Flirting with the Devil
“You waved to me from the train, all blond and blue-eyed, your pale skin ruddy from the cold.” This was my grandfather Mordechai as a teenager writing to Trudi, his one great love. His devotion to her overshadowed the love he felt for my grandmother. Indeed, it overshadowed his love of anything else in life. I liken Mordechai to a radio receiver that could only receive one frequency. In his case, the other-worldly signal from Trudi’s brain, an electric motor that generated a signal strong enough to give some people actual headaches. It’s all in the love letters which she and my grandfather wrote to one another.
I emphasize the Russian side of our family, but we are also Feingolds, aus Deutschland. People who came from Germany to Sweden and, eventually, America.
Rosa, my Mutter, passed away a year and a half ago. In liquidating her estate, I have come upon a lot of greeting cards with the kind of heavy, Jewish decorative art that I learned to abhor in my youth. Arthur Szyk is a modern example of the genre. Among other things in the safe deposit box, there was this crumbling stack of letters tied in brown string. Old, from the Second World War, with German stamps and postmarks from her side and Swedish stamps and postmarks from his, the letters are in Berliner Dialekt. Written in Fraktur script, the handwriting is decipherable, but a bear to get used to. Why mom held on to her father-in-law’s youthful indiscretion, I’ll never understand, other than that she liked Mordechai.
In Berlin on business in the middle of April— Spring in the air— I took the letters with me to a philologist named Siegfried who I found online. Dare I say it? You can find anything in Berlin. I emailed Siegfried a few weeks before my trip and was amazed to receive a ready and rapid reply. He would see me. He lives on the second floor of a tan five-story apartment house on Barfusstraße in Wedding, a block from Schillerpark. Spirited, with a glint in his eye, a white beard and a gnarled face, he is in his late 80’s, one of that strange breed born prior to World War Two.
“Your parents named you Siegfried,” I blurted, shaking his hand vigorously, feeling my face go red. That was the effect he had on me. “Your name means victory and peace,” I added.
“It’s of no importance,” he assured me. “If it bothered me, I would have changed it, but it doesn’t bother me.”
“Oh, okay,” I agreed, watching him close and lock the front door before disappearing into the kitchen to make us coffee. In Germany, coffee is a must.
The walls of his study are filled with German expressionist paintings and woodcuts from the 1920’s. They must be worth their weight in gold! Serving the coffee, he read aloud from several of the letters, chuckling with amazement at their childish sentiments.
“They’re love letters by young people,” I explained lamely.
Siegfried gave me a fuller picture of Trudi’s train ride than I could piece together with my limited German. It was March of 1938. Trudi and her parents were leaving Berlin for Rostock, nearer the Baltic coast, where they spent the war.
Together with online searches, we could also deduce that Trudi’s father, Hans Schmitz, a somewhat overwrought Berliner, worked for the Reichsbahn, the state railway. So he never ended up in the Wehrmacht fighting on the Eastern Front. From his perch on the Baltic Sea, it was easy for Hans to turn a blind eye to the cattle cars loaded with Jews heading east to the concentration camps. A typical railway man, he looked upon politics as a disease and considered Hitler to be his own worst enemy. Hans turned down a promotion to Gauleiter, district chief, because it would have required him to join the Nazi Party. Trudi went to school, where they knitted socks for the troops, collected clothing for the Winter Relief and sent care packages to the front.
Quaint.
Rostock got bombed mercilessly. After the war, it became East Germany’s major seaport.
When Kristallnacht struck in November of 1938, the Night of Broken Glass, a pogrom against the Jews, the Feingolds signed over 95% of their possessions to the Nazis and decamped to Malmö in Sweden where my great-grandfather taught at the university. His expertise was ancient civilizations, which immediately put him at loggerheads with National Socialist mythology regarding swastika sun symbols and the qualities of the so-called Aryan race. The Nazis were only too happy to banish der Professor from the Reich. He was exactly the kind of intellectual Jew who made Hitler’s blood boil.
“Den Teufel,” sighed Siegfried.
“The Devil?” I asked.
“You are American.”
“Yes, that’s right, Swedish-American. Growing up, my parents sent me to live—”
“Of course,” he barked, as if broken families were as common as dirt. “What interests me is the current state of America. Do you feel that you are flirting with a devil by allowing Trumpf to run for a second term?”
“Ah… um…” I stammered, caught off guard.
“That’s why I agreed to see you!” he harrumphed, which was okay with me, but unexpected. I took a clunk of cold coffee and gathered my thoughts.
“It’s a case of domestic politics,” I explained carefully. “There are all these politicians pooping…”
“Yes?” he asked, amused.
Thinking in a jumble of German, Swedish and English, I was having trouble expressing myself. “These politicians are screwing around. Chiefly Mitch McConnell, minority leader of the Senate, but yeah, it’s a handful of people who are oblivious to history and afraid of getting shot by Trump’s supporters. Every opportunity they have to put a stop to Trump’s candidacy, like three blind mice, they don’t do it,” I ended with an embarrassed chuckle. Why did I have to bring up mice, for God’s sake?
“What about Biden?” Siegfried asked, making the name sound like two words.
“Megalomania,” I explained. “Egocentricity. Aware of his age, he promised in 2020 to only run for one term. He claimed he was a transitional president, a bridge to the younger generation. But when push comes to shove, his high regard for himself has convinced him that he can win reelection. A nice gramps, but really, really old and doddering,” I concluded. “It’s not that the Republicans are so strong, it’s that the Democrats are so weak.”
“I keep reading that in the German press,” Siegfried replied, taking out a meerschaum pipe and filling it with tobacco from a tin. “Do you identify as Jewish?”
“Very much so.”
“So, what do you think of the war?”
“A tragedy for all concerned, on the ground in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank,” I said, more sure of my opinion. “Hamas is playing the West for fools. First they murder the Israelis and then they stir up pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel sentiment among young people all around the world. They are winning the propaganda war, which sucks.”
“Let’s go outside. I want to smoke,” Siegfried insisted. Standing with me on the front walk, lighting his pipe with a fancy silver lighter and billowing clouds of white smoke, he asked if I had considered moving to Israel.
“I am considering it. I never expected the American public to turn on me, but I am a student of history. I see America reenacting all the same mistakes as Nazi Germany in the 1930’s.”
“I lived through one world war, I don’t want to live through another,” Siegfried declared, shaking his head. “The Russians are breathing down our necks. You Americans need to stop flirting with the Devil and get your act together.”
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