Lev Raphael grew up loathing everything German. A son of Holocaust survivors, haunted by his parents’ suffering and traumatic losses under Nazi rule, he was certain that Germany was one place in the world he would never visit. Those feelings shaped his Jewish and gay identity, his life, and his career.
Then the barriers of a lifetime began to come down, as revealed in this moving memoir. After his mother’s death, while researching her war years, Raphael found a distant relative living in the very city where she had been a slave laborer.
What would he learn if he actually traveled to the place where his mother had found freedom and met his father? Not long after that epochal trip, a German publisher bought several of his books for translation. Raphael was launched on book tours in Germany, discovering not so much a new Germany, but a new self: someone unafraid to face the past and transcend it.
Raphael, Lev. “My Germany: A Jewish Writer Returns to the World His Parents Escaped”, University of Wisconsin Press, 2009.
Peeling Back the Layers
Amos Lassen
I don’t have a favorite writer but I do have a list of favorites. There are two authors’ works that make me run to the bookstore whenever I hear that there is something new out. One is Andrew Holleran and the other is Lev Raphael. Raphael stunned me with “Dancing on Tisha B’Av” and each of this books sits in a proud place on the bookshelves above my desk making them easily accessible. I spend a lot of time investigating Jewish and gay issues and Raphael admirably deals with both and dealt with them at a time when few others would touch them. Now he has a new book and I read it hungrily as it also touches another pet interest of mine—the Holocaust.
Raphael, himself, is the son of Holocaust survivors and so he has a special bond with it. He, like so many of us, grew up despising everything German. I can even remember my first trip to Germany and how uncomfortable I was there. I had to go because I had to face my own fears. Unlike Raphael, I was not haunted by my parents’ sufferings as my parents were Russian and Rumanian but like him I had a great deal of trouble whenever I thought of what the Jewish people lost during the most hateful period in the history of the world. For Raphael, his character as well as his Jewish and gay identities were shaped by the feelings he had about the Holocaust. It is interesting that time does not help buffer the memory of 6,000,000 dead. We see it and we feel it all the time.
I read that Lev Raphael was certain that there was one place he would never visit and it was Germany. However shortly after his mother died and while he was researching what went on during her own world years, he discovered a distant relative who was living in the same city where his mother had performed slave labor. He decided that he had to go to the place—the same place his mother met his father. What he discovered was a new Lev Raphael, a man who could face the past and both rise above it and even begin to accept that it is part of the world’s collective consciousness. Here is a story of yearning to know the past and then being able to heal from what is learned and perhaps even to forgive. He knows what love and hate are and how completely close these two emotions are. Raphael relives for us the sorrows and the soul of the Jewish people and although we may never understand the Holocaust, we can begin to make some kind of peace with it.
We know that our lives are shaped by our memories and our feelings and that who we are is something that comes about because of the way we experience things. Raphael had a threefold identity to deal with—as a Jew, as a gay man and as a son of those who experienced the Holocaust.
Let me put this a little more directly. I had learned about the Holocaust throughout my formative years and I did my fair share of reading about it. I will never forget how I felt after reading Eugene Kogon’s “The Theory and Practice of Hell” or after seeing Millie Perkins in “The Diary of Anne Frank”. However nothing prepared me for sitting next to a woman on a bus in Jerusalem and seeing the numbers tattooed on her arm . When she saw I noticed them, she put her fingers to her lips and made the “shh” sound and whispered to me “Live..now is the time to live...but never forget”. Lev Raphael lived in a house where he was not allowed to forget and he puts his feelings into this beautiful book. As I read it I wept and I smiled and I rejoiced at the beauty of Raphael’s written word. This is not just a book to be read—it is a book to linger over and to savor. I may never be the same having read it.
Raphael has been publishing fiction and essays about children of Holocaust survivors for over thirty years--longer than any other American author.
Peeling Bsck the Layers
