome, or to taint the atmosphere of her party with an awkward moment. Dora Rosenberg loved people and she surrounded herself with company to blunt the force of whatever trauma life threw at her. During the war, she had doggedly persisted, hoarding ration coupons and supplies, holding parties by candlelight when the lighting failed, and starting the dinners in late afternoon when curfews wouldn’t let the guests stay after dark. She clung to them even more fiercely after her husband died and the shelter he built around her began slowly to erode.
The gathering devolved into smaller conversations. Jake’s voice drifted down the table. “As I told the minister the other day …” His comments, though directed at the girl, were loud enough for everyone to hear.
Tuning his brother out, Sol grew more annoyed. Everyone already knew about Jake’s position. He’d begun working for Walter Rathenau years earlier, long before he became foreign minister. The day he’d gotten the job, he ran home from university, breathless. “He’s amazing,” he told Sol. “He’s going to be the German Disraeli, they say.” Working long days with fervent zeal, Jake had gained Rathenau’s favor and ridden his coattails into office as an appointed aide.
“Anti-Semitism in Europe,” Sol heard Jake saying nonchalantly to the girl now, “is nothing but a passing social phenomenon.”
“Passing for about a thousand years,” Sol muttered under his breath.
“What was that, darling?” his mother asked absently, not looking toward him.
Sol did not answer. He had once believed, as Jake did, that they could be counted among their non-Jewish brethren, more alike than different. As a teenager, he’d been as secular as his brother. When the war broke out, he gamely enlisted with his friend Albert, caught up with everyone else in the Spirit of 1914, convinced that Germany was right and would swiftly prevail. Only then was Sol made aware for the first time in his life that he was not like the others. The lone Jew in his unit, he was hazed with a barbarism that he could not have imagined. They pissed in his water canteen and spat in his rations, which he ate anyway because he was close to starving by then and there was no other food to be had. They stole his extra pair of socks and he had gotten frostbite and trench foot and lost two toes on his right foot as a result.
But perhaps worst of all was the isolation. Shunned by the other soldiers, Sol found himself alone in the most desolate place on earth. Even Albert turned his back out of fear, avoiding his childhood friend until the day Sol cradled his head as he died in the trenches of the Ardennes.
And then he’d returned home. He didn’t expect a hero’s welcome—the civilians did not know how valiantly they had fought or the hardships they had suffered. But Sol was unprepared for the bile and recriminations: the Jews, the papers said, had not fought for their country. They had allied themselves with foreign interests, surrendered willingly and stabbed the German soldiers, who had treated them like brethren, in the back. Jewish factory owners were supposedly responsible for the shortages of munitions, food, and other supplies that had resulted in the defeat of Germany. Four years later, idiots like Herr Mittel were still repeating those same insidious lies propagated by the media and politicians in order to further their own interests.
Soon the coffee cups were drained and there seemed to be an unspoken cue for the guests to stand and start for their coats, despite his mother’s protestations that they should stay a bit longer. “We’re going down to hear some jazz,” Jake announced as he reached Sol’s end of the table, already a “we” with the girl at his side.
“Hello,” Sol said to the girl, a shade too loudly, as she started past. “I’m Jake’s brother, Sol.”
“Miriam,” she offered, extending her hand in the modern custom, and Sol, fighting his natural tendencies, shook it.
“You look familiar,” he began and a look of confusion crossed her face, as if their paths could not possibly have intersected. “A sister, perhaps?”
“Leah,” she said, and her voice carried the same dismissive note with which Sol had heard his brother speak about him. “She’s older, works at the KaDeWe.”
“Yes,” he replied quickly. “Will she be joining—”
But before Sol could finish the question, Jake was at Miriam’s side, taking her arm. He clapped Sol on the back a shade too hard. “How’s work at the Gemeinde?” he asked in a way that was meant to illustrate to Miriam the difference between Jake’s important position at the ministry and his brother’s clerical job.
Sol’s mind raced as he tried to think of something interesting to say about his work but found nothing. “We should go,” Miriam said, looking up at Jake.
Sol watched as his brother’s expression changed, and there was a submissiveness there he had never seen before. “Yes, of course.”
He held his breath, waiting for an invitation to join them. He would make an exception, go out on the Sabbath just this once, in hopes that Miriam’s sister might be there. It was worth risking the wrath of God if it meant finding her, for the privilege of basking in the light of those brown eyes. But the invitation did not come—Jake and the girl were already brushing past him, making their way to the door, and in that instant Sol was inst
antly reminded of the vast gulf between his brother’s world and his own, the places he could never belong, even if he wanted to.
The next morning, Sol set out for shul once more. On the street, he sniffled, his nose tickled by the acrid odor of the ersatz coal everyone burned to keep warm these days. He had slept poorly, dreaming of the evening in the jazz café that had not taken place, a smiling Leah taking his arm the way Miriam had Jake’s, and had awoken strangely warm and empty and exhausted at the same time. His boots scuffed noisily against the cobblestones, carving tracks in the fresh coating of snow that covered the ground.
It was not until he reached the main thoroughfare that he noticed the difference: the street seemed eerily quiet, with a lack of activity more reminiscent of the last few weeks of August, when those Berliners who could fled the city for holiday to the seaside or the mountains, than early March. Inside the synagogue, the change was even more noticeable—the men did not call out to one another as they usually did but clustered in the corners, talking in low voices as if afraid someone might overhear. He stood awkwardly to one side of the room for several minutes, wanting to join in the conversations but not sure how. Nine o’clock, the starting time for worship, came and went, yet the men did not take their seats.
Finally, Herz Stempel broke away from the circle and came to the spot where Sol stood alone. At fifty-four, Herz was one of the younger congregants, less closed off and suspicious of outsiders. “What is it?” Sol asked.
“You haven’t heard?” Sol shook his head. “Rathenau’s dead.”
Sol scanned the congregation in his mind, trying to recall which of the men in the sea of gray hair and beards was Rathenau. Then he realized that Herz was not talking about one of their own but rather about the foreign minister, for whom Jake worked. Walter Rathenau was also a Jew. “How?”