Archive
05/05/11
Fritz
Earlier today, at one and a half minutes before high noon (Or was it a thousand yesterReich days prior?), I had lunch, in this same restaurant (Where, tonight, I'm bidding my hometown a beery bon voyage), With a highly successful commercial-real-estate developer, A messianically passionate go-getter of a second-generation survivor, Scion of a modestly prosperous ophthalmologist Who emigrated here, to St. Louis, Missouri, in 1936 (Just after the Nuremberg Laws had been crafted and hatched), With none of his less prescient Jewish genealogy — Grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, in-laws.
For the hyperenergized, steal-the-stage, nonstop hour of his soliloquy, I did all I could to muzzle my festering skepticism, My escalating cynicism, my percolating outrage, Listening to his misguided exuberance, unbridled enthusiasm, As he tried to hard-sell me his belief that modern-day Germany (Which he's visited many times, over the past two decades) Has exonerated itself, with triple doses of self-scorn and remorse, Describing his research trips, in quest of his heritage's shreds, In rural cemeteries, small-town town halls, liberated Gestapo archives, Where IBM's Dehomag files of keypunched Juden Remain, intact, alive, neatly organized in once-sealed file caskets.
For an all-too-protracted fifty-six and a half minutes (He'd apprised me, by e-mail, three days before, That he had a 1:20 meeting, 7.2 miles across town, Which he was obligated to attend, under some unwritten protocol, For being chief of the Deutschland Wilkommen Agency), I listened to the spin-meister of reconstituted propaganda Inform me of the absolution of the Jew killers of Lutherdom, That vast desolation located between Hitlerville and Himmlerton, And how all in that Teutonic Eden has been forgiven and forgotten, The country itself been renamed Let Bygones Be Bygones, His family exhumed from the ovens, chambers, ashes, and dust,
Just in time for rejuvenated Germany to issue its highest honors To those Jews who died in the "reckless quest" for Judenrein. Then he was gone, and I was left with myriad fliers, brochures Depicting ornate Orthodox synagogues on the Rhine, Seders being conducted in Berlin's Unter den Linden biergartens, Statues of Konrad Adenauer sporting phylacteries and a yarmulke, Mercedes-Benzes boasting Star of David hood ornaments. With an inexplicably sudden revelation of epiphanic proportions, I realized that my new friend, Fritz, had been sent, by YHWH Himself, To lead me into the Promised Land. And this afternoon, I finished packing my resettlement bag.
05/05/11
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