Judenstaat Read Online Free

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    Judit’s mother Leonora never understood why she had turned down the promotion. If Judit had real connections, she could have found her a desk job in the National Museum and she wouldn’t have to take the forty-minute bus ride to her desk job at the nursing home. Leonora lived in the Altstadt and could see the museum from her balcony.
    The apartment had been reclaimed by her husband after the war. His family had lived in Dresden for generations, mostly in that apartment. The place was too big, room after room, light bulbs that always needed replacing, furniture under dull plastic slipcovers. Aside from the kitchen and the parlor, it looked like no one lived there anymore, but if she gave it up, Leonora said, who knows where they would put her? Probably across the street from the nursing home. When Judit pointed out that this would eliminate a long commute, her mother shook her head.
    â€œYou don’t know what it’s like out there. Those black-hat parasites spreading out from Loschwitz. You can’t look at the wall without seeing a dozen of their pashkevils telling me to cover my hair and not to show my elbows in the summer.” She switched to Yiddish. “ Imagine if I turned on the light on Shabbos, they’d burn the place down. I’d be a prisoner in my own home. ”
    Leonora had no use for black-hats, but it didn’t keep her from lapsing into their jargon when she got the chance. Like everyone else she knew, she flew the Stripes and Star from her balcony on May 14th and hung on every word of Prime Minister Sokolov’s speeches, but there was still something of the Polish girl remaining, and the Yiddish remained with it. So did some superstitions. Every October, Lenora made a heavy New Year’s dinner of brisket and honey-cake. October was also the anniversary of Rudolph Ginsberg’s death, and Leonora—who believed that only backward Jews went to synagogue—paid a black-hat to say Kaddish for him, purchased a memorial candle at the Chabad House, and visited his grave.
    They met a year after the war. In their wedding picture, Leonora wears a silky dress that had made do for several brides at their Displaced Persons camp in Gorlitz. She had asked Rudolph to find her a German name and he’d chosen a heroine from a Beethoven opera, which she then asked him to spell for her—both “Leonora” and “Beethoven.” In that photograph, she’s skinny and intent—all eyes—clinging to the arm of her abstracted-looking husband like a lemur to a tree.
    Rudolph Ginsberg had never completed his degree in biology before he was shipped off to a labor camp in Riga. By the time Judit was born, he worked in Dresden’s Hygiene Museum constructing displays on the human body, and writing instructive labels on jars of brains and livers preserved in formaldehyde. One of Judit’s earliest memories was of that museum where she opened drawers labeled “Foreign Objects,” filled with oxidized coins and bobby pins, misshapen marbles, most of them well over a century old. They had all been removed from the stomachs of children. As Judit opened drawer after drawer, her father had said, “Isn’t it strange, Judi? Here are all these things the children swallowed, but all of the children are dead.” Nobody else’s father talked like that. Leonora would say, “You’ll scare the child.” But Judit was never scared. She was bewildered. Even then, she knew the difference.
    Rudolph died when Judit was in college. Leonora still kept his chair turned to the window. Neither sat in it.
    â€œSo I take it you’re too busy to visit Daddy this year,” Leonora said.
    â€œI don’t see the point,” Judit said. “It’s not like he notices.”
    â€œI like to make sure his grave isn’t overgrown,” said Leonora, “and the little bush I paid for, nobody watered it. I