Those four words opened up another world, another language that would one day be born within my own language—and the conviction that no word that speaks of what is human is untranslatable.
Father had added a further damper to the ukase banning the Hungarian language: “If you wish to communicate with the family, you will simply have to learn German.”
“But do you know German?” Father’s reply was chilling: “I know eight words, the ones the teacher reserved for the Jewish students in the class—the only ones he dinned into me: ‘Du bist ein Stück Fleisch mit zwei Augen’ (‘You are a piece of meat with two eyes’).” Then he said: “I hate German.” Many years later, the little girl would understand that in the dark waters of a shared suffering and a shared rebellion, this hatred developed into a dual rejection: of German, the language of the persecutors and those who humiliate, and of Hebrew, the language of his Jewish-self, his persecuted and humiliated self. From his childhood in Balassagyarmat he harbored a lifelong rejection of any doublespeak. Of any betrayal of the Word. Of the language of the Prophets: the Hebrew of his pious mother Deborah, from a long line that came originally from Moravia, and the Hebrew prayers of his father Nathan, from a long line that came from Galicia. Countries on the very margins of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, created at the moment of the partition of Poland in 1772, then wiped from the world map in 1918. The crossroads of the languages spoken by all the peoples it comprised: Polish, Ruthenian, German, Yiddish. Places of wretchedness and violent persecutions where the poorest Jews drew on the mystical roots of an intense piety: Hasidism, hasid—hesed, goodness and fervor of the heart. And so it was with Grandfather Nathan, a typesetter in a small printing works, who brought to life the sacred texts in the humble gestures to which the Sabbath gave their full meaning. Every Saturday, dressed in his threadbare but respectable black suit, he would do the rounds of all the hospitals in Budapest on foot, sit at the bedsides of the sick who had no visitors, talk with them, and then take a sweet from his pocket and give it to them. On leaving the synagogue on a Friday evening, he would never let a solitary fellow worshipper go off alone into the night, but always invited him to join his large family around the table.
These memories were recounted to me by my old Aunt Szerenke, in the German of which Aharon Appelfeld once wrote: “It was not the language of the Germans but that of my mother. . . . In her mouth the words had a pure sound, as if she were speaking them inside an exotic bell jar. . . . The words of the languages around us seeped into us without our knowing it. The four languages flowed together into one, rich in nuances, contrasting, satirical, full of humor. In this language, there was a lot of space for feelings, for the subtlety of emotions, for imagination, and for memory.”
This is the German of Imre Kertész from Budapest; of Aharon Appelfeld from Czernowicz; of Tibor, the family’s last patriarch, from Prague. When I hear their voices, when they speak to me, whether in Berlin, Jerusalem, or Haifa, I hear Aunt Szerenke’s voice and that entire little circle of survivors, all speaking the same language, from a world that is no more.
This is the German that has been punctuated by exiles and passed down through the generations, from country to country, like a violin whose vibratos have retained the accents and intonations, the words and expressions, of adopted countries and ways of speaking.
This is the German that has no land or borders. An interior language. If I were to hold on to just one word, it would be innig—profound, intense, fervent.
This is the German partly learned at school in the days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and partly a crossborder language within the family. This was especially true of Aunt Szerenke, who had not gone to school but who, as the eldest of nine siblings, absorbed the private language of her parents: Nathan, born in Hungary, and Deborah-Charlotte, born in Slovakia. German was the language of their marriage; Hebrew, the language of their prayers. Aunt Szerenke was a well of memory. She left certain things unspoken, but between the words the silence of her smile expressed the essential, her infinite understanding of people’s lives.
As soon as she learned that I had chosen to study German at the lycée, she wrote me a letter, on paper like a sheet of sky, as light as a wing. My first letter from “over there” for which I had no need of a translator. Her handwriting danced between the lines, echoing the rhythm of her words that had been composed out loud and were uninterrupted by any punctuation. She nominated me her “secretary”: “Even if I don’t know how to write them very well, I know you understand the words that are in my heart.” The ultimate honor, straight from the heart. I was now authorized to receive and keep secrets, just as the little writing desk received them, as well as to transcribe words from a language that we would always share. I became a secretary; it was my first job and the first step on the different paths that would lead me to translation. This was how I discovered a German that went far beyond the classroom walls and the school curriculum. Was not this language of the soul, which had defied so many prisons, so many frontiers, by its very essence the language of poetry? It resonated with me from the beginning, something that I recognized when, leafing through my textbook, an edition still printed in Gothic script, I first came across a poem in German, some lines by Goethe:
Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn,
Im dunkeln Laub die Gold-Orangen glühn
Do you know the land where the lemon-trees bloom, the golden oranges glow amid the dark leaves1
I experienced the same enchantment as when, in the leafy shade of the little garden of the house on Mandula Street, Aunt Szerenke, drawing from that age-old well, would tell me endless stories in her idiosyncratic German peppered with Hungarian, Yiddish, and Slovak. The same enchantment as when, on summer nights with my elderly Uncle István, snuggled in blankets under the huge trees of Margaret Island, we listened to Schubert’s Lieder ascending to the stars.
Just one room, with a high ceiling and those big English bay windows. One room to live in. The home of an exile, Mitzi, Grandmother Deborah’s niece, and her elderly mother, Emma, who had been born in Poland. The room was allocated to them by the British refugee office when, right after the Anschluss, the government opened the border for one month to Czechoslovakian nationals living in Vienna. In a corner, behind a screen, a wash basin and, just next to it, a two-ring gas cooker. Two narrow divans upholstered in worn velvet, and a sagging armchair and two chairs around a small table. An old suitcase on top of the wardrobe, the toilet along the hall. And the electricity meter, which you have to feed with coins to have light when dusk falls or when the London sky is grey and lowering. London, where, after the war, they were reunited with a cousin, the conductor Rudolf Schwartz—the sole survivor of his large Slovakian family—who was deported to Auschwitz and then, thanks to Furtwangler, released. Only to be sent to Sachsenhausen and Bergen-Belsen.
One summer’s day, for the first time, Mitzi broached the past.