stopover on a journey home, during which I stayed in an airport hotel. Nothing too surprising about that; plenty of people have never been to Frankfurt. Except that my family comes from there.
My great-grandfather Rabbi Markus Horovitz founded the cityâ??s Borneplatz Synagogue in 1882. My grandfather Abraham was born there, as were my father and his siblings.
Rabbi Markus Horovitz
I had never wanted to go to Germany. I insistently regarded Germans en masse as inherently evil â?? a people whose fastidious respect for authority and order rendered them predisposed to embrace Nazism â?? and never mind the ostensible post-war national reckoning. Never mind any nuance, in fact. Todayâ??s Germans still spoke the same language in which their elected leadership had barked out its genocidal orders 70 and 80 years ago. That was enough for me.
My family had fled Germany for England in 1937. I had seen the blurred black-and-white photograph of my great-grandfatherâ??s synagogue ablaze on Kristallnacht in November 1938. There was nothing, I long believed, for me in Germany.
So why did I go earlier this month? I could varnish this, but the truth is that the brief trip originated not in some belated recognition, as I turn 50, that I might want to introduce myself and my children to the German pages of our past, to reconnect with a heritage that predated Hitler. It was, rather, because Bruce Springsteen is touring in Europe this summer; I wanted my kids to see one of his exuberant performances before more members of his band move on to the great gig in the sky (two have died in the past three years); the only time during the tour when I could be sure two of my children wouldnâ??t have matriculation exams was the weekend of Shavuot, and that weekend happened to find Springsteen in Frankfurt.
Read Full Article »