Jews, Germans, and “The Russians”: Adriana Altaras’s titos brille

In titos brille, Altaras offers an account of her parents’ persecution by the Nazis and their Croatian allies during the war years, their flight from communist rule in Yugoslavia, the consolidation of the Jewish community in West Germany beginning in the 1960s, and the author’s own recent interest in Jewish ritual and practice. First and foremost, the novel is a memorial of sorts, for the author’s recently deceased mother and father but also for the survivors from across central and eastern Europe who reestablished a Jewish presence as well as the multiethnic, multilingual “Old Europe” that they embodied: “so sterben sie langsam, die letzten Überlebenden, nehmen das alte Europa mit und fürs Erste gibt es keinen Ersatz.” (Now they are slowly dying, the last survivors, they are taking the Old Europe with them, and for now there is nothing to replace it.)2Altaras, titos brille, 82. Hereafter tb. The tone of this overtly autobiographical narrative is largely elegiac and even melancholic, then, as in the quotation above, but there are also moments of wry humor and occasional flashes of indignation, pettiness, and even prejudice that allow the reader to believe that he or she is being given privileged access to Adriana’s inner world.

It is the sudden presence of Russian-speaking Jews in the narrator’s Berlin neighborhood, coinciding with the deaths of her father in 2001 and then her mother in 2004, that is the impetus for Adriana’s retelling of her parents’ escape from Yugoslavia and their contribution to the rebuilding of the Jewish community in Gießen and indeed nationally. She reports, for example, how it was “Jüdische Russen, russische Juden” (Jewish Russians, Russian Jews; tb, 102) who arrived en masse to snap up bargains when she was selling off the contents of her parents’ home for the benefit of a Jewish charity. Here, the imprecision of their Jewish identity is intimated, but just as important is the symbolism. The newcomers, Adriana implies, are appropriating the legacy of the survivors who built the postwar community at a hefty discount and with little appreciation for its significance. Even as she is flogging her parents’ mass-produced furniture and inexpensive prints of clichéd Jewish scenes (tb, 97), therefore, she knows that the burden of preserving their memory falls to her. “Wirst du das Erbe annehmen?,” she imagines her dead parents saying to her: “Aber das ist doch gar keine Frage, oder?” (Will you take on the legacy? But there’s no question that I will, of course?; tb, 85). This will be the work of a lifetime, or at least of the next twenty years, she calculates, including lecture tours to inform non-Jewish audiences about “das Leben jüdischer Migranten der Nachkriegszeit” (the life of Jewish migrants in the postwar period; tb, 99–100). At the same time, the second-generation narrator is oppressed by how banal her life appears to be in comparison with what her parents went through: “Was für ein Leben! Wie klein und eindimensional mir meines erscheint.” (What a life! How small and one-dimensional mine appears to me; tb, 100). In essence, Adriana feels duty-bound to communicate the legacy of the generation of survivors who refounded the community in Germany but is simultaneously also compelled to assert—or to at least to try and define—her own German Jewish identity against the monumentality of what they experienced and against the superior numbers and entrepreneurial esprit of recently arrived coreligionists from the former Soviet Union.

It is only when speaking of the “Russians,” in fact, that Adriana betrays distrust, jaundice, and even anger, jarring with her narrative’s otherwise predominantly even-tempered tone. The Russians are now everywhere, it seems, including as servers and doormen at the funeral reception that followed her mother Thea’s death (tb, 81). Adriana believes that this ubiquitous presence at community occasions has less to do with religious conviction than with jobs and control of resources. Referring to a power struggle that had involved her mother, Adriana reports how Russian immigrants had attempted to seize the presidency of the community and describes their mafia-like methods: “Sie schienen von der russischen Mafia inspiriert zu sein: Um 4 Uhr morgens bekam meine Mutter Pizzalieferungen, die sie angeblich bestellt hatte, wurde nachts alle zwei Stunden angerufen, bedroht.” (They seemed to be inspired by the Russian mafia: my mother received pizza deliveries at 4 a.m. that she had allegedly ordered, she got phone calls every two hours through the night, and was threatened; tb, 110–11). The association of Soviet-born Jews with the Russian mafia features again later in the text, when Adriana mentions the children “russischer Abstammung” (of Russian descent) at her son’s (Jewish) school, suggests that half of them have non-Jewish parents, and relates how some of their families are connected to organized crime. Her comment that she found the remaining Russians to be “ausgesprochen herzlich und gebildet” (decidedly warmhearted and well-educated) once these dubious characters had moved on is patronizing, to say the least, as is her amplification that she soon learned to drink vodka out of a tumbler (tb, 211–12).

Most obviously, Adriana positions herself in titos brille as the guardian of the memory of the existing community against the Soviet-born Jews arriving en masse after the end of the Cold War. Styling herself as a voice for German Jews who grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust, she feels duty-bound to attest to the traumatic experiences and hard-won achievements of the survivors and (later) refugees from communist antisemitism who reestablished a Jewish presence in the land of the perpetrators. Their story, Adriana implies, is a properly Jewish story, in sharp contrast to the “Russians,” with their (seemingly) tenuous relationship to Judaism and their banal opportunism. At the same time, this insistence on the prior claim of the established community is more than a simple reiteration of postwar settlement, watchfulness against resurgent antisemitism, and growing assertiveness while remaining somewhat apart. Notwithstanding its mostly understated, reflective style, in fact, Adriana’s retelling is subtly transgressive, as she positions herself not only against the influx of immigrants from the former Soviet Union but also—precisely via her purposefully low-key narration—vis-à-vis her peers in the second generation, with their angry outbursts against a non-Jewish majority that still refuses to accept full responsibility for the past, and vis-à-vis the Eastern European survivors who dominated the community after 1945 until recently.

In all this, the likely non-Jewish German reader is implicated not only as a fellow citizen to be informed about the customs and culture of a minority—although the meaning of the different foods at Passover is explained, for example (tb, 222)—but as a confidant and perhaps even an arbiter. For the most part, this potential intimacy is expressed diffusely, through Adriana’s unselfconscious and self-disclosing narration of her own and her parents’ life stories. This is the autobiographical pact, of course, as famously defined by Philippe Lejeune.3See Lejeune, “The Autobiographical Pact.” Occasionally, however, contextualizing references within the narration of family history permit the non-Jewish German reader to grasp more directly the “reasonableness” of Adriana’s self-understanding as a Jew who feels at home in Germany, now more than six decades after the Holocaust, in the late 2000s. Her account emphasizes, for example, that her mother descended from yekkes—middle-class Jews from central Europe who identified with German culture before the Holocaust—and that Thea spoke German at home and went with her father to Vienna to watch German theater (tb, 162–66). Elsewhere, Adriana’s allusions to Hitler’s Ustaše collaborators in wartime Yugoslavia, (tb, 115), communist show trials in the 1960s, and present-day antisemitism in Croatia (tb, 150) and in France (tb, 174) seem to situate fascism, totalitarianism, and anti-Jewish prejudice as European and not just German phenomena. Finally, Adriana is married to a non-Jewish German. In her description of Georg as an affable, intelligent, and “etwas autistischer Westfale” (somewhat autistic Westphalian; tb, 53)—whose appearance is as stereotypically German as that of all of her prior lovers (tb, 42)—the reader will register affection, love, and Adriana’s evident willingness to engage.4There is a long tradition of interfaith love stories, alluding to the intimate but frequently fraught relationship between Jewish and non-Jewish Germans. See Garloff, Mixed Feelings.

Perhaps counterintuitively, therefore, the Jewish narrator’s restrained aesthetic and suggestion of reconciliation may be best understood as a transgression of a transgression. It is most likely a repudiation of the acerbic satire, provocation, and often hostility that typifies the work of second-generation writers such as Biller, Broder, and Seligmann and more generally a postwar tradition of German Jewish writing of raw emotion, and especially resentment, initiated by survivors such as H. G. Adler and Jean Améry.5See Finch, “Ressentiment.” Biller, in fact, is mentioned in titos brille, with Broder, in the context of a Jewish friend Raffi who is invited to polemicize on German television (tb, 38). Biller’s Der gebrauchte Jude and Seligmann’s Lauf, Ludwig, lauf! Eine Jugend zwischen Synagoge und Fußball and Hannah und Ludwig – Heimatlos in Tel Aviv were discussed earlier in this chapter as examples of their authors’ recent willingness to (re-)imagine a place for Jews in post-Holocaust Germany, yet a complete rapprochement is not possible. Biller reclaims a Jewish voice in German culture but remains bitterly estranged from the country itself, and Seligmann’s narration of his parents’ return to the land of their birth is simultaneously an acid indictment of the antisemitism they encountered.

Adriana’s self-consciously modest narrative thus implies a radical rearticulation of the Jewish identity of the second generation—a self-distancing from Soviet-born newcomers that prompts an unprecedented embrace of Germany, and of non-Jewish Germans. She even praises her “unerotisches Deutschland” (unerotic Germany) for its dogged persistence in confronting its Nazi past: “Es hat—zunächst verordnet, dann nach 68 geradezu in einem Aufarbeitungswahn—verhältnismäßig viel seiner dreckigen Geschichte thematisiert” (at first as a result of eternal pressure and then, after 1968, in feverish self-analysis, Germany has thematized a relatively large portion of its dirty past; tb, 175). (Adriana’s more conciliatory tone, however, does not mean that she won’t defend Biller, Broder, and all the other “angry” Jews against an acquaintance who accuses them of “tyrannizing” Germans; tb, 156.) Yet this is not the novel’s only quietly daring intervention. The history of the postwar resumption of the Jewish presence that Adriana presents for her likely non-Jewish German reader subtly but unmistakably challenges key norms long defended by the community itself. This includes the narrator’s allusions to corruption by prominent individuals; her rebuttal of Orthodox values regarding women; and—the bulk of her account—her depiction of Sephardic Jews from the Balkans, which offers a corrective to the conventional emphasis in German Jewish memory culture on the experiences of survivors from Orthodox eastern European backgrounds.

Daughterly loyalty, then, might have led Adriana to include an account of how her late father had accused senior figures in the community of corruption relating to German reparations for Jewish victims (tb, 28). (This refers to Werner Nachmann, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany from 1969 to 1988, who in 1987 was found to have embezzled 30 million DM.)6See Goschler and Kauders, “1969–1989.” However, a later allusion to how her own rabbi profiteered from the sale of licenses to certify kosher food (tb, 230) shows that she is also determined to expose malpractice in the present day—airing the community’s dirty washing in public will seem unforgivably treacherous to her fellow Jews. Nor does she even spare her father, in fact. Jakob is famous as the hero who fought with Tito—leader of the partisans fighting against the Nazis and later president of Yugoslavia—and rescued twenty-four Jewish infants (tb, 12–14), and rebuilt the Gießen community. Yet, Adriana reveals, he was also a womanizer whose several mistresses Adriana discovers after his death (tb, 30), cruel to his first wife and Adriana’s half-sister Rosa (tb, 19–20), the father of a half-brother she has never met (tb, 55), and unreliable in his retelling of his exploits, possibly including the saving of the children (tb, 24). In summary, Adriana signals that she is prepared to step outside of the community and critique its image of itself, placing principle and unflinching honesty over blind loyalty to the clan.

More generally, Altaras’s determination to participate on equal terms in the non-Jewish mainstream is an innovation that is a continuity, or rather—noting the paradox—a resumption of a continuity. Implicitly but certainly not unwittingly, therefore, the author revives the Reform Judaism that, by end of the nineteenth century, had to a large extent come to define the community: modern, enlightened, and perceiving no contradiction between being a Jew and being integrated with the non-Jewish majority, and even being a German patriot.7See Meyer, Response to Modernity, especially 140–44. This is clearly different from the way her parents understood their presence in Germany—as survivors, resistance fighters, and exiles from postwar Soviet persecution—and it is different from other members of her own generation, like Raffi, whose lives are still overdetermined by the Holocaust past and by the need to be always vigilant against resurgent antisemitism. Less obviously, however, her embrace of the secular culture of the majority also presents a challenge to the strict religious conformity of the eastern European survivors who reestablished the community after 1941—and to the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews whose numbers are also increasing in Berlin in consequence of immigration from the United States and the new-found fervor of some Soviet-born Jews (tb, 211).8See Schrage, Jüdische Religion in Deutschland, especially 50–53. Here too, Altaras’s values are “German values.” She can’t bear the chauvinism of her strictly observant coreligionists and their halakhic literalism, as she makes abundantly clear: “Was ist schlecht an Reformen? An Veränderung? An Frauen? Wir leben schließlich nicht mehr im Mittelalter.” (What is wrong with reform? With change? With women? After all, we no longer live in the Middle Ages; tb, 245). Indeed, her own commitment to Jewish ritual is lax, to say the least, notably her son’s Bar Mitzwah, which recalls family traditions but has little religious meaning (tb, 251; 255). Above all, she is married to a non-Jew. Her transgression is not just intimacy with a German, therefore, but her flaunting of the prohibition on exogamy.

Ultimately, Adriana is at home in Germany. America and Israel feature as alternative destinations for the second-generation German Jew seeking either a less encumbered existence in the diaspora or the identity-affirming experience of making aliyah. However, she is repulsed by her American relatives, “eine amerikanisch-jüdische Variante aus ‘Baywatch’ oder ‘Dallas’” (an American-Jewish variant from ‘Baywatch’ or ‘Dallas,’ tb, 217), who are all grossly overweight and who seem to view her and her children “als seien wir geradewegs aus dem Stetl geflohen” (as if we had just fled the shtetl; tb, 218), and her relationship with Israel too has always been “gelinde gesagt—schwierig” (to put it mildly—difficult; tb, 201). A disappointing sabbatical year in a kibbutz and then, in more recent years, the constant requirement to justify her decision to live in Germany and her growing discomfort with the militarization of Israeli society mean that she is always pleased to return to Berlin (tb, 201–8). When violence breaks out in the West Bank, her instinct is to worry about the increased security around Berlin’s Jewish institutions, including her sons’ school, and not to ponder the potential rights and wrongs of the decades-old conflict in the Middle East (tb, 209).

As intimated above, however, it is through her narration of her parents’ Sephardic legacy that Adriana makes her most decisive contribution to a reframing of Jewish identity in Germany. Certainly, her comment that it would take more than twenty years to work through her mother’s papers and to tour Germany to inform her non-Jewish fellow citizens about “das Leben jüdischer Migranten der Nachkriegszeit” (the life of Jewish migrants in the postwar period; tb, 99–100) indicates both the diversity of the community and the extent of the history that is still to be disseminated about less familiar groups. (“Migranten” here most likely refers to Jews who arrived as refugees from communist persecution in the 1960s and 1970s rather than to survivors who came immediately after the war.) Through her rendering of family history, correspondingly, Adriana suggests that Jewish life in Germany is more varied, more complex, and more contested than is normally conceded by the community itself or by the majority, and that this reality needs to be acknowledged by Jews and non-Jews alike.

Adriana’s father Jakob, the reader learns, was from a Sephardic background, the descendants of Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal in the late fifteenth century who migrated across France, Holland, England, Italy, and into the Ottoman Empire, including the Balkans (tb, 22). Adriana recalls visitors to her childhood home speaking their Spanish Jewish language (Spaniolish) with her father (tb, 206); later in her narrative, she tells of a cantor she knows in Berlin, who escaped Thessaloníki just before the Nazis exterminated its community of “Spanish Jews” in 1942 (tb, 93). In this way, Adriana alludes, albeit parenthetically, to the long and illustrious Sephardic history in the Greek city, and across the Balkans more generally, and invokes the near total destruction of this form of Judaism across Greece, Serbia, Croatia, and Macedonia. (The Jews of Bulgaria—a German ally—were largely saved following protests by politicians, clerics, and intellectuals.)9See Levy, The Sephardim in The Holocaust. In general terms, this counters the global ignorance—even occlusion—with regard to the fate of Sephardic Jews during the genocide.10See Abramson, “A Double Occlusion.” More specifically, it addresses the lack of knowledge in Germany given the usual focus on the Jews of eastern rather than southeastern Europe.

The narrator’s efforts to expand German and German Jewish Holocaust memory are supported by a wealth of detail from her parents’ extraordinary and yet vividly representative life-stories. Adriana recounts, for example, how Thea, her mother, and her mother’s sister Jelka were driven from their home by German soldiers (Thea’s father died of a heart attack following the invasion), captured by Croatian fascists (the Ustaše), and then interned in the Rab concentration camp by the Italians—although, for a short time, this actually protected them from the Nazis (tb, 67–69). With regard to Adriana’s father, the reader discovers that Jakob was one of six sons, one of whom became a rabbi, one an engineer, and two became doctors. “Wahrscheinlich ging es in vielen sephardischen Familien so oder ähnlich zu,” she comments (It probably happened like this in many Sephardic families; tb, 22), referencing the work of the well-known Sephardic writer Elias Canetti. A prolific author raised in the German language—along with Ladino, or Judeo-Spanish—Canetti will be familiar to many readers as a documenter of the rise of fascism and the fanaticism of the masses.11See Lorenz, ed., Elias Canetti. Elsewhere, Adriana tells of how Jakob joined the resistance, repaired Tito’s glasses—hence the title of the novel—and was persecuted by the postwar regime after he accused the communist partisans of having murdered his brother during the war (tb, 25). (The story about Tito is probably one of her father’s self-aggrandizing fabrications.) For his daughter, absorbing these tales as a child, Jakob is a Dr. Zhivago figure (tb, 28), enigmatic and full of charm.

Adriana’s account of Sephardic Jews in the Balkans, including allusions to their near-extermination in the Holocaust, does more than simply complement the customary emphasis on the fate of Ashkenazi Jews from eastern Europe, however. It also integrates their Jewish suffering into the “canon” of German and German Jewish memory. Adriana thus describes how Thea was forced to leave school and to wear the Star of David, aged fifteen, following the introduction of race laws in Yugoslavia, how she was placed in the concentration camp at Rab when she was seventeen—though the occupying Italians were less antisemitic than the Germans—and how she was overwhelmed by disgust for the humiliations she endured, for other inmates, and for herself (tb, 61–62). The daughter’s more or less factual description of the sequence of events, moreover, is then immediately followed by passages of direct speech interspersed over several pages that reproduce her mother’s own words, spoken many years ago in conversation with her family. The content largely overlaps with what Adriana has just reported, although key details are added, for example that twenty-eight out of thirty-three of Thea’s classmates were deported (tb, 68–69), that the Germans launched a killing spree after the Italian surrender, and that Thea worked as a translator for the Americans after her escape (tb, 75–76). These are important elaborations of Adriana’s previous summary—they emphasize that Sephardic Jews were also caught up in the Nazi killing machine—but just as significant perhaps is Adriana’s choice to have her mother substantiate her previous narrative as an eyewitness. Quite apart from the immediacy that this brings to Adriana’s invocation of the Holocaust in the Balkans, it also aligns her Sephardic story with a German and German Jewish memory culture that, historically, has relied very heavily on first-hand accounts of the ghettos and camps.

In fact, it is clear that Adriana is already well-versed—and deeply involved—in contemporary practices of Holocaust commemoration in Germany. Woven through her retelling of her mother’s persecution, deportation, and internment—and indeed through Thea’s ostensibly original account—is Adriana’s simultaneous narration of her absorption of debates about German guilt, self-recognition within current discourses on the transmission of Holocaust trauma to the second generation, and finally her active participation as an author of memory texts. Her reproduction of Thea’s eyewitness report, accordingly, is prompted by a discussion with colleagues about the building of a Holocaust memorial in central Berlin. (The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was inaugurated in 2005.) She mentions how she began to read scholarly literature on the theme of memorials and German commemoration culture as well as the Mitscherlichs’ 1967 work Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern: Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens (The inability to mourn: Principles of collective behavior; tb, 67). At the same time, she relates the staging of her play Trauer to go (Mourning to go; 2004), itself written in response to the public debate on the Berlin Holocaust memorial:

In titos brille, a second-generation narrator asserts the prior claim of the established community to define Jewish identity against Soviet-born newcomers while also hinting at the existing diversity among Jews long resident in Germany—enriched by waves of migrants before the “Russians,” including her own Sephardic family. At the same time, she also subtly positions herself vis-à-vis the eastern European Jewish survivors and their descendants who dominated that community since its reemergence after the war. Adriana asserts a liberal Judaism in place of the generally Orthodox tradition from which the survivors came, insisting for example on equality for women, and stresses the transnational, multicultural, and even worldly orientation of her Sephardic heritage, with family dispersed across the Balkans and beyond, conversant in multiple languages, and trading and traveling across borders. The reader might think, then, of reconstructed synagogues such as the Neue Synagoge on Berlin’s Orianienburgerstraße, built in the neo-Moorish style adopted by German Jews in the mid-nineteenth century to reference the cosmopolitan tradition of the Jews of Islamic Iberia, who famously lived in harmony with their Muslim neighbors and overlords before their expulsion in 1492 following the Christian reconquest.12See Efron, German Jewry. The allusion to the multilingual Sephardic writer and humanist Elias Canetti invokes the same cosmopolitan sensibility.13See Esformes, “The Sephardic Voice.”

In the end, the reconciliation with the non-Jewish German majority that Adriana seems to embrace, symbolically expressed through her marriage to Georg, might even style the liberal—Reform—Judaism she champions as the more authentically German Jewish tradition, in comparison to the apparent opportunism of Russian-speaking interlopers and the atavism of Eastern European survivors and their descendants. Adriana’s German-speaking grandfather, a yekke originally from Budapest, could not imagine that the Nazis would target him and his family (tb, 68); her aunt Julia was the embodiment of the Austro-Hungarian empire (tb, 940); and her mother Thea—who visited the theater in Vienna as a child—battled with the West German authorities to be acknowledged as a “Volksdeutsche” (ethnic German; tb, 163), given that her family, generations ago, may have hailed from Frankfurt. Thea was even buried on the Tag der deutschen Einheit (the Day of German Unity, the anniversary of unification on October 3, 1990), with a special dispensation for the ceremony to take place on a public holiday (tb, 80). Perhaps the most scandalous aspect of Altaras’s deceptively understated titos brille, in sum, may be its hint that reconciliation is simply a much longed-for and greatly delayed return to an intimacy—even a “German-Jewish symbiosis”14See Benz, “German-Jewish Symbiosis” and Traverso, The Jews and Germany.—that was in any case always meant to be, notwithstanding the unfathomable outrage of the Holocaust.