Broken in Germany

Where is Rachel? What am I doing here?

It was a freezing winter night, and somewhere outside of a nightclub in the city of Lille, I found myself lost, without a word of French at my disposal, stuck in a rented Mercedes-Benz. I felt sick. That could have been either because I was very drunk or because I ate something bad the night before.  Finally I found a restroom and pulled myself together.  Then I crawled into the backseat of the car and watched the sunrise and the people getting up in the morning and wondered what in the world was going to happen to me.

* * *

A very fast and blurry week earlier, I took off from Newark airport.  My friend Rachel had been living in Stuttgart, Germany for more than a year and she had been asking me to visit for a while.  I put it off, even though it sounded like fun and a nice change from life in my Flatbush basement apartment.  There wasn’t any good reason to go.  But after the company I worked for closed down, things seemed to matter less.  I certainly didn’t have much going for me. When the weekends came along I wondered about the chevra, the group of friends that I no longer had, or the family that had totally fallen apart.  The boredom finally drove me to do something that seemed pointless.  Or as they say in Yiddish, without tachlis.

I packed up what I thought I might need for a freezing European winter, booked my ticket on Expedia and off I went. The flight was an overnight one and as I flew across the Atlantic, looking out at the clouds below and the endless expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, I knew that I was going in a new direction. This was not like the ten flights I had taken back and forth to Israel and Germany certainly wasn’t a holy land.

Rachel met me in the airport in Stuttgart, Germany, and she seemed happy to see me.  We drove to the apartment and I passed out. For the next day or two I hung around and got to know Stuttgart and a pretty suburb of Stuttgart that was built like a charming village.

For Shabbos we went to a yeshiva nearby that had mostly Russian students.  They were very welcoming – it wasn’t every day they had a visitor from New York – and we had the Friday night meal and a shiur in Russian afterwards.  Like most shiurim I’ve heard, I didn’t understand any of it.

After Havdala we went for a walk with a student from the yeshiva.  As we passed through the city center he showed us the stones in the pavements memorializing the Nazi victims of World War Two.  Then he asked me pointedly why someone from New York would take a vacation in Germany.

I wasn’t really sure myself.  The trip had been freaking me out.  Germany meant the Holocaust and the Holocaust was something I understood all too well. I lived with my grandparents for several years and their histories cast a constant shadow over everyone’s lives, almost as if there was now little else that Judaism was concerned about other then this horrific act of genocide. So why did I come? I didn’t know the answer, and said something about just wanting to get away and continued walking.

Two days later Rachel told me she wanted to leave on a trip, so I put a few things into a duffle bag, threw it in the trunk and we started driving. We were the three of us: Rachel, the yeshiva guy, and me. It was Chanukah and Christmas and it seemed as if everyone was celebrating something, with so much to do, and so much cheer all around.

As we drove down the A-8 in the middle of the night, listening to Avraham Fried, I felt the rush of my life.  The idea of speeding down a highway in the middle of a country where all of my ancestors had lived and had to escape for their lives, was surreal.

I was driving. Anytime I cut someone off in a lane of traffic they followed us maniacally blaring their horns.  Since we were in a rented car with foreign addresses nobody gave a damn about the speed limit. We were flying.

We drove all the way to France and somewhere along the road between fifty different ideas of what to do next, a lost pocketbook and the GPS giving directions in incomprehensible German I became very frustrated and upset. Moods soured.  Rachel got angry and said she was going take off. Was she serious?

Then at three in the morning, in the middle of a club in northern France, she really did disappear with some guy she met. I didn’t want to get stuck in that crazy place by myself, so I got a hold of the car key to our rented Mercedes and drove off.  I didn’t know if the car was in my name and I was worried that I might be charged in Germany with a stolen vehicle if I drove back there.  Finally, I called Rachel on her cell phone.  We got together and drove back to Germany. It was a much quieter ride this time.

I stayed around Stuttgart for a few days. The students at the yeshiva gave me lots of food and I tried to learn some Russian.  One guy who heard I was from New York gave me his phone and name and begged me to try to help him get an American visa. I said I’d try to help.

By the time I flew home, Rachel and I had made up and were back to being friends. The trip set me back a few thousand dollars, and I was sort of broke after that.  Perhaps I was broken in more ways than one. Visiting Germany I got to see the place where a lot of the pain of the religious community came from. Maybe there was some freedom in that. In visiting Germany on my own terms, even if I came home, still broken.