Room for Doubt

Part One: Out of Berlin I expected to go a lifetime without ever setting foot in Germany. When I first began traveling to Europe as a college student, it was Ireland, Britain, Holland, France, and Italy that I ended up visitingneither wholly by chance nor wholly by choice, but in that drifty, in-between way college students do things. Afterwards, when I was living in England for two years, it would have been easy enough to go to Germany, but I didn't. And then, as I grew into my thirties and forties, this coincidence hardened into a resolve. "I have never been to Germany" became one of the totemic sentences of my identity, like "I have never been to a professional ball game" or "I have never been sky-diving."And never will, these sentences implied. But of course Germany was a different case. Nothing prevented me from attending ball games or taking up sky-diving except fearfear of crowds and boredom in the former instance, just plain fear in the latter. The feeling that kept me away from Germany, while it had elements of fear mingled into it, was much more complicated. It partook of moral distaste and historical allegiance. It stemmed from a notion that Jews do not visit Germany, and broadened out to include all morally upright people in its scope. I found myself unduly shocked when friends of mine reported that they had enjoyed their trips to Germany. "Shocked" is perhaps not the right word: I found it incomprehensible that one could have a good time there. And since pleasure (though sometimes a very abstruse pleasure, of a sort that other people might call work) is what fuels all my travel decisions, I couldn't imagine ever wanting to go to Germany. My Jewishness, though it clearly had something to do with this attitude, was not enough to explain it. I am not and have never been a very good Jew. Born into a family of secular Jews in which religious disbelief went back several generations, I grew up celebrating Christmas and attending school on Jewish holidays, as did most of the other California Jews I knew; in fact, we were all so assimilated that I barely knew which of my childhood friends were Jewish and which were not. On my father's side, there had once been some synagogue-going by my grandfather, but that, I suspect, was largely for business purposes: as a child, I was told that this grandfather had been sent to San Quentin for selling land that didn't exist "to other members of the synagogue," a description which managed to suggest that the crime inhered mainly in the tribal betrayal. My father's reaction to having a father like this was to become scrupulously rule-abiding and unshakably agnostic. My mother's relationship to Judaism was slightly more mystical. Her parentsa Russian-Jewish woman, staunchly tough and unremittingly difficult during all the years I knew her, who had wanted to be a doctor but had been channeled by anti-Semitism and anti-feminism into nursing; and a man about whom I have no information except that his name was Ephraim Gerson, that he abandoned his family when the children were young, and that he joined the Communist Party shortly before dying of alcoholismhad no religious feelings whatsoever. Perhaps because of this, my mother longed to see what religious belief felt like. She would introduce into our family bizarre versions of Jewish practice in an attempt to simulate the real thing. At one point she insisted we have a Passover seder, and when the Haggadah specified that a ceremonial bone be placed on the table, she went out to the backyard and fetched in the family dog's chewed-up bone. One year she attempted to ban Christmas from the house. (I cannot remember whether my sister and I overcame the ban that year, or only the following year.)Lesser, Wendy is the author of 'Room for Doubt ', published 2007 under ISBN 9780375424007 and ISBN 0375424008.