There were textbooks, of course—or, rather, books that detailed the liturgy and the rules—but, as with most textbooks, I do not remember them except one: Jüdische Riten und Symbole (Jewish Rituals and Symbols). Harry had already given me this book, and I had already read it. I still refer to it when I get into discussions with our Jewish day school–trained children on topics such as whether Yom Kippur is a higher holiday than Shabbat. (It isn’t.)
The attitude of the Jewish family I was marrying into was important to the rabbi. He focused on what he knew from experience could cause problems for a convert: the Jewish side of the family not accepting the convert’s perhaps more observant ways, or, worse, ridiculing her or acting as experts in Jewishness, with constant admonitions. He impressed upon Harry how important his support would be for the success of this possible conversion and that he must honor how much his future wife was putting forth to make it happen.
The rabbi eventually summoned Harry’s parents to Zurich “to get to know them.” I wonder what that meeting must have been like for them. Although both of them were imposing personalities themselves, a rabbi was nevertheless a person of authority and respect—and this rabbi carried the weight not only of being chief rabbi of Switzerland but also of having been chief rabbi of the Israeli Defense Forces, an impressive credential for staunch Zionists like Harry’s parents. He was a man who not only spoke as many languages as Harry’s father but also published scholarly articles in many of them. I wonder how it must have felt for them to affirm to this rabbi that they would support their future daughter-in-law, when they had not yet had much of a chance to reconcile themselves to their son’s choice.
I don’t know what the rabbi said to them, but they never once challenged my way of being a Jew, nor our way of running our family and household. I’m not even sure their abstinence from meddling was due to anything the rabbi said—maybe it was a policy and wisdom of their own—but whatever was said or promised during that meeting, the mere happening of it helped set Harry and me up to succeed.
Even though it was far from the rabbi ever to say so, Harry felt that this rabbi was not quite sure what I wanted with this Jew of East European descent. Maybe this wasn’t true, or maybe it was a manifestation of the traditional disregard Yeckes (German Jews) have for their brethren from the East. But, even upon our first meeting, I believed the rabbi trusted that I knew what I was doing. I must have fit his paradigm of a capable young lady. I would make a fine Yecke.
WEDDING DAY
I ONCE SAID TO A FORMER BOYFRIEND THAT I WOULD never get married in a church.
“Why not?” he asked. We were driving by the white-and-yellow baroque church of the village, Hohenschäftlarn, where I grew up.
“Because it would be fake,” I said.
“What’s fake about it? Don’t you believe in God?” he asked, not that he was particularly devout himself. He cranked the engine of his pickup truck as we roared up the hill, leaving the village and the church behind us. Talking about marriage with this guy, whom I knew I wouldn’t marry, was fake as well, but it was the kind of existential stuff we talked about.
“It has nothing to do with God.” I replied. “But if you go to church only for your first communion, your confirmation, and then your wedding, it’s fake.”
Four years later, on June 6, 1988, I indeed got married not in a church but in the magistrate’s office down the hill from that very same white-and-yellow baroque church. Harry and I had decided to get married in Schäftlarn, where the mayor himself, who loosely knew my family, would marry us, rather than some official in Munich’s magistrate. I had been there twice, as a witness at friends’ weddings, and I didn’t want to get married in that wedding factory where thirty minutes were allotted per couple and some civil servant whom you did not know officiated.
Like Oma and Resi before me, I got married in a suit at a city hall because my wedding was inopportune. But I did not see it that way. It all felt right to me. I was following my heart and my gut while my mind was busy with the million details of making major life changes happen: the conversion, the marriage, the emigration, the packing, and the paperwork.
My knees shook as I stood in front of the mayor, Harry to my right and my family behind me. I wasn’t thinking about how momentous or inopportune this wedding might be; I was thinking only, I’m getting married awfully young. I had just turned twenty-five, but in the mental plan of my life, I had figured I would get married at twenty-nine.
After the ceremony, we took pictures on the front steps of city hall, by the glass case where the public notice of our impending marriage had been posted. According to French law, which applied to Harry as a French citizen, the same had to be done in the Paris arrondissement where he had been born but had lived for only the first three weeks of his life. Only after that public posting could a “marriageability” certificate be issued, confirming Harry was not already married. In a way I loved that old-fashioned custom of public announcement that afforded anyone the opportunity to object to our marriage. It evoked cinematic drama: the couple at the altar, the priest announcing, “Whoever objects to this marriage, speak now or forever hold your peace.” Only we weren’t at an altar, and there was no priest, and no one objected publicly.
People objected privately, people of major consequence, like Harry’s father, who did not attend our wedding. Harry had asked me, meekly, whether I would be upset if his father did not come, and I had said that I wouldn’t be. I did not want someone who did not support our wedding, who might wish us ill, to be present, to ruin the occasion with a long face, and to mar the atmosphere with thoughts of tragedy. I picked my witness that way and chose Harry’s close friend David, who was Jewish and who had supported love over reason from the very beginning. Markus was Harry’s witness.
I did not, however, entirely get my wish of unconditional support from those who attended. Our witnesses, yes. My brother and sister, yes. Harry’s brother, yes. Although he and Harry were never close, he and I had a rapport, and I think he saw that I was good for his brother.
Harry’s mother attended with a cheerful face (she was, in that way, a wonderful actress); Oma, however, wore the sourest expression she could muster. She would never have committed the social affront of not attending—it was inconceivable to her that she should not be at her granddaughter’s wedding. No, she would keep with the social mores and be there, but she did say to my mother, as we were leaving city hall, that this would not have happened had my father still been alive. This was as much a dig at the tragedy of my marrying a Jew as at my mother’s incompetence in keeping her daughter in check. It was also typical of Oma to say this to my mother, who might pass it on, rather than directly to me.
In the three years that led up to my marriage, Oma met Harry several times. She liked him and cooked special meals for him, but she and I never once discussed the fact that he was a Jew and what my marrying him might mean. I consciously never brought it up. I did not want to drive a wedge into my relationship with her. Neither did she, I assume. In a way it wasn’t necessary, because she knew that I knew about the family history, about Resi and Guido and the hardship their union had brought on the family. But she and my grandfather were also the prime example for my argument that in times of persecution and totalitarian rule, anybody who was righteous and would stand up for a humane society would be in trouble, whether they were verjudet or not.
The wedding photos taken on the front steps of city hall show Oma with a stone face. Later on, after some wine, she loosened up. The photo of her and me, with the meadow at the country inn where we had our wedding lunch as a backdrop, shows both of us smiling into the camera. The bond between grandmother and granddaughter remained unbroken.
Our Wedding, June 6, 1988 (left to right) my mother, my sister, Oma, Harry, Harry’s mother, me, Markus and next to him Harry's brother, next to me my witness David
At the wedding lunch, my mother sang West Side Story’s “Somewhere (There’s a Place For Us).” She is a trained sopran
o and at that time sang in the extra choir at Gärtnerplatz Theater, one of Munich’s two opera houses. The power of her voice swept us all up into the tragedy of the star-crossed lovers. I cried even though part of me was thinking that this ballad was a bit melodramatic. I had not picked the song; it was her gift to us. Her choice summed up her stance: her endorsement of love against all odds, and her puzzlement about how to deal with her daughter’s decision.
I did give her Herman Wouk’s This Is My God after my rabbi had made me read it. I knew a paperback by an American author would be palatable to her, and she did read it, but she never discussed it with me. I can see her leaning back in her chair after finishing a chapter, with that hmm, okay, this is interesting smile on her face that really expressed her benign indifference toward anything that did not interest her emotionally.
Harry and I had decided to keep the wedding a secret and to announce it with elegant mailings after the fact. There was simply not enough time to pull off a larger wedding, but, more important, deciding whom to invite would have been impossible. Harry’s family was well known in the Munich Jewish community, and if their oldest son got married, pretty much everyone would need to be invited. Except it would not be a boisterous Jewish wedding, only a short civil one. The scandal of Harry’s choice would have been on public display when his parents’ emotions were still raw and the family was unsettled about how to deal with this course of events. Three years of machinations of who had known about us and who hadn’t would have come to the fore, and more friends and relatives would have been miffed.
Some friends were still miffed, especially a few close ones, who believed they should have been privy to the secret (were they not good enough friends to be there?). At least we could claim that everyone had been treated equally: it had been a small wedding; only the closest family had attended. The two brothers, both good photographers, had taken the pictures. The wedding announcements, printed on square, glossy white cards, featured one of two pictures: Harry embracing me from behind, both of us smiling into the camera, me holding the wedding bouquet of trumpet lilies, or the two of us standing behind the oversize red umbrella my brother had given us that read, in cursive white lettering, Just married.
Our Wedding (June 6, 1988)
CONVERSION
HARRY AND I HAD OUR THIRD INTERVIEW WITH THE rabbi shortly after we were officially married. Since the rabbi had “sent me away” twice already, he could now accept me as a sincere candidate. When we asked whether he had found a teacher who could work with me in the limited time we had, he smiled and said, “The best teacher ever—my wife. She’s the only one I can impose on like this, and on top of that, she’s the best.”
One would think I would know Zurich well, given that I spent a summer there studying with the rabbi’s wife, the rebbetzin, as Harry referred to her in Yiddish. But I wasn’t there as a tourist. My memories of Zurich are of walking back and forth between my hotel and the rabbi’s apartment. I usually wore white ballet-slipper flats and flowing, calf-length skirts I had bought specifically for this time, so that I would look properly modest and feminine in the modern Orthodox way. I always carried my notebook. The books stayed behind in my hotel room, where I studied the rest of the time, mainly going over my notes or the siddur (prayer book), memorizing blessings and prayers. That hotel room was a cavernous place, with high ceilings and creaking floors and wood-paneled walls and plain old furniture that had stood the test of guests.
I had a terrible cough those weeks in Zurich, left over from a bad cold. The minute I lay down, the cough would seize me and I would have to sit up, heaving. Most nights I spent propped on pillows so as not to trigger the cough, and my behind would go numb from this unaccustomed position. I downed all kinds of cough syrups and sucked lozenges to calm the tickle in my throat, but I rarely managed more than a few hours of consecutive sleep. The coughs would ratchet up to seizure-like convulsions, and more than once I threw up into the sink in my room. I’m sure I told the rebbetzin about these coughs, and she probably advised me to get this or that syrup from the pharmacist, but she did not see the worst of it. The coughing fits were confined to the night, and in the morning twilight their severity seemed improbable even to me, especially in my half-delirious state from lack of sleep.
My sleep deprivation and singularity of purpose made those weeks in Zurich seem suspended in time; I was in my own fog, my body ravished, my mind bursting. Aside from spending a few hours with the rebbetzin every day, and sometimes the rabbi, I was alone. Harry stayed behind in Munich and was busy packing up our belongings for the container shipment that was leaving for Chicago August 1. We spoke on the phone every night, as we have spoken to each other every day since we became a couple. But he was not there, couldn’t help with the coughs and couldn’t calm my body at night.
The rebbetzin was a small, warmhearted woman. She usually wore a flowery housecoat as she taught me the practicalities, not the theories, of being a Jewish woman. She would grab a scarf to cover her short gray curls only when the doorbell rang and she didn’t know who the visitor might be. (Traditionally, married Jewish women are not supposed to show their hair to anyone but their husband, as it is considered seductive.) She showed me how to run a kosher kitchen with two sets of dishes, one for meat, one for dairy.
“Ideally you would have two sinks in a kosher kitchen,” she said on our very first day together, as we were standing in her kitchen, “but you can see that I don’t have that here, either. In Israel I had this, but this is just a rented apartment. So here is how you deal with having only one sink.” She whisked a plastic dishpan from its spot on the counter and placed it into the sink.
“See?” she said, turning on the faucet. “Now you can wash your dishes, or rinse them, without anything touching the sink itself.” She looked at me with some glee in her eyes.
I nodded.
“What do you eat more? Meat or dairy?” she asked.
“We don’t eat meat that often,” I said.
“So then you make the tub meaty,” she said. “And of course you have separate sponges, or brushes, and towels,” she added, turning off the faucet and draining the pan. She handed me the dripping pan and said, while pressing a blue-and-white-checkered towel into my hand, “We eat more meat, so the pan is dairy and this is the dairy towel.”
While I dried the pan, she leaned against the counter and continued, “You color-code everything. I do blue for dairy and red for meat, but you can do whatever you want.”
I discovered that that is a standard method once I moved to the United States. In fact, one can now buy scrub brushes with red bristles labeled MEAT and blue ones labeled DAIRY—the exact opposite of my color-coding. I chose red for dairy because our dairy dishes sport ladybugs and red dish towels are a better match. Never mind what the stores sell; the point, as the rebbetzin said, is not which colors but that you know what’s what.
She took me to the supermarket and showed me how to read the labels to determine whether a product had nonkosher ingredients. For instance, if “whey” is listed, the product is dairy. Any mention of animal fat makes it not kosher (because the animal, even if it is kosher, like a cow, still needs to be slaughtered in a kosher way), unless the product has a kosher stamp, which in Switzerland most products didn’t have at that time. We visited Zurich’s kosher butcher, who had the monopoly on selling kosher meat, as there was just enough of a Jewish population to sustain one butchery. I was used to buying cellophane-wrapped meat in a supermarket, but this reminded me of the butcher of my childhood—a white-tiled shop tucked into one of the little streets below the baroque church.
Every day I sat on the rebbetzin’s couch, my notebook on the coffee table, and learned how to run a Jewish household. The rabbi wanted me to learn the proper way, and his wife’s initiating me was the right mix of hands-on practicality and rabbinical correctness. I already knew quite a bit about Jewish customs, festivals, and history from having lived with Harry for three years; from the books I had read—Chaim P
otok’s The Chosen, Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre’s O Jerusalem!, Leon Uris’s Exodus, Elie Wiesel’s Night—and from the many movies I had seen—Barbra Streisand’s Yentl, the Yiddish classic Yidl mitn Fidl, Meryl Streep’s Sophie’s Choice. I had not flinched through the nine hours of Claude Lanzmann’s Holocaust documentary Shoah, while Harry left the movie theater several times, before his stomach turned. I was less vulnerable then, not only because I wasn’t “of the people” yet—and even when I was, the trauma of the Holocaust would never be my trauma, my history—but also because I did not have children yet. That vulnerability would come years later and would be a more universal one, of mothers.
I needed to find my own brand of Judaism, my way of being a Jew. Harry and most of his postwar generation of European Jews were brought up with a Judaism defined by outside forces: anti-Semitism, with its culmination in the Holocaust, and Zion-ism—any national identification would be with Israel. While German families flocked to Italy to sunbathe on Adriatic beaches or flaunt their cultural sophistication in the streets of Florence, Jewish families flew to Israel, got sunburns at the Red Sea, or marveled at the rebuilt Jewish quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem. Charitable giving is less de rigueur in Germany in general than it is in the United States, but the Jews in Germany gave as much money as they could to Israel. Harry has a box full of certificates for trees people had planted in Israel in honor of his bar mitzvah.
I did not yet feel that I could regard Israel as “my” country; I already had two countries and was conflicted enough about that. The Holocaust could not be mine, nor could millennia of persecution. I could empathize, learn all about Jewish history, but it would not be my history. My Judaism would have to go back to the source, to what Judaism was all about: a way of life, defined by the Torah, the five books of Moses.
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