Jumping Over Shadows

by Annette Gendler

Eventually we all sat down to dinner, I with my back to the French doors that opened onto the terrace, Harry’s dad to my left at the head of the table, his mother facing me, Harry to my right. It was a Friday evening, and so we celebrated Shabbat. The candles already flickered on the buffet along the wall. We rose as Harry’s father performed the Kiddush, mumbling the Hebrew blessing over wine and challah bread. He cut, almost tore, the soft yeasty challah into chunks, and I marveled at the piece he handed me; it was about two inches thick.

  I don’t remember much more about that meal, including how we managed a conversation, but I do remember my eyes widening when Harry’s mother came in with a platter piled with breaded schnitzel. In the family I came from, if there were four people for dinner, there would be four schnitzels. Here, a whole platter was served for a party of four.

  I would learn that having a good dinner in this family meant to stuff oneself until the body had to pool all its resources to digest and one consequently had to retire to the couch for a snooze. And that is exactly what Harry and his dad did after dinner. While his mother and I continued to chat at the dining room table, after clearing off the dishes, the men moved to the adjoining living room to watch the evening news and before long were snoring audibly. This is just dandy, I thought. I’m here to meet the parents, and what does Harry do? Sleep while I’m left to entertain the mother. Where was the social courtesy? Or was this a sign of my being one of the family already? Weren’t we supposed to have a serious talk?

  I was also to learn that in this family, serious talks rarely happened before midnight. Thankfully, his mother was easy to talk to. Later in the evening, both men did resurface, and we wound up in the living room, his father and I facing each other. Harry sat next to me; his mother stayed on the sidelines in the dining room. We had a calm confrontation—if there can be such a thing. My heart was pounding up to my throat, but somehow I managed to keep my voice steady. Harry’s father said what no one else had dared to say and asked me what no one else had dared to ask, least of all Oma, who had the most reason to ask in my family. He said that he understood all about love, but that life was more complicated than that. That it wasn’t easy to be a Jew, and why would I want to do that to myself and to my children? Was I willing to break with the traditions I had grown up with? With my family, if I had to? Was I willing to forsake all that when he could not assure me that he would welcome me? That anyone would welcome me? Was I ready to be an outsider?

  He challenged me like a father should, and I gave my answers. The practical answers about how we were moving to America and could have a new life there, and how I would not have to fit into the community of survivors in Munich. With some of my practicalities I was on thin ice, such as how we would find a rabbi to do a proper Orthodox conversion, and how that would be a priority when I was starting studies at one of the best graduate schools in the world and we would be busy establishing ourselves. Wouldn’t my studies and Harry’s finding a job be more important? There I had no solid plan and only promises to present.

  On the philosophical questions, however, I was on solid ground. I gave my answers. Harry was the man for me. I had no doubt. I would commit the mistake of a lifetime to forsake the love of my life for conveniences. I knew there would be a price to pay. None of us could know what that price would be, but didn’t we pay for all of our choices, the good ones and the bad ones? I would rather pay for a good one.

  Why would I want to be a Jew? Not in a religious sense—that was not the issue. But in the sense of putting myself on the wrong side of the fence? Did I comprehend what that could mean? I told the story of my grandparents and their Jewish brother-in-law and their unpopular political associations. It was not the kind of sacrifice some non-Jews, who were sent to the death camps themselves because they had hidden Jews, had made. But it was the precedent I had grown up with.

  “Isn’t it,” I said, “always dangerous to be righteous in times of persecution?”

  “Damit haben Sie recht”—you are right about that—he said.

  He did not talk about what this meant to him until the very end, and even then he did not dwell on the past. He told me how much he loved his son, and that he did not want to lose him, but that nevertheless everything he had ever believed in and valued was telling him to disown him. And that he was not sure he could do that, nor was he sure he could accept Harry’s choice. By now there were tears in his eyes, and in mine, and in Harry’s, who sat silent beside me.

  His father said, “Ich muss da über meinen Schatten springen, und ich weiß nicht, ob ich das kann. Aber ich werde es versuchen.” I have to jump over my own shadow here, and I don’t know if I can do that. But I will try.

  We left it at that.

  PROPOSAL

  KEEPING OUR RELATIONSHIP A SECRET FROM HARRY’S parents until we had set the civil wedding date was one of the wisest things we did. The secret afforded us three years to figure out who we were as a couple, and it kept the full weight of history and societal expectations at bay. It spared his parents three years of emotional turmoil and shame. It saved us from bad blood between them and me. Now that I know them well, I know they would have cooked up every possible scheme to pry Harry and me apart, short of sending him to open a store branch in a Siberian outpost. They would have waged a steady and relentless war, not necessarily by heavy bombardment, although I’m sure Harry’s mother would have initiated some major showdowns, but by slow subversion, chipping away at the foundation of our love.

  Even in the few weeks between early April, when we broke the news, and our wedding date of June 6, they presented us with a plan that would at least avoid our getting married before I had converted. They summoned us late one evening. The dining room was blue with smoke, the air heavy with deliberations. Harry and I sat at the table, opposite Harry’s father, like schoolchildren before a principal. I kept my hands in my jeans pockets as I leaned into the chair. Harry’s mom sat in the adjoining living room, the way she always sits when something serious is about to be discussed: perching on the edge of the couch, bent forward, elbows on knees, cigarette in hand, ashtray in front of her on the round coffee table that stands too far from the couch.

  The proposal was this: We would not get married, and Harry would go along with me to America as a tourist, and since that would preclude his earning a living or staying in married-student housing, they, Harry’s parents, would pay for an apartment and our living expenses until I converted.

  Opposition rose in me while I was listening. I had enough of a rebellious twentysomething in me to immediately object to having our plans overthrown or being bossed around. It was, I would later appreciate, a typical Gendler proposal, one Harry and I could never have cooked up, but one that was also ingenious enough not to be dismissed so easily. Therein lay its danger. Sure enough, we teetered on the edge of considering, and out of courtesy we did not give our response that night.

  “This is not so dumb, you know,” I said to Harry as we drove home.

  “Indeed it isn’t.”

  In our hearts we both knew we would reject this, yet we talked through the scenario. There was something to be said for accommodating their concerns, since we had been, ostensibly, so brutal in presenting them with a fait accompli. We could still move to America together, begin a new life—we just wouldn’t marry beforehand. However, if we weren’t married, we would have to find an apartment on our own, rather than relying on university housing. And what about health insurance? Harry would not be able to be on mine if we weren’t married, but he could probably extend the one he had in Germany. But what would he do all day? He wouldn’t be able to work on a tourist visa. Plus, that visa would be for only a few months, six at the most if he was granted the maximum stay. We would get into a cycle of his having to leave in order to stay. Sooner or later, the Immigration and Naturalization Service would find that weird.

  On the other hand, our lifestyle would be better. Harry’s parents would most likely spring for a nice apartment and give us a generous allowance.
Visions of high-rise apartments with floor-to-ceiling windows and curved facades crossed my mind. But we would be bought. That was it—we would be bought.

  Yet in those moments of considering the proposal, we did not argue the point of being bought. We rebelled on practical grounds.

  “It won’t do,” I said. “What would you do all day? Twiddle your thumbs?”

  “Yeah, I’d be the perpetual boyfriend.”

  The pressure on me to convert would have been immense, not only from Harry’s parents, because that wouldn’t have been any different from what it was anyway, whether they were paying the bills or not. No, this would add Harry to that equation. His ability to live a life would depend on me. And not only on me, because even if we found an amenable rabbi in Chicago and I did all I had to do, whether the conversion came through would depend on a court of rabbis and could take years.

  No, it wouldn’t do. We had to remain masters of our lives, our relationship.

  A few days later, Harry told his parents what both of us had first wanted to say: this is nice, but out of the question.

  I marvel now at our ruthless clarity in pursuing our path. But I also know that our not budging on going through with the marriage set the tone for our relationship with his parents: they knew we would listen, but we would do our own thing.

  THE RABBI

  ONCE IT WAS CLEAR THAT WE WERE STICKING WITH our plans, Harry’s parents poured their energies into making the conversion happen before we left their realm of influence. And that, it turned out, was a blessing. Even then, I was thankful that their intervention helped us pull that off before we left for America. I’m not sure if they thought about it in those practical terms, but I know finding a rabbi for conversion, amid the chaos of beginning a new life in a new city, would not have been high on our agenda. It would have dragged on.

  Through one of Harry’s father’s oldest friends, they made a connection to the chief rabbi of Switzerland, a highly respected Orthodox rabbi who had served as chief rabbi of the Israeli Defense Forces and who was willing to handle conversions. Given that in the 1980s the Jewish communities in the German-speaking world (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland) consisted of only a few thousand Jews, there were not that many rabbis, and most of them did not want to deal with the hassle of conversion. Judaism does not proselytize and therefore has no set rules, only conventions, on how to accept a convert. In any conversion, the sponsoring rabbi puts his reputation on the line, and if he is not into rubber stamping, he scrutinizes every candidate.

  I don’t recall Harry’s parents summoning us to propose that we consult this rabbi. Most likely it was another smoke-filled evening. This idea of possibly accomplishing my conversion before we left for the United States was a tall order but not out of the question. It was the kind of challenge I would rise to. So, in the midst of sewing the white suit I had envisioned for my wedding and completing the paperwork for the civil ceremony, we made an appointment with this rabbi and took the train to Zurich.

  In Zurich, the train station, with its twenty dead-end platforms and vaulted roof, echoed with the announcements of arrivals and departures, the screeching of engines, and the patter of travelers rushing to and fro. Passing through the usual security checkpoint at Zurich’s Jewish Community Center required showing ID and the armed guard calling the rabbi’s office to double-check whether we indeed had an appointment.

  At the Jewish Community Center, the rabbi’s office was a big room filled with books. He stepped forward from his desk as we entered.

  “I am pleased to meet you,” he said, and he shook both our hands. He wore a regular business suit, not a black one. He had a kipa (skullcap) on his head, not a black hat, and his gray beard was short and trim.

  “Please, please, sit down,” he said, motioning toward the two armchairs in front of the desk while he sat back down, leaning forward, elbows on the desk.

  “Thank you for seeing us on such short notice,” Harry said.

  The rabbi nodded, then said, “You come from Munich, yes?”

  “Yes, we live there,” I said.

  “But you’re not from there?” he asked.

  “It’s a little more complicated than that,” I said.

  “It is always a little more complicated,” he replied with a smile, leaning back, ready to listen. “So, where are you from?”

  I explained that my mother was American and my father was from Czechoslovakia, that he had met my mom while at Purdue University on a Fulbright Scholarship, and that I had been born in New Jersey, as my dad had worked for Bell Labs there, but that he ultimately wanted to return to Germany, where his parents lived, and that that had been fine with my mom, who had never grown roots because she had moved around so much as a child. So my siblings and I had grown up in the Munich area.

  The rabbi took all of this in, looking interested, and when I had finished my account, he nodded and said to Harry, “And you?”

  Harry explained that he was born in Paris and carried a French passport because his parents did not want him to be born in Germany, that his mother had survived the Holocaust as a hidden child in the French countryside, that his dad was from the Polish–Russian border area and had managed to flee the Nazis and had joined the Red Army.

  “How did you end up in Munich, then?” the rabbi asked with a frown, posing the question that is eternally embarrassing to any Jew living in postwar Germany.

  “Well,” Harry said, “my father would have stayed with the Russians if Stalin had not turned anti-Semitic. When he started killing the Jewish doctors, my dad left and joined a cousin who had survived Auschwitz and who was in a DP camp in Weilheim, south of Munich. There he started selling socks, and pretty soon he had a shop in Munich and was doing much better than the cousin who had left for New York. He met my mom years later when she came into his shop on a business trip with her dad and wanted to buy stockings. The rest is history.”

  “So it is,” the rabbi said, looking down at his folded hands.

  Harry took advantage of the pause in the conversation to ask, “But your German is perfect—you cannot be a Sabre?” (A Sabre is a Jew born in Israel.)

  “I am originally from Vienna,” the rabbi said. Indeed, he still spoke the well-groomed, comfortable German of the Viennese, even though he had, as he told us, left Vienna as a child.

  He was of the same generation as my father, born in the 1930s, and he came from the same culture, that of the late Austrian-Hungarian empire. He did not, however, have the oily gallantry of Viennese men, for he had been steeled too much in the harshness of a pioneer’s and, later, a soldier’s life in the desert land of Israel.

  “So, now that we all know where we’re from, let’s talk about what brought you to me,” the rabbi said.

  “I want to convert, and we heard that you could help us with that,” I said.

  He looked me straight in the eye, as if inviting me to say more, and so I continued, “If I convert, I want to do it the proper way. I want an Orthodox conversion so that there is never any doubt about it. Or about the children.”

  “Why do you want to do this?” he asked.

  “We want to have a Jewish family,” I said.

  “Your heart is in this?” he asked, glancing at Harry and then at me.

  “It is,” I said. Somehow I felt comfortable speaking with this man I had just met about the most fundamental aspects of my life. I wasn’t nervous; my heart wasn’t thumping.

  “You know enough about Judaism?”

  “I’ve been learning. We’ve been together for three years. I know a lot, but not everything, of course. I still need to learn.”

  “What does your family think about this?”

  “My father passed away three years ago. I haven’t discussed it much with my mother; I don’t think she knows what to make of it. My grandmother is not thrilled, but she hasn’t said anything. You see, my grandfather’s sister was married to a Jew, and that was very difficult for the family during the Nazi time. My grandparents were known
social democrats, so that was a problem, and having a Jewish brother-in-law made life even more difficult.”

  “I see,” he said. Then he turned to Harry. “What about your family?”

  “For them, this is a catastrophe,” Harry said. “But a friend of theirs made the connection to you.”

  “You would be willing to do this without your parents’ support?” he asked Harry.

  “Yes, I would.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Annette is the woman for me.”

  “And you?” He was looking at me.

  “I would, too,” I said.

  “Well, it seems to me that what we have here is a very determined young couple,” he said, and he clapped his desk with his right hand. For a moment it looked as if he were ready to get down to business.

  “There’s another issue with this,” Harry added. “We are under time pressure.”

  “Oh?” The rabbi cocked an eyebrow.

  We told him our plans. The civil wedding date was set, and I was accepted at the University of Chicago. Over the summer we would dismantle our life in Munich, get immigration papers for Harry, and board a plane on September 1.

  He was willing, it seemed, to accept me as a candidate, but he didn’t say so. He would follow the convention of sending me away three times and making definite plans only after the third meeting.

  “If you have that little time, it would mean you’d have to study a lot. But that’s not a problem for you, is it?” he said, peering at me through his bifocals.

  “It’s not,” I said. “I just finished a master’s degree. I can absorb a lot in a short amount of time.”

  “Then I would like you to read this book,” he said, getting up and pulling a paperback from one of his shelves. “Herman Wouk’s This Is My God—it is not a book of rules but a personal account of the Jewish way of life. I’m sure you won’t have trouble finding it.”

  I bought the German translation, which was so bad I special-ordered the English original. The rabbi’s recommendation of this book, a novelist’s account of what being an observant Jew meant to him, set the tone of our working together. A conversion was not about mastering textbooks; it was about adopting a way of life.