I Sleep in Hitler's Room by Tuvia Tenenbom Read Free Book Online Page B

cigarette and another, as he prepares to bring the new cigarette to his lips while holding to soon-to-be-lit lighter, the Chain-Smoking Rabbi brags a bit about his younger years:
    “I was tempted to emigrate to the US after the war. My uncle offered me a job in his factory, he offered me an empty house that belonged to him. It was real temptation,” laments the Elder Smoking Jew. Alas, he did not accept the offer.
    Why?
    “Because I was a German.”
    This German rabbi is funny, I must say.
    This calls for another cigarette.
    When a Jew changes into a new cigarette, it is very important to remember, he must change the topic of the conversation as well.
    Any comment about Angela Merkel? I ask my Smoking Partner.
    Partner or not, Rabbi Schmidt refuses to comment, saying he has been out of politics for thirty years. But later on, when I ask how it feels to be an icon in today’s Germany, he dismisses it by saying that the real reason for his being made into an icon “has to do with the fact that the government today is not so impressive as it used to be.”
    That’s Rabbinical!
    Helmut is a rare combination of scholar and politician, though I am not clear which part influences which part and which is his stronger side. Hard to say. Per our agreement, he is going to read these pages, having the right to strike words off it. This will offer me a better and deeper understanding of the man. Will he go back on anything he said? But whatever he chooses to do, one thing seems clear to me: He is a man who lives history and loves it. He impresses me as someone intimately familiar with history’s often contradictory turns, extracting pleasure from minute details that others would prefer to ignore. He sits in a wheelchair, the years obviously taking their toll on him, but his mind seems to be sharp and ever alert. He enjoys his job at
Die Zeit
and speaks fondly of it. He says to me, of his paper, that “we’re totally independent. Nobody tells us what we ought to print and what not.” He takes pride in that.
    As I am about to leave this Elder Jew, he comes back to the Arab–Israeli conflict. He tells me that his admiration goes to former Egyptian president Anwar Sadat but not to former Israeli president Menachem Begin.
    He explains:
    “If Moshe Dayan [Israel’s Defense Minister at the time] was the one signing the peace treaty with Anwar Sadat, there would have been lasting peace in the Middle East today. The ones who killed both Rabin and Sadat knew what they were doing.” Helmut, the historian that he is, ends the interview with a rather interesting prediction: “The war in the Middle East today can turn into a war between Western civilization and the Islamic world. And in the end Israel will be only a minor player, if at all.”
    Somehow I feel, don’t ask me why, that during his younger years this man did not go to the streets and threw empty bottles at people just for the fun of it.
    As I leave the Second Jew behind me, I feel calmer. It feels to me that I start gaining my sanity. I’m not going to Iceland. Not yet. There is some logic to it all. There’s a system here in Germany. Not everybody is stupid. It has to do with history, not just beer.
    Maybe, just maybe, the reason everybody is drinking so much beer is that they want to forget the Holocaust. It’s possible. Everything is possible. Maybe that’s why I smoke cigarettes, because I want to forget Auschwitz.
    You never know.
    But I am a little bothered. What the Smoking Jew told me, that “quite a few of them are of Turkish background,” I know for a fact to be totally wrong. Unlike him, I took part in the demos—and I didn’t see one Turkish man or woman in the crowds.
    Well, he claimed to have read this piece of info in the media.
    And since I have time aplenty, I decide to check up on it.
    How do you check out The Media? A good idea would be to pay a visit.
    Question: Visit whom?
    I heard, don’t tell anybody I told you, that here in the North