Jews in a Brave New World

...local Jewish leaders stepped forward uneasily, trying to balance anger with responsibility...

...Hypocrisy is rampant in the societies the interviewees describe...

...Significantly, the German title of Sich-rovsky'sbookis Wir WissenNicht Was Morgen Wird—"We Don't Know What Tomorrow Will Bring...

...The experience of Aryeh, a young German bank trainee, is typical...

...Reviewed by Paul Berczeller Forty years after the end of World War II, the people of Germany and Austria, including the Jews living there, cannot escape that past...

...social intercourse outside their own community is invariably stilted and awkward...

...only when they are among themselves do they allow themselves to remove that mask...

...They don't want to understand that we don't have as much time as they do...

...It was almost grotesque how extremely polite and friendly they were to me, whatever the demand...

...When old people ask me where I'm from and I tell them I'm from Israel," says Anna, "they immediately...

...The book records conversations that Peter Sichrovsky, a Jewish j ournalist born in Vienna two years after the fall of Hitler, had with 13 contemporary coreligionists in Germany and Austria...

...Should I kill my father for what he did...

...They revealed themselves in order that the generation of new Germans and Austrians, as well as the older people, might become aware that a new generation of Jews is living here for whom the past is not dead...

...resentment grew among the populace, until the most malicious elements resorted to threats of violence and addressed hate mail "To the Jewish Community, Division Swines...

...I had become a clown, a terminally ill patient whose every wish was granted in the few weeks left to him...

...Mention of gentile friends or business partners is rare...

...Today's young Austrians and Germans seem to feel it is more important that they become reconciled with the generation responsible for the War— their own mothers and fathers—before it dies away...

...Sichrovsky wisely pressed his subjects for small yet telling descriptions of their lives, rather than grand theories: The exchanges become pieces of litmus paper dipped into everyday existence to test the beneath-the-surface acidity of the two countries...

...The latest proof of this difficult truth—following close on the heels of Bitburg—was the Kurt Waldheim affair, a by now familiar pattern: The public figure, struggling to explain himself, took refuge in merely having done his duty...

...tell me they were innocent, that they hadn't known anything, and some tell me that they had helped Jews...

...Unhappily, German and Austrian Jews have little choice of rejecting this status...

...Contacts with younger non-Jews, say Sichrovsky's subjects, are fleeting and filled with disillusionment...

...I never kowtowed to my superiors and was not afraid to speak up...

...the other trainees appointed me their spokesman...

...Amid the attendant scandal and broken taboos, Strangers in Their Own Land made its timely appearance in English (it was originally published in Germany last year...

...Judging from recent events, whether the Germans and Austrians really want reconciliation on such terms remains in doubt...

...Hard work is essential for many, but Martha, a j our-nalist, notes that this can exacerbate the underlying problem: "We are creating a new hatred of Jews because the few of us who are living here in Vienna are extraordinarily industrious and successful...

...But one day I decided I'd had enough of all this...

...Spiritual and emotional contentment are not easily achieved in these circumstances, and the Jews have adopted a variety of protective strategies...

...Over and over again, the respondents here complain that non-Jews cannot understand them...

...But the others don'tunderstandus...

...Several of those interviewed were thus brought up in the U.S...

...But now I'm too proud...

...I got everything we asked for...

...This would not be apparent to the average observer...

...Erica, Robert's girlfriend, asks, "What do you want me to do...

...To their compatriots they are "living documentation" of the past (as one of those interviewed put it) and, at the same time, comforting symbols that the present is different...

...To the children of the Holocaust, the Final Solution poses a perpetual dilemma: How can they find happiness in Germany and Austria without betraying their parents' suffering...

...With the pre-war generation, the problem is frequently anembarrassingdefensiveness...

...Questions on "Jewish" subjects, ranging from Einstein to Heine to the geography of Israel, are invariably reserved for them— ghettoizing not only knowledge but, by extension, the children themselves...

...Hate my parents...

...And what emerges, with depressing consistency, is a feeling of alienation profound and pervasive enough to justify the English title...

...Judaica, publicly legitimated, is nevertheless a subject that teachers and society as a whole deem beyond their proper ken...

...Those who are nonbelievers nevertheless seek out the company of other Jews...

...Robert, whose love affair with the blonde daughter of a former SS officer is crumbling, tells her and Sichrovsky: "Every conversation with non-Jews is like an interrogation...

...The anti-Semitism that has historically been an element of the German and Austrian Volksgeist may be "outlawed"—indeed, few overtly anti-Semitic incidents are reported— but something more subtle has taken its place...

...Their parents, likeSichrov-sky's, had survived the Nazi concentration camps, or emigrated or even hidden...

...Although the children of survivors of the Nazi era may have different ways of coping with life in contemporary Germany and Austria, they express a common need to stand watch together, to make sure they won't "miss the right moment" when it is still possible to "get out in time" as their parents once did...

...You Jews live in Germany once again—they are in effect told—you are normal, accepted members of society...

...or Israel, but all have now lived in Germany or Austria for at least 10 years...

...Jewish children get the message sooner or later...

...And everybody will join in again, and above all here in Vienna...

...Teachers treat Jewish students gingerly, as though they contained high explosives...

...Unreality infects the public lives of the Jews who speak out in Strangers in Their Own Land...

...A few years ago," remarked a girl named He-lene, "I was still happy to tell them about these things...

...David, a 10th grader growing up in Berlin, dreads the day when the Germans wake up "feeling like Germans again.' With all the anxiety and mistrust that exists on both sides, is true reconciliation between Germans and Jews a realistic prospect...

...As the Introduction pointsout, "ordinarily these young Jews put on a mask when dealing with others...

...It turns into a pedantic discourse devoid of any notion of what's really going on in me...

...The German version of this book contains a glossary of Jewish terms and customs that was omitted in the American edition...

...I don't want to be a living museum anymore...

...I have often experienced it, even, I'm sorry to say, when talking to you...

...Some rely on religion, joining official Jewish communities where they live or forming smaller groups of their own...

...The peculiar status accorded Jews at work and at school—recalling another sort of "special treatment" they received in the past—is a source of anxiety instead of comfort...

...Lurking within this uncertainty is the fear that, as Martha puts it, "the time will come when someone will again decide to take everything away from us and kill us all...

...For them, a just reconciliation must incorporate a remembrance of the past...