The Persistence of Dread: From Vienna to Jerusalem
SHAKED, GERSON
The Persistence of Dread From Vienna to Jerusalem Dread has dogged me ever since I can remember. Memories derived from a specific historical context have pursued me all my life, memories that make...
...My relation to my home and my parents, my personal assurance or lack of assurance, the confrontation with uncertainty—all these GERSHON SHAKED are the products of an historical experience shared by many Jewish children born in Europe in the late 1920s or early 1930s...
...Right after that lesson was over and the inspector left the classroom, I ran home...
...I could not turn on the lights because the raiders had taken all the bulbs...
...After all, I couldn't sing the song 5 my grandmother used to hum every once ™ in a while, Oy yoy yoy, shikker iz der guy, shikker i izer, trinken mus er, vile eriza gay (The guy is ' a drunkard, a drunkard is he, and he has * to drink because he is a guy)—the one and i only anti-gwy song I know to this day...
...I noticed a sign saying that a bathhouse was near the railroad station and that travelers could use it for a reasonable fee...
...later, he was sent to Buchenwald...
...They knew they were the priigelknaben (whipping boys) of history and fair game for anyone, even when goyim were fighting with each other...
...Some were observant Jews and recited s'lichot (penitential prayers) at night...
...Still damp I got dressed and, with my heart in my mouth, I returned to the railroad station at a run...
...I cried when we separated...
...I cannot forget the dread in their faces...
...I saw that she had decided I hadn't come to endanger her existence and she let me into the house...
...We saw how it surfaced so starkly when Iraqi Scuds began to fall on us...
...Shaked recalls how relatives and friends huddled in his house, believing its walls would protect them from the evil in the streets, even though his father was already in Buchenwald...
...This was merely a dress rehearsal...
...I stammered for a moment and finally told her I had been born there and that I would like to visit the rooms...
...As I tried to get away, November stood opposite us and smiled...
...This was legitimate romantic Zionism, the Zionism of orphans who sought shelter and refuge...
...He was the first person in the promised land who made me a promise and kept it...
...I came to Israel alone...
...He hit and kicked me everywhere he could reach with fist and foot, and I struggled with his two friends, who were holding me...
...My life has been an effort to flee from that experience or, rather, to create or take part in the creation of a way of life that will not permit its recurrence...
...With no parents in the house, we did whatever we pleased...
...The large Israeli community in the United States shows that many Jews do not wish to do so...
...The woman, who was the girl's aunt, asked me where I was going...
...So I went to the bathhouse...
...I grew up in the Land of Israel...
...I remember a scene from the end of the Hebrew month of Elul, just before Rosh Hashanah...
...I didn't have any mocking rhymes about goyim up my sleeve...
...What will I do if the Judaism of the Book of Joshua, of Rabbis Chaim Druckman, Shlomo Goren and Moshe Levinger and the other rabbis who act like donkeys riding on the messiah should become the official Judaism of the people of Israel...
...I told her that my final destination was the Children's Farm at Pardes Channah...
...My father's face blanched...
...I didn't live in the lap of luxury, but Israel became the only certainty in which I could believe...
...One memory from that period seems positive...
...I remember my uncle weeping...
...Rumors circulated that soon there would be another wave of arrests...
...he planned to wait in Trieste to accompany me to my ship...
...he shouted...
...What will I do if these become the official standards of the state...
...Real space isn't important...
...Mama had to earn a living, meanwhile liquidating our yarn and knitting supply business and trying to get visas for various countries...
...Mama scolded Papa for taking me to such places in times of tension...
...I have no more convincing justification than my life to account for my views...
...My uncle's whimpers, two or three other Jews saying s'lichot, the autumn wind howling outside, the spirit of chaos—these scenes embody for me the life of a young boy who grew up in a time of dread...
...None of the tricks I had learned from my books were of any help...
...That was a litde boy's dream of a Utopian land, an arcadia...
...She was arrested in 1939...
...Mama would appear and even our beloved Austrian housemaid would join us...
...I stood there naked, and suddenly I noticed that everyone was staring at my genitals...
...It has also become clear to me that there is a connection between my most personal history and the history of the Jewish people...
...On Kristallnacht, November 10, 1938, at nine years old, I was alone in the house...
...It was only when they turned to the piano that they noticed the child clinging to its leg...
...One of my first memories of dread is when the Schutzbund [Social Democratic Defense League] and the Heimwehr [Christian Socialist Home Defense Forces] battled with each other for control of Vienna in the 1930s...
...They felt it at their back as they felt the hard hands of the Ukrainian children who tormented them in their village...
...The children in my class made some noise, as children do when they are presented with an unfamiliar situation or figure...
...Influenced by these dreams, we classmates formed an association...
...I inherited their fear and added another, derived from my experiences, and I shall apparendy pass something of that on to my descendants...
...When I told her that I just wanted to see the apartment where I had passed my childhood, she calmed down somewhat...
...In short, to extend a rabbinical proverb, "You should be ashamed of yourself, because you make others ashamed...
...I turned on all the lights and set two chairs against the front door...
...Eight days earlier, Hitler overran Austria— an infamous act remembered as the Anschluss, the "Annexation...
...I heard shouting on the floor above...
...In public places, like school, invisibility was not an option...
...The past had been erased from my memory, as it were, until I decided to go back to look at the apartment where I had lived as a child...
...Soon there was knocking...
...At first she tried to restrain me, saying that the house wasn't tidy...
...How different it was from the Zionism of those pioneers in the sunny fields of the Jezreel Valley...
...If I were rejected in the land of my birth because I was a Jew, for no rational cause, without any connection to my behavior or character, here I was accepted because I was a Jew, without any connection to my character or behavior...
...My parents brought dread with them from Belz, the shtetl (town) of their birth...
...My short, plump mother whispered strange prayers, and Papa paced back and forth, restless and nervous, muttering curses in Yiddish...
...An adult returns to a fading city and listens to the sounds of a language and to old tunes and jingles that still echo in his ears...
...Meanwhile pressure grew on every side...
...I expected that my grandmother and my two aunts, who had emigrated to Palestine before me, would be waiting for me...
...Gershon Shaked—a renowned literary critic—analyzes the works of Jewish writers worldwide...
...Taking no interest in me, they emptied the apartment of its contents—rugs and paintings, silver and furniture, piece by piece...
...I remember myself, a nine-and-a-half-year-old child, in the railroad car...
...Ribek led them as they chanted a chorus I can still remember: Jud, Jud spuck im Hut, sag der Mama das istgut (Jew, Jew, spit in the hat and tell your mother it's good...
...I will go underground and struggle with them and their rabble until my soul departs from me, even if they try to shut me up and to jail my body...
...I encountered that inherited dread again when my father took me to the Prater, an amusement park in Vienna, and afterwards to a cafe patronized regularly by Jews...
...No one would hit me any more because I was a Jew...
...The inspector looked at us with furious eyes...
...This was the only place a child of the age of Jewish anxiety could wander about, knowing that the foundations and pillars of the world wouldn't collapse the next day because of his or her identity...
...My forefathers feared for their historical fate when they fled from Poland to Vienna and from Vienna to Palestine...
...I am the son and grandson of homeless people who seek to live somewhere by right and not by sufferance...
...Suddenly my friend Georg Berlstein and I, who were excellent pupils, had been placed in the "bad" group, and the stupid members of the class were now "good...
...I stood at the gate and looked about, but no one waited for me...
...I have reservations about bringing up these memories of my childhood fears...
...Shaked's non-Jewish friend abandoned him to Nazi ruffians...
...A few of my Jewish classmates used to come to my house in the afternoon...
...After placing that mark of Cain on my forehead, he started hitting me with all his strength...
...Are you in a Jewish school here...
...In contrast to Ribek, who was idiotic and muscular despite his short stature, November was delicate and smart, one of the best pupils in the class...
...The dread was passed on to me...
...Passersby who saw them hitting me took strange pleasure in it...
...As the mob shouted and rejoiced outside, once again silence and darkness descended on our house...
...Three days after the Germans entered Vienna, something else happened...
...But my aunt, who had been in Palestine since 1929, could get a certificate only for me...
...What is the limit to my deep and uncompromising identification with this country...
...He pointed to the oranges: "You want some...
...They worked me over with their boots...
...Then I addressed November personally, crying, "What did I do to you...
...His dread destroyed the last line of defense between me and the horrible, mysterious force embodied by Ribek, the coalman's son who had attacked me outside the house...
...Today I'm certain that none of the men bathing there had paid any attention to me when I entered, that no one had even glanced at my face, let alone my genitals...
...I was afraid to open the door...
...At the building's entrance two lions still stand guard, as in my lost childhood...
...he picked me up and started running for his life, muttering something about antisemites...
...This was where you were accepted for the reason you had been rejected elsewhere...
...Now his superior had come and decreed that we were outcasts...
...Papa would come home...
...We were nine years old...
...Socialists and fascists struggled bitterly all over the city, and the Jews sat frightened in their homes, keeping their heads in their shells like tortoises, because they feared that they would be the first to suffer in that civil war...
...When I told her that I had come from Israel, she didn't know how to respond...
...After the Germans' appearance, he exchanged it for a swastika...
...waiting for me at the corner of the street opposite my house with two other boys...
...She had hoped to go with a transport of illegal immigrants...
...I debarked and saw my new land...
...Hitler rides triumphantly through Vienna (top) as cheering crowds of Austrian Nazis salute him, March 21,1938...
...He was as silent as a fish and kept smiling...
...First I shouted to them all: "What did I do...
...Now the rules had changed...
...The power of the Land of Israel lies in my ability to show my nakedness in a bathhouse without dread...
...Wave after wave of German troops poured into Austria to consolidate Hitler's annexation...
...If you don't do all that, you deserve punishment...
...In April 1938 Papa was arrested and sent to Dachau...
...We were heroes about to build the means for our rescue, like Robinson Crusoe, and we would fight against all our enemies...
...Huddled in that darkness, mortified and alone, I discovered a private Zionism...
...My classmates overtook me...
...Ribek's two friends grabbed me, and Ribek wrote the word Jude on my face in enormous letters with a piece of charcoal...
...Ever since then, the two people who offered me assistance without being asked have stood for the Land of Israel in my eyes...
...The first words he uttered still ring in my ears: "How are you behaving...
...We planned to hide from our pursuers in the parks of Vienna...
...The word /udehad negative connotations for me: a reason to hide from the sun's eye, a reason to sit in a dark house,, a reason to be pursued and beaten, something you would like to rip off your back like a hump...
...On the other hand, I also dreamed I would be in the promised land without parents in a children's settlement, over which I would be the king...
...I quickly left the shower...
...On my way back from Vienna to Zurich, I went through Klagfurt...
...I was transferred to the Jewish school...
...Not far from my temporary seat was an orange stand...
...To his credit he did not change his attitude to the four Jewish children in his class...
...Neither my friends nor I were being judged by our behavior or our achievements but by our origins...
...We had read Robinson Crusoe...
...The streets of Vienna (left) are quiet two weeks after the Anschluss...
...the teacher had never discriminated against us...
...When she saw that I didn't respond, she added that her son had been killed in the war and asked me again what I wanted...
...There was a boy named Ribek in my class, the son of the coalman from whom our housemaid bought fuel for our stoves...
...When it was over, I curled up within myself, surrounded by the bare walls of the empty apartment...
...Experiences pass before my eyes one after another, the dreads of that little boy, afraid for his life...
...Since I was afraid no one would come for me and I would remain abandoned, I didn't hesitate...
...On my way home from school that day, I saw my classmates, Ribek and November, A military band and enthusiastic young Austrian girls (above) cheer German troops near Unz, Austria, March 21,1938...
...I remembered having seen the girl, Yehudit, on deck...
...In my mind I was Beni, and the promised land was a kind of refuge where "all hopes will be fulfilled...
...The ship reached Palestine in April 1939...
...I went to 8 Belvederstrasse, entrance two, third floor, an address I had learned by heart as a child, so I could get home again if I lost my way...
...But the source of my views as a literary critic is my life...
...Two others joined us because their parents were running from consulate to consulate and couldn't be home most of the time...
...A stranger passed by and saw me on the verge of tears...
...Through the steam and streams of water I saw many pairs of eyes, and I was stricken with fear that something dreadful would happen because "they" had discovered I was circumcised...
...What has been called the Masada complex, or the Shoah complex, is a mythological expression of the hidden fears lurking in the collective unconscious of Israeli society...
...Outside an annoying rain fell, and I could hear its patter through the murmuring of these refugees—friends and uncles who, in normal times, were businessmen, practical men...
...Perhaps it is better to lose my identity and pride and save my humanity...
...This was the one and only place a child would be judged by deeds, not by origins...
...Noise, impertinence, lack of discipline—those are Jewish characteristics...
...He was dressed in a brown suit...
...Her family had received the apartment from the gestapo, she claimed, after the gestapo had driven them out of their house...
...I crawled back under the piano...
...She didn't understand...
...So I did try with all my strength and might, and my efforts to do well in the competition had been viewed favorably by the one I considered the highest judge—my teacher...
...The passengers debarked, group by group, family by family, and I got off by myself with my gray suitcase, wearing my festive sailor suit that I hadn't worn before on the ship...
...I sat alone, stifling my tears, looking through the window at the landscape "I and telling myself I was Beni, sailing to the promised land...
...What will I do if this Judaism eliminates the words of old Hillel, who based Judaism on you shall love your neighbor as yourself...
...He went to the stand, bought three oranges and gave them to me...
...Shaked's public school teacher, who had been an Austrian patriot, switched to public support of the Nazis after the Anschluss but never discriminated against his four Jewish students...
...Yes," I answered...
...Fears were imparted to me more by the expression on my parents' faces than from my own experiences, but that was the kernel of all the fears that emerged in later years...
...I shared a cabin on the Galilea with a family whom Youth Aliyah had asked to care for me...
...A passenger helped me with my suitcase...
...For some reason, she even wore a kerchief like an Orthodox Jewish woman...
...Families or friends met the others...
...For me the security of the Jews is of supreme importance, as is their untrammeled opportunity to develop their own identity...
...Until then some children had envied us...
...At times I ask myself another question...
...At that time I read a book by Miriam Singer, Beni Fliegt in das Gelobte Land (Benny Flies to the Promised Land...
...Suddenly, from out of nowhere, some men burst in and started turning over the tables, shouting Jude and other words...
...It was a stifling, hot, humid day, and my sailor costume wasn't suitable for the blazing sun...
...On the contrary, he even tried to talk with me and comfort me...
...The house is in one of Vienna's affluent neighborhoods, near the Belvedere Palace...
...Will I be able to associate myself fully with the country that has awarded me identity and pride and permitted me to nurture this identity and to transform it from a negative stain to a positive mark...
...We went out and looked for hiding places in the Belvedere Garden...
...To my regret, I am not certain that the Jewish people wishes to preserve its identity...
...Memories derived from a specific historical context have pursued me all my life, memories that make me shudder...
...Passersby joined in the harangue and took pleasure in seeing the young Jew hurt and humiliated...
...But that was naked dread, in both senses of the word, the very dread from which to this day I have not been freed...
...Of course I didn't know all that when my father and mother turned off all the lights and sat, fearfully, in the darkness of our living room, as though turning off the lights were a magic charm that would defend them from the evil eye of the rioters...
...Although my father was in Buchenwald, relatives and friends believed our house would protect them from troubles and persecutors...
...He helped me carry the suitcase to the ship...
...I had been educated in the bosom of an achievement-oriented society that divided the world into achievers and failures, and I was doing my best to be a success...
...I did not know of the rioting outside...
...At night I stifled my tears in solitude, to let the others sleep, so they wouldn't reject me...
...Those who survived are left with their personal memories and the abstract historical memory of the annihilation of their contemporaries...
...My parents and friends occasionally hinted to me that I had to run faster than others, because I had a theoretical hump on my back, and I had to try harder in the race...
...An elderly woman opened the door for me...
...I stared at the oranges with hungry eyes...
...Fear haunts him still when he is not at home in Israel...
...She raised her hand as though I were a bailiff who had come to confiscate all her property...
...nomena, such as in the creation of a commission to commemorate the Shoah in the United States and in the willingness of Israel to equip itself with nuclear arms...
...The boys kept on shouting after me, screaming that I was nothing but a yellow Jew coward...
...My attempt to flee, the way my father had fled his pursuers in the cafe, was not successful...
...I heard them saying Judenbube (Jew-boy) and other derogatory terms...
...home...
...other pupils...
...That image was a life raft and I clung to it When I reached Trieste, Papa was waiting for me at the railroad station...
...I had been a good litde Viennese boy, ambitious and quiet, who knew all the rules of reward and punishment in the world: If you behave well, do your homework, raise your hand in class and know the answers to the teacher's questions you will be properly rewarded...
...I went from room to room...
...Mama's contorted features and Papa's face on the brink of tears live with me to this day...
...I could walk in the street without being chased...
...Mama gave me a single suitcase...
...And I will bequeath this struggle to my children...
...I was sweaty when I arrived by train, and I wanted to bathe...
...The dread was reaching in to us from the street and from the radio...
...o I decided not to respond, but to run Passersby who saw them hitting me took strange pleasure in it...
...She stationed herself at the entrance as though to protect her possessions...
...It constantly reappears in apparendy contradictory pheSeven-year-old Shaked (above) with his father in the Kaumberg Hotel gardens in Vienna, 1936...
...When I returned to Europe in 1964, I wanted to see the place of my birth...
...My world had been destroyed...
...We would sail together down the Danube, through the Black Sea and the Bosporus, to Haifa...
...I summoned up the knowledge I had gleaned from my aged Hebrew teacher and said todah...
...Meanwhile Papa had been released from the concentration camp by obtaining a visa from Trinidad and Tobago, but he still had lost all chance of leaving the country legally because the ge-stapo had confiscated his passport...
...He sat in a corner of the room and whimpered...
...That is why I understand so well the spirit of the Palestinian refugees...
...On his right arm he wore an arm band with a swastika and on his head a peaked cap with that familiar Nazi symbol in the center...
...I remember family members, mostly men, sitting under the tables, with the shutters down, everyone whispering, with two women coming in now and then to bring them something to eat...
...Memory is the source of dread, and it shapes consciousness...
...The great trauma began in March 1938, when the Nazis entered Vienna, greeted by the Viennese with cheers and dancing in the streets...
...Airb'semhlc outbursts punctuated his childhood, until his flight alone to Palestine in 1939...
...I took off my clothes and entered the public showers, which were cheaper than the private ones...
...I remember my third grade teacher, Drexler...
...Everything seemed so small...
...What is the place for a man like me in a society ruled by norms of behavior preached by Meir Kahane's followers, admired by the supporters of Ariel Sharon and by friends of Geula Cohen, Rafael Eitan and Rehav'am Ze'evi...
...There is no better proof than numbers and people...
...I tried to take refuge in fantasy, but fear overwhelmed me...
...About two weeks before all the Jewish children in my school were to be transferred to a special Jewish school (called, pejoratively, the Judenschule), a Nazi inspector appeared in our classroom...
...Before the Germans appeared he used to wear a red-white-red striped insignia in his lapel, declaring himself a loyal citizen of independent Austria...
...Shaked's fantasy in Vienna was to become his favorite childhood book character who flies to the promised land and finds safety there...
...He was probably the only non-Jewish boy who had contact with us Jews...
...Hitler propaganda posters advertise the slogan: One people—one empire—one leader...
...Nearby sat a woman with a girl my age at her side...
...But fame and success have not dispelled the dread he carried with him to Palestine as a young boy...
...We were driven by dread and wanted to create a Zionist solution for our great fears...
...they found welcomes like these routine...
...The answer is very hard for me, but I know I will not go into exile because Jewish Nebuchadnezzars are trying to destroy my inner Temple...
...She looked at me with a smile of pity and informed me that she was to take Yehudit to that very place, and, if I liked, she would also take me...
...She was an old woman like any old woman, with silver hair...
...the space in one's soul is...
...I walked into entrance two and climbed to the third floor...
...I heard them saying Judenbube (Jew-boy...
...Two of them were as I was, like orphans after their fathers had been taken to concentration camps...
...When the men burst in, I did not know where to hide...
...When I try to examine how my consciousness was formed by my most personal memories, it is no consolation that my troubles were shared by a multitude...
...I ask, has my suffering, and that of people who suffered far more than I, been in vain...
...On condition that they don't endanger us Jewish refugees, I would be happy to grant absolute independence to the Arab inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza...
...Translated by Jeffrey M. Green...
...they said and did things I do not want to remember...
...I didn't know whether I had to answer them in the same stupid vein...
...Some of my dreads, which seem to be merely personal, prove to be inherited...
...My parents tried to disappear, to become invisible, as in a fairy tale...
...Next to him sat a boy with golden hair and blue eyes, tall and thin, whose last name was, strangely, November...
...He was glad for our successes and sometimes presented us as an example for the A few weeks after arriving at the youth village in Pardes Channah between Haifa and Tel Aviv, Shaked studies Hebrew...
...He left Vienna with a forged passport and fled to Yugoslavia...
...I never saw the men's faces, only five pairs of boots...
...Sensing the approaching dusk by the shadows on the lofty walls, I crawled under the piano in a corner...
...He was dark, short and broad-shouldered, outstanding in his indolence and stupidity...
...The passengers who had disembarked with me gradually disappeared, until finally I sat down alone on my gray suitcase and, like any child who has come to a dead end, prepared to weep...
...Good Aryan children behave well and with exemplary discipline...
...Dread has not been effaced from the tablets' of Jewish existence...
...I finally managed to overcome one of my tormentors and ran home with my heart in my mouth...
Vol. 16 • October 1991 • No. 5
