The next day, after a winding train ride from Cologne to Trier, cutting through hills, crossing verdant meadows, overtaking fast-flowing streams, and stopping at hamlets in the beautiful Eifel region, I stood before another ancestral grave: that of Ferdinand’s father, my great-grandfather Moshe May. This was an altogether more ancient cemetery, dating back to 1652, and defiled not by the Nazi regime but by Allied bombing, followed by vandals who desecrated it in 1982, and then again in 1983, 1992, and 1995.34
My mother had told me about this cemetery. She and my father had come to Trier after that first trip back to Cologne when they had been showered with cakes by the owner of his favourite childhood cafe; and she remembered my father stopping an old man in the street, who was in his nineties, and asking him if he had ever known a Moshe May. Incredibly, the man had. ‘Yes, of course,’ he said, ‘I remember him vividly! The old May! He lived in a house with a turret, and when I passed by he was usually in his living room on the ground floor studying the holy texts. After the death of his beloved wife, he was there more than ever. He was a Bible scholar. A fine man.’
My mother had repeated those words to me so often. The meeting had moved her and my father. They had been taken by the old man to the house with the turret where Moshe had lived and shown the room where he’d studied all day.
‘Here lies a kind-hearted descendant of a line of upright people and a family of scribes’, begins the inscription in Hebrew on his tombstone, one of the more recent. A few yards away is the grave of Karl Marx’s paternal grandfather, Mordechai Halevi ben Schmuel Postelburg, a rabbi who died in 1804. Unlike Moshe’s, its headstone is all in Hebrew, with not even the concession of the name and dates of the deceased written in the German form. And there are even older stones, many of them so deeply sunk into the ground that only their tips can be seen, peeking up from the earth.
Then I saw other Mays: Moshe’s wife Bella, who died at forty-five. Their little son Eliahu, secular name Eduard, who passed away at fifteen. (Is this why Ferdinand named my uncle Edward, in memory of the little brother he lost?) Their daughter Chava, who lived only to her twenty-first year.
I learned that Trier’s Jewish community at the end of the nineteenth century, when Moshe thrived, numbered around 300 – similar to Christburg’s, in which Ernst was raised. Occasionally, spouses would be found among the Jews of surrounding villages, but the few families represented in this cemetery mostly intermarried. Three hundred feels claustrophobic; I could understand why Ferdinand, like Ernst, left once assimilation became acceptable – within the community as well as to its non-Jewish neighbours.
Yet, wandering around the tiny plot, which is well-tended and pervaded by timeless quietude, I was besieged by an identity passionately lived – not one fraught with life-sapping riddles, or that flees into a labyrinth of internal exile, as in the lives of the three sisters; not one that takes, as it took me, half a lifetime to excavate in the face of denial, obfuscation, and fury. And again I felt a profound sense of arrival, as I had at Ferdinand’s solitary grave the day before; but this time I’d arrived not just at a monument to lost family but also at the portal to an immense heritage, which these stones somehow rendered vivid, real, thinkable, legitimate – and mine. This surely was restitution.
I wasn’t allowed to visit the cemetery unaccompanied. It is surrounded by a wall and always locked. Access could be gained only by arrangement with the city’s synagogue, where I was told to report first and to ask for Peter Szemere. But when I showed up, the receptionist said that he couldn’t see me then after all. A party of schoolchildren was visiting and I should return an hour later, when he would be free.
Rather than waiting, I thought, Why don’t I join the schoolchildren’s visit? I slid into the meeting room just as Herr Szemere was starting to tell two dozen teenagers about the basics of Judaism and that it is not an alien religion but rather that of a parent to their offspring: Christianity and Islam.
He did a superb job regaling them with lively biblical stories, but the children were restless and bored. When we moved from the meeting room to the hall of worship, they’d found it amusing and possibly absurd that men had to cover their heads. Tracksuit hoods were reluctantly put on and boys wearing kippas for the first time laughed at each other. It was a disconcerting session, void of any trace of reverence on the part of the children before a tragic history or at the power of faith to keep a people going through unspeakable odds. But I was impressed by what a patient and articulate rabbi Trier had, and afterwards I congratulated him on his entertaining introduction to the story of the Jewish people.
How long, I asked, had he been the rabbi here?
‘Rabbi?’ He looked puzzled. ‘I’m not the rabbi. When we have services, a rabbi drives over from Luxembourg.’
‘How long have you been a congregant?’ I persisted.
‘I’m not a congregant. I’m Christian.’
He saw my surprise and chuckled. ‘This is Germany. We don’t have enough Jews to fill all the positions in synagogues, so in a small city like Trier a Christian has to contribute.’
‘Are you from Trier?’ I asked. I imagined that he represented the Jewish community because he was an elder of the town, perhaps with ancestors who had known Jews, like my family, who’d once lived here.
‘No, I came from Munich.’
‘So why did you look for a position in a synagogue?’
‘Because I worked for El Al, the Israeli airline, at Munich airport, and when I had to retire at sixty I needed another job to make ends meet. I spoke some Hebrew from having to deal with Israeli passengers – modern Hebrew, of course, but still better than nothing.
‘I’m from a family of Hungarian aristocrats,’ he continued. ‘We fled the communists in 1956, after the Hungarian uprising against Moscow. We lost all our wealth. In Germany, we had to work hard for a living.’
‘And why did you go to work for El Al?’
‘Very simple: they paid better than Lufthansa. It’s the security risk of working at an El Al counter. You’re a terrorist target.’
His journey from Hungarian Christian aristocrat to official of the synagogue at Trier via Munich airport cast me into that clichéd emotion that I try to avoid in Germany: melancholy. Jewish life in this city of my ancestors felt threadbare, empty, artificial – and Moshe’s tomb, along with the world to which it so eloquently points, achingly lonely. Unlike in Berlin, where the Jewish ghosts of pre-Hitler Germany still retain a foothold, in this city they were silent. The past is a graveyard.
‘For being a terrorist target, the Israelis had better pay you well,’ he added with a smile.