Today I was reading the poems of the Pittsburgh Jew, Gerald
Stern, whom I had once met, several years ago. His distinctive, cantor’s voice rung
in my head as I read - and I took so much joy from his words and
from the personality revealed through his words that I couldn’t help thinking
again of Count Van Aefferden and the
bitterness which had twisted his brain and curled his lips towards the end of his
life.
I had served him a number of times as a bookseller and had
always been struck by his good manners, curious of his German aristocratic
title “Graf” coupled with the Dutch “Van”. His accent in English was
unmistakably German – a language I had adored and had taught myself to a feeble
leaving cert standard, spurred on by my love of the writings of Kafka and Paul
Celan.
I remember the bizarre experience of my first time in a cake shop in Konstanz in
1983. How odd it seemed to use a language which had up to then been holy for me,
because of its association with the poems of Paul Celan, how odd it seemed to
use it for the daily commerce of purchasing pastries and so, words which had
always seemed holy, seemed now as greasy as the brown pfennigs sliding about in
the till.
Later, in my bookseller days I was always curious about German
customers and spriched a few words ein paar worter with them whenever I could.
The Graf became fond of me, appearing, in retrospect now, to overlook my black
hair, my brown eyes. He must have been approaching 80 at the beginning of this century, his
hair in a silver sidecrease, his blue eyes too rheumy to be ice-like. His diminutiveness, the way he wore his hair,
his kind of glasses, his gentleness all reminded me of my mother’s father – the
dead grandfather I still loved, even after he curiously denied the Jewish heritage
all the family was proud of.
After a number of pleasant encounters, one day the Graf came looking for Thomas
Kenneally’s Schindler’s Ark.
I’m looking for Schindler’s Ark,” he announced, “I’ve
looked in the history section but cannot find it."
I told him how it was
written in the form of a novel so we kept it in the fiction section.
“Ah the fiction section”, he said. “Of course that’s where
it belongs.” He spoke in a playful tone of voice, but the words raised the hair
on the back of my neck. My front was turned to him and I
genially asked:
“Oh so do you think the Schindler story is a little over-romanticised?”
“Oh yes,yes,yes,yes,yes,” he said.
“So you don’t believe it’s all true?”
“Oh, No. No,no,no,no.”
“Which parts do you think are untrue?”
“Oh all of it.”
“All of it?”
“Yes all of it.”
I knew if I revealed my true feelings he would stop revealing his real opinions.
“So you don’t believe in the holocaust?”
“Oh no.”
“You don’t believe six million Jews died?”
“Oh no not six million”.
I thought of the Bible's words ‘To save one man is to save the world’ which I had learned from
the writings of Isaac Bashevis Singer.
“Of course if just one million died that would still be
quite a lot.” I said.
“After the war there was hunger there was typhus, people were dropping like
flies,” he said.
“So you don’t believe there were gas chambers or ovens?”
“How could there have been ovens? There was not enough coal to burn in German
homes. Zyklon-B was for exterminating lice – I myself was gassed with Zyklon-B. It’s
just a story made up after the war so Israel could get money out of the
Fatherland.”
He denied the holocaust so reasonably, dismissed the Shoah so lightly as one
does a fairytale after all your milk teeth have gone.
“I myself was in a camp.” He said.
“You?” I said.
“Yes until 1948.”
“In the Soviet zone?” I asked.
“No the British zone.”
I wondered to myself what class of criminal the British kept locked up for
three years after the war had ended. He said the war had been terrible for him.
He bewailed his stolen youth. As Leonard Cohen might have asked where were the
horns? How come no green saliva? I asked him if he had fought on the Eastern Front. He said, no, the Western Front. I asked him what branch of the Wehrmacht he had fought with. He said the parachute regiment. I asked him if he had fought in Crete and he shook his head and seemed evasive in body language. The conversation came to an end.
I maintained the professional relationship that day, the
habit of years of needing to, before the various varieties of monster which presented themselves in the guise of customer. But he was soon returning to me with leaflets printed by
neo-Nazi groups. Months passed and he became more agitated, his personality was
affected. One day he asked a colleague to show him an encyclopaedia. As she did
so a page fell open on Einstein and the Graf’s index finger swooped on
Einstein’s photograph like a Stuka.
“This book is no good that man is a Jew!”
After that I maintained no front and presented my raised hackles to him. One
day he wanted to order a book only available in America. The chainstore I
worked for was going through a period when orders to America were curtailed. I
told him I couldn’t get it for him. When he protested I said there was nothing I
could do, I was only following orders. He persisted several times I repeated the
phrase ‘I’m only following orders,’ until he declaimed:
“I am a good customer of here.”
A crowd had gathered,
confidentially I gathered him close to my face and uttered softly, so softly: “Ja,
aber wir haben auch viele gute Kunden die Juden sind.” (Yes but we also have many good customers who are Jews.)
He looked as if he were in the early stages of spontaneous combustion. After
that day I never saw him again. I went
through several stages of grief with him, astonishment, anger, hatred. Today so
many years later, reading the poems of Gerald Stern, drinking in Stern's
affability, I pitied the Graf Van Aefferden, pitied him that he should deny
himself such simple joys in life all because he hated Jews.
What true Mensch could dislike
Gerald Stern or deny himself the pleasure of his poems?