A Chosen Few by Mark Kurlansky Read Free Book Online Page B

unquestioning. Explaining that these were the different types of Jews, he added his own Lubavitch doctrine of a fifth son who didn’t come at all because he didn’t know this was Passover. Most of the Jews these people had ever known were of the fifth son type. But David was quick to add that “it is none of you, because you are all here.”
    Irene muttered, “He’s talking too much,” fearing that people would start leaving. Unlike the first night, there were no Israelis to lead in the songs tonight—but that well-known Ukrainian actor-singer and irrepressible ham, Mark Aizikovitch, was there. He had spent the first night at a special Russian seder at Alexanderplatz, where he did not have to stick to “Dayenu” and the other Hebrew songs that he didn’t really know. The people there had been thrilled to get his standard repertoire. Tonight, with the first part of the seder over and everyone merrily eating their kosher dinner, David agreed that Aizikovitch could sing whatever he wanted. After teasing David with the opening bars of “Hello, Dolly,” Aizikovitch did a series of comic Yiddish songs. A few of the old Communists remembered the words and sang along. This music was popular in Germany.
    Then David resumed reading the last stretch of the Haggadah in Hebrew.
    Suddenly Aizikovitch got an idea. As an intuitive entertainer, he could see that the crowd’s interest in all this Hebrew recitation was waning. But he knew a Hebrew song that always pleased. The Russians had requested it the night before, and it had been the perfect grand finale. With no warning, Mark Aizikovitch, in his deep baritone, broke into “Hatikvah,” “The Hope,” once the an-them of Zionism and now the Israeli national anthem. How could he have known how taboo this song was to ultra-Orthodox Jews like David Marlowe? But instead of cutting Aizikovitch off, Marlowe simply burst out laughing and declared the seder finished. It was the only way to avoid the sacrilege of singing the national anthem in the middle of a seder. He was not unhappy. Given the twentieth-century history of this city, it was enough that there were Jews having a seder here at all.

PART ONE

THE B READ Y EARS

    “
Der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland
.” (Death is a master from Germany.)
    P AUL C ELAN , Todesfuge

1

From Łódź to Paris
    T he thud of an orange startled Moishe Waks. After hearing stories about Poland all his life from his parents, he was not surprised that the Poles were throwing things at him. What was surprising was that they would waste an orange. Oranges were expensive in post-Communist Poland. Then he picked it up, and the Waks family laughed. It was only the peel, so there really wasn’t anything to be amazed about.
    The Waks family always did a lot of laughing when they got together, which was not that often. Moishe lived in Berlin, a plump and successful Berlin businessman, and he was the one leader in the West Berlin Jewish Community who took an interest in Irene Runge and the
Ossis
at the Kulturverein. His older brother Ruwen, taller and less plump but otherwise looking very much like his brother, lived in Israel. Their mother, Lea, a strong-willed woman with a crisp, ironic sense of humor and a proud, straight posture, still stubbornly lived in Düsseldorf, all the while preaching Zionism.
    By the time Poland opened up for visitors and the Wakses could go back to look around, Moishe’s father, Aaron Waks, a dogmatic but loving man, had died in Düsseldorf. Moishe and his brother had gotten the idea of having their mother show them Łódź, where she and Aaron had grown up. But the trip was making her visibly ill. She was showing her sons things she had never even been ableto talk about. Still, like many Jews with Polish roots, in recent years her sons felt that they had to see Poland.
    Families from Łódź were part of almost every Jewish community in the world, but in Łódź itself there was only one usable synagogue left. The