Up in the air

People get emotional on airplanes. Some scientists blame the low oxygen levels at higher altitudes. I think it comes from the emotional ambivalence of leaving one place and approaching another, heightened by the preposterousness of seeing Earth from above.

I got emotional on a flight a few months ago, while reading Cynthia Ozick’s review of the 1996 English transition of W. G. Sebald’s novel “The Emigrants.”

Ozick writes, “It is 1928, and only once in that terrible year, Kasimir recounts, did he get work, ‘when they were putting a new copper roof on the synagogue in Augsburg.’ In the photo Kasimir and six other metal workers are sitting at the top of the curve of a great dome. Behind them, crowning the dome, are three larger sculptures of the six-pointed Star of David. ‘The Jews of Augsburg,’ explains Kasimir, ‘had donated the old copper roof for the war effort during the First World War, and it wasn’t till ’28 that they had the money for a new roof.’ Sebald offers no comment concerning the fate of those patriotic Jews and their synagogue a decade on, in 1938, in the fiery hours of the Nazis’ so-called Kristallnacht. But Kasimir and the half-dozen tinsmiths perched against a cluster of Jewish stars leave silent mark in Sebald’s prose: what once was is no more.”

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Upon returning to solid ground, I requested “The Emigrants” from the Squirrel Hill library. It arrived just a few hours before the start of Passover. In between the last-minute grocery shopping and vacuuming a year of chametz from my car, I dashed to Murray and Forbes to collect the book. By the end of the three-day chag, I had finished it.

“The Emigrants” is unlike any novel I have read. Writing in the first-person, as himself, Sebald presents four long accounts of seemingly real people who fled the European continent in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Through the gradual accumulation of language, images, motifs and themes, these four accounts coalesce, showing how easily a peaceful society can slip into cruelty and how long the echoes of that cruelty can haunt individual people, even many years after they have fled to safety.

And yet, this is fiction. From sentence to gorgeous, wandering sentence, it can be hard to tell what is factual and what is imagined. Heightening this uncertainty are dozens of photographs incorporated throughout the text. These images seem to verify the stories being told, and yet a deeper consideration reveals ample room for interpretation and invention. A photograph may not necessarily show what Sebald claims it is showing.

The longest story is “Ambros Adelwarth.” It follows a branch of Sebald’s family that came to the United States amidst Germany’s economic troubles of the 1920s. In January 1981, Sebald visits his New Jersey relatives, hoping to understand their past.

On the second day of his trip, Sebald sits with his aunt Lina and uncle Kasimir in their kitchen at a retirement community called Cedar Glen West. Kasimir pours a little schnapps and then describes his decision to leave Germany. “In those days … people like us simply had no chance in Germany,” he says. He shows Sebald — and then Sebald shows us — the photograph of the work crew atop the roof of the Augsburg synagogue.

The image is powerful. It suggests a once-amiable ease of contact between Jewish and gentile Germans, and it inevitably foreshadows the horrors to come. In the silence between that ease and those horrors is the bottomless mystery of human capriciousness.

Sebald revisited this image in the poem “New Jersey Journey,” published posthumously in English in 2012: “Drinking schnapps I consider/the ramifications of our calamity/and the meaning of the picture/that shows him, my uncle/as a tinsmith’s assistant in ’23/on the new copper roof/of the Augsburg synagogue/those were the days.”

Does it matter whether the roof was replaced in 1923 or 1928, given the magnitude of what was to come, the “ramifications of our calamity,” as Sebald puts it?

It always matters. For the record, it was 1928. The date is verified by a history of the synagogue published by the Judishes Kulturmuseum Augsburg-Swabia in 2010, in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the rededication of the synagogue.

Ozick pins her comments to the notion that the Jewish community “donated” its roof. This is also just slightly off. In the original German, Sebald wrote “geopfert.” A more precise translation would be “sacrificed,” as for a cause — “opfert,” like “offering.”

Germany mandated these metal donations, called “Metallspende,” amid World War I. It launched the program around 1916 and expanded it through 1917 and into early 1918. An order on March 26, 1918, ultimately confiscated all aluminum, copper, brass, nickel and tin, and so the brand-new roof of the Augsburg synagogue had to be sacrificed to support the war. It was not a “donation” but a patriotic gesture by default.

Reflecting on Sebald’s semi-fictional reflections on the Augsburg synagogue, Dr. Sabine Offe of the University of Bremen wrote, “Concentrated in this brief reference to the patriotic sacrificing of the Augsburg dome are the ambivalences of German-Jewish existence in the first decades of the 20th century, and individual recollection interlocks with collective history. Associated with the donated metal were the hopes, also by the Augsburg community, of civic and social recognition as Jews and as Germans … But the idea of the integration of Jewish and German traditions projected here onto the building was already illusory.” As proof, she cites a census of Jewish soldiers conducted by the Supreme Army Command in 1916. It was an effort to shame Germany’s Jews for non-service. When the census revealed high Jewish enlistment, the results were suppressed.

Reader, you’ve patiently waited some 955 words for a sign of Pittsburgh, and now it arrives. The year after Uncle Kasimir installed a new roof on the Augsburg synagogue, the congregation welcomed Rabbi Ernest and Annette Jacob as its spiritual leaders.

The following year, in March 1930, the Jacobs had their first child, a son, Walter. Walter Jacob survived the Nazi era, fled to England and then America, was ordained, and then devoted nearly 70 years to a rabbinate at Rodef Shalom Congregation before his death last fall.

Ozick summoned the “fiery hours” of Kristallnacht in Augsburg in theoretical terms. She knew they had happened but felt no need to know how. We know: The Jacobs lived on the synagogue grounds. Walter watched the destruction and its aftermath.

Just as Sebald couldn’t shake the image of his uncle on the synagogue roof, Jacob clung to an image from that day. As community elders handled their charred Torah scrolls, a local milkman stepped through the rubble to deliver the milk. “No one was supposed to go anywhere near our apartment house,” Jacob often recalled. “But he did.”

That small act of resistance became part of Jacob’s motivation for returning to Germany in the 1970s and 1980s, stepping through rubble of history to rebuild liberal Judaism in his homeland. An early milestone came with the rededication of the Augsburg synagogue in 1985. Ozick suggests it had been destroyed. Almost every synagogue in Germany was destroyed that night. In fact, the Augsburg synagogue survived. The Nazis had extinguished their own fire to protect other properties on the crowded main street.

The power of local history is the pressure it exerts from below. Knowing the history of your community can collapse the distance between your one small life and the great, wide world. The encounter between local and global often creates tension — not so much about the facts as about the tone and the focus and the significance of those facts.

Sebald and Ozick are aiming for big truths. They don’t need to reckon with all the little details to assert the grand meaning of those years. The little details exist for us. They carve an opening into world history just large enough for the average person to enter.

Like the German Jews of the 1910s and 1920s, we are living through tremendous “ambivalences,” to borrow Dr. Offe’s term. It can be hard to know where we stand.

The story of the synagogue roof is true. The story of the milkman is true. Humanity inexorably lives both at once: forever damned, forever redeemed. This is why I got emotional at 30,000 feet: knowing we each decide which story will carry us farther. PJC

Eric Lidji is the director of the Rauh Jewish Archives at the Heinz History Center and can be reached at rjarchives@heinzhistorycenter.org or 412-454-6406.