Let us look to the future. The world is changing. New technologies, new methods of communication, new faces on the television at night. In Washington, an unpretentious president speaks the plain truth about world affairs. In Moscow, his counterpart acknowledges the very crimes that cost my grandparents in Birobidjan their lives in 1938. If we want to be true to our best selves, we need to make the most of this historic opportunity. We must take our place as part of the world community. We must step forward, with a daring pragmatism that is the trademark of our national genius.
But, some may say, if we are opportunists, what of our principles? What of our founders and what of their ideals? How can we help but think of Leopold Stein at this moment, who stood where I am standing nearly forty years ago? He was not much older than myself. And he looked at the world around him, a very different world, and he held out his hands to that world. He reached for opportunity, and at the same time, reached beyond our borders. In his own words, “We shall build a bridge between East and West.”
Prime Minister Stein poses the challenge. We must hear it as an opportunity. We must reach for this opportunity and know the challenge of this generation will be for Judenstaat to join the family of nations, fully and enthusiastically. And know that in doing so, we are fulfilling our historic destiny. [Sustained applause.]
THE SAXON QUESTION
1
On the eve of our country’s twenty-fifth anniversary, the nature of the ever-present Saxon Question has changed both in form and substance. As was once said by the most venerable of historians, Bruno Webber, “Everyone knows a German, but nobody knows a Saxon.” In short, both the individual identity of Saxons and thus the German State of Saxony was dismissed as—at best—myth, and at worst, sabotage intended to undermine our historic claim to our land.
What is Saxony? Is there, or at the very least, was there, a Saxon tribe? Are there Saxon traditions that constitute a separate identity with commensurate forms of ethics and cultural norms and historical memories? A close examination of the documentary evidence opens this question further, and ultimately leads scholars to more existential questions about the nature of claims, or memory itself.
The article gave Judit a headache. Still, she was willing to wade through this pretentious nonsense if it held a key to the man whose bed she had been sharing, and who made her see the world all over again. She tried to concentrate and failed. The library’s reading room smelled like him. She walked across the lawn and every blade of grass gave a sweet crunch. Back at her desk, she recopied her notes, and her hand wouldn’t cooperate; it crept up through her hair and raked through strands until the curls stood straight up. She had to keep things secret.
Judit had been in love before, with boys in school, always older and smarter, who told her their troubles and never kissed her; with her counselor at Archeology Camp, who was about to be inducted into the army and on his last night of freedom did kiss her and do some other things to her in the back of a van; with her physics teacher, who made quiet jokes about gravity and time, and who treated all his students with such tenderness that any of them would have followed him home. This was different. Somehow, the secret made it different.
Judit was a vessel for that secret. She carried it around, fearing and hoping or even daring it to tip and swell. She slept only fitfully. Something precious and dangerous was inside her. Later, she would learn that all lovers accumulate secrets, the ones they share, the ones they keep, and the ones that spill into bed. With great luck, those secrets never stop feeling powerfully dangerous.
What did she know about Hans? He had no memory of his mother and father. He’d spent his first few years with an uncle who owned a tavern and who had crossed the border into Brandenburg, leaving Hans at the Chemmitz Home for Unclaimed Children.
Judit did the math in her head. So he’d been born just after Liberation. And if he’d never known his parents, they must have fled just after Judenstaat was established. Were they musicians too? “I haven’t a clue,” said Hans. And they just left him with an uncle in a tavern? “It was a very nice tavern,” Hans said. “Sawdust on the floor. Clean curtains. Three solid meals a day.”
“So your parents couldn’t feed you? That’s why they abandoned you?”
“What makes you think they abandoned me? I tell you, I have no idea. And I couldn’t care less, frankly. As far as I’m concerned, I just sprang up like a weed and kept on growing.”
There was a dizzying and rootless quality to Hans, with his big apartment two kilometers from campus in a shabby neighborhood where he piled stacks of sheet music as tall as Judit, and kept a bin of soapy water on the coal-fed heater to wash dishes. He had a sink, but most of the time, laundry soaked there. The first time Judit spent the night, they cooked canned stew on his hotplate, and she was amazed that he could anticipate such terrible food with such enthusiasm.
“You’ll have to introduce me to home cooking,” he’d said. “All musicians are citizens of the world.”
Judit laughed. Hans was nearly thirty, but he sounded like an earnest schoolboy. “If you weren’t a Saxon, I’d accuse you of being a Cosmopolitan.”
Hans let the comment pass. But Judit wished she could have taken it back. It had felt sophisticated to use that word, but everyone knew professors who had lost their jobs in 1968.
Still, back then, Judit was an unreconstructed Bundist. What if Hans really was a Cosmopolitan, loyal to nothing but himself? What if he didn’t believe in a state with a Jewish character? Or worse yet, what if he was one of those Saxons who rewrote history and denied any Jewish claim to the land? Where were his parents during the war? Did they play a role in the Churban? Judit couldn’t bring herself to ask these questions. Instead, she watched the hotplate glow as he searched for his can opener and cooked that stew right in the can. He had two spoons.
2
THE textbooks Judit read in school all marked the years after Liberation with arrows bending across eastern territory into Judenstaat. Each arrow was marked with a number: three thousand, sixty thousand, eighty thousand Jews streaming into the country. Then, there were arrows that pointed outward from Judenstaat, west, to Germany: ninety thousand so-called Saxons.
Well, some of them stayed. No doubt, Hans’s uncle had one of those Righteous Gentile certificates displayed in that tavern. They weren’t hard to get, back then. It just took a single Jewish witness. Even now, you can still find them framed in some old Saxon-owned cafés. Borders always shift after a war. Half of the population is on the road. One might speak of justice—a rough justice—for the Muslims who choose a destiny in Pakistan or the Japanese who pull up shallow roots and leave the nations that they’d occupied, or the East Prussians who may or may not lay claim to disputed territory. Those who remain should have few expectations.
Saxons were just a footnote to heroic years of rebuilding: American-funded reconstruction of the Opera House, the new Parliament that rose like a white wave on a field of rubble, artful and modern Bauhaus apartment blocks, all blue and yellow like the flag, and thanks to Soviet engineering, somehow and suddenly those trolleys that would take you just about everywhere.