by Sam Apple
I went home that night and knocked out a thousand words on Hans for the English edition of the Forward, a famous Yiddish newspaper. But trying to convey Hans's story after one interview was harder than keeping a straight face during his concert. After my article appeared, I mailed it to Hans at his parents’ apartment in Vienna with a note suggesting that I might like to visit him and write more about his life. Upon receiving my letter, Hans called me (the only time I spoke to him during the following year) and said that I was welcome to come whenever I liked.
I decided to travel to Austria because I was fascinated with Hans. I wanted to understand what had driven him to a life of wandering and to discover what it was like to be a shepherd in the twenty-first century. I wanted to make sense of Hans's Jewish identity, to appreciate what it really meant for him to sing in Yiddish.
But Hans wasn't the only object of my curiosity. Nine months before I met Hans, Austria's far-right Freedom Party, a direct descendant of the Austrian Nazi Party, had stunned Europe and the world by taking 27 percent of the national vote in the October 1999 parliamentary elections. An even bigger shock came four months later when the conservative People's Party announced it would form a governing coalition with the Freedom Party, meaning that an extremist party with Nazi roots would be at the seat of Austrian power. As soon as the new government formed, Israel pulled its ambassador out of Vienna and the European Union imposed diplomatic sanctions on Austria. The New York Times opined that “the Freedom Party's rhetoric, and the racist thinking behind it, has no place in the government of a European democracy.”
There is good reason for the heightened sensitivity to far-right politics in Austria. Technically speaking, the Nazis invaded Austria on March 12, 1938, after Hitler ordered the German Eighth Army to cross Austria's northwestern border. But it was perhaps the most cordial invasion of one country by another in modern times. As German motorcades and infantry units passed through town after town, the citizens of Austria walked off their jobs to cheer the Nazi soldiers and shower them with flowers.
At the time Austria's Jewish community, almost all of it located in Vienna, accounted for approximately 185,000 of the country's 6 million citizens. The Viennese Jews were so well established and wealthy—they dominated a wide range of industries, from banking to the furniture trade, and comprised more than half of all doctors, lawyers, and dentists— that it seemed impossible to believe all their successes could be wiped out overnight.
But that is more or less what happened in the spring of 1938. With the Nazis firmly in power, the Viennese began attacking their Jewish neighbors with a murderous fervor. Even the German soldiers were shocked by what they saw— Germany's own anti-Jewish rioting seemed tame by comparison. Crowds cheered as gangs of storm troopers grabbed Jews from the sidewalks, beat them, and forced them to scrub the streets with toothbrushes. Synagogues were smashed and Jewish-owned stores ransacked. Jewish women were knocked down and pissed on. The white beards of rabbis were set afire for sport. On April 23, 1938, hundreds of Jews were marched to a famous Viennese amusement park where they were made to get down on their hands and knees and eat grass.
In the following years Austria would become a full-fledged part of the German Reich, and Hitler and Eich-mann would turn out to be only the most famous Austrians with blood on their hands. Austrians accounted for 40 percent of the personnel in the Nazis’ killing operations and provided more than one million soldiers for the German army.
The murders stopped with the end of World War II, but five and a half decades later 27 percent of Austrians had voted for a party founded by former Nazis, a party with a leader, Jörg Haider, who regularly vilified immigrants and who had a habit of making pro-Nazi statements. Was it possible that the Austrians’ hatred of Jews had passed to the postwar generations, as though nothing had changed? Was Austria still, in some sense, a Nazi country? I wanted to find out.
My other reason for visiting Hans and his sheep was more personal. In writing about Yiddish culture and European anti-Semitism, I would be exploring the world of my grandmother Bashy, a world I inhabited for much of my childhood. Some of my earliest memories are of Bashy singing Yiddish lullabies to me as she pushed me along the sidewalks of suburban Houston in an old-fashioned buggy. There was “Patsh Zhe, Patsh Zhe, Kichelech”:
Patsh zhe, patsh zhe, kichelech
Der tate vet machn shichelech
Di mame vet shtrikn zekelech
Holts hakn, bulges hakn, hiner tseyln
Morgn vet zayn a chasene.
Clap, clap, cookies
Your father will make shoes
Your mother will knit socks
Chop wood, bake rolls, count the hens
Tomorrow there will be a wedding.
And then there was my favorite, “Unter Sams Viegeley” (any name could be substituted into the song):
Unter Sams viegeley
Shteyt a vayser tsigele
Vos vet der tsigele handlen
Rozhinkes mit mandlen
Vos iz di beste schoyre
Di beste schoyre iz toyre mit rashe
Sam vet zogn a droshe
A sheyne droshe vet er zogn
Zayne matones vet er hobn
Shich un zokn vet er kpyfn
Un in cheyder vet er loyfn.
Under Sam's crib
Stands a white goat
What business is the goat in?
Raisins and almonds
What is the best merchandise?
The best merchandise is the Torah with Rashi [commentary]
Sam will give a good speech [at his bar mitzvah]
He'll give a good speech
He'll have presents
He'll buy shoes and socks
He'll run to Hebrew school.
I love these songs both because they remind me of Bashy and because I find the words a touching and funny reflection of what mattered most to my ancestors: Torah, weddings, small trades, and goats—probably in that order. It was a world Bashy had left behind when she fled her Lithuanian shtetl at age eleven, but she had carried enough of it with her to give me a good taste.
Until I was old enough to drive, Bashy would pick me up from school every day, arriving an hour before classes ended and parking directly in front of the building. Since she wouldn't use the air conditioner in her tiny 1980 white Dat-sun (I spent countless hours trying to persuade her that doing so would not cause the car to go up in flames), she had to stand and wait outside. As soon as the bell rang, I would race to be the first one out, gesturing with my hand for Bashy to get back in the car so that no one would see my four-foot-ten-inch, white-haired grandmother trying to relieve me of my backpack.
After school we'd cruise around Houston together at twenty miles per hour, barely fast enough to generate a breeze through the car's open windows. Even other elderly drivers would zip past us, but Bashy never seemed to notice. Her eyes, hovering an inch above the steering wheel, stayed focused on the dangerous road ahead.
First we'd stop at the supermarket, where Bashy would sometimes introduce me to the confused cashiers as “my grandson, who keeps kosher.” We'd buy the potatoes for Bashy's latkes and the flour and yeast for her challahs, then head to the bank, where Bashy liked to check in on the jewels in her safe-deposit box and where she would sometimes introduce me to the confused tellers as “my grandson, who keeps kosher.”
Back at Bashy's home, a one-story obstacle course of antique furniture that always smelled of mothballs, I'd lie down on the couch and eat greasy potato latkes covered in cinnamon and sugar. Just as I was about to fall asleep, Bashy would yank up my head, shove a pillow underneath, and then wrap me in one of the pooch perenis (feather-filled comforters) she had managed to bring from the Old World. Once Bashy was convinced that she had attended to all my needs—food and warmth—she would sit down at the end of the couch, rub my feet, and tell me stories about her day: A policeman she encountered on her morning walk had told her that her jewelry was too beautiful and expensive to wear on
the streets; the pump attendant at the gas station had told her that the strudel she had given him was better than anything his own mother made; the mailman couldn't believe how nice her roses were.
It was only as I grew older that I realized Bashy was embellishing these stories, that she and the policeman did not have a such a warm rapport and that the pump attendants at the gas station were not anxiously awaiting her next strudel delivery. What I didn't quite understand then, but see now, is that Bashy was reestablishing the order of the shtetl in suburban Houston. The folk characters had changed from the tailor and the shoemaker to the policeman and the pump attendant, but the mental landscape was largely the same.
And sprinkled throughout this landscape, like the raisins in the rock-hard challahs Bashy baked, was Yiddish. We spoke mostly in English, and so it was only as I got older that I realized that words like chazeray (junk) or grepts (burp) wouldn't be understood by anyone outside of my family. I've always liked the curses best: gey kpcken offen yom (go shit in the ocean); a geshvir dir in boych (an ulcer in your entrails); a krank dir in hartzn (a sickness in your heart). But now I also appreciate the ritualistic use of the word gezunt (health). Our family had a gezunt for every occasion. Before I left the house, it was zay gezunt (be healthy). If I were going on a trip, it was for gezunt (travel in health). At bedtime it was shlof gezunt, shtey uf gezunt (sleep in health, wake up in health). For a new piece of clothing it was trog gezunt (wear it in health). And so on.
And yet for all its tenderness, the landscape was not an entirely peaceful place, for the enemy—that is, the Gentiles— lived among us, and no matter how much she liked an individual goy, Bashy remained suspicious. Not even Mr. Newman, the elderly neighbor who helped her drag her garbage to the curb twice a week, was to be fully trusted. As far as Bashy was concerned, any non-Jew who strolled past her roses and up to her front door might just be dropping by to start a pogrom.
To prevent this pogrom, Bashy had six locks installed on her front door: two dead bolts, two chains, and two key locks. Visitors to the house were greeted by a floodlight that detected their arrival, then by Bashy's anxious eyes peering through the flowered curtains to the right of the front door. If Bashy recognized her guest and concluded that he was Jewish, or the rare welcomed goy, there was a long wait while she methodically unlocked the door, starting from the bolt at the top, which she could barely reach on her toes, and working her way down to the key in the doorknob.
Now and then I would time Bashy to see how long it would take her to undo all of the locks. But even as I teased her, the mentality that we were strangers among the goyim seeped in. Thanks to Bashy, I can't look at Christmas decorations without thinking goyisheh naches (something that gives the Gentiles pride or pleasure), and I feel guilty for even smelling the treyf (unkosher) aroma of a McDonald's bacon cheeseburger. It didn't happen often, but there were moments walking through the crowded halls of my public high school that I felt like a living anachronism, as though I belonged to a different time and place and had ended up in the late twentieth century among cowboy-boot-wearing Gentiles by mistake. I imagine a similar sense of disorientation is common to new immigrants, but I was born and raised in Houston. I'm a second-generation American on my father's side and a third-generation on my mother's side. I had every reason to be fully comfortable in my American skin, and yet deep down I knew that 99 percent of the people I saw on a daily basis were playing for the other team. Unlike Bashy, I could recognize the absurdity, recognize that the Gentiles in America were not out to get me. In fact, they were pretty nice. But I couldn't escape the dichotomy of Bashy's world. The distinction between Jew and goy was as sharp in my mind as it was in the mind of any self-respecting anti-Semite.
All of which is to say that when I left for Austria to think about Jews and Gentiles and anti-Semitism, I was carrying a lot more baggage than just my backpack. I didn't quite know what to expect when I left, but it wasn't long before I was up to my knees in sheep shit.
Two
A Neurotic Goes to Austria
On June 6, 2001, the day of my departure, I clicked my backpack closed and hopped in a cab to JFK International Airport. My plan was to walk with Hans and his sheep for a few weeks and then head to Vienna, where I would try to make sense of postwar anti-Semitism in Austria.
Everything appeared to be in place. I had a tape recorder and eighteen blank tapes. I had seven green-tinted steno notebooks. I had fifty pairs of disposable contact lenses. I had two hardcover library books on Austrian history and a travel book for tourists that included information on how to order SchiVeinshaxe, or “pork knuckles.” I had twelve one-time-use toothbrush pads called Dental Dots that stick to the tip of the finger.
What I soon discovered I should have had but did not: a regular toothbrush; hiking boots; wool socks; a heavy coat; a rain jacket; rain pants; a sweater; deodorant; a watch; press credentials; a small satchel so that I would not have had to show up to interview a prominent Viennese politician with my notebooks and tapes in a garbage bag.
The flight to Austria was uneventful. That said, one should be aware that if you ever order a vegetarian meal on Austrian Airlines, you will likely get two servings of fruit for breakfast. One serving will be in a cup, the other in a bowl. But they will be identical servings down to the number of grapes.
When I disembarked and retrieved my backpack from the luggage carousel, I found that the top was covered in a strange semenlike substance. While I'm fairly certain it was not semen, the thought that one of the airport baggage people had ejaculated on my backpack put a bad taste in my mouth as I nervously looked for Hans. I noticed that I had an old tag from El Al, Israel's national airline, on my bag, and it occurred to me that this possible masturbatory attack on my backpack may, in fact, have been an anti-Semitic masturbatory attack.
After several minutes of scanning the faces around me, I spotted a brown wool hat with a brim that circled the head and extended outward at least a foot (think floppy sombrero). As this is not the type of hat you expect to see a non-shepherd wearing in an airport, I wasn't surprised to find a smiling Hans beneath the enormous brim. We hugged briefly. We didn't know each other well enough to hug, but a hug somehow felt mandatory after an international flight.
Hans's hair was much shorter in the back, but his sideburns remained substantial. He wore navy blue pants with a splattering of mud on the right leg and a faded black T-shirt. Although I had not noticed the similarities before, the small wrinkles beneath his eyes and the rounded tip of his nose now reminded me of my father.
Hans and I exchanged pleasantries as we walked to his blue minivan, inside of which were two giant bags of salt, five or six shepherd's sticks that looked as though they had been carved from branches, old boots and work clothes, the squealing puppies of one of the sheepdogs, and an assortment of Yiddish folk tapes. The van had a faint odor of excrement, and I wondered whether it was the puppies or just the natural smell of a shepherd's van.
“You want to drink?” Hans asked, opening a carton of orange juice and sniffing it.
“No thanks,” I said.
I tried to make myself comfortable in the passenger's seat, opening the window a crack to counteract the smell.
“When you are in Vienna, you will stay with my parents or my girlfriend,” Hans said as we pulled out of the parking lot. His hat was now off, and his brown hair was matted to his head.
“I already have reservations at a hostel,” I said, wondering who this girlfriend might be. As far as I knew, Hans was happily married.
“This is not necessary,” Hans responded. “You will be my guest when you are in Austria, and when I am coming with my girlfriend to New York, we will stay with you.”
I pictured 625 sheep crammed into my tiny Upper West Side walk-up.
“Um, okay,” I said. Hans's self-invitation had startled me, but I was secretly relieved. A few days before I left, I had searched the Internet for photos of my hostel's rooms. I found the hostel's webpage, but instead of the
rooms, a large picture of two bare-chested men, one embracing the other from behind, popped up on the screen. I had inadvertently made reservations at Vienna's only gay hostel.
As we drove from Vienna's airport that morning, heading toward the flock, I got my first glimpse of the Austrian countryside. About 100 kilometers south of Vienna, the crop fields of Lower Austria begin to give way to Alpine foothills, a horizon of green waves that made even a cynic like me feel euphoric. I wouldn't have minded stopping for a few minutes to take in the view, but there was no time. We were an hour behind schedule, and Hans's wife, Kati (pronounced Kä-ti), was waiting for us with two of their three children, Andreas, fourteen, and Wolfi, nine. (Hans's eldest son, Günter, sixteen, was living with his grandparents in Vienna while working as an apprentice to a carpenter.)
Strapped into the passenger's seat, my small black backpack wedged between my legs, I tried to think of something to say. I'm shy and bad at small talk, but I found it especially hard to chat with Hans because we seemingly had so little in common. I'm American. He's Austrian. My knowledge of music is limited mostly to old-school hip-hop. Hans is an expert in the real old school: Yiddish folk. I don't wear my glasses despite my poor vision because I'm convinced it's impossible to balance the lenses evenly on the bumpy bridge of my nose. Hans walks around airports in a gigantic shepherd's hat.
“Do your sons enjoy working as shepherds?” I asked.
“Yes, they like it very much,” Hans said, his eyes on the road. He didn't seem unhappy, but his face is rarely without shades of pain. “My son Andi is very good shepherd,” Hans said. “Perhaps he will take over the flock one day.”
I had forgotten just how rough Hans's English could be. He has a large vocabulary and is rarely difficult to comprehend, but he never mastered the finer points of the language. “The's,” “this's,” and “that's” are interchangeable in his speech. Short “i's” usually end up as long “e's” so that “ill” becomes “eel” and “bird” becomes “beerd.” Prepositions come and go without warning.