A scene in Anna Winger’s novel “This Must Be The Place” (Riverhead) is reminiscent of the chasidic story about someone who no longer remembers how to pray — neither the words nor the melody — yet somehow simply recalls the instinct to pray. Two friends descend into a storage area in their Berlin apartment building that had once been a secret Hebrew school for young people in hiding. They light memorial candles for their own lost relatives, and, aware that they don’t know Hebrew prayers, instead sing out the songs they do know, with gusto.
Set in December 2001, “This Must Be The Place” is an urban novel, a love story, a tale of searching for one’s place. There’s much musing about Germans and
Jews, about the past, and about memory and identity. Many Berliners who have never been to New York City wear “I LOVE NY” T-shirts, in solidarity with the city after 9/11. Winger, an American who has lived in Berlin for the last five years, grew up in Cambridge, Mass., along with long periods in Kenya and Mexico and New York City. The daughter of Harvard anthropologists, she picked up their skills of close observation, which she has fine-tuned in her work as a professional photographer and here in this well-written fictional debut.
The novel traces the friendship of an American woman named Hope, who has followed her workaholic husband to Berlin soon after a private tragedy and the events of 9/11, and Walter, a German actor who lives in an identical apartment in the same building. Once quite well known, Walter, who’s now in his 40s and has lost his hair and gained weight, now does the voice of Tom Cruise in films dubbed into German. He has just been dumped by his much younger girlfriend, an actress, and he dreams of America. Their 90-year-old building, with its fading grandeur, is in a once elegant and now gentrifying section of what had been West Berlin. Hints of the building’s history and of the Jewish families who once lived there are whispered about, hidden under peeling layers of wallpaper.
“Most Germans of my generation would love to be Jewish,” Walter tells Hope. “Even just a little. People are always coming up with a Jewish great-grandmother out of the blue ... Everyone wants to identify with the oppressed, not the oppressors, to relieve their own inherited guilt. If you ask, almost everyone here will claim that their own family had nothing to do with the Holocaust, that they were hiding Jews in the basement, or in the attic, or under the bed.”
Hope’s husband Dave, who is Jewish, admits that he likes his Germans guilty. As he says, “They’re nice to me now.” In an interview while visiting New York, Winger speaks of her unexpected love of Berlin, and believes that this is the best moment to live there.
“It’s a city with a complicated history — where you choose how you interact with history every day,” she says, adding, “The amazing thing about Berlin is that in so many ways it’s a Jewish city.” She moved there to join her husband, a German-born television and film producer. When she first met him, about a decade before they started dating, she says that “the idea of being with a German was not something I took seriously. It was so off the charts, not part of my world.” But when she finally visited Berlin, their friendship changed. Much to her surprise, she was struck by how familiar his world was to her own. “Everything about the country really surprised me. You hear only negative things in Jewish America. Actually, the culture is intensely intellectual, people are more open than expected; it’s very urban, welcoming.”
She began writing the novel when she was pregnant with their daughter, when she could no longer travel extensively for her photographic work. In some ways, the novel is an answer to the many questions she was thinking about as an American Jew living in Berlin — and an attempt to explain to her daughter, “a child with mixed heritage, everything that happened in the place where she was born.” Winger’s own Jewish identity has evolved in her years as a Berliner. While living in New York, being American and Jewish seemed so intertwined that she didn’t think much about it. In Berlin, she feels a large responsibility to celebrate Jewish holidays with her friends, and in fact wrote two years ago in the New York Times Magazine about her eclectic Passover seder. In Berlin, she has never experienced anti-Semitism, and instead finds the opposite: a high level of sincere interest among Germans in Judaism. “They’re curious in a positive way,” she says. “You are more likely to have a negative experience in an American yacht club than in Berlin. Of that I’m certain.” She adds, “The fact that they have learned from their mistakes is integral to what makes Berlin so welcoming.” In general, she sees people as “post-guilt, enlightened, well-educated about Jewish subjects. They feel responsible to make their country a better place, and that’s palpable.” She is frequently asked about the Holocaust, and people want to talk, but she doesn’t want it to be their only subject. “I’ve had to make my own peace with the ghosts of history,” she says. Her 4-year-old daughter speaks German and English. Winger is also the creator and producer of “The Berlin Stories,” a new series for NPR. An exhibition of her photographs is set to open in Berlin in 2009. “My hope would be that people would read the book, and it would give them pause to reconsider some of the prejudices they have about the city,” she says. Anna Winger will be reading from “This Must Be The Place” on Monday, Aug. 25, at 7 p.m., at Housing Works Bookstore, 126 Crosby St., Manhattan.
Shelf Life: Late Summer Reading “The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker” by Steven Greenhouse (Knopf) is a timely and important look at the nation’s workplaces through the stories of workers. The longtime labor and workplace correspondent for The New York Times, Greenhouse examines issues of fairness, where economic forces and ethics sometimes collide, income equity, stagnating wages, work/family balance, treatment of laborers, job security and outsourcing jobs overseas, and also provides examples of companies organized around values. He takes the readers into meatpacking plants, midnight shifts at Wal-Mart and corporate offices, and cites the words of Proverbs: “He who oppresses a poor man insults his Maker.”
“The German Bride” by Johanna Hershon (Ballantine) is an uncommon and powerful variation on the immigrant story. The novel opens in 1865 Berlin, when a young Jewish woman marries a German-born merchant and follows him to the American West. Her life as a frontierswoman in rugged Santa Fe, N.M., has nothing in common with her affluent life in Germany, other than the sorrows that inspired her to leave, but her spirit is inspiring.
Lara Vapnyar’s “Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love” (Pantheon), is a collection of five well-seasoned stories featuring the blended romantic and culinary adventures of recent Eastern European emigrés as they adjust to life in America. Following the stories are amusing recipes for the Russian delicacies she mentions, mixed in with stories of her own family.
“City of Thieves” by David Benioff (Viking) is an intriguing novel set during the siege of Leningrad, the story of two young men in a jail cell awaiting execution, who are given a tough assignment as reprieve: In the besieged city, they must find a dozen eggs that can be used for a wedding cake for the daughter of a powerful officer. During their five-day search, they encounter partisans, murderers and the German army. Benioff, a screenwriter, adapted his first novel “The 25th Hour” into a feature film directed by Spike Lee.
“My Life of Turmoil: A Jewish Immigrant’s Story and Warning” by Larry Wenig (Epigraph) is a sequel to the author’s autobiographical work, “From Nazi Inferno to Soviet Hell.” Here, he details his journey after World War II, at age 22, from a displaced persons camp in Austria to life in the Bronx with his family. A successful lawyer, he also offers his analysis of the world situation.
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