9UNP0347SD_347 Lev Raphael

- Jennifer Kaye: The Wisconsin Veterans Museum is an educational activity of the Wisconsin Department of Veterans Affairs. On behalf of the museum and the University of Wisconsin Press, the Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies at UW-Madison, we would like to welcome you to the 2009 Wisconsin Book Festival, which is put on by the Wisconsin Humanities Council, with generous sponsorship by American Girl Fund for Children, the Isthmus, Overture Center for the Arts, IMS, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Just a couple housekeeping things to get out of the way. We would love it if you filled out evaluation forms after the talk. We like to get your feedback. Evaluation forms are on the table in the back there. In addition, as a thank you for coming out to the Wisconsin Book Festival, the Wisconsin Humanities Council has orange raffle tickets on the table. If you fill those out and give them to me, those tickets will be put into a raffle, so that you can receive an autographed book by one of the speakers at this year's book festival. Also, we would love for you to come back tomorrow. 

We have two speakers tomorrow at the museum. At noon tomorrow, we have Douglas Jacobson, who is speaking on his book, "Night of Flames," a novel of World War II. And at 2:30 tomorrow, we have Andrew Bacevich, a professor of International Relations in History, from Boston University, who will be speaking on his book, "Sacred Trinity: U.S. National Security During the American Century." Those are tomorrow. The first one is at noon, and the second one is at 2:30. I believe both authors will be doing book signings after their talks, as well. Today, we'd like to welcome Lev Raphael to the museum. Lev is a prize-winning pioneer in American-Jewish literature. He was born and raised in New York City, the son of Holocaust survivors. He received his MFA in creative writing at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and holds a PhD in American studies from Michigan State University. 

He has been publishing fiction and non-fiction about the Second Generation, which is children of Holocaust survivors, since 1978. He is the author of 19 books which have been translated into multiple languages, including German. He also has been a radio host, a newspaper columnist and an academic. Lev will be speaking on the book, "My Germany, A Jewish Writer Returns to the World His Parents Escaped." And after his talk today, we would love to have you come down into the museum store. He will be signing books. And we have books available for you to purchase. I'd like to welcome Lev. 
(applause)

- Lev Raphael: Thank you for coming today. 

I believe in signing other people's books, "I didn't write this, but it's pretty good." Authors always wonder who's going to be the competing event, and even though he's not in the Wisconsin Book Festival, Al Gore is speaking next door, which I think is hilarious, because my karma has become very curious. When I spoke at the Library of Congress in the spring, President Obama was across the street. And I actually had friends telling me they were trying to make up their mind as to whom to see, which I thought was bogus, because I know who I would've seen in that case. I want to talk about my new book, "My Germany," and give you the context, tell you how it came to be, and then share some of it with you, a short part of it. Then we'll have plenty of time for questions. I'm really honored to be speaking at this Veterans Museum, and really, any Veteran’s Museum, because I owe a lot to Vets. On April 13, 1945, my father's life was saved by American soldiers. He was on a train, with 2500 other internees from Bergen Belsen, which was being driven wildly all around central Germany at the time, as the Nazis were trying to figure out what to do with their prisoners. At one point, since they couldn't get past a river, machine guns were set up, and they were planning to kill everybody who was locked in the boxcars, the cattle cars. 

And they were stopped when members of the 30th Infantry Division appeared over hill with a tank. The Germans escaped. They were captured later, but they escaped at the moment. And I had the amazing good luck to meet some of these veterans a few weeks ago at a conference in New York State, which brought together veterans and people they had liberated from that train. And amazing doesn't describe it. I'm still work through it. I got to shake the hands of men who physically, actually saved my father's life. And I got to thank them, from my father, and thank them, and tell them without their intervention, I wouldn't be standing here. They were all in their late 80s. One was 92. 

And they were incredibly modest. They did not like anyone calling them heroes. They did not like anyone calling them brave, even all these years later. Well, my father was on that train. And soon after he was liberated, he met my mother at a displaced persons camp, not far from --, and this is the background of my childhood. This is what I grew up knowing. I knew, from a very early age, that my parents had both, in different ways, escaped death by luck, by the right person appearing at the right time, by making the right decision. And I knew something that's very disturbing for kids to know, that life, or I felt that life was provisional, it could change at the drop of a hat, and you were perhaps never safe. Because everything that you took for granted could change instantly. A Holocaust survivor, not one of my parents, once told me that she actually felt sorry for children of Holocaust survivors. 

And I said, "Well, what do you mean by that? Shouldn't they feel sorry for you?" She said, "No, no, no. I had a normal childhood. I had a happy childhood. I had a happy family. They haven't. They've grown up completely differently than we did." And even though I grew up in New York City, which was, of course, very Jewish. Although you remember Lennie Bruce says, you know, "New York is very Jewish. 

Topeka would never be Jewish, even if it had Jews living in it." 
(light laughter)

 I grew up among Jews who were not children of survivors, or survivors. And so, in a way, I felt like I was living on a foreign planet, very far from anyone I knew. I had almost no relatives whatsoever, so I was constantly astonished by people who would have family reunions, and family birthdays and family events, and there were dozens of people there. Even to me, a family reunion, we could all fit in one minivan, I think. So that was absent in my life. We had no mementos of the past. And I remember growing up with a Russian girl in my building. And her grandmother had escaped the Russian Revolution, but had brought mementos with her. 

An ostrich feather court fan, a tiara, and all sorts of really interesting things, and pictures, especially pictures, which fascinated me, because my past was absent. My past was absent in terms of photos, mementos, in terms of the physical. It was also absent in terms of memory, because my parents had a lot of trouble sharing memories of the past, even good memories, because they would lead somewhere very unfortunate for them. If my mother, for instance, talked about a wonderful picnic she remembered taking with her family, before long, she'd start crying, because she'd remember what happened to her father, who was killed by the Nazis, and her mother, as well. Then she couldn't talk about it. So even access to memories that were good was kind of cordoned off. It was, really, the barbed wire of history was around everything. I grew up in a void. I mean, home was gone. Family was gone. 

Memory was gone. And culture was gone, in a way, because we really didn't fit in. From my foreign planet, watching Leave it to Beaver was really like watching aliens. Who were these people who were so cute and charming, and had a colonial house, and got into fun trouble, and everything was resolved in 23 minutes or so. I mean, in my life, nothing was resolved, because we lived with such and undertow of darkness and depression and anger. And I grew up knowing something that all children of Holocaust survivors know, is that the Nazis tried to kill their parents. And they didn't succeed. But they killed almost everybody else. Dozens and dozens of our relatives simply disappeared, and are only names. Some of them are only even first names, because over time, my parents forgot last names of distant cousins. 

So these are very hard lessons to absorb for a kid. It's also difficult growing up as a child of Holocaust survivors, because your narrative is not the American narrative. It's not the narrative of the Minuteman fighting the British Empire, or astronauts going off into space, or taming the Wild West, or the sheriff coming in to town and cleaning up the bad guys. If it is heroic, it's heroic in a very different register. And that's something that is hard to learn and understand as a kid. And I also grew up in the '50s and '60s. And it's hard to imagine, but there were no Holocaust museums. There were no Holocaust Studies programs. There were no Holocaust Studies syllabi in high schools, middle schools. None of that existed. 

And Holocaust literature itself was very different. You didn't have the widespread. You know, you have whole sections in book stores now. But back then, most of it was in the languages of the survivors. So it was in Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, Czech, Russian, French and German. And not that much had been translated into English. So the awareness of the Holocaust wasn't that great. Then there was shame about the Holocaust among American Jews, who, to some extent, felt that they hadn't done enough to help Jews in Europe. It's arguable how much they could've done. But I picked this up very early on, that when I mention that my parents had been in concentration camps, my Jewish friends' parents really did not want me to say anything more. 

They were embarrassed by it. They just would've preferred that this was not something that we talked about. So you grow up with a tremendous sense of disruption, of absence. You grow up with parents who are haunted. And in a sense, you live in a haunted house. The ghosts of the absent ones are always around you. The people you would never know. And everything seems open-ended. Americans love the word closure. You know, there's a hurricane and three months later, "Have the victims found closure?" 

Well, have they found a house? You know, that's the real question. But we're always looking to wrap things up very neatly, you know, like a sitcom or a mini-series. You know, it's got to be tied up. And there are some things that will never find closure. I mean, the survivors I've talked to say they won't be able to get over what happened to them in a way that Americans would like. I really think the Jewish poet, Melanie Kaye-Kantrowitz captured it beautifully in one of her poems. She says, I can't go home. I'm a Jew. Where I come from was burned off the map. 

And I think that is the truth for many survivors. It's definitely the truth for many of the children of survivors. So I grew up with all this knowledge, this very difficult knowledge. Who did it? Who was responsible? The Nazis. The Germans. To me, they were indistinguishable. There was no difference between Nazis and Germans. So I grew up reflexively hating them, and like my parents, boycotting anything that was German. 

If my parents went shopping, they didn't check the prices of things first, they checked to see where they were made. They would pick something up, and if it said Republic of West Germany, then they would put it back down. And if, by accident, somebody in our household did buy something that was made in Germany, there would be an explosion. How could you buy that? They built their country on Jewish blood. This was the kind of thing we used to hear. So of course my parents were very unhappy if we knew people who drove German cars. And I don't know how old I was before I actually sat in a German car. And drove somewhere. Nothing German could exist in our household. 

My parents loved classical music. We had piano lessons, like all good Jewish kids. And we couldn't buy Deutsche Gramophone records, which were the best at the time, because that was forbidden. That was taboo. We couldn't even wear leather coats or jackets, when those became very hip. And I didn't understand why. The answer was very simple. Because the Gestapo wore leather. Now, you take all this in. And it sounds crazy when you repeat it to other people, but it is just how you lived. 

I wish I had asked my parents why it's okay to sit on a leather couch. I don't know what they would've said. I would've gotten smacked, I think, for that. 
(laughter)

 But you don't ask the questions. You don't ask, how does all this fit? How does this make sense? Why do I have to do the same thing you're doing? Why do I have to carry on this boycott? So, that's the life that I lived. 

That's how I lived. That's how I grew up. If I would be on a bus somewhere, or a train somewhere in New York City, and somebody of the right age was speaking German, I'd instantly wonder if that person had been a concentration camp guard, or anything, in any way contributing to the Holocaust. Now, given New York, it's as likely that those people would've been German Jews, but I wouldn't have been able to make the distinction. So what "My Germany" charts is what Germany was to me as a fantasy growing up, what it was to my parents, what happened to them. But it takes it a step further than of my works have ever done before. Because I have moved past this. It's taken a very long time to do it. It started after my mother died. I was doing some genealogical research and I found a distant, distant, distant, distant cousin, by marriage, living in the city where my mother had been a slave laborer. 

And I, who had thought I would never step foot in Germany, I would never even traverse Germany by plane or train, suddenly I thought, maybe I'll go to Germany. Now, this was a revolution in my head. And I started corresponding with this woman, who was very nice. And I actually did go to Germany, on research, to explore where my parents had met, because that was more important to me at that time, than actually going to other camps or ghettos connected to their past. And it was a remarkable experience. Well, first of all, I have to tell you, I was not afraid of Germany at that point. I was afraid of being afraid. I didn't know how I would respond. Now, I wasn't expecting a psychotic break, or anything like that, because I'm a writer, I mean everything's material, right? So even if I did have one, I guess I could write through it. 
(laughter)

 I didn't know if the minute I got off the plane in Frankfurt, I would want to get back on the plane. I didn't know what it would be like to be surrounded by "them." And when I was a kid, I used to have a couple fantasies. One, that the Nazis were invading Washington Heights, and they were invading our building. And I had a machine gun, and I was defending the entire building against all of the Nazis. But I was losing, because I kept having to fall back to, you know, another staircase and another doorway. And I did the thing that they always make fun of in the movies. I went up. You're not supposed to run up the stairs from bad people. 

But another fantasy, a darker one in a way, was that I was flying in Europe and my plane crashed. And I didn't die. No, that would've been okay. I lived, and ended up in a German hospital. That freaked me out when I was a kid. And so, I went to Germany. My experience was totally different. And the first thing I can compare it to was James Baldwin, when he went to Paris. He went to Paris to escape American racism. And the thing that was beautiful for him in Paris, among many things, was discovering that in Paris, he was not "Black," he was American. 

That was the thing that distinguished him most from French people. And that's the thing that started clicking on in me instantly in Germany, that I was an American. I really wasn't feeling myself conscious as a Jew and feeling afraid of being Jewish. I was noticing how everything was different from what it was in America. And I was very lucky. I didn't have to stay in a hotel. I didn't have to be surrounded by strange Germans who could be plotting to kill me in my sleep, you know. This distant relative and her husband invited me to their wonderful home. I stayed with them. And German organization was, during the war, as we know, monolithic, and in some ways brilliant in terms of murder, because look at how many Jews and others they were able to exterminate. 

But there are good sides to it. And if I had gone to Germany on my own, I never would have been able to accomplish what I did in just under a week with her help. She called every archive, every place that I wanted to go, and she told them who I was and why I was there. And of course, in a very German fashion, I got my schedule in the morning. After breakfast, I was being picked up and taken to the state archive, and I would meet with the head archivist. And then, I would have a break for coffee, very nice to schedule that, at the town square. Then I would go here, and then we'd go there. And it was wonderful. People were great to me. And I was astonished to feel comfortable. 

That was the big thing for me. I was astonished to feel the exact opposite of what I had expected to feel. And I liked many of the people that I met. I really, really liked them, and felt a strong connection, especially to children, people my own age, whose parents who had been "in the war." When a German of my age says to you, "My father was on the Eastern Front," you know exactly what she's saying. She's saying he was in the killing squads, or in the -- , or he was somehow connected to all that. So I felt a deep connection across secrets and silence with this Second Generation in Germany that I did not expect to feel. Then I went on, a German publisher, coincidentally, bought three of my books for translation. This is funny to me, because when you have a partner who likes to quote things you say, it can be amusing, anyone with a good memory, if your spouse or partner does this. Years ago, I was having a really bad time with my career, and I announced I'm giving up writing. 

I'm not going to write anymore. I'll go into something else. I've had it. I can't get published. And then I had another bit of bad news. We were in the kitchen, and my partner's picking up the kettle and I said, "That's it. I wish I were dead." And he said, "Does that mean you don't want any tea?" 
(laughter)

So, he said something similar when I got my first book contract. 

And he said, "Didn't you tell the editor that you had given up writing as a career, and were looking for something else?" He also said, "I thought you were never going to Germany." I said, "Well, I think we are going." So, with "My Germany," and what is all developing out of it, I feel like I've moved into a new and completely unexpected future. I have many German friends now, here and in Germany. I write German emails, and if you know the German language, you know it is very difficult to get things correct. And I am always happy to get even one sentence correct. This is a language that has 16 ways to say the word, the. Actually, my partner is very funny. He said, "I think the Germans were driven insane by their own grammar, and that explains their history." 

So, I watch German movies now. I drink German coffee. We were not allowed to have a German coffee grinder. We could have nothing that's German in our house. And when I go to Germany, and when I speak to German groups here, at German cultural centers, and German conversation groups, the question of forgiveness comes up sometimes. And I don't talk about forgiveness. I talk about reconciliation. Because I think there's no way to bridge, to erase the rupture, between peoples, between Jews and Christians, Jews and Germans. But there is a chance for reconciliation, to build across that. And what I also like to talk about is a concept some of you will know from Jewish mysticism, called healing the world. 

And that's something that has inspired me through my career. What it assumes is that the world is really broken. The world is fragmented and in pieces. And that we all have to, in our own way, in whatever way we can, we have to heal the world. And that's what I hope my books can do. And that's what I hope "My Germany" does. I'd like to read you the prologue. And this is where the book started. Again, people ask me where my ideas come from. If I'm in a crabby mood, I'll say Walmart. 

But any writer here knows that you usually have more ideas than you'd ever have the time to develop or work with. But this, I never thought I'd write anything about Germany, per se. As I said, I never thought I'd go there. And the idea for this book came to me in the experience that I'm going to share with you. I am on a train heading into Magdeburg, in eastern Germany, about two hours southwest of Berlin. Sixty-one years ago my late mother was a on a very different train headed for this same city. Her train did not have a dining car. Her train did not have or changing electronic displays updating the train's speed and distance from its next station. Her train had no well-appointed bathrooms. It had none. 

She was transported in sealed and stinking cattle cars with 300 other Jewish women internees from the concentration camp of Stutthof, on the Baltic coast near Danzig, down to Magdeburg. In Magdeburg, she would be a slave laborer for over a year at Polte Fabrik, Germany's largest munitions plant. The factory was frequently bombed by the Allies, and it was also the scene of many accidents. Every night in the camp, my mother would dream of her fingers being cut off. Those dreams haunted her for years after she was liberated. They haunt me, now, here, as I look down at my middle-aged hands. I have come to Magdeburg to do a very different kind of work. I'm on a hectic two-week book tour, scheduled to speak about and read from my novel, "The German Money," the story of a Holocaust survivor's adult children, who are arguing about their mother's will. The title refers to German reparations paid to the survivor in the novel. Not all survivors did so, but my parents applied for reparations from the German government. 

And because they were always pretty poor, the monthly checks made a big difference in their lives. Did they resent that? They never said, though my mother detested the word itself, "Wiedergutmachung." How could you make things good again? I found it embarrassing that my parents took money from the Germans at all, given how they felt. And when those monthly checks came, I stared at the envelopes with repulsion and fascination. As my train nears the station, now, it hits me that this entrance could not be any more American. My mother was a slave, considered subhuman by the very people whose language she spoke so perfectly that it might have saved her life. She survived. She immigrated to the U.S., and bore me in the world's freest country. 

And now, here I'm returning to the scene of her brutal imprisonment as a successful American author. My mother was brought here to Magdeburg against her will, but I have made the choice to come. To come to Germany, the country I had sworn never to visit. Growing up, I didn't just think of Germany as a graveyard, it was also a gigantic thieves’ warehouse. I had read in Holocaust histories of the massive European-wide plunder of the Jewish people as they became enslaved and exterminated. Nazis didn't just confiscate shops, businesses, factories, apartments and homes; gold, jewels, money, artwork. They also snatched up pianos, furniture, silver, fur coats, candelabras, household goods, mattresses, underwear, whatever they could, wherever it lay. So, anywhere I turned in that cursed country, I could be facing something that had belonged to one of my relatives who had been murdered, and I wouldn't know it. Germany was likewise the country whose products I could never buy, the country that was so alien and radioactive that when I was a little boy, I used to imagine maps of Europe without Germany, as if I were a superhero whose laser gaze could slice it away from the continent and it would just sink without a trace, leaving Switzerland with seacoast. 
(light laughter)

 I used to imagine the Swiss Navy. And I would have revenge for the camps and killing squads that not only murdered dozens of my parent's relatives, but poisoned their memories. Poisoned mine. Talking about their lost parents, cousins, aunts and uncles was so painful for my own parents, that I have, in middle age, no family tree to climb up, no names and professions and cities to study and explore. The Nazis certainly won that round, like a giant grinding his victim's bones to dust. Yet here I am in Magdeburg, going over an introduction that a German-speaking friend has helped me write. It seems only polite to break the ice with my audiences by speaking a bit of German. And I am enjoying people's reaction as the tour progresses: surprised that an American would even attempt to speak German, and enjoyment that I have done so correctly, with a passable accent. I have come here in strength, not weakness. I feel anxious, but I feel prepared. 

Affiliated with the Protestant cathedral a block away, the bookstore is packed before I begin, with at least 40 people looking interested and attentive. It's very warm. And at times, I feel compelled to do better than I've ever done before, because not so very far away, from where I am standing, my mother was an utterly expendable cog in the German war machine. My book is a challenge to that. People, insight, literature, all these things count. When I'm done, the questions come slowly. And while I understand some of the German, at times a fog of incomprehension sweeps over me and I have to wait, patiently, for the translation. I wonder, is this "German fatigue," too much time immersed in a language that's not my own, or something else that makes me feel dizzy? The audience wants to know a great deal. The audience wants to know everything. 

How long did the book take to write? How much is autobiographical? Can I say more about my mother's experiences in Magdeburg? How about my father? How did they meet? How much did my parents talk about their war years? Then, this soft-voiced question from the man in the front row. He asked me, in English, "Is forgiveness possible?" Well, I start with my mother, who did tell me sometimes that she never blamed all Germans, and that younger Germans surely had nothing to do with events before their birth. But that was her, and only part of the story. 

What do I think? He wants to know. "Forgiveness?" I say. "Of course it's possible. If not, I wouldn't be here." I think that I mean it when I say it, but the idea has actually never occurred to me before. I am not in Germany to forgive anyone. I am in Germany to explore what has always been taboo and terrifying to me. I am in Germany to face my demons. 

When the long evening ends with applause and announcements, the effusive bookstore owner, who doesn't speak a word of English, gives me with a picture book about Magdeburg and several bottles of local liqueur. Exhausted, humbled, all I can think of is the ending of William Faulkner's "Light in August," "My, my. A body does get around." Thank you. 
(applause)