Becoming a (Russian) German Jew: Jan Himmelfarb’s Sterndeutung

Vertlib, of course, migrated from Russia in the late 1970s, via Israel, Austria (for the first time), Italy, Austria (again), the Netherlands, Israel (once more), Italy (again), Austria (again), the United States, and finally, Austria (for good, in 1981).3Vertlib, “Nichtvorbildliche Lieblingsautoren,” 198. This migration story is told in Vertlib’s autobiographical novels Abschiebung (Deportation; 1995) and Zwischenstationen (Intermediate stops; 1999). See Gilman, “Becoming a Jew,” especially 28–32. Biller arrived in Germany with his Russian-speaking parents from Prague in 1970, and the Austrian writer Julya Rabinowich migrated with her family to Vienna in 1977, to name two other authors with a background in the Communist bloc—as already mentioned, Biller both references and fictionalizes family history in Sechs Koffer (2018) and Sieben Versuche zu lieben (2020), and in Spaltkopf (Split-head; 2008) Rabinowich tells the story of a seven-year-old Russian Jewish child who experiences the difficulty of living between histories, cultures, and languages in Vienna.4See Krenz-Dewe, “Zum wechselseitigen Verhältnis” and Guenther, “Julya Rabinowich’s Transnational Poetics.” Even as these established writers anticipate the focus on the Soviet and Soviet Jewish past in fiction by more recently emerged authors who came as children in the 1990s, however, this does not mean that there is a shared understanding of German Jewish or even Russian Jewish identity. In their essays, interviews, and fiction, the two groups barely mention one other.

Scholarship on the first post-Soviet writers to make a name for themselves in the early 2000s typically focuses on their “Russianness,” arguably replicating the reductiveness just described in the work of authors from the established community, and indeed in much of the sociological and ethnographic research conducted on the Kontingentflüchtlinge in the decade after their arrival. (This was discussed in the Introduction.) Lena Gorelik’s début novel Meine weißen Nächte (My white nights; 2004), for example, is identified by Anke Biendarra as a paradigmatic “arrival narrative,” focused on its Russian protagonist’s confrontation with a hostile German bureaucracy, life in an asylum-seekers’ hostel, and melancholic flashbacks to a Soviet childhood.5See Biendarra, “Cultural Dichotomies.” Alina Bronsky’s Scherbenpark (Broken glass park; 2008) is discussed in similar terms, with an emphasis on the sexual exploitation of the young Russian woman who is its main character,6See Mennel, “Alina Bronsky, Scherbenpark.” and the author’s darkly comic tale Die schärfsten Gerichte der tatarischen Küche (The spiciest dishes of the Tatarian cuisine), published two years later in 2010, is regularly cited for its reproduction of familiar tropes, including Soviet corruption, exotic dishes, and a tyrannical Russian grandmother maneuvering to marry her daughter into a better life in the West. Finally, commentators invariably reference Wladimir Kaminer, who arrived in Germany in 1990 and quickly established himself in Berlin’s literary and music scenes, including DJ’ing at the regular “Russendisko” at the Kaffee Burger club on Torstraße.

Kaminer, it is usually claimed, identifies above all as Russian, with Jewish themes being seen as peripheral in his collections of satirical short stories Russendisko (Russian disco; 2000), Mein deutsches Dschungelbuch (My German jungle book; 2003), Es gab keinen Sex im Sozialismus (There was no sex in socialism; 2009), Onkel Wanja kommt: Eine Reise durch die Nacht (Uncle Venya is coming: A journey through the night; 2012)—invoking Chekhov—and Goodbye, Moskau: Betrachtungen über Russland (Goodbye Moscow: Observations on Russia; 2017), which is prefaced with a quotation by the nineteenth-century surrealist Nikolai Gogol: “Oh, Russland, wohin rast du?/ Gib mir eine Antwort!”7See Lubrich, “Are Russian Jews Post-colonial?” Lubrich, in fact, argues that Kaminer is neither “Russian nor Jewish” (36). (Oh, Russia, where are you headed so fast/ Give me an answer). Kaminer, the American scholar Sander Gilman claims, is “the representative RUSSIAN.”8Gilman, Multiculturalism, 216–19. See also Gilman, “Becoming a Jew.” Gorelik too appears to be focused on Russia and on Russians in her novels Verliebt in Sankt Petersburg: Meine russische Reise (In love in St. Petersburg: My Russian journey; 2008), Die Listensammlerin (The collector of lists; 2013), and, most recently, Wer wir sind (Who we are; 2021), in which the author processes her migration thirty years previously, including the parents’ difficulties in relating to their daughter as she becomes fluent in German and starts her own family in the new country. In Baba Dunjas letzte Liebe (Dunja’s last love; 2015), Bronsky narrates the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster and, in Der Zopf meiner Großmutter (The braid of my grandmother; 2019), the author comes back to the familiar theme of a Russian family’s arrival in Germany in the early 1990s. In addition, Bronsky has published several books for young adults that feature one or more characters with a conspicuously Russian background.

A related focus of current scholarship is on what Adrian Wanner calls the performance of “Russianness for German consumption.”9See Wanner, Out of Russia, 50–88. This refers, on the one hand, to the brazen self-stylization that characterizes, say, Kaminer’s literary production and public appearances, such as his amplification of his Russian accent on stage. On the other hand, it refers to publishers’ marketing strategies. Nora Isterheld, accordingly, discusses book covers featuring onion domes, titles that play on Russian stereotypes, and images of the author, for example a photographic portrait of the Ukrainian (non-Jewish) novelist Marjana Gaponenko that recalls a Russian noblewoman striking majestic poses. Russian phrases, in Cyrillic, also feature frequently, emphasizing the provenance of the author and “otherness.”10See Finkelstein, “From German into Russian.” At the same time, the performance of a Russian identity can also suggest a more meaningful invocation of Russian culture within European and global traditions. As noted above, Kaminer alludes to Chekov and Gogol, the title of Gorelik’s Meine weißen Nächte is a translation of the name of Dostoyevsky’s short story of 1848,11See Isterheld, “In der Zugluft Europas,” 158. and Bronsky too alludes to Dostoyevsky throughout her oeuvre, including a prolonged intertextual engagement in Dunjas letzte Liebe.12See Pailer, “Female Empowerment.”

It is in the work of Olga Martynova that the most sustained engagement with Russian literature as world literature is to be found. A poet and novelist with a Jewish background, Martynova was already well established in Russian literary circles when she moved to Germany in 1991 with her husband, the lyricist Oleg Jurjew, and even after her emigration she continued to write poetry in Russian and to enjoy success in her country of origin. As Miriam Finkelstein argues, Martynova’s work exemplifies the recent (re-)emergence of a Russian-German translingual literature, incorporating elements of both traditions and often with Russian lexical items (often in Cyrillic) strategically deployed.13See Finkelstein, “From German into Russian.” Her Sogar Papageien überleben uns (Even parrots outlive us; 2010) is a densely poetic tale of how a Russian literary scholar, Marina, reconnects with a former lover during a lecture tour to Germany—allusions to Russian, German, and more generally European classics abound. The same is true of Martynova’s second novel, Mörikes Schlüsselbein (Mörike’s collarbone; 2013), which also features a Russian-German couple as well as an invented Russian poet, Fjodor Stein, whose first name recalls Dostoyevsky and whose surname suggests Jewish roots.14See Isterheld, “In der Zugluft Europas,” especially 316–33. See also Lehmann, Russische Literatur in Deutschland, especially 356. The title, of course, invokes the nineteenth-­century German Romantic poet and writer of novellas.

Yet for all that they clearly thematize Russia, Russian literature, and Russian history, Soviet-born authors also evidence a profound interest in their Jewish identity—although this may be more overt in texts written from the mid-2010s.15It is worth noting that around 1.5 million Russlanddeutsche—ethnic Germans—also arrived from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s, with writers also emerging from this cohort. Many tend to focus on the history of their community during Soviet times, namely deportation under Stalin or conscription into Hitler’s army. Eleanora Hummel is the best known. But others such as Mitja Vachedin, Wlada Kolosowa, Katerina Poladjan, Alina Galkina, Dmitrij Wall, and Nellja Veremej deal with the absurdities both of life in the Soviet Union and arrival in Germany, with its attendant bureaucracy and discrimination. See Isterheld, “In der Zugluft Europas,” 146–62, esp. 157. Joseph Cronin, then, has argued for a reevaluation of Kaminer’s oeuvre, to highlight the author’s concern with antisemitism in the Soviet Union, accusations leveled against the newcomers that they had falsified Jewish genealogies, and assumptions about their commitment to Holocaust memory, even if these themes are expressed only indirectly.16See Cronin, “Wladimir Kaminer.” In Bronsky’s Der Zopf meiner Großmutter too, the author plays on widely held beliefs, including across the established Jewish community, that the Jewish identity of a good proportion of the new arrivals was fraudulent. The grandmother can claim only a distant relative as Jewish, but this is good enough for her, her husband, and grandson to gain entry to Germany. Once there, the Russian matriarch curses “the Jews” also living in her asylum-seekers’ hostel. In Gorelik’s Meine weißen Nächte, the protagonist’s brother goes to Israel to learn Hebrew. His interest is short-lived—he also expresses an interest in Buddhism—but the point is precisely the haziness of Russian Jewish identity. In subsequent texts, Gorelik explores Jewish identity in a much more dedicated fashion. In Hochzeit in Jerusalem (2007), Anja travels to Israel to discover what it means to be a Jew, especially a non-believing Jew who lives in Germany. Eccentric relatives create opportunities for amusing interludes, a contemplation of the global Russian Jewish diaspora, and reflection on the element of chance that meant that her family ended up in the land of the perpetrators. Five years later, Lieber Mischa . . . Du bist ein Jude (Dear Mischa . . . You are a Jew, 2012) demonstrates the author’s evolving engagement with Jewish traditions and rituals.17See Heiss, “Lena Gorelik’s Autofictional Letter Lieber Mischa.” Lydia Heiss describes this book, addressed to the author’s son, as a “guide to being Jewish in contemporary Germany.”

Martynova too, whose work was earlier described as profoundly influenced by Russian and European classics, also emphasizes the significance of Jewish authors, and even a specifically Jewish aesthetic, within European literary traditions.18See Martynova’s interview with Jo Frank. Isterheld notes the echoes of Joseph Roth’s Radetzkymarsch (Radetzky March; 1932) in Sogar Papageien überleben uns. (The Jewish Catholic convert Roth describes the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy—Martynova depicts the decline of the Soviet Union.) Specifically, the German critic notes that the quotation that provides the title of the novel is taken from Roth’s 1927 essay “Juden auf Wanderschaft” (The wandering Jews) in which he discusses the arrogance of German Jews in the 1920s as they deluded themselves that they were culturally and morally superior to the eastern European Jews (Ostjuden) arriving after the First World War and that they were safe in their embrace of German patriotism.19Isterheld, “In der Zugluft Europas,” 320–21. See Hoffmann, “Translator’s Preface.” The parallel with attitudes in the settled German Jewish community toward newly arrived Soviet Jews in the present day is, if not explicit, then at least likely. The Jewish writers Osip Mandelstam, Paul Celan, and Rose Ausländer are also invoked.20Isterheld, “In der Zugluft Europas,” 325. Elsewhere, in a special issue on “Jewish literatures of the present” in Jalta—a magazine dedicated to German Jewish debates—Martynova discusses her deceased husband Oleg Jurjew and asks whether it is possible to speak of a “a whole ‘Jewish text’ of world literature,” given how Jewish culture has migrated to all four corners of the earth.21Martynova, “Das Wort Jude,” 81. This 2019 essay is entitled “Das Wort Jude” (the word Jew), which recalls an extended discussion of sensitivities around naming Jews in Martynova’s third novel Der Engelherd (Hearth of angels; 2016), a metaphysical discourse on love, home, and identity.22See Pörzgen, “Transgenerationale Traumatisierung.”

Soviet-born writers emphasize Russianness and Jewishness, therefore. Alexandra Friedmann’s début novel Besserland (Better country; 2015) depicts her family’s eventful journey to Germany with “Jewish humor,” as her publisher puts it.23See https://aviva-berlin.de/aviva/content_Literatur.php?id=14191528. Last accessed July 25, 2024. Marina Frenk’s ewig her und gar nicht wahr (a lifetime ago and not even true; 2020) has its protagonist travel to New York, Israel, and Moldova in search of her Jewish identity, including her grandparents’ flight to Uzbekistan to escape the Holocaust. Dmitrij Kapitelman’s Eine Formalie in Kiew (A formality in Kyiv)—published, in 2021, twenty-five years after his family left Ukraine—focuses on his parents’ struggles to settle in Germany. Again, travel is central to the plot, as the protagonist travels to Ukraine to recover a document he needs for his application for a German passport and to excavate family history, including Jewish life stories. And—a final example—Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s second novel, Im Menschen muss alles herrlich sein (Glorious people; 2021), focuses on life in the Soviet Union but there are references to Jewish genealogies; to the choice between America, Israel, or Germany as a destination after the family quits Russia; and—as so often in recent writing—to the Jewish writer Franz Kafka.24Salzmann, Im Menschen, 144–45; 165; and 217. I am grateful to Dr. Miriam Wray for identifying these references.

This extended review of Soviet-born writers provides some evidence at least for Eliezer Ben-Rafael’s suggestion—already cited in the Introduction—that, for Russian-speaking migrants, resettlement in “Germany provides the conditions to re-attach themselves to Jewishness.”25Ben-Rafael, “Germany’s Russian-speaking Jews,” 78–79. Indeed, it might be argued that one of the most important tropes in the literary production of this cohort is precisely a protagonist’s attempt to reconcile a Soviet biography with a Jewish sensibility that only emerges following exposure to German and German Jewish memory culture. In the land of the perpetrators, it seems, a Russian identity can evolve first into a Russian Jewish and then a (Russian) German Jewish identity.

For Jessica Ortner, the inevitable consequence of the “mnemonic migration” that takes place when Soviet-born writers introduce Russian and Russian Jewish histories into their German-language texts is “a clash between cognitive schemata in which the protagonists have been socialized and those they encounter in the host country,”26Ortner, Transcultural Memory, 12. relating specifically to the perceived challenge that a focus on Stalinist oppression or even Soviet antisemitism appears to pose to the primacy of Holocaust memory. This framing of the interaction between Soviet, Soviet Jewish, and German Jewish histories might appear somewhat abstract, however, and may also underestimate the extent to which protagonists actively mobilize—or even fabricate—other kinds of memory in order to rearticulate what it means to be a Jew in Germany today. Becoming a Russian Jew and then a (Russian) German Jew, accordingly, often involves a conscious self-positioning—or repositioning—vis-à-vis the existing community and the occasionally coercive expectations of the non-Jewish majority.

Himmelfarb’s Sterndeutung can be read as an auto-ethnography of Jewish migrants from the former Soviet Union and their efforts to create a new life in Germany. In a highly personal narrative that is at the same time self-consciously aware of how it is more broadly representative, the fifty-one-year-old Arthur depicts his mother’s hankering for her old life in Russia, his own endeavors to achieve a prosperous future for his family, his wife Julia’s difficulties in finding a job (she is a qualified teacher of Russian but her German is poor), and his daughter Anna’s success in gaining a place at Business School and her relationship with Max, a German fellow student. To an extent, Arthur’s account plays to stereotypes of “the Russian.” In the Soviet Union, he had been a translator of German newspapers but now he renders official documents from Russian for other newcomers hoping—in fulfillment of the cliché—to access state benefits.27There are comparisons to be drawn between Soviet-born Jewish writers in Germany and Russian-speaking Jewish authors who immigrated to the United States, such as Yelena Akhtiorskaya, Masha Gessen, Nadia Kalman, Sana Krasikov, Ellen Litman, Irina Reyn, Anya Ulinich, Lara Vapnyar, Anya von Bremzen, David Bezmozgis, Gary Shteyngart, Boris Fishman, and Michael Idov. See Katsnelson, “Introduction.” See also Krasuska, Soviet-born. He also partners with his friend Igor in a dubious used car export business, while Igor drives pizzas to ungrateful customers, his wife Ina cleans apartments, and a mutual friend Sergei heaves sacks of coal: “Aber sie werden dadurch nicht wieder zu Ärzten und Ingenieuren. Die Selbstachtung Neueingewanderter leidet fast immer.”28Himmelfarb, Sterndeutung, 42. Hereafter S. (That doesn’t help them become doctors or engineers again. The self-respect of new immigrants almost always suffers.) Financial need and loss of status lead the newly arrived Russian Jews to engage in insecure, off-the-books, and potentially illegal work.

Yet Arthur goes beyond a simple description of the struggles of Soviet-born migrants to find work commensurate with their qualifications and aspirations, or of how integration is of course easier for the younger generation. He also introduces three further plot strands, each narrated in a quite different mode. First, lengthy factual passages interspersed throughout the novel summarize what Arthur has learned about the Nazi genocide from standard scholarly works, including—perhaps less familiar to the reader than the death camps—the mass shootings of Jews that took place across eastern Europe as the Germans rapidly advanced in 1940 and 1941 (the “Holocaust by bullets”).29See Desbois, The Holocaust by Bullets. Second, this terse historiographical narration contrasts sharply with Arthur’s self-evidently implausible fabulation of the circumstances of his birth in December 1941 on a train evacuating Soviet citizens—including Jews—from the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv before the German forces arrived. Arthur claims to recall the precise moment of his entry into the world, along with details such as the train’s blacked-out windows, as well as his onward journey to Stalingrad, Tashkent, and Kazakhstan, where he, his mother, and his grandmother spent the war. Finally, Arthur relates his friendship with the German Jew Roth, who survived the war in hiding in Berlin.30See Lutjens Jr., Submerged. Here, Arthur strikes an intimate but measured tone, contrasting with both the evident embellishment of his birth story and the restrained emotion of his restatement of the horror. In what follows, the relationship between these three strands is explored, and specifically how they interact to position—and reposition—the Soviet-born newcomer in relation to both Jewish and non-­Jewish Germans.

Arthur’s extensive recital of what he has read about the phases and sites of the Holocaust includes detailed accounts of the deportation of Berlin Jews from the Grunewald railway station and their later extraction from the ghetto in Riga and mass shooting into pits they had been forced to dig (S, 66–77); the murder of 100,000 using three gas vans at Kulmhof (S, 83–84); 23,000 killed at Kamenez-Podolsk (S, 15–16)—including his maternal grandparents—and the killing of the Jews of Kharkiv (S, 104–7), with whom he would have died in the womb if his uncle Naum had not been able to help his pregnant mother to board the train, along with her own mother. Elsewhere in the text, Arthur also relays historical knowledge he has acquired about the Warsaw Ghetto (S, 135–36); Treblinka (S, 147–48) and the Treblinka uprising (S, 241–44); the extermination of Hungarian Jews (S, 304–7); and the death marches (S, 347–50), as well as his own encounters with Germans who still cannot accept that the population as a whole was complicit (S, 327–39). During a visit to Auschwitz with Julia, then, Arthur overhears a young woman explaining that ordinary Germans did not know, that the leadership hid the crime, that there was resistance, and so on and so forth (S, 338).

In reproducing what is effectively a compressed history of the Holocaust—deportations; Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units); the first use of gas; the heroic uprisings in Warsaw and Treblinka; the killing of more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews in Auschwitz in mid-1944; and the death marches of late 1944 and 1945—the Soviet-born protagonist claims his place in German and German Jewish memory culture. He has done his homework and has transformed himself from the (stereotypically) ill-informed Soviet-born migrant, with little understanding (supposedly) of the genocide, into a worthy candidate for membership of the established Jewish community of his adopted country, for which the obligation to remember is paramount. Indeed, Arthur’s remedial work is impressive. In the Soviet Union, he notes, state propaganda tended to erase the Jewish specificity of the Holocaust by emphasizing the victimhood of Soviet citizens in general (S, 270), and it was only after his arrival in Germany that he gained access to the books that he needed in order to fully comprehend the Nazis’ racial madness. Here, the Austrian-born American historian Raul Hilberg is mentioned by name. In his The Destruction of the European Jews (1961), Hilberg was one of the first scholars to focus on the Holocaust as a crime perpetrated against Jews as Jews (S, 373).

Arthur’s internalization of Holocaust history following his arrival in Germany leads him to reassess his Jewish heritage. In Russia, he had been a Jew only because all of his ancestors were Jews: “Meine Eltern, vier Großeltern, meine acht Urgroßeltern und meine sechzehn Ururgroßeltern waren Juden.” (My parents, four grandparents, my eight great-grandparents, and my sixteen great-great-grandparents were Jews; S, 7). Unlike many post-Soviet migrants to Germany, therefore, his halachic credentials are unimpeachable. Now, however, he grasps that he too was “mitgemeint” (intended too; S, 347; S, 349), as he puts it several times, and that his pregnant mother and grandmother could just as easily have ended up on a cattle wagon to the death camps, with other Jews destined for extermination. In Germany of all places, it seems, Arthur truly becomes Jewish.31This is a process that sociologist Dmitrij Belkin describes for himself in his aptly named Germanija: Wie ich in Deutschland jüdisch und erwachsen wurde (Germanija: How I become Jewish and grown-up in Germany; 2016). See Panagiotidis, The Unchosen Ones, 321. This is a determinedly secular understanding of Jewish identity, of course—Arthur has no interest in the founder of Hasidism, the Baal Shem Tov (S, 325), for example—but it is one that would be immediately recognizable to, and accepted by, the established community in his adopted country.

Arthur’s rehearsal of what he has gleaned from books about the Holocaust eases his entry into German and German Jewish memory culture. It does not, however, establish the Soviet-born narrator’s personal, emotional investment in Holocaust history, or counter the presumption more generally that Russian Jews were less directly impacted by the genocide and thus cannot properly relate to commemorative practices in Germany. Arthur’s fabulation of the circumstances of his birth is not entirely fanciful, therefore, insofar as it positions the Soviet-born migrant not simply as newcomer to Holocaust memory regurgitating what he has learned from books but as someone who is directly implicated in that traumatic past. Soviet Jews too were also forced to flee, and they were murdered if they stayed—just as happened to his maternal grandparents (S, 115–16). More generally, Arthur goes on to hint that for Russian Jews the genocide and the German invasion were two sides of the same coin. In a reference to the siege of Stalingrad, the narrator associates a relative’s report of the heavy smoke from German bombing and the Volga in flames with the gas chambers at Treblinka (S, 155).

What is perhaps most significant about Arthur’s switch from historiographical narration to invention, however, is the implication that it is necessary to extemporize a Soviet Jewish proximity to the Holocaust that is otherwise barely present in German and German Jewish memory culture. In an essay for the weekly magazine Der Freitag, the sociologist, historian, and curator Dmitrij Belkin describes this gap:

Arthur’s outrageous, even scandalous, suggestion that he was preternaturally cognizant of the exact moment of his birth also has a more specific resonance, however—and one that succinctly expresses how arduous it is to write the Soviet Jewish experience of the genocide into the literary canon, to say nothing of memory culture more broadly. Many, if not most, readers of Sterndeutung, accordingly, will recognize Arthur’s narration of his birth in a train hurtling away from the advancing German army as an obvious intertextual allusion to Günter Grass’s Die Blechtrommel (The tin drum; 1959), whose protagonist Oskar is also born fully aware of his surroundings, including the depravity of his “three” parents (his mother, his father, and his mother’s lover) and the growing appeal of fascism from the early 1920s. Oskar, as is well known, refuses to grow after age three, disrupts Nazi parades but also joins the Party and entertains German troops in France, and testifies—beating his drum or shattering glass with his high-pitched screams—to the atrocities taking place around him, including the deportation of the Jews of Danzig. In sum, Die Blechtrommel is considered to be a landmark in West Germany’s confrontation with its Nazi past, relentlessly exposing the complicity of ordinary Germans, their self-serving indulgence of the regime, and the morally ambivalent artist who is both repulsed by Nazi brutality but also drawn to its spectacle.34See Michaels, “Confronting the Nazi Past.” A key theme is the novel’s unreliable narrator,35See Demetz, After the Fires. which is where Arthur’s tribute begins, of course.

The invocation of Die Blechtrommel is even more flagrant than this. Just in case the reader fails to notice the parallel between two infants precociously alert to the chaos into which they are born, Arthur directly references a key motif in Grass’s 1959 classic, namely the moth that is drumming on a lightbulb at the exact moment of Oskar’s arrival. In Die Blechtrommel, the moth recalls German Romanticism, where it is a symbol of precarious fragility and hubris, while predicting Oskar’s own percussive accompaniment to the absurdities and horrors of the Nazi period. In Sterndeutung, however, Arthur claims to remember that there was no moth drumming against a lightbulb, since the entire train was blacked-out to evade German air attacks: “Bei meiner Geburt schlug keine Falter gegen eine Glühbirne.” (At the time of my birth, there was no moth beating against a light bulb; S, 20.) Outside the train too there is nothing but pitch-black emptiness. Arthur’s birth—as he claims to recall it—was not distinguished by intimations of exceptionality (however ambivalent), by any auspicious constellation of planets, or even by the presence of stars in the night sky.

On the face of it, Arthur’s allusion to this foundational literary contribution to Germany’s confrontation with its Nazi past confirms his desire to integrate into the memory culture of his adopted country. Many—Jewish and non-Jewish—German readers will immediately recognize the allusion to Grass. At the same time, Arthur’s emphasis that there was no moth drumming against a lightbulb draws attention to fundamental distinctions between the reception of his story and how Oskar’s idiosyncratically representative tale has been absorbed into German memory culture. First, the absence of a drum-beating moth implies the absence of Jewish voices in the literary canon of coming-to-terms with the past. Indeed, Grass has been criticized for his privileging of German perspectives, including by the Holocaust survivor and scholar Ruth Klüger.36See Preece, “Günter Grass.” Second, in drawing attention to how Soviet Jewish voices specifically are even more marginal, Arthur is most likely making a point not only to the non-Jewish majority but also to the established German Jewish community. And third, the non-appearance of a propitious constellation of planets extends and repurposes the allusion to Goethe that was the basis for the relevant passages in Die Blechtrommel. Grass’s use of the moth motif recalls Goethe’s famous poem about longing, “Selige Sehnsucht” (blessed longing; 1814), and his references to Saturn and Mars at the time of Oskar’s birth suggests Goethe’s own rather self-aggrandizing and overwhelmingly optimistic account of his own entry into the world in volume 1 of his Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit (From my life: Poetry and truth; 1811).37Goethe, Aus meinem Leben, 10. For the Goethe references in Grass, see Arnds, Representation, 138–41. Oskar is an inheritor of the German literary tradition—even if the legacy itself and his continuation of it are ambivalent, even potentially malevolent—whereas Arthur is doubly excluded, as a Jew and a Soviet Jew.

Arthur’s narration of Soviet Jewish history, therefore, is an attempt at Sterndeutung—interpreting the stars—where the star motif refers throughout not only to celestial objects but also to Jews, especially dead Jews, murdered in their towns and villages: “Keine Sterne mehr in Kamenz-Podolsk, in dessen Nähe doch der Baal Schem in einem vergangenen Jahrhundert geboren worden war.” (No stars any more in Karenz-Podolsk, near to which the Baal Schem was born in the last century, though; S, 325.) In composing—fabulating—this Soviet Jewish experience he claims a place for it in the memory culture of his adopted country.

Significantly, the impetus for the narrator to write the manuscript that, in due course, will be published as Sterndeutung—thus the novel’s literary conceit—comes from his German Jewish friend Roth. (As in Martynova’s Sogar Papageien überleben uns, discussed above, there may be an allusion here to Joseph Roth and his essay “Juden auf Wanderschaft” about encounters between German Jews and Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe after the First World War.) Roth, then, gifts Arthur a book for his birthday—perhaps this is one of the Holocaust textbooks that Arthur devours—and urges the Soviet-born newcomer to write about his own experiences. With self-reflexive irony, Arthur wonders whether this would be “ein jüdisches Buch auf Deutsch?” (a Jewish book in German), a “jüdisch-deutsches Buch” (a Jewish-German book), a “Buch auf Deutsch über Juden. Und über Deutsche” (a book in German about Jews. And about Germans), or quite simply a “Judenbuch” (Jew-book; S, 258). Each of these suggests a different degree of both Jewishness and integration, and the final formulation may even recall—in the similarity between the sounds Buch/Buche if not in the exact meaning of the words—Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s Die Judenbuche (The Jews’s beech, 1842). This nineteenth-century novella famously revolves around the unsolved murder of a local Jew.38See Chase, “Part of the Story.”

In any case, it seems likely that Roth is hoping for a book confirming the Russian immigrant’s willingness to conform to the expectations of the existing Jewish community, and his “successful” integration. His primary concerns, therefore, are whether Arthur had two Jewish parents—that is, whether he is halachically Jewish (S, 226)—and why Arthur takes money from the German state to pay for his mother’s upkeep (S, 281). More specifically, Roth’s injunction to write follows a gathering at Arthur’s house with recently immigrated Russian friends that includes nostalgic anecdotes about home, wonderment at the German state’s generosity in disbursing large sums to post-Soviet Jews, and a vision of their adopted country as a land of opportunities. “Auch aus den Nachkommenden kann etwas werden, erklärte ich Roth” (S, 257), Arthur suggests, perhaps with ironic deference. (These later arrivals might be able to make something of themselves, I explained to Roth.) “The Russians,” Arthur seems to want to reassure his native-born friend, can become proper Jews, and even German Jews.

Yet Arthur’s account is more than simply a fulfillment of the established community’s insistence that the newcomers adapt to its norms, and more than simply an expansion of its existing commemorative practices to include the Soviet Jewish experience of the Holocaust. In the third of his subplots, delivered in a deceptively low-key style, Arthur thus positions himself not only as a worthy member of the community and respecter of Holocaust memory but also as a more consistent guardian of that memory even than the German-born Jew who survived the genocide. This bold self-styling, it can be argued, relies upon three startling assertions: the Russian Jewish immigrant’s prior immersion in German and German Jewish culture; his familiarity with the international canon of Holocaust literature; and his vigilance with regard to Germany’s still incomplete reckoning with its past in the present day.

After Roth gives him the book, then, Arthur shows him his existing collection: Goethe, Rilke, and Kafka. The implication is clear—the Russian-speaking newcomer had already imbibed German culture before his arrival and is well-versed in his adopted country’s humanist heritage and the Jewish contribution to this heritage, before the Nazi genocide. Goethe was widely admired by German and European Jews;39See Berghahn and Hermand, eds., Goethe in German-Jewish Culture. Goethe’s own attitude toward Jews was more ambivalent. See Wilson, Goethe. Rilke had a Jewish mother and was fascinated by the concept of diaspora; and the German-speaking Prague Jew Kafka, of course, thematized Jewish non-belonging throughout his work.40See Robertson, Kafka. Indeed, as Dmitrij Belkin notes in an essay of 2010, familiarity with German and especially German Jewish literature was common among Russian-speaking Jews: “The collected works of Goethe and Heine, Thomas Mann’s Joseph trilogy, the novels of Kafka and Hesse accompanied hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews to Germany, as a key component of their identity.”41Belkin, “Mögliche Heimat,” 28. More generally, Marat Grinberg argues that the “Soviet Jewish bookshelf” of literary works translated from Yiddish, Hebrew, and German afforded a subterranean way of connection to a Jewish heritage that had been suppressed by the authorities and a vision of “worldliness.” See Grinberg, The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf. What Arthur seems to be suggesting to his German Jewish friend, accordingly, is that he is already part of the community—and even that fellow Soviet-born Jews are reimporting a tradition of reflection on Jewish belonging and even Jewish worldliness. More generally, the hidden and less hidden references to German and German Jewish literature throughout the text—e.g., Grass, Joseph Roth, possibly Droste-Hülshoff—reinforces this point.

More than this, however, Arthur’s bookshelf also contains important works of Holocaust literature from beyond Germany, specifically Tadeusz Borowski, the Polish poet and writer best known for his short stories Pożegnanie z Marią (1946; This way for the gas, ladies and gentlemen) and Roman eines Schicksallosen, the German translation of Hungarian Nobel prize-winner Imre Kertész’s Sorstalanság (Fatelessness; 1975), a semi-autobiographical account of a young Hungarian Jew’s experiences in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. The point here is most likely that Arthur is better informed about German and German Jewish culture and Holocaust memory than his German hosts—whether Jewish or non-Jewish—and that his Soviet Jewish narrative should also be considered to belong to this global canon. Elsewhere Arthur mentions Primo Levi, specifically in relation to the Treblinka uprising and the Italian survivor’s formulation of the imperative to stand up for humanity: “Wenn nicht jetzt, wann dann?” (If not now, when?; S, 242). In Levi’s 1982 novel with that title, Se non ora, quando?, Russian-Jewish partisans try to fight their way to a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Variations of the same refrain appear on several occasions throughout Arthur’s account (e.g., S, 196; S, 203), including during a brief discussion of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, which is taking place in the narrative present (S, 205). This episode is discussed in greater detail below.

The most striking way Arthur asserts his more thorough internalization of the norms of contemporary memory culture, however, is his—entirely inconsequential—refusal to stand and applaud at his daughter’s graduation ceremony following a speech delivered by a wealthy donor who, the press had recently revealed, has a Waffen SS past (S, 377–88). Once again, the allusion to Günter Grass is obvious. In 2006, Grass belatedly revealed that he had been a member of the notoriously fanatical elite unit at the end of the war, and an earlier mention that the individual under discussion had been fifteen at the outbreak of war and eighteen when he was conscripted confirms the match with the biography of Germany’s most prominent postwar author (S, 323). What’s most significant here is that Arthur’s refusal to honor a public figure with a tainted past contrasts sharply with Roth’s apparent indifference (e.g., S, 258–60) and even willingness to overlook and even indulge youthful indiscretions. When Arthur tells Roth about the patron, the latter replies with a story about his aunt, who died in hospital following the withdrawal of treatment by her doctors—a decision that he had agreed to. Only after her death was he able to cry, he relates, but he now views his tears more as an acknowledgment, after the fact, of his part in her demise than as genuine mourning. Roth concludes that he does not know what his aunt has to do with Arthur’s account of his daughter’s graduation (S, 227–33), yet the juxtaposition implies that Roth sees the donor’s belated regret for his proximity to Nazi crimes as comparable to the remorse he feels for easing his aunt’s pain, that is, as an act of good faith notwithstanding its distressing outcome. Here, it falls to Arthur to voice the objection that would normally be expected of the German Jew, ever vigilant against the hypocrisy of the non-Jewish majority. He treats his native-born coreligionist to a brief but uncompromising monologue on Jewish writing and Jewish memory, the impossibility of narrating the individual deaths of the millions of victims, the sacred obligation to preserve the testimony of those who were actually there, and the constant risk of German backsliding.

Himmelfarb’s Sterndeutung juxtaposes fact, fabulation, and self-reflection to exemplify its Soviet-born protagonist’s emergence as a (Russian) German Jew. Yet Arthur’s self-positioning vis-à-vis the non-Jewish majority and the established community may, in the end, limit his Jewish identity as much as it first enables and then ratifies his claim to belong. Indeed, in migrating into the norms and expectations of his adopted country and his adopted community, it may be that Arthur sacrifices Jewish worldliness for Jewish parochialism.

Interspersed throughout Arthur’s retelling of Holocaust history, the fate of Soviet Jews, and postwar antisemitism, therefore, are brief but striking references to events taking place in the narrative present, namely the burning of migrant hostels in Solingen in 1993 and the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, when around 800,000 Tutsi were murdered by their Hutu neighbors. These allusions initially appear to indicate a willingness to universalize the Jewish experience as a basis for solidarity with others—Arthur cites the famous quotation by Rabbi Hillel the Elder: “If I am not for me, who will be for me? And when I am for myself alone, what am I?” (S, 209). (The quotation continues with the line also used by Levi as a book title and cited elsewhere in the novel: “And if not now, then when?”; S, 296, 203; 252.) Following a lengthy summary of the media’s reporting of incitements to kill Tutsis broadcast on Rwandan radio, the massacre of hundreds of thousands in churches, and the world’s inaction, however, Arthur admits the inadequacy of his own words: “Lange genug sah, hörte und las ich. Was blieb mir übrig, als es niederzuschreiben, da es vorbei war?” (I watched, listened, and read for long enough. What else could I do but write it down, since it was over anyway?; S, 209.) At the end of the day, Arthur is too fixated on his own past to intervene on behalf of people thousands of miles away. “Aber in Ruanda gibt es keine Züge,” he remarks (there are no trains in Rwanda; S, 205) on the same page as he indirectly references Levi as an “Italian Jew” always ready to use his camp experiences to call for solidarity with others. Likewise, when Arthur reads about the asylum-seekers’ hostels in Solingen he notes the inconvenient train connections that a visit to join others in expressing outrage would involve: “Nur hätte ich viermal umsteigen müssen” (Only, I would have had to change four times; S, 124).

Chapters 2 and 3 of this book explore in detail the tension between a German Jewish identity primarily—and parochially—focused on life in the land of the perpetrators and a globally oriented Jewish sensibility that defines itself through solidarity with others. In Sterndeutung, Arthur’s Soviet Jewish experience, of course, will recede ever further into the past. His narration begins just before his fifty-first birthday and ends shortly after his fifty-fourth, and it is clear that he is fighting a losing battle to demonstrate the relevance of what he claims to remember about his birth, or even of his more factual recounting of Holocaust history. His wife Julia, as already noted, is keen to travel to the European capitals that were inaccessible to her in Soviet times, and their daughter Anna is solely interested in getting good grades and securing a high-paying job—just like her non-Jewish German boyfriend. For this (Russian) German Jewish family at least, integration—and conformity within the German mainstream—seems to be the future.