Unorthodox?: Channah Trzebiner’s Die Enkelin

The juxtaposition of her grandfather’s (and, to a lesser extent, her grandmother’s) traumatic past and its continuing reverberations and Channah’s incomparably less momentous present-day preoccupations generates the thematic and stylistic dissonance that is typical of many recent German Jewish novels. Even more jarring in Die Enkelin, however, is the extensive inclusion of Yiddish. On the one hand, then, there is the thoroughly modern feel of Channah’s frequent references to sex, weight, and fits of jealousy. On the other hand, for the likely non-Jewish and secular reader, Yiddish invokes a traditional Orthodox Judaism, characterized by religious faith and ritual but also by patriarchy and the subordination of women. For the non-Jewish German reader specifically, moreover, Yiddish is distinctly uncanny, being both familiar but also only obliquely accessible, even with a glossary, and reminding of the near-extermination of eastern European Jews. The novel’s opening third, correspondingly, goes beyond the introduction to Jewish customs that is often a feature of German Jewish literature, although this is present too, for example when it is reported that placing stones on a grave “ist ein [jüdischer] Brauch” (a Jewish custom).2Trzebiner, Die Enkelin, 153. Hereafter E. Moving back and forth between her German narrative frame and Yiddish direct speech, Channah suggests both the intimacy of German and Jew and the unforgivable crime that was committed.

Each member of Channah’s immediate family suffers the burden of Holocaust history differently, and with different consequences in the present day. Her grandfather Abraham’s first wife was murdered in the gas chambers, along with their son and unborn child (E, 12). Decades after his own experience of the camps, Abraham remains obsessed with food and compulsively steals from grocery shops in Germany (E, 24) and market stalls in Tel Aviv, often implicating Channah in his transgressions (E, 24). At the time of the Chernobyl disaster Abraham is overwhelmed with a disproportionate sense of doom (E, 22), and his alternating outbursts of anger and affection point to his persistent traumatization (E, 12–14). Soon after the war, he married a fellow survivor, as was common in Displaced Persons camps (E, 210). His second wife, Channah’s grandmother Rywka, had barely survived a Nazi doctor’s attempts to sterilize her (E, 111). Rywka lost her husband in the Łódź ghetto; her baby was torn from her and deported to a death camp; her parents and eight brothers and sisters were murdered in Bergen-Belsen—Channah is named for the youngest girl (E, 12)—and she was conscripted as a forced laborer in one of its sub-camps (E, 132–34). In the present day, Rywka suffers partial blindness, since her left eye was stabbed out by an SS man for his amusement (E, 110).

Channah’s mother Pola is encumbered by her parents’ trauma and appears prone to depression. Pola is burdened, Channah believes, by the survivor’s guilt felt by Abraham and Rywka, which manifests in their daughter as an inability to participate fully in life (E, 73). This becomes especially acute after Channah’s father dies. Born to a gentile mother and a Jewish father who had been hidden by Jehovah’s Witnesses, Rick was less burdened than his wife and, for as long as he was alive, his drive sustained the family (E, 73). Channah worries that her mother will kill herself and obsesses about maintaining the semblance of order that Pola seems to need in order to ward off the chaos that threatens to overwhelm her: “Mama mochte keine Unordnung.” (Mama didn’t like any disorder; E, 72.) Pola’s sister Rachel is equally affected, Channah reports. She too feels their parents’ pain “als hätte sie es selbst erlebt” (as if she had endured it herself; E, 80) and, like Pola, seems to exist in their shadow.

In the third generation, Channah and her sister Zoé feel excluded from the intensity that exists between their parents and grandparents and overwhelmed by being exposed to a history that the survivors are not able to assess as entirely unsuitable for young children (E, 75). Above all, however, Channah feels “unsichtbar” (invisible; E, 69) for her mother, and she knows she exists only to remind her grandparents of those who had been murdered: “Meine Person war nicht von Bedeutung. Ich war ein Beweis dafür, dass es andere gegeben hat. Kinder, Mütter, Väter, Brüder und Schwestern.” (My person was not of significance. I was proof that others had existed. Children, fathers, brothers and sisters; E, 12.) Even her name belongs to another, her grandmother’s youngest sister, who was murdered in Bergen-Belsen.

The originality of Trzebiner’s novel, however, lies in the potential transgression insinuated by its third-generation narrator’s perspective on her grandfather’s character flaws. Indeed, Channah consistently undermines the conventions surrounding the representation of Holocaust victims and thereby signals a certain critical distance for a younger cohort caught between veneration for the survivors’ experiences and awareness of how these experiences deform their present, and their ability to be “normal”—if normal means being unburdened and fully part of their German milieu. Added to this, though less perceptibly, Channah’s narrative frames her grandfather’s self-absorption and occasional sexual transgressions—a patriarchal sense of entitlement that cannot be fully explained away as Holocaust trauma—in relation to a distinctly contemporary concern with gender. This, in turn, reorients the novel away from the intergenerational transmission of trauma toward a more expansive concern with the contradiction, whether real or perceived, between Orthodox Jewish values and “modern life.” In essence, integration into mainstream society—aligning with the non-Jewish German majority—may be as much an escape from what Channah perceives as the constraints of her Jewish context as an overcoming of her grandparents’ Holocaust trauma.

Abraham is not only a Holocaust victim. He is also a bully, serial adulterer, and even predator. His thieving of food might be understood as a consequence of his experience of starvation in the camps, and survival no doubt required him to demonstrate a certain cunning and physical strength, as Channah notes: “Opa, und da bin ich mir sicher, hatte nur überlebt, weil er so Schlau wie ein Fuchs war und ihm von Natur aus die körperliche Stärke für alle Hunger- und Ausrottungsstrapezen gegeben war.” (Grandpa, I’m convinced, only survived because he was as sly as a fox and because he had the physical strength for all the hardships inflicted by hunger and extermination; E, 15.) It is less clear, however, that the Holocaust was the cause of an indifference to the needs of others that seems distinctly male. “Opa,” his granddaughter reports, “war irgendwie der Pate, er nahm sich, was er brauchte. Er nahm es sich so selbstverständlich und ohne Diskussion, dass keiner sein Verhalten je anzweifelte.” (Grandpa was the patriarch, he took what he needed. He took it as if it were his right and without discussion, so no one ever questioned his behavior; E, 30.) Abraham’s sense of entitlement, therefore, seems to be a predisposition rather than a response to trauma. More generally, his behavior appears to be expected, even normalized, within the wider family. There seems to be an acceptance of his repeated affairs, beginning in Sweden just after the war, when he was already married to Pola (E, 156), and continuing right up to his death, and of his regular groping of his wife’s female acquaintances and, in later life, his care assistants (E, 30). The elderly man even comments on his granddaughter’s clearly underage friends, naming one as fat, another as skinny, and a third as ugly: “Ich glaube, mehr als ihren Körper hat er nicht gesehen.” (I think he never really perceived more than their bodies; E, 30.)

Most immediately, Channah’s portrayal of her grandfather impinges on the sanctity of Jewish victimhood. Indeed, to have been designated for extermination does not—and should not have to—equate to moral purity, and to expect “better behavior” may be a form of antisemitism. Rafael Seligmann, Maxim Biller, and other authors suggest a similar critique of the sacralization of Jewish victims and often feature elderly male survivors with overactive libidos. In Die Enkelin, however, the grandfather’s privilege has an additional significance. The fact that his Holocaust trauma dominates Channah’s narrative, at least initially, is not incidental. It is only some way through the text that the reader discovers the full extent of her grandmother’s suffering, when Channah hears the story from her aunt Rachel (E, 85–87), and it is not until even later that she realizes that, years before, Pola had implied but not explicitly disclosed that she had been forced to prostitute herself in the camps (E, 189). In highlighting her grandmother’s gendered experience during the Holocaust, the fact that Abraham’s story occludes Rywka’s even within the family, and her grandfather’s contempt for women in the present day, Channah hints at a more general theme of power relations between the sexes.

The first third of Channah’s narrative, in fact, is concerned not only with the intergenerational transmission of Holocaust memory, or even with the gendered aspect of this intergenerational transmission—although it seems that the grandfather’s story must be told first. It is also about the patriarchal structure of the family more generally, and specifically the patriarchal structure of Orthodox Jewish families. The second two thirds of her narrative, therefore, tell the story not only of Channah’s liberation from the burden of her grandparents’ trauma but also of her self-­emancipation as a woman, and as a Jewish woman. This entails an embrace of the secular mainstream of German society that recalls Altaras’s titos brille (tito’s glasses; 2011), examined in chapter 1, but which is potentially even more transgressive in its accommodation of Holocaust memory and Jewishness to her immediate concerns as a young woman, beginning a career and settling down with her (German) boyfriend. The “normality” Channah craves might be thought trivial, even trite, but it is her choice to make.

Channah’s divorce from her (Jewish) husband involves both predictable financial insecurity (E, 88) and a repudiation of her previous socialization, therefore: “Ich wurde dazu erzogen, eine brave Ehefrau zu sein. Ohne Mann hat eine Frau keinen Wert.” (I was raised to be a good wife. Without a man a woman has no value; E, 88.) In fact, as Channah sees it, being subordinate to a man is an intrinsic part of her Jewish identity. After her grandfather’s death and the dissolution of her marriage, she reports, she no longer feels motivated to observe Shabbat, even though she longs to, every Friday (E, 81). What’s most significant about Channah’s self-emancipation, however, is that she rejects not only the most obvious manifestation of traditional roles—Orthodox Judaism—but also two options that might seem to offer the possibility of combining a visible Jewish identity with gender equality. When she is in New York, researching for her book, it is unsurprising that she would be repelled by the suggestion, in an Orthodox area of the city, that women should sit at the back of the bus and is alienated by the wigs and identical long skirts that they wear in public: “Ich fühle mich nicht wohl, das erste Mal unter eigenen Menschen fühle ich mich sehr fremd.” (I didn’t feel comfortable, for the first time among my own people I felt alienated from myself; E, 185.) (In the next pages, she also recalls women survivors in Tel Aviv, friends of her grandmother who scolded her in Yiddish for displaying her skin, and she associates this experience with feelings of shame about her own sexuality; E, 187–89.) At the same time, she also rejects the liberal Judaism embodied by Lily, a professor at a New York university. Lily is married to a non-Jew, surrounds herself with left-leaning academics and senior colleagues at the United Nations, invites a Jewish lesbian couple to dinner, and displays an openness and tolerance that Channah sorely misses in her “Ghetto” (E, 159–60). Yet Lily too has rules, including how cookies are to be arranged on a plate, not mixing up Harvard and Yale, and that Channah should, on demand, be able to recite the four questions for Passover in English (E, 162). (Traditionally, the youngest capable person present at Passover asks the four questions. These are referenced in the novel’s full title.) Likewise, in Tel Aviv, she is also not able to align herself with the easy-going self-confidence she encounters on the city’s famous beaches, filled with young Jews from across Europe. She flirts with a young Israeli but is upset by his questioning of why she would want to live in Germany, avoids his attempt to kiss her, and spends the following week visiting his grandmother, a Holocaust survivor (E, 37–39).

Channah’s urge to assert herself against her conditioning pushes her not, as might be expected, to embrace a more liberal version of Judaism, therefore. Instead, she is compelled to explore the world beyond. Most immediately, this means negotiating a new relationship with her German context. Subsequently, however, it implies a fashioning of femininity, which—even if it might appear to the reader to be somewhat clichéd and even simply another version of conformity—for Channah at least represents a kind of worldly self-realization.

After her divorce, Channah secures a job in a Frankfurt bank, largely following a stereotypical display of chutzpah at her interview, when she grossly embellishes her previous experience and views the entire exercise as revenge on Germans for what they inflicted on her grandparents and mother (E, 92–95). Moving past her excruciating reflections on her efforts to beguile a senior manager (E, 97–110)—a throwback to her previous socialization, perhaps, as noted above—the key breakthrough she makes in her first proper employment is that it is possible to be friends with non-Jews, including “drei herzensgute, intelligente und zum Schreien witzige Damen” (three warmhearted, intelligent, and hilariously funny ladies; E, 101). She learns to trust strangers—Germans—and experiences this as “heilsam” (healing; E, 101). The next step on her journey toward reconciliation with her German homeland comes when she secures a place to study for a PhD. at the university. She meets Charlotte, an empathetic young German woman, who, Channah reports, has an uncanny ability to sense her Jewish friend’s hesitation “in der neuen fremden Welt” (in the strange new world; E, 102). Channah begins to teach tutorials and is gratified by the positive feedback she receives, especially from a handsome young man, who, she imagines, resembles Brad Pitt (E, 105–6). Again, this episode signals her embrace of—and acceptance into—the non-­Jewish German mainstream.

More difficult is the indifference, ignorance, and sporadic insensitivity she encounters whenever the Holocaust is mentioned. A series of short chapters coming in the middle of the narrative detail variations on a theme of the gulf that exists between her fixation, as the granddaughter of survivors, on the genocide and the inconsistent, even thoughtless responses of her non-Jewish compatriots. An acquaintance of Marco’s family is anxious to tell Channah about a local memorial for deported Jews—Channah, internally, makes a list of the injuries inflicted on her family for which actual rather than symbolic compensation would be required (E, 107–12). Later, she plans a visit to Auschwitz but postpones rather than embarrassing Marco’s family by traveling directly from their home, at Christmas, to the extermination camp (E, 116). Slowly, in fact, she comes to appreciate that Marco gives her what she has never had, that is, distance from the Holocaust and “einen zeitlichen oder räumlichen Abstand zu meinen Großeltern, meiner Tante oder meiner Mutter.” (A temporal or physical distance from my grandparents, my aunt, or my mother; E, 125.) Still, Marco accompanies her on a trip to Bergen-Belsen—where her grandmother was liberated in 1945 (E, 132)—shares her outrage when the ticket office at Celle railway station is intentionally unhelpful (E, 137–38), and benefits both from her gratitude and her musings on the burden that third-generation Germans are forced to carry for their grandparents’ crimes (E, 142). Despite her misgivings about his lack of romance (E, 146), “unjewish” independence from family members (E, 118; E, 148), and worries that he might fall for a pretty (non-Jewish) French girl (E, 195–97), Channah’s decision to move in with Marco surely signals her willingness to now “trust” Germans.

For the reader primed to expect Jewish writing to be focused on the Holocaust, mentions of Brad Pitt, a stereotypically seductive French girl, and Marco’s wandering eye might appear incongruous and even alienating. The same is true, for example, when Channah serves up clichés about the benefits of sharing an apartment with a gay man, more sensitive and attentive than a boyfriend could ever be (E, 167–69), or when she extemporizes about how women want to be treated as princesses and urges men—if they value their sex lives—to remember to compliment and indulge their wives. This latter thought is expressed during a lengthy and inescapably hackneyed depiction of a Russian Jewish mother in New York, who urges her to find a good Jewish man and settle down (E, 173–78). Yet Channah’s references to movie stars, gender clichés, and self-conscious citations of Jewish stereotypes provide her with a point of entry “into the world.” Popular culture, then, offers a way out of the perceived constraints of Orthodox Judaism and Holocaust trauma and into an unburdened “normality.” Here, Die Enkelin can be compared to Deborah Feldman’s bestseller Unorthodox (2012). Feldman was raised by her Yiddish-speaking grandparents in the Orthodox tradition, entered an arranged marriage at seventeen, and fell pregnant, but then left her husband, repudiated her New York Hasidic roots, and—most scandalous of all—revealed to the world the secrets of the inward-looking community that she had left behind.3Feldman moved to Germany in 2014. Überbitten appeared in 2017 as a German-language version of her memoir, Exodus, from 2014. The Yiddish title—“reconcile”—and the echoes of Yiddish throughout the text have a special resonance in the German context, of course. Both Die Enkelin and Unorthodox, accordingly, narrate their female authors’ emergence into a form of worldliness while also profiting from the fascination with sects fostered in the media and mass entertainment.

Trzebiner’s Die Enkelin is less aesthetically challenging and thematically complex than other novels analyzed in this book, and its articulation of contemporary Jewish identity, beyond Orthodox Judaism and even beyond Holocaust memory, is less expansive and less inspirational. A skeptical reading of Channah’s integration into the secular mainstream, in fact, might conclude that she has abandoned her heritage—with only a residual concern for the sanctity of her grandparents’ suffering—and simply swapped subordination to her Jewish grandfather for subordination to the skewed gender norms of fashion magazines and movies. (She also overlooks the significant strands within modern Jewish practice aiming to include feminist, lesbian, and progressive voices, sometimes even within Orthodox congregations.)4See Ferziger, “Feminism and Heresy.” Yet this mundanity is surely significant in itself. Die Enkelin, it can be argued, thus offers an important corrective to ethnographic and especially literary scholarship that may overstate the cosmopolitan and even utopian orientation of Jews today, particularly younger Jews. As we move on to examine Salzmann’s Außer sich and Grjasnowa’s Der verlorene Sohn, it is vital to bear in mind that the global solidarity they imply may be an elite discourse of authors, artists, and activists, and an aspiration rather than a reflection of the mindset of the Jewish community as a whole.