“To be Jewish was unpardonable, to stop being Jewish was impossible,” Emile Roman said, burning with a slow and melancholy wrath. “My true name is Don Samuel Béjar y Mayor, and I am not Jewish because of the faith of my ancestors, for my parents never practiced, and when I was young I cared about religion as much as you cared about your grandparents’ belief in the miracles of the Catholic saints. No, it was anti-Semitism that made me a Jew. For a time my Jewishness was like a secret illness that doesn’t exclude a person from contact with others because it isn’t revealed in external signs, not like the lesions or pustules that condemned you as a leper in the Middle Ages. But one day in 1941 I had to sew a yellow Star of David on the upper chest of my overcoat, and from then on the illness could not be hidden, and if I forgot for an instant that I was a Jew and couldn’t be anything but, the looks of people I met in the street or on a streetcar platform (while we were still allowed to travel by streetcar) reminded me of it, made me feel my illness and my strangeness. Some acquaintances turned their heads so they wouldn’t have to say hello, or be seen talking with a Jew. Others walked far out of their way, as you would make a wide berth to avoid a filthy beggar or someone with a horrible deformity. As I was walking down the street, anyone at all might insult me, or push me off the curb, because I had no right to be on the sidewalk.
“Have you read Jean Améry? You must, he’s as important as Primo Levi, if much more despairing. Levi’s family emigrated to Italy in 1492. Both men were in Auschwitz, although they didn’t meet there. Levi didn’t share Améry’s despair, nor could he accept his suicide, though he, too, ended up killing himself — or at least that’s how it was reported by the police. Améry’s name wasn’t really Améry, or Jean. He had been born in Austria and was legally Hans Mayer. Until he was thirty, he thought that he was Austrian and that his language and culture were German. He even liked to wear the Austrian folk costume of lederhosen and kneesocks. Then one day in November of 1935, sitting in a café in Vienna, just as you and I are sitting here, he opened the newspaper and read the proclamation of the Nuremberg race laws, and discovered that he wasn’t who he had always thought he was, who his parents had taught him to believe he was: an Austrian. Suddenly he was what he had never considered himself to be: a Jew. He had walked into the café taking for granted that he had a country and a life, and when he left there he was stateless, and worse, a possible victim. His face was the same, but he had become another person. In 1938 he escaped to the west, to Belgium, while there was still time, but in those days the borders in Europe could change into barbed-wire traps overnight, and the person who had escaped to another country woke up one morning hearing a loudspeaker blasting the voices of the executioners he thought he’d left behind. In 1943 Mayer was arrested by the Gestapo in Brussels, tortured, and sent to Auschwitz. After the Liberation, he repudiated the German name and language and decided to called himself Jean Améry. He never again set foot in Austria or Germany. Read the book he wrote about the hell of the camp. After I finished it, I couldn’t read or write anything. He says that at the moment your torture begins, your covenant with other human beings is lost forever, that even if you are saved and live many years more, the torture never ends, and you will never be able to look anyone in the eye or trust anyone. When you meet a stranger, you wonder if he has been a torturer. If an old and well-mannered neighbor says hello when she meets you on the stairway, you think that she could have denounced the Jewish man next door to the Gestapo, or looked the other way when he was dragged downstairs, or shouted Heil Hitler until she was hoarse when German soldiers marched by.”
I WAS INVITED TO GERMANY once, some years ago, to give a talk in a very beautiful city, a storybook city with cobbled streets, Gothic rooflines, parks, and hundreds of people riding bicycles: Gottingen, the home of the Brothers Grimm. I remember the silken sound of the bicycle tires as they rolled over the wet cobbles at night, and the sound of the bicycle bells. It had been a sunny day, and I’d been up since early morning, taken from one place to another all day, always by very helpful and friendly people whose sole concern was to organize the immediate satisfaction of any desire I could dream up, with an efficiency that became oppressive. If I said I was interested in visiting a museum, they immediately began telephoning, and in a short time I had information pamphlets, hours, and possible means of transportation at my disposal. In the morning they took me to give a talk at the university, then agonized over various places to have lunch. Did I prefer Italian food? Chinese? Vegetarian? When I said that I liked Italian, they discussed which of several possibilities would be the best.
That afternoon, drowsy as I was from the food and the accumulated exhaustion of the trip, they took me to a bookstore to give a talk there. I read a chapter from my book, and then a translator read it in German. I became depressed thinking of all the pages I had to go, and I was disgusted and irritated by my own words. I looked up from the book to swallow, to take a breath, and saw serious, attentive faces, an audience listening with great discipline but without understanding a word. I was embarrassed by what I’d written, and felt guilty for the boredom those people must have been experiencing, so to shorten their agony I read as fast as I could and skipped entire paragraphs. I closed my eyes when my German translator began to read, and tried to sit up straight and be attentive, as if I understood some of it, and in the slightly less inanimate faces of the audience I looked for reactions to what I’d written some time ago in a language that had no similarity at all to what they were hearing. I would detect a smile, an expression of agreement with something I’d written, but had no idea what it was. At the end I felt so relieved that it was of no consequence that the applause was enthusiastic, though I smiled and bowed my head a little, with the usual insincerity of a person being praised. I wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible and not have to sign another book or show interest in another explication, and to be free of the crushing politeness of the organizers, who were already plotting my next steps, looking at the clock and calculating how long it was before the museum I wanted so much to see would close, discussing whether it would be quicker and more comfortable for me if they took me in a taxi or by streetcar.