Mannheim

by Erika Dreifus

I did not cry the first time I went to Mannheim,

when my father and I studied the nameplates

listing the residents of the building on Ifflenstrasse

where his mother had been born, and grown up.

The building she left one April day in 1938, just in time,

and had never re-entered.

I did not cry even when the current second-floor residents

invited us to visit,

and I stood in the high-ceilinged rooms where my great-grandparents had

withstood the Kristallnacht.

In fact, in the photos my father snapped

to show my grandmother, back in Brooklyn,

I am smiling.

I did not cry the second time I went to Mannheim,

when my father and mother and sister and I

toured the city

armed with Grandma’s handwritten maps

and visited the shiny new synagogue.

So much blue.

From the hotel we telephoned Brooklyn

before driving away on the Autobahn.

The third time,

the train from Stuttgart stopped.

I descended to the platform.

And the signs read,

Mannheim.

This time my grandmother was gone.

Not just from Germany.

But back in New York

her namesake

had just arrived.

I blinked a few times.

Bit my lip.

Stared at the sign, and swallowed.

And then I walked, fast, through sunbaked streets,

straight to the department store

where I bought the baby a sweater

and tiny socks

before I hurried back to the train station.

DIASPORA

-Erika Dreifus

Rain delays my flight an hour. Another. Other flights are canceled.

Diverted. I wait for my plane to Columbus, Ohio, where the elder

daughter of a second cousin will be called to the Torah as a Bat

Mitzvah in the morning. I wait, despite the storms and the

announcements and the overcrowded Delta terminal in New York and the

additional holdup after boarding as thunder rattles the commuter jet on

the tarmac, and in the end, I will arrive safely at the Columbus

Airport Marriott at two-thirty in the morning.

Seven hours later, in the sanctuary of Congregation Tifereth Israel on

East Broad Street, young Talia stands behind the Torah. Her maternal

grandmother—my father's first cousin—recites a Hebrew prayer in the

cadence of the sabra she is. The paternal grandparents chant

together, with the Lusophone inflections of their family's adopted home

in São Paulo, and the entire Brazilian contingent laughs when the rabbi

attempts a few words in Portuguese.

And the rest of us—the aunts and uncles and cousins of varying

degrees—have converged from Canada and California, from Memphis and

Boston, from Raleigh and tiny Williamson, West Virginia, and in our

blood and our bones we've reconstructed here the remnants of our common

home, the birthplace of my father's parents, and the sabra's,

Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles. The mid-October sun

streams through stained glass into the sanctuary, joyful ancestral

tears.

Erika Dreifus's paternal grandparents emigrated from Nazi Germany in 1937 and 1938; this family history has infused much of her writing, including short stories published in Mississippi Review Online, Solander: The Magazine of the Historical Novel Society, Southern Indiana Review, and TriQuarterly, and "Homecomings," a story that won the David Dornstein Memorial Creative Writing Contest. Please visit http://www.practicing-writer.com to learn more about Erika and her writing, and check in with her "My Machberet" blog (http://machberet.blogspot.com) for her notes on matters of Jewish literary and cultural interest.