They laughed at him. They listened, but they laughed, those poets and linguists who had no use for states at all, or Socialists who’d walked out of the Third International or who stayed and then regretted it and who had weathered years of fixed ideas. “Young man,” said one delegate in stately Litvak Yiddish, “If I were you, I’d take a walk around the park and calm down. For what do we need a country?”
Stein had an answer, but it wasn’t one they would be ready to accept. Not yet. He would quote Comrade Stalin on the National Question. Here were a people with a common culture. All that was missing was a land.
“Then go to Moscow,” someone countered. “I hear they treat Jews well there if they stay on their leashes.”
“I’m not a Russian,” Stein said in his insistent German, a language any Yiddish speaker understands. “I’m a German. So are you. Come join me there.”
That started a back-and-forth so fierce and hostile that Leopold Stein felt battered and invigorated. Afterwards, a few delegates came up to him and asked if he’d written a position paper laying out his platform. They went to a café and kept on talking until the place closed down. By 1945, all of those people would be dead.
Now 1947, in Schmilka Camp, Stein fills a coffee urn at a water pump. In a camp outside of Gorlitz by the Polish border, Stein at a long plank desk below a banner: WE ARE HERE. The credo of the Bund. The very place we faced our death is where we build our lives. That’s what it means, to live in Judenstaat.
Stein in a work shirt and dungarees, holding a spade over his shoulder. In Munich, his hometown, Stein filmed with a hand-held camera by American occupation troops as he walks none-too-steadily through the milling crowd, overwhelmed by the force of his own logic, and the camera lingers on two men who share the Bundist newspaper, A Home. “No Hope for U.S. Visa in Bavaria. President Truman Urges Surviving Remnant: Go to Saxony!”
Beside Stein, Stephen Weiss, Auschwitz survivor, bird-of-prey demeanor. Weiss is not a Bundist. Weiss is not a brawler. Few images of Weiss survive, though his early prominence is not disputed. Where there is a Stein, there is a Weiss. History demands it. Weiss is the editor of A Home. Yiddish and German are two of his eight languages, and he shares with Stein the common language of a fixed idea. He was born in Vilna. Talent and ambition led him to Berlin. Then, following what he thought were sound instincts, he crossed the border to Vienna, then to Budapest, and at the prospect of induction in a labor battalion, he chose to stay with distant relatives who promised him a job at their printing press in Warsaw. This was in 1939.
Stein knew Weiss before the war when their paths crossed briefly in Berlin. Weiss had been a different man then, a kind of aesthete, always with a cigarette in a holder, babbling and posing. Now, the cigarette is gone. He looks like an emaciated owl. No one can match Weiss’s single-minded energy, nor can they understand what drives him.
Stein, Weiss, a crowd of adolescents, and row after row of boots. The film stock, rare and near decay, is not officially catalogued. The boots are laid out on a long table. Stein’s people have stuffed each boot with a note. The young men remove the notes in a hurry, papering the raw dirt as they measure the soles against their feet, and swap them with their neighbors. All the notes are printed in bold German typescript: WE ARE HERE. The credo of the Bund. You have your boots. Now, don’t go anywhere.
Yes, all of this is well documented, the continuity of Ashkenaz, the people and the nation, through generations of development and then expulsion and renewal, and the stirring of a revolutionary Age of Reason, and finally the Churban. What monument will mark what they have lost and have survived? Their lives themselves will be that monument. Is Stein naïve to open negotiations with Soviets and Americans and keep the country nonaligned? That is the work of Stephen Weiss, who arranges meeting after meeting.
What would become of the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidjan on the Manchurian border, or of England’s failed experiments in Palestine and Uganda? Their failure is fresh proof that the Jewish state is right under their feet, and fascists fear Jews for that very reason. Yes, Leopold Stein can be very persuasive. Surely he emphasizes humiliation of the enemy. Truman may not be drawn in that direction. Stalin is another story.
There will be opposition from some quarters, opposition that can only be overcome if they act quickly, before forgetting starts. Forgetfulness will be the enemy. A promise is revoked and then renewed and then revoked so many times that when they approach the checkpoint, Stein and Weiss cannot be sure that the guards who meet them there will follow orders.
The orders are to raise a flag. Now, speculation: the night before, Stephen Weiss laid out the materials, and by the light of a Primus stove, he patched together the design. He knows the cloth; he knows the thread. He unfolds the flag that afternoon; in spite of careful preservation, it is in danger of unraveling.
Weiss does not believe in flags as a rule. He has lived under too many of them: the crest and crown of the Hapsburgs, the double-headed eagle of the Russian Empire, the optimistic flags of four republics, the Soviet flag, and, of course, the flag that brought him close to death. But this flag, he believes in.
Of course, a man who’s lived under so many flags can never claim a country. Such is the nature of a Cosmopolitan, opportunistic, cynical, and ultimately loyal to no one but himself. Weiss’s role is a cautionary tale. But here is documented fact. That day, at an army checkpoint in 1948, Stein and Weiss meet at an arranged time with the Soviet officers who have a quiet conversation with the guards and lower the red flag of liberation. Then, they raise the new flag, constructed from the uniform Weiss wore in Auschwitz.
Blue and white prison stripes; in the center, a yellow star. The flag of Judenstaat.
3
“YOU’LL hate this,” Oscar Kornfeld said to Judit, “but it’s just not what they’re after.”
Judit said, “It’s what I’ve got.”
“What can I say? I’m not the one who makes decisions,” Kornfeld said.
Who makes them? Judit didn’t say that, but she thought it all the time since she’d started working under Kornfeld, a nebbish who seemed to be paid to warm his desk. He’d been promoted on the strength of a series of taped interviews with camp survivors. He had a way with old people, probably because he was born old. The series had languished since his promotion. He seemed to miss it.
“Sweetheart,” Kornfeld said, “you know we won’t be showing this movie to schoolkids. We’re talking worldwide distribution, dubbing in English, Italian, who-knows-what. No one cares about those men in Vilna. Can’t you find something more original?”
Of course, there was Stephen Weiss. Weiss had been airbrushed out of photographs, and his image had not appeared in any film produced by the museum. Kornfeld might have asked her where she’d found that footage, but he didn’t mention Weiss at all. Case closed. No need to raise more questions.
Kornfeld could tell that she was agitated. “Don’t worry. You’ll come through fine. Maybe another field trip, dig through some regional collections. Isn’t that where you found those photographs of Prime Minister Sokolov in Birobidjan for the coffee table book? We broke out that bottle of brandy.”
“I didn’t drink any of it, Oscar.” Judit only used Kornfeld’s first name when she’d reached her limit and he knew it. “That book was a rush job, and I’m still not sure those pictures were authentic.”