by Sam Apple
“What's wrong?” I ask.
“I miss my wife,” the shepherd says.
“I know,” I say. “But there are lots of women here. Talk to them. They'll find your accent charming.”
“I do not want other women,” the shepherd says. “I want my wife.”
“I'm sorry,” I say. “Let's go to Burger King.”
We go to Burger King. I order a fish sandwich and a Dr Pepper. The shepherd orders a cheeseburger. When he is finished, he sings a Yiddish song about a lonely tailor under his breath.
Across from us, an attractive blond woman with hoop earrings is dipping fries into a small paper tub of ketchup.
“Just go talk to her,” I say.
The shepherd gets up and sits down across from the woman.
She looks nervous. “I am shepherd from Austria,” the shepherd says.
“I'm Darlene,” the woman says. “I'm a cashier from Laredo.”
“I am without my sheep,” the shepherd says.
“I can see that,” Darlene says. “Want a fry?”
The shepherd takes a fistful of fries. “My country is full of old fascists,” he says. “People know what happened during the war but act as if they do not know because they want to believe this myth that Austria is veecteem.”
“What's a fascist?”
“Someone who cares only for power.”
Darlene laughs. “We got those here too.”
“You are beautiful woman,” the shepherd says. “Perhaps you would like to wander with me some hours?”
“You're sweet,” Darlene says, “but I've got a plane to catch. You want the rest of my fries?”
The shepherd comes back to my table. We go on waiting. Days pass and our flight never arrives. The shepherd begins hitting on more and more women. After a month he has approached almost every female employee in the airport. It looks bleak. I eat more fish sandwiches and try not to worry.
One day I come back from the bathroom in Concourse C and the shepherd is holding the hand of a glowing redheaded woman.
“This is Shayna,” he says. “I found a woman who understands me very well and would like to be with me.”
The shepherd and Shayna become an item. She wanders the airport's wide hallways with us and tells us stories about the outside world. The shepherd seems more relaxed. He observes the herding instincts in an immigration official's German shepherd. He tries his first Cinnabon and enjoys it.
We wait and wait. The sadness returns to the shepherd's eyes. “I miss my wife,” he says.
“Forget your wife,” I say. “She ran off with a dentist. Now you have Shayna.”
“But I am not happy,” the shepherd says.
“No one is happy,” I say.
“You are too young to understand,” the shepherd says.
But I do understand. The plane is not going to come because the shepherd isn't ready for it to come.
The next morning I board a flight to Toledo. The shepherd cries. I tell him everything is going to be okay, but I don't believe it.
Twelve
The Wandering Jew
The first sentence I ever read about Hans, in the Yugntruf e-mail, described him as “a wandering Jew.” I didn't think much of the label at the time, but in the months prior to my trip just about everyone I spoke with made Wandering Jew asides, and I thought I had better figure out what they were talking about before I left for Austria. I don't remember when I first heard the expression “Wandering Jew,” but I'd always assumed it was a playful reference to the Jewish Diaspora. The Jews didn't have a homeland, so they were roaming the earth as wandering Jews.
I had it all wrong. The Wandering Jew is a specific Jew, a legendary figure destined to walk the earth for eternity, or at least until Christ returns. Over the centuries the legend of the Wandering Jew has taken on countless variations in different countries, but the earliest written accounts from the thirteenth century go something like this: Jesus is walking through Jerusalem carrying his cross to Calvary when he stops to rest on the doorstep of a house along the road. Unhappy to find Jesus loitering on his property, the owner of the house shouts, “Walk faster!” In some accounts the man hits Jesus; in others it is only a verbal assault. Either way, Jesus is not amused and responds, “I go, but you will walk until I come again.”
In the early versions of the legend, the Wandering Jew is a fairly affable character who spends much of his time doing good deeds. Even more impressive, he has an array of cool superpowers, including a knack for sniffing out hidden treasures and predicting the future. Sometimes he can make himself invisible. On rare occasions he heals the sick.
But over the centuries the Wandering Jew grew much less likable as he became the product of a distinctly anti-Semitic imagination. Whereas in the early versions of the legend he is depicted as an ordinary traveler dressed in plain friar's garb, by the seventeenth century he is lanky with flowing hair, bare feet, and beggar's rags. (In some descriptions he carries a staff.) Rather than making friends by revealing hidden treasures, he is now guilt-ridden and depressive, and his magic is thought to reveal his association with the Antichrist.
The most influential account of the legend, the Kurtze Beschreibung pamphlet, dates back to 1602 and identifies the Wandering Jew as a morose shoemaker named Aha-suerus with soles on his feet “the thickness of two fingers across.” The Kurtze Beschreibung inspired countless imitations over the next centuries and turned the Wandering Jew into an international sensation. Soon Wandering Jew imposters were popping up across Europe, some of them swindlers, most seemingly just looking for a little attention.
In the eighteenth century the Wandering Jew began to make his way out of the strict confines of the anti-Semitic imagination and into a broader literary imagination. Reflecting the popular fascination with foreign travel at the time, different authors have the wandering Jew trekking across every part of the world. One French account has the Wandering Jew on the North Pole, where he finds himself trapped, his feet held to the earth by the magnetic force. (He escapes by sliding his feet along the ground until the force diminishes.) An English writer puts the Wandering Jew on the moon, where he is surprised to find the inhabitants made of metal and engaged in a brutal war. (The noise of the moon surgeons banging away at their injured brethren irritates the Wandering Jew, and he soon leaves to visit the planets.)
But though his adventures grew more fantastic, the Wandering Jew remained more folk legend than fully realized fictional character in these accounts. Few authors mentioned his inner life or described how he experienced his suffering. Then along came the Romantics with a new approach to the Wandering Jew. No longer was it sufficient to note that “none ever saw him laugh.” The Romantics were interested in why the Wandering Jew wasn't laughing. What was it like to live forever, watching generation after generation die? What sort of psychological toll did endless isolation have on a man?
Over the course of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries few of the major English Romantics were able to resist at least a passing stab at these questions. Shelley alone wrote five separate works that relate to the legend, either directly or indirectly, including both “The Wandering Jew's Soliloquy” and The Wandering Jew. And it wasn't only the English poets who caught the Wandering Jew bug. Goethe wrote a number of fragments of what was to be a lengthy work on the Wandering Jew before giving up with the excuse that he didn't have time to study the background materials. Another German, Christian Schubart, wrote perhaps the most influential work on the Wandering Jew of the period. In Schubart's “Der ewige Jude” (“The Eternal Jew”), the Wandering Jew stands atop a mountain and rolls down the skulls of family members as he recalls the various ways he has tried to kill himself over the centuries.
It's easy to see why the Romantics were obsessed with the idea of an eternally Wandering Jew. Wandering is a romantic gesture, at once a rejection of the world and a search for something new. And what better metaphor than an eternal wanderer for the loneliness of the human experience,
for the elusiveness of human connection? Then, to top it off, the guy's a Jew. The Jewish wanderer is the Romantic's dream come true, an outsider among the outsiders, a sufferer among the suffering.
I don't know how much of my own romanticizing of wandering and Jewishness had drawn me to Hans. Certainly from the beginning I was fascinated by the metaphorical possibilities of Hans's life. In his shepherding I saw the rejection of modern society in the aftermath of the Holocaust. In his Yiddish songs I inevitably listened for the millions of missing Yiddish voices that should have been singing along.
The problem is that metaphor obscures as easily as it illuminates. As I prepared to deepen my understanding of Hans in the days ahead by meeting with his friends and relatives, I wanted to see Hans less for what he represented and more for who he was.
At the same time, I knew that I would have to transcend my neuroses if I was ever going to be able to look at Austria as more than a cauldron of Jew hatred. Austria might be full of anti-Semites, I thought, but I'll never really know unless I step back and do some rational observing. If I was going to get Austria right, I was going to have to unlock Bashy's front door and give the goyim their say.
Thirteen
Meet the Mozarts
“Gut, Som, you made it,” Christine greeted me, seemingly as surprised as I was that I had managed to find her apartment on the west side of Vienna. Christine lived in a prewar building with a dingy lobby and a wide spiraling staircase. Along the middle of each story was a row of wooden closets with toilets in them. “It was cheaper to build with toilets on outside,” Hans would later explain.
Christine had a toilet inside of her apartment and a kitchen with curvy marble counters, bright yellow cabinets, and a poster of a Chinese man ferrying several women across murky waters. The kitchen opened onto Christine's bedroom, where she had a pyramid-shaped bookshelf. The modern touches, together with a dangling wind chime and a handful of well-placed candles, gave the apartment a distinctly New Agey feel, the feel of a place where one might meditate without irony.
The strangest part of the arrangement was the glass-paneled shower, which stood in the hallway for all to see, as though the architect had forgotten about it and stuck it where he could at the last moment. The shower became more than a passing curiosity when Christine handed me a towel and told me to go ahead.
I wasn't sure what to do. Was I supposed to get naked in this woman's hallway? I began to pace back and forth, soap in hand, until Christine popped her head in from the kitchen and, registering my concern, said that she would close the door and not come out.
I still wasn't thrilled with the situation, but I was dirty from shepherding and there was really no choice. As I stood in the shower—positioned in such a way that if Christine broke her promise and stepped out into the hall, she would not see my penis—it occurred to me that I was in an anti-Semitic country, in the home of a Gentile, hiding my circumcised penis. So much for overcoming my neurotic imagination, I thought.
The next morning I stuffed my not-so-compact green alarm clock into my pocket (I didn't have a watch) and began gathering my notebooks and blank tapes. It was only then that I realized I had no bag other than my large hiking backpack. Christine had already left for the day, and so I grabbed the only thing I could find—a plastic, black garbage bag—threw my notebooks and tape recorder in, and hurried into downtown Vienna for the first time.
When you emerge from the Stephansplatz subway station in central Vienna, the first thing you see is Stephansdom—St. Stephen's Cathedral—an enormous Gothic structure that dates back to the twelfth century. It has spires and catacombs and all of the other things that make old European cathedrals so scary. It also has a multicolored, patterned roof, which—unfortunately, since it's the most visible landmark in the city—calls to mind argyle socks.
The next thing you notice when you exit Vienna's subway, or U-bahn, are the handful of strolling teenagers dressed as Mozart. Decked out in big white wigs, knee-length frocks, and ruffled cuffs, the young Mozarts patrol the plaza in front of Stephansdom like a royal guard. The worst thing you can do in downtown Vienna is give the impression that you're not a local because the moment you do, the Mozarts will descend upon you, ask questions about your musical interests, and then, regardless of your answer, try to sell you tickets to the symphony.
That morning I had plans to meet with Leon Zelman, the director and cofounder of Vienna's Jewish Welcome Service. Before my trip I had called the Jewish Welcome Service and arranged an interview by announcing that I was a “journalist from New York”—a title I would use again and again in the days ahead after discovering that it allowed me access to almost anyone in the country.
The Jewish Welcome Service is located directly across from Stephansdom, at the back of the offices of an Austrian travel agency. As I waited for Zelman, I held my garbage bag of notebooks behind my back, hoping that he wouldn't spot it until it was too late to cancel the interview. My alarm clock ticked against my thigh like a bomb waiting to go off. Around me Austrian travel agents with blond ponytails planned the vacations of their fellow countrymen.
I had no real idea who Zelman was or what I would ask him, but I was still determined to figure out if Austria was a Nazi country, and the Jewish Welcome Service seemed a natural place to start. Luckily for me, no one I met with seemed to mind or even notice that I lacked a good excuse to be conducting interviews with them. I was a journalist from New York. I wanted to talk. That was enough. In the weeks ahead I realized that no one was surprised that I wanted to sit down and talk about Nazis and Jörg Haider because that's all anyone was really talking about in Vienna that summer. It had been a little over a year since Haider's far-right Freedom Party had taken a stunning 27 percent of the vote and joined the government, and the country was still reverberating from the aftershocks of the election. Haider, whom The New York Times has called “the most famous Austrian since Hitler,” was on the cover of the local newspapers almost every other day. The European Union had already called off its largely useless sanctions against Austria, but protests against the government were still taking place in downtown Vienna once a week. There was so much talk about Nazis that someone who didn't know better might have thought the war had ended years rather than decades earlier. The discussion was perhaps the one good thing that had emerged from the rise of the Freedom Party. It was no longer so easy to change the subject from Austria's past.
Zelman emerged from a back door wearing a sports coat and the type of oversized glasses that only the elderly can get away with. His eyebrows were bushy. His white hair had receded almost to the back of his head. We walked to a nearby café and took a seat outdoors under an umbrella. It was sweaty and crowded, and the streets were filled with tourists talking loudly about phone cards and streetcar fares. Zelman told me that he was a Holocaust survivor but that it was hard for him to discuss those years. When I left, he gave me a copy of his memoir, and I learned that he had grown up in a Polish shtetl, been transported first to the Lódz ghetto, later to Auschwitz, and then on to several other camps.
I had expected the head of the Jewish Welcome Service to be extremely critical of Haider, and he was. In a thick East European accent, Zelman spoke about the small distance between hateful rhetoric and violence and recalled a few of the many sympathetic comments Haider has made about Nazis over the years, such as his description in 1995 of Waffen-SS veterans as “decent men of good character.”
But Zelman wasn't anti-Austrian. “I started here with nothing,” he told me between sips of coffee. “No family. No language. Vienna gave me a chance to find a new identity. America didn't want me because I was sick at the time. I was too weak to travel to Israel. I wanted to go back to Poland, but there was no place for me to go. Vienna gave me a new belief in the future.”
It was my first post-Hans interview, and already I began to feel like everything I knew was being turned on its head.
In the distance a heavyset tourist posed with his arm around a Mozart. “But w
hat about all the anti-Semitism?” I asked.
“Yes,” Zelman said, “but you must remember that Vienna has as rich a Jewish cultural history as any city in the world. There were so many great Jewish writers and musicians and doctors and so on. I feel a connection to that heritage. And from that heritage, I want to make a mission. I want to translate the Vienna of the past for a new generation so that they will understand what the Jews contributed to Viennese culture before 1938.”
Zelman's plan to educate Austrians about Judaism made me think of Hans. Zelman was trying to teach Austrians about the Jewish past with his Jewish Welcome Service; Hans was trying to teach them with his singing. But neither of them, it occurred to me, had given up on the Austrian people.
Before we split up, Zelman asked me what had brought me to Austria, and I told him I had been following a shepherd who sings in Yiddish. There was a brief uncomfortable silence, and then I was off again, into the sea of tourists and overpriced souvenir shops selling Mozart rulers and “There are no kangaroos in Austria” T-shirts.
Later that afternoon I met with Dr. Thomas Frühwald. I had been given his name by Erich Loewy, an Austrian-born American professor of bioethics who had created a small stir in Austria a month earlier after accepting the city of Villach's award for achievements in the field of medicine. Villach is in Carinthia, the southern Austrian province where Haider was and still is governor, and Loewy chose to use his acceptance speech as an opportunity to speak out against the Freedom Party. “Anti-Semitism has entered the very fiber of [Austrian] society itself,” Loewy bellowed to a packed auditorium. “It remains a part of the way we understand ourselves— something which for hundreds of years was promoted by the church and which will not be that quickly eradicated from the societal subconscious.”