The night the electricity started working, everyone stayed up and filled the streets, pushing their baby carriages—everyone had babies—or in the case of Rudolph or Leonora, just strolling because Judit was not yet born. The cafés were open too. Back then, there were forty newspapers in Dresden alone, half in German, a dozen in Yiddish, the rest in languages that ranged from Russian to English to Hungarian. The Bundist Party organ, A Home, was still published in Yiddish in those days.
Judit read about all of this in Bruno Webber’s classic book The Battle of the Languages, where he described debates between Leopold Stein and the Yiddishists. In 1950, all of the state-run newspapers switched to German, and mobs overturned printing presses until Soviet soldiers had to fire in the air to maintain order. After that, the other Yiddish newspapers were shut down.
Years later, who knows how, a story came out. Joseph Stalin had said to Stein during their historic Yalta meeting, “Don’t give me another country full of Yiddish speakers. They’re not to be trusted. Birobidjan was a disaster. We had to get rid of most of those Jews in ’38.”
More widely known was Stephen Weiss’s reaction when he was asked to weigh in on the matter. “Well, we could always speak Esperanto.”
The role of Stephen Weiss would soon be clear, as laid out in his secret manifesto. The foreigners hired to build roads, the supplies trucked from Berlin, the open borders, they were all the first step to a full invasion bankrolled by America, and there would be brutal consequences. After the espionage crisis, Leopold Stein’s legendary vigor faded, month by month, and when it became clear just how deeply the Cosmopolitans had infiltrated, it would only be so long before Stein himself would be held accountable.
Judit was just two years old when Stein suffered his stroke in 1953. Her parents, like everyone in Judenstaat, could remember the moment when they heard the news, in Rudolph’s case from a neighbor who stood in the courtyard, staring at the gray sunlight as though he couldn’t believe the day was still a day. As for Leonora, some instinct made her turn on the radio. The two of them put Judit in a baby carriage that she was too big for, and went to the square that would be named after Stein that same year. They stood there with five thousand others, waiting for something to happen.
Stein had been attending Stalin’s funeral, along with dignitaries from around the world. Afterwards, he’d been found unconscious on the floor of his hotel room. He was flown to a special hospital, accompanied by a male nurse from Odessa. Jews packed into the square between the Opera House and the smooth sandstone edifice of Parliament where a black banner draped the columns, and they watched snow drift down, big flakes that didn’t melt right away.
Judit was certain she remembered snow. She also remembered that there were smears of lamplight or candlelight everywhere. She tried to catch those smears of light, but they melted on her mittens. She kept on trying. She got wet through, but neither of her parents noticed, and she didn’t cry.
1954: Dresden suburb raided for provisions, a kindergarten burning. Fragments of newsreels document the aftermath of raids by Nazi bandits across a barren landscape. Fire boiling up in black and white. Fire spreads and turns the Elbe into a stream of dirty milk. Sandstone cliffs glow in the distance, steep, the surreal formations of the region once called Saxon Switzerland with its hidden tunnels and countless caves.
1955: Newsreel. Soviet troops stand at the ready, in persistent rain. Their fur hats are wet, and around them, black sandstone dissolves into brown streams that foam and boil into eroded crevices like brewing cauldrons. Out of the cavern creep three ghastly Saxons, raising their arms in surrender as they bow their heads. The cache of arms, glinting as the camera is thrust into the cave: explosive devices, German Lugers and assault rifles, bazookas shipped from America. The next year, Judenstaat sealed the border and began work on the Protective Rampart.
And they told Judit that one of those Saxons crossed that border and killed Hans Klemmer. Or they lied about who killed him. Or they lied about his death. The footage at the reel’s end flapped with a kind of recklessness.
3
KORNFELD pushed the footage back at Judit. “What can I say?”
Judit tried to keep her tone civil. “I thought you asked for a historical overview.”
“Actually, no,” said Kornfeld. “What we want is a historical reckoning.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means, what do we add up to, Judit? We can’t show the face of forty years ago. We need to show where we’ll be forty years from now.”
“Sorry, Oscar. That I can’t tell you,” Judit said.
Kornfeld cleared his throat. Then he leaned across his desk and said in a lower voice, “They’re thinking of bringing in someone. A director.”
“To direct what?”
“Interviews. Maybe work with a script.” So it was going to be another parade of Kornfeld’s camp survivors speaking against a backdrop of stock footage while a ponderous voice read out the numbers on their tattoos.
But that was not the specter haunting Judit. It was the footage she’d been screening when the stranger left that note—that unmarked reel. The canister looked like a hundred other canisters.
Kornfeld misread what Judit’s face was doing. “The director isn’t my idea. Believe me. She’s from across the border. From Germany.” Kornfeld’s voice hardened. “You know this couldn’t come from me.”
It wasn’t like Judit to let films go uncatalogued. Yet she’d been thrown off balance then, and she might well have left it anywhere. That voice—that note—it was all bound up with the grainy images that looked so much like all the other Soviet footage from 1947 back when Leopold Stein had his beard and nothing had been reconstructed. But no—she had not seen that film before and couldn’t find it now.
“You’re not even listening,” said Kornfeld. “I told you, we’re on a deadline and this feels more and more like it’s out of my hands.” He shook his head. “I just wish you’d reconsider about video transfer. If we could work faster, they might lay off. A program like Paint Box—Sammy’s work is really something. Look at this still.”
He pulled out a blurry frame from a folder and laid it down: Anton Steinsaltz and Khrushchev on a beach somewhere. She hadn’t seen the original, but she could tell that cracks and white space had been smoothed away. Both men were in formal dress and sat on folding chairs, facing the ocean. Someone lurked behind them, obscured by sunlight, a shaggy figure in bathing trunks.
“Who’s that?” Judit asked. “A lifeguard?”
“That, darling, is John Fitzgerald Kennedy,” said Kornfeld. He formed the words one at a time, all the while looking at her. “Do you know what that means?”
“Not really,” Judit said.
“It makes us look at Anton Steinsaltz all over again,” Kornfeld said. “That’s what I mean. We think of him as a hack—or maybe some old ghetto fighter with a knife behind his back. We think of Judenstaat as closed off to the world, and here Steinsaltz is in 1961 with Kennedy. Kennedy! This is just the sort of thing that would make them leave us alone to do our goddamned work! And if we have the tools to polish those old images it’s like—” He struggled to find the right words. “—like polishing a precious stone. In the Media Room, with those computers—”
“I get it,” Judit said. “The image looks like crap. You can tell it’s been doctored. The sunlight’s coming from the wrong direction. I will not fabricate. It will not happen.”