Das deutsche Gerichtsurteil gegen Beschneidung hat mich schockiert und ich finde es falsch, obwohl ich finde, dass Beschneidung tatsächlich eine Art der Körperverletzung ist.¹ Das Urteil ist ein Fall von religiöser Unterdrückung, was jedoch vielen Menschen in Mitteleuropa offensichtlich nicht klar ist – sogar die Österreicher und Schweizer haben sich dieser Entscheidung angeschlossen.

Um es vorweg zu nehmen: Obwohl ich dieses Thema schwierig finde, bin ich grundsätzlich der Meinung, dass alle kulturellen Praktiken, die die Verletzung von Babys beinhalten, fragwürdig bis absolut widerlich sind. Schon in meiner Kindheit, als skeptischer Junge in einer jüdischen Umgebung, habe ich insbesondere die Beschneidung etwas widerlich gefunden. Ich wünsche mir, dass Beschneidung und alles ähnliche von der Welt verschwinden würde. Ich bin auch dankbar dafür, dass das Thema aufgrund des Urteils jetzt diskutiert wird, auch in Israel.²

Allerdings zeigt für mich das Urteil und dessen Unterstützung ein grundsätzliches Fehlverständnis der Bedeutung von Beschneidung im Judentum.³

Beschneidung, so krass sie als Praxis sein mag, gilt im Judentum schon seit Jahrtausenden als wichtiges, für Jungen sogar als das wichtigste Zugehörigkeitskriterium. Natürlich bedeutet diese Tatsache allein nicht, dass die Praxis gut oder schlecht ist. Eine Beschneidung ist tatsächlich eine ziemlich bescheuerte Art und Weise, sich von anderen Gruppen zu unterscheiden. Ich finde aber, dass man es bei Religionen wirklich nicht anders erwarten kann. Was erst einmal wichtig ist, ist die Bedeutung dieser Praxis, für die von dem Urteil betroffenen Menschen.

Egal wie wir es bewerten, man muss einfach wissen, dass die Entscheidung, einen neugeborenen Jungen nicht zu beschneiden gleichzeitig bedeutet ihn aus der Gemeinschaft, aus der man selbst kommt, zu entfernen. Ein Junge aus einer jüdischen Familie, der nicht beschnitten ist, wird vermutlich nicht nach jüdischem Recht eine jüdische Frau heiraten dürfen, sollte er sich das wünschen.⁴

Das ist alles ziemlich scheiße, weil für uns, die wir einen jüdischen Hintergrund haben, dann die Wahl, es dem Kind ganz selbst zu überlassen, nicht vorhanden ist: wir legen für ihn fest, ob er ein potenzieller Jude ist oder nicht.

Ich wünsche mir, das wäre alles nicht so, aber es ist so. Fakt ist, dass, wenn es mir auch nur ein bisschen wichtig wäre, mein Leben nach jüdischer Tradition zu führen, nach diesem Urteil Deutschland als Wohnort einfach nicht mehr in Frage käme. Selbst ich, so absolut sekulär wie ich bin, mache mir jetzt angesichts des wiederbelebten Gestanks der Intoleranz erneut Gedanken zum Thema. Und das, noch bevor wir über Geschichte geredet haben.

Denn im Judentum selbst ist das ein schwieriges, historisch beladenes Thema. Schon seit über zweitausend Jahren kommt immer mal wieder ein Herrscher, der den Juden die Beschneidung verbieten will. Weil die sturen Juden immer wieder auf ihre Religion beharren, wurden sie früher auch immer wieder ermordert. Damit will ich nicht andeuten, dass Deutschland auf diesem Hintergrund wieder Juden schlachten will – das glaube ich nicht – der Punkt ist, dass dieses Gerichtsurteil im, der Geschichte sehr bewussten, jüdischen Bewusstsein, alte Wunden aufreißt.

Dazu muss man sagen, dass unter vielen Juden, Versuche, Juden von ihrer Religion abzubringen oder insbesondere sie dazu zu bringen, ihre Kinder nicht entsprechend der Religion zu erziehen, mit Genozidversuchen gleichgesetzt werden. Ich finde diese Gleichsetzung stark übertrieben, kann sie aber nicht ändern, und ich kann sie gewissermaßen auch verstehen. Denn dieses Urteil ist nicht das erste mal, wo Juden gesagt wird, die dürfen gerne wo leben, so lange sie ihre religiöse Identität abgeben.

Der Wunsch, Beschneidung nicht mehr in der Welt, oder zumindest im eigenen Land, zu haben, ist ein berechtigter. Dieses Urteil wird aber meiner Meinung nach bei den meisten Juden zwei Arten Reaktionen auslösen: entweder woanders zu leben, oder hier zu bleiben und aus Trotz weiterhin Beschneidung zu betreiben. Die jüdische Kultur hätte nicht so lange überlebt, hätte sie nicht den Reflex entwickelt, das Überleben als solches allen Vorschriften der Herrscher als überlegen zu betrachten. Selbst einige Juden, die sich zuvor vorstellen konnten, die Beschneidung sein zu lassen, werden nun darauf bestehen. Wer das nicht versteht, kennt offensichtlich weder Juden noch das Judentum.

Die inhaltliche Bedeutung einer Aussage ist oft eine andere, als die Bedeutung der Aussage selbst, in ihrem Zusammenhang. Das Urteil, Beschneidung mit Körperverletzung gleichzusetzen, ist inhaltlich richtig, durfte aber trotzdem nicht gemacht werden, denn es bedeutet schlicht und einfach, dass Juden und Moslems nicht mehr in Deutschland willkommen sind – solange sie drauf bestehen, weiterhin Juden bzw. Moslems zu sein.

Dieser Post wurde von Sabine Günther korrigiert, wofür ich mich herzlich bedanke.

Kommentare, in Englisch oder in Deutsch, sind unten herzlich willkommen, insbesondere anderer Meinung. Kommentare, die ich subjektiv als rassistisch empfinde, werden nicht veröffentlicht – ich bitte die Verfasser dieser Kommentare, ihren Rassismus woanders zu äußern und mir (per Mail) einen Link zu geben.

[Englische Übersetzung beginnt / English translation begins]

Ignorance and bris

The German court ruling against ritual circumcision – outlawing it as a form of unnecessary bodily harm – shocked me. I think it’s the wrong decision, although I actually do think ritual circumcision is a form of unnecessary bodily harm.⁵ The ruling is a case of religious oppression, but this is apparently not clear to many people in Central Europe.

Before I even start, I should make something clear: although this is a very difficult issue for me, I do basically believe that any cultural practice which includes harming babies is at best questionable, usually repugnant. In my childhood, as a skeptical boy in a Jewish environment, I was already disturbed by circumcision. I wish circumcision and everything like it would cease to exist in this world, and I’m thankful for the court ruling insofar as it’s instigated discussion about this, even in Israel.⁶

Nonetheless, the ruling reveals a fundamental lack of understand of the meaning of circumcision in Judaism.⁷

Jewish circumcision – crass a practice as it may be – has, for millennia, been an important criterion for belonging; for boys, perhaps the most important. This alone says nothing to how good or bad it is, of course. It’s actually a pretty insane way to differentiate yourself from other groups, but I don’t think one can really expect much better from religion. The important thing is only the meaning of the practice for those affected by the ban.

No matter how you choose to judge it, it’s crucial to understand that the decision not to circumcise a newborn boy means, at the same time, to decide to remove him from the community you come from. An uncircumcised boy from a Jewish family, I think, will later not be able to marry a Jewish woman by Jewish religious law, even if he wishes to do so.⁸

It’s a pretty shitty situation. Those of us from a Jewish background don’t actually have the choice to let our boys decide on their own. We face the decision of either deciding that our boy can potentially be every bit as Jewish as he wants, or that he can’t.

I wish it weren’t so, but so it is. Fact is that if it were even just a little important to me to live by Jewish tradition, Germany (and Austria, and Switzerland) would no longer be places I could see myself living in. In fact, even as thoroughly secular as I am, the reanimated stench of intolerance makes me have second thoughts already. And all of this before we even touched on the history.

You see, in Judaism in particular this is a difficult, historically loaded topic. For over 2,000 years already, Jews have been confronted, again and again, with some ruler who wishes to stop their circumcisions. Because the stubborn Jews repeatedly insisted on sticking to their religion, they used to be repeatedly murdered. I don’t mean to insinuate, that Germany will return to the wholesale slaughter of Jews on this backdrop – I don’t believe that’s the case whatsoever. The point is simply that this court ruling reopens old wounds, wounds which all Jews remember well.

I also have to add that for many Jews, such attempt – attempts to get Jews to abandon their religion, and especially to get them to stop raising their children as Jews – are seen as a form of genocide. I find the comparison highly exaggerated, but I can’t change the way people feel, and I can even understand it a little; after all, this ruling is not the first time that Jews have been told they can live somewhere so long as they relinquish their religious identity.

The wish to see circumcision gone from the world, or at least one’s own land, is a fair wish to have. However, I believe this ruling will trigger one of only two reactions amongst Jews: either we’ll live somewhere else, or we’ll stay here and circumcise our sons out of spite. The Jewish culture would not have lasted this long if it did not have the reflex of seeing the survival of the culture as overriding any ruler’s decrees. I imagine that even some Jews who might previously have considered avoiding circumcision for their sons might now insist on it. If you can’t understand this, you clearly know neither Jews nor Judaism.

What you say is often something different from what it means that you said it. The ruling is correct in stating that ritual circumcision is unnecessary bodily harm. But a German court should never have said such a thing – the fact of the statement, in its context, means very simply that Jews and Muslims are no longer welcome in Germany – so long as they insist on continuing to be Jews or Muslims.

Thanks, Colin, for the suggestion that led to this post’s English title!

Comments in English and in German are most welcome, especially those disagreeing with me. However, any comment I subjectively consider racist will not be published. I ask those whose comments I do not publish to publish their comments elsewhere and email me a link.

Footnotes

1. Man kann sich aber natürlich auch fragen, ob man also nicht auch das Rauchen in der Schwangerschaft strafbar machen will, und sogar das Essen von industriell aufgezogenem Fleisch.
2. Ein Beitrag auf Englisch zum Beispiel hier von Larry Derfner.
3. Wie es im Islam ist, kann ich nicht genau sagen – es folgt hoffentlich bald ein Beitrag von einem muslimischen Freund dazu.
4. Ich kenne mich mit diesen Einzelheiten nicht aus, da ich mich nie mit der Religion identifiziert habe, aber soweit ich weiß, müsste der Junge sich dann konvertieren und auch beschneiden lassen, und würde danach noch immer für viele Juden nicht als wirklich-echt-ganz-100%-jüdisch gelten.
5. But while we’re at it, why aren’t we banning smoking during pregnancy, or even the consumption of industrially-grown meat?
6. For example, see what Larry Derfner wrote.
7. I can’t really speak for Islam, but I will hopefully soon have the pleasure of hosting a guest post by a Muslim friend on this topic.
8. I should point out that I’m not very knowledgeable about the details, mainly because I’ve never identified with the religion. But if I’m not mistaken, the boy would have to go through the process of conversion, including adult circumcision, in order to marry that way – and then many Jews would still consider him not really-truly-totally-100% Jewish.

I can understand this sentiment quite well. Some five years ago, Y. gave me a ride in his car; his self-definition as a male was new to me at the time, and indeed I had never had to deal with this situation before. I knew that Y. wished to be seen and treated as a man, and wanted to respect that, but it took me a lot of effort to start using the male gender for him.¹ I remember sitting in the passenger seat, struggling with awkward silences, and trying to figure out how to speak to him, until I finally got a male “you” out of my mouth.

Today I have only minimal difficulty respecting the self-definition of the transgenders. I also expect other people to respect their self-definition, as I expect people to respect self-definition in other aspects of identity. How is the case of Y. different from my self-definition as an Israeli? After all, just as Y’s biological gender contradicts his self-definition as male, so does my American citizenship (from birth, via my mother) contradict my self-definition as Israeli.

There’s something incredibly arrogant, even obnoxious, about refusing to respect another person’s self-definition. People seem to recognize this more easily when it’s an entire group’s self-definition that is in question – Israelis take offense at someone denying our view of Israel, or Jews, as a community with a distinct identity; Palestinians take offense at someone denying their self-definition as a nation. The examples of groups getting furious about others denying their group identity are endless (Basques, Afrikaner, and French Muslims come to mind). Yet the same is also true in reverse – it is awful to be persecuted for belonging to a group you do not identify with, as some Europeans with Jewish ancestors discovered under the yoke of Nazi fascism.

As anyone who has ever had a crisis of identity will know, changing your self-definition is not an easy thing, and few people are able to do it on a whim. If a person whose genetic heritage says “female” or “Jew” decides they are “male” or “Muslim”, you can bet on it being important to them, and you can count on them having come, in some way, to the conclusion that the new label is more appropriate to them as a person. Ultimately, as an outsider, you cannot know better than them which label fits, and presuming to do so – even with excellent evidence – is insulting and degrading. It is to say that their self-knowledge and self-determination is of less importance than your knowledge of their background.

Again, I understand that it’s difficult to adjust to changes in the self-definition of others, even when you don’t know them (as in the case of my acquaintences’ comments about Y.) It is especially difficult regarding transgendered individuals, probably because being openly transgendered is a relatively new thing in Western societies, and because the conventional, ancient view of gender is as a completely inborn, unchangeable property. The idea that gender labels are entirely a social construct – albeit one influenced by a basic biological fact – is a very difficult idea to swallow. I find it counter-intuitive. But I also consider it intellectually undeniable – though I lack the ability to explain it properly and convince you it is so.

Be that as it may, gender labels are just one example, and my main point remains: hard as it is, respecting an individual’s self-definition is just basic decency, and refusing to respect it is indecent and offensive. I have to stress that I am not writing this to condemn or attack anybody. I acknowledge the difficulty involved, and only want to argue for the importance of making the effort to observe this basic, though unconventional, decency. Comments are open if you wish to dissuade me from or berate me for my deviant view of decency – discussion is welcome, as always.

Footnotes

1. It’s important to note that in Hebrew, there are two different forms of singular “you” – one for males, another for females. The same applies to other pronouns, like “your”, as well as to verbs, like “like” – so I can inflect the sentence “Do you like hamburgers” one way for addressing a male (ata ohev hamburgerim?) and another for addressing a female (at ohevet hamburgerim?), but I have no way of leaving the sentence neutral as it would be in English.

I just got back from Leipzig’s #globalchange festival/demonstration. At one point, I noticed two guys holding up an Israeli flag, and went over to ask what that’s about. It was the only national flag present and I wasn’t sure what it was doing there. “We’re here to provoke,” said one of the guys. “This demonstration is structurally anti-Semitic.” The idea, of course, is that a demonstration with anti-elite, anti-banker sentiment is anti-Semitic, whether the demonstrators know it or not. I tried to argue against this odd rhetoric, but he quickly said he doesn’t want to discuss it.

These counter-demonstrators are, I gather, anti-Germans. This is a movement considered to be left-wing and anti-fascistic, with a commitment to unconditional solidarity with Israel. The paradox of the “provocation” I witnessed is that this was the only mention of the “banking=Jews” stereotype I could detect in today’s demonstration, or indeed in all of the Real Democracy Now activities that led up to it in the past half year. It seems to me like the anti-Germans were the only ones bringing anti-Semitism into the demonstration. It annoys me to no end that they weren’t open to discussion, and this post is my attempt to say what I would have told them if they were willing to listen.

I recently read a pamphlet titled “The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere”, a fascinating guide to understanding and combatting anti-Semitism targeted at social change activists. It can be found online [PDF] and I highly recommend reading it, especially if you are involved in any kind of movement for social change. It makes the crucial point that anti-Semitism is:

“a divide-and-rule strategy that has served to maintain ruling classes, conceal who actually has power, and confuse us about the real systems of oppression that pit us against one another.”
(Chris Crass, Quoted on a now-defunct website hosting the pamphlet.)

Historically, rulers and ruling elites have used anti-Jewish sentiments to deflect the anger of the oppressed masses towards a relatively powerless group (Jews). In a way, it comes down to rulers explicitly or implicitly fostering the belief that the Jews, not the rulers themselves, are the problem.

What those anti-Germans were trying to do today was the same in reverse – delegitimizing an expression of legitimate grievance against the ruling class by claiming it’s an illegitimate expression of intolerance against Jews. This makes me pretty angry, I have to say. If I had detected any anti-Semitic sentiment or rhetoric from the demonstrators, I would go berserk. But I felt very comfortable at the demonstration, felt it was a matter of global solidarity, explicitly inclusive to me (with my irrelevant Jewish background) and to anyone else. The first thing that made me uncomfortable there was the anti-Germans with that big Israeli flag. How dare they insinuate that the German banking system is controlled by Jews? Where the heck did they get that idea?

You know what, I don’t actually know the names and backgrounds of any major German bankers. And I don’t need to. We were demonstrating against the absurd situation in which Europe and the world are in crisis yet the number of millionaires in Germany has only increased. We were demonstrating because we’re told things are going to get hard and we have to live in fear of economic collapse while those who were involved in creating this mess have nothing to fear and they continue to control much more wealth than the rest of us. Even if it so happened that 99% of German bank owners are Jewish, this wouldn’t have been an anti-Semitic demonstration.

Speaking out against someone who happens to be a Jew is not anti-Semitism. Speaking out against “the Jews” or attacking someone because they’re a Jew is anti-Semitism. Is those anti-Germans’ approach supposed to somehow protect Germany from a resurgence of anti-Semitism? Seems to me like at the very least, it muddies the waters and creates confusion about what is or isn’t anti-Semitic, making it easier for real intolerance to fly in under the radar. Even worse, it can actually re-enforce anti-Semitism by suggesting that speaking out against the powers that be is speaking out against Jews – supporting the false equation that “(the) Jews” are responsible for the power structures we live within.

There. I think I got it out of my system now. Has anyone else encountered similar situations, where people meaning to fight intolerance end up implicitly encouraging it?

Deep breaths. I just finished reading an article on Ynet, by Guy Bechor, titled “A Middle Eastern lesson“; it was shared by Peace Now on Facebook to “give insight to Israeli fears”. That it does. It also gives insight into a romantic populist world-view, forged of myth and nationalism, in which countries are populated not by people, but by peoples (German: Völker), embodied by their leaders (German: Führer). And while writing this imaginative nonsense, he manages to call those who would strive for peace “gullible”. Deep breaths.

But let’s start at the beginning.

Fable

Bechor begins with a fable of Aesop’s… Something about wolves and sheep and dogs. This is a good way to start, as it puts the reader in exactly the mindset needed to believe Bechor’s hysteria. There are three kinds of players in Bechor’s world: the wolves, who are really bad, the sheep, who are just helpless, and the dogs, who are not wolves and no simple sheep, but can at least defend themselves.

(BTW, is this fable the original version of the allegory in Team America, where it’s “assholes”, “pussies” and “dicks”, respectively, in exactly those roles?)

Genius

Having set the stage, we now go on to discuss the actual complex realities of one of the most politically difficult regions currently to be found on our planet. Except there are no complex realities, since Bechor is so much more intelligent than us morons.

Allow the genius to teach us the ways of the Middle East: it boils down to Arabs being brutal and violent, and Jews and Christians having to create heavily-armed nation-states to defend themselves. I kid you not, ladies and gentlemen! At last, Bechor has revealed to us the simplicity of the Middle East, and there it is, in one sentence! Thank me later.

Facts, of course, are irrelevant. In Bechor’s world, things are simpler, and more fantastic. In Bechor’s world, Christians are being “butchered” in post-revolution Tunisia and Egypt (citation needed). In Bechor’s world, what’s happening in Syria is about Arabs killing minorities. There is no context, there are no politics to speak of, just a people being evil.

Sin

What Bechor does here is, to me, an immense sin. Like certain Führers of times gone by, Bechor sees the world as composed of peoples, acting as united wholes. There are Arabs, there are Christians, there are Jews. Wolves, sheep, and dogs (his words, not mine). Never mind that someone can be an Arab and Christian at the same time, that kind of complexity is incompatible with this simple, simple world. It is divided into nations, these nations are in some kind of eternal struggle, and, hence, they need armies. End of story.

What’s worse, when it comes down to choosing who represents these nations, again Bechor sides with evil. It is the Assads and the Mubaraks and the Ghaddafis and the Ben Alis, and their paid thugs, who show Bechor’s “true Middle East” — not the masses of people, oppressed by those asshats for decades, who finally take to the streets, put their lives on the line, and demand their freedom. Not the soldiers and officers who defect or desert when ordered to fire on civilians. No, the Führer is the nation, and the people must follow.

Excuse me while I throw up.

Morality

But if all that weren’t enough, of course Bechor must also paint the Left as a dangerous enemy.¹

[…] outside elements – and to my regret domestic elements as well – try to weaken the IDF via needless commissions of inquiry, incitement and criticism, propaganda, and an effort to taint the army’s moral prestige.

I don’t know, Guy, don’t you think the army’s moral prestige might also be tainted by soldiers trashing houses, systematically humiliating civilians and prisoners as a kind of sport then (sometimes) posting photos on Facebook, or firing white phosphorous on residential neighborhoods? Don’t you think that being put in the position of policing an occupied, largely civilian population, with mainly just combat training as preparation, might be having some ill effects on the army’s morality as well? Don’t you think commissions of inquiry might help make sure soldiers stick to the IDF’s moral code, and incidentally increase its moral prestige by proving it can take scrutiny? And most of all, is a reputation for morality really more important than actual moral behavior?

I don’t know, man.

Truth

The Middle East is a difficult place to be. Bechor is right in that the dictators’ response to the Arab Spring is revealing. It reveals the dictators’ true colors to anyone who had a doubt.

Yet the revolutions themselves are revealing a reality that should have been clear, but is clearly lost on Bechor and his ilk: the Führer ist not the Volk. The people under dictatorship are not represented by their so-called “leaders” — they are their victims.

Rivers of blood flow through the Middle East, as usual. This is a difficult time, and even more difficult is to guess what comes next.

But the basic and obvious reality — one which I’ve incidentally heard from at least two Arabs I’ve spoken with here in Germany — is that peace is in everyone’s best interest. Most Israelis know it, on some level. Most Arabs know it on some level. And finally, we may just see some governments in the Middle East which strive for everyone’s best interest, and not just the interests of the dictators and the elites behind them.

Footnotes

1. Fun fact: Dachau, the first German concentration camp, was built just weeks after Hitler took power, and its first inmates were German lefties, imprisoned for being in the opposition.

After my previous guest post Beware: Adult Content generated a high volume of traffic to Michael’s blog, he invited me back, and I will be contributing occasionally (even though we both know what really drove the traffic surge were the key words “adult content”). As I end my visit to Leipzig I offer you a piece I wrote during a previous visit two years ago. It is long.

My German Manicure

By Shoshana London Sappir

I am ushered to a downstairs room in the beauty salon. The manicurist, walking a step behind me, says something in German about “links.” My mind flashes straight to Dr. Mengele on the platform. Links – left –means life. Rechts – right – means death. She wants me to take the seat on the left, I realize. I sit down.

“English?” I ask. She struggles with the words “only a little,” giggles and shrugs. I answer with a big smile, trying to convey: “Don’t worry, we’ll be just fine.”

The woman, in her mid-forties with dark-framed glasses, brown hair tied back in a pony tail and a white smock, places a folded white towel on each of my knees.  Then she places a deep bowl of soapy water in front of me, signaling me to dip my fingers in the holes. While we wait, she asks me in German where I live. I figure it out from the word “haus.”

“Israel!” I answer, gleeful with comprehension. “Mein kind lives hier,” I explain, mixing English with scraps of Yiddish that float up from my childhood. She understands and asks me if he is a student at the “uni.” I don’t know how to say “sort of,” or that he is starting next fall, so I say “ja,” and add proudly, albeit half in Russian, that he speaks German.

Our conversation is going very well. She asks me to take off my rings and tells me that she has a daughter who is living in London and speaks English. We laugh at the symmetry. We are both mothers of grown-up children who live away from home and speak each other’s respective languages. I ask if her daughter is a student and she says no, “arbeit.” “Arbeit macht frei!” a bell rings in my mind. I know that word!

I am treating myself to some pampering while I wait for my son to get off work at his new job in Leipzig, Germany. He is 19 years old and has lived here for nine months.

I never really saw Michael as an adult before this visit. Last time I saw him, I reminded him to take a sweater and asked him if he had enough money. Now I am his guest, and it is he who is taking care of me: he made me my hotel reservation; he speaks for me when we order from a menu and he even coaches me in manners. He claims I talk too loud when we walk in the street or sit at a restaurant. Funny, in Israel I always thought of myself as the quiet one.

The manicurist takes my right hand in her left and starts on it with an oversized glass nail file. All evidence to the contrary, she makes another attempt to find out if we have any language in common: “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” she tries. “English,” I start counting off on my fingers, “Hebraisch,” she shakes her head apologetically, “Russische” – here I lilt my voice hopefully – it is the former East Germany after all, and if she had paid any attention in school we would have something to work with – but no, she is sorry to indicate; “Spanische,” I continue, and she is by now feeling pretty bad about herself. I sum it up with a shrug and then I remember what I majored in at university. “Arabische!” This just makes her file a little harder.

And it makes me think about the irony of speaking so many languages but being so utterly unequipped to deal with the present moment. I love studying languages and until now I thought I had mastered more than enough of them to serve the needs of one lifetime. Yet here I am, literally speechless. I have definitely been studying the wrong languages. I could just as soon have known German by now. But how could I have known my son would end up in Germany? Conversation has come to a halt; I am staring into space while the manicurist focuses on my hands.

But the dialogue goes on in my head. How did you come to be from Israel and have a son living here? I imagine her asking me. Well, it’s a long story, I say. Actually, his grandmother on his father’s side was a German Jew, but she had to leave because of the war. Oh, that’s too bad, her imaginary voice in my head says, and her glib tone of voice surprises me. She does not sound sufficiently embarrassed, horrified or guilty and I get the feeling she does not know that much about the war. I remember that I read somewhere that the generation of this woman’s parents didn’t speak much about the war, and the post-war generation grew up with a kind of void regarding the past; some of the more eloquent members of that generation – my generation, in fact – tell of a feeling of sitting on a huge secret, knowing there are things you don’t ask about and don’t talk about, and if you are sensitive and conscientious you might find that eerie, creepy and crazy-making; moreover, from what I have heard, the Soviet-satellite East of Germany, of which Leipzig once was a part, did not commit to the same process of self-examination as the West. And as I have already figured out, if she had been a good student she would know some Russian and we would be having this conversation out loud and I could ask her.

But, in the imaginary ignorance I silently attribute to her, she apparently does not share my outrage at her people – maybe even her father, grandfather, uncles, the grownups who raised her, the people who came to her childhood birthday parties – who went all the way to Kaunas, Lithuania, to round up and kill my great grandparents, and my mother’s 11 uncles and aunts, including little Dvosha – my grandmother’s baby sister born in the old country long after she herself left for America – Dvosha, who a surviving cousin told me read Hebrew at four, recited entire Psalms by heart at five and died sometime between the ages of six and nine.

Because the woman filing my nails has only vaguely ever heard of any of these atrocities, I imagine, my resentment growing, they do not weigh down on her conscience, and therefore being a German cosmetician who is doing the nails of a Jew from Israel whose son is a would-be student in Leipzig is not a terribly charged experience for her, and the story I find myself telling her in response to her imaginary question about how my son ended up here comes out different from the one I usually tell myself or people who ask me about it in Israel.

In this simplified version of the story, Michael’s paternal grandmother had to leave Germany “because of the war” – more specifically, directly from Bergen Belsen, but that’s just another place she never heard of, so I won’t complicate things by mentioning it – and he decided, well, to come back. And I think for today we can leave out the part about how in the interval his grandmother was part of founding the State of Israel, how my family moved there from America to be part of the miracle of the return to our Jewish homeland after two thousand years of exile, and that at one time we believed that now that we had our own state we and our children would never want to live anywhere else. All of that may be implied when another Jew asks me what Michael is doing here, here in the land of the killers, of all places outside of our Holy Land, but in this little room in a beauty salon populated by a work-weary woman who is massaging my hands with cream, I will keep it simple, one mother to another, proud of our young-adult children venturing out into the world to seek their futures. Why ruin a perfectly sunny day in May with all those dark memories, unfathomable ironies and unanswerable questions when we just came here to have a little fun?

“Everything okay?” she asks, looking up from my left hand, which she is holding in both of hers and rubbing.

“Everything’s fine,” I smile back at her.

My husband’s Uncle Meir, who unlike his parents and siblings fled Germany before the war, is emphatic about not visiting the sins of the fathers on the sons: “This generation had nothing to do with that,” he told me. So I look at this kind lady and tell myself: “It is not her fault she was born to a bunch of murderers.” Nor was Michael responsible for the dreams of his fathers. He rebelled against the idea that just because he was born a Jew in Israel he had to be religious or Zionist. He is neither.

It pained me when Michael announced that in Germany he felt at home. This is not something I expected to hear from my Israeli-born son. But I suspect the grandmother he never met passed on certain subtle aspects of German culture to his father, who passed them on to him, giving things in this country a familiar, comfortable feel. Before Michael I had almost never heard a Jew say anything positive about Germany: I heard a lot of people say they would not set foot there – including my husband, until he changed his mind – and that they “couldn’t stand the sound of the German language.” Even though Israel has maintained relations with Germany for more than 40 years now, most of the people I know can not resist making a snide comment at the mention of that country. Few met the news of Michael’s moving there with equanimity. For a long time I couldn’t say the name of the country out loud. I would say “my son went to Europe.” One day I took the bus home from my Russian class with a classmate, and she told me she had a daughter who was living “in Europe.” To which I said “I have a son in Germany too!”

Yet, Michael states plainly that Germany’s public civility and cleanliness make him feel comfortable and welcome here, just as much as Israel’s noise and chaos always bothered him.

So you see, I wrap up my closing argument in my imaginary answer to the cosmetician’s question about how my son ended up here, I thought my son would stay in Israel, with us, but he decided to move away and live here, just like young people do all the time, just like your daughter in London, I tell my new friend, although still silently, in my head, as she massages some cream into the backs of my hands.

I am so engrossed in thought that it takes me a while to notice something is amiss. I don’t see any bottles of nail polish in the room. This is not like any of the manicures I have ever had, surrounded by hundreds of colorful little bottles forcing me to make a deliciously agonizing choice. For half an hour my hands have been massaged, peeled and rubbed with cream, my cuticles have been poked and my nails have been filed, but where is this going? When I try to broach the issue, I am so anxious I can’t think of any pseudo-German word for “color” or even “red,” so I try faking it with an accent, coming out with something like “ruhd,” gesturing and lapsing into English: “Where are the colors?”

The manicurist points to a shelf behind me, on which there are six bottles of polish, all nearly indistinguishable shades of bright pink. I ask, in English, if that’s all. Yes, it is. I choose the darkest one, hoping it is redder than it looks, but when she paints my pinky nail it comes out electric pink, and I scream: “No, no, no, forget about it!” This cuts right through the language barrier.

She wipes it off and continues her program of cream, peeling, mask and massage as I try to get over my shock. I try to put a positive spin on my disappointment. I have been having hand pains for some time because I type so much, and maybe, I comfort myself, I am getting just the treatment I need even though I didn’t ask for it. But still, it said “manicure” on their sign and that is what I asked for. Is it possible that the only word in German I had no doubt about, that I thought I really knew, that I didn’t try to cobble together out of fragments of two thousand years of globe-spanning Jewish linguistic history, could the word “manicure” have more than one meaning? Could they take it literally to mean “hand treatment,” without nail polish? Apparently they could and they did and they charged me 25 euros.

I go out into the street staring at my boring, colorless nails in disbelief. I could have filed my nails and put cream on my hands myself. What did I just pay 25 euros for? What is wrong with this country?  When I meet Michael at my hotel I am indignant.

“I can’t believe what just happened,” I begin my rant.

“What’s the matter?” he asks.

“I went for a manicure, at that place we saw the other day, and look, look!” I shove the backs of my hands into his face.

“Yeah, what?”

Boys, I sigh. My daughter would have gasped. “No color! No nail polish!” I spell it out to him. “What’s the point of getting a manicure if you don’t get your nails polished?”

“What a bummer.”

“And it cost me twice as much as it does in Israel!”

“No kidding.”

“What is wrong with these people?” I scream. “You tell me. What kind of people are they?”

“Mom?”

“What?!”

“Come with me,” he says.

And I look at my son, mein kind, this six-foot man with a blond pony tail who makes waitresses blush, this citizen of the world who knows his way around town and speaks the language, and I feel safe and cared for and I follow.

He leads me across the street, holding a hand to my elbow, gently reminding me to watch out for the trams. He takes me to the drug store and for another 10 euros I get my favorite shade of braun.