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Friday September 29, 2006

Three generations confront their history

by joanne catz hartman

“Where are you from?” I’m asked when I travel. Depending on how far away I am from my zip code, I’m likely to say San Francisco or Northern California. I’m an American, a Californian, a resident of the East Bay.

But even though I was born and raised in Sonoma County, and still live in the Bay Area, where I am from has taken on entirely new meaning lately.

While I hail from Russian-Romanian Jews, I’m also half-German. I don’t speak the language, and until recently, I’d been to Germany only once for a few days as a teen. Growing up in Santa Rosa, German community was almost non-existent — hofbrau restaurant withstanding. Sauerkraut and Wiener schnitzel weren’t standard fare at our dinner table.

But a half-day’s travel on a plane out of San Francisco lands me in Frankfurt, Germany, in hopes of reconnecting with my German Jewish roots. My 8-year-old daughter and I will rendezvous with my mother in the western German town of Aschaffenburg. We’re joining a group of Jewish former residents who, along with my mother, have been invited back for a one-week stay in their hometown, their hotel and flights paid for by the city.

I hadn’t been aware until now that many German cities have hosted reunion visits for Jews who once lived there. My mother has been back, but this time I wanted to come too. I want my daughter to know something about her German roots. “Your great-grandparents lived here,” I tell her, as our bus pulls off the highway and bounces over cobblestone streets in the Bavarian town. The rolling terrain and hillsides remind me of Sonoma County. I wonder if the similarity was such for my mother when she and my father chose to settle there.

We represent the West, among Jewish Texans and New Yorkers, and those from Florida and Israel, Argentina and Peru. I’m part of what the group refers to as “the younger generation” and I like that label since I’m over 40. The others in the younger generation, ranging from college-age to mid-50s, feel like relatives; their parents and grandparents like aunts and uncles, with their familiar German accents and childhood stories. We dine together in the city’s castle, take a guided tour through a wooded park, and watch an opera performance of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” in the castle courtyard. We’re treated like royalty.

I’m thrilled really, to be here. I had been scared, concerned about anti-Semitism (I find, after one week roaming among Germans, absolutely none to speak or write about) and worried about sadness, too — would memories among these survivors be too much to bear?

In a small museum, the Jewish Documentation Center, in a building next to where a synagogue once stood, Jewish artifacts and memorabilia explain the history of the town’s Jewish past. “There’s Oma!” my daughter instantly recognizes her grandmother’s childhood self in an enlarged photo displayed on the museum’s wall. Several of my mother’s former schoolmates are here and they pose next to their photographic image while we take new photos and videotape this reunion with their past. There are many smiles — the joy at being reunited — and some sadness, too; many faces in the photographs are of those who did not survive the Holocaust.

We’re presented with a database of former Jewish citizens and my child giggles when she reads the name Ludwig Hamburger in our family lineage. The genealogy is much more detailed than the handwritten notes I have in our scrapbook at home. I notice new names we might have considered when naming our daughter: Rosy, Lisbeth. The ancestry takes up many pages.

My mother’s childhood story holds importance, not only as a personal one, but also in a historical framework, too. “Here is where I rode my bike home from school the morning after Kristallnacht to avoid the main streets,” she points down to the path along the river. My daughter doesn’t know this word and she doesn’t ask. The time to tell her of Kristallnacht is soon. I’m glad she’ll have a survivor’s account within which to hook this term, and might recall a clear summer’s sky in a beautiful German town overlooking a curving river with a castle beside her, and the memory of her grandmother pointing it all out.

Because, in a way, this is also where she’s from.

Joanne Catz Hartman lives and writes in Oakland. She can be reached at jc_Hartman@comcast.net.

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