Judenstaat

Simone Zelitch

Description

It is 1988. Judit Klemmer is a filmmaker who is assembling a fortieth-anniversary official documentary about the birth of Judenstaat, the Jewish homeland surrendered by defeated Germany in 1948. Her work is complicated by Cold War tensions between the competing U.S. and Soviet empires and by internal conflicts among the “black-hat” Orthodox Jews, the far more worldly Bundists, and reactionary Saxon nationalists who are still bent on destroying the new Jewish state.

But Judit’s work has far more personal complications. A widow, she has yet to deal with her own heart’s terrible loss—the very public assassination of her husband, Hans Klemmer, shot dead while conducting a concert.

Then a shadowy figure slips her a note with new and potentially dangerous information about her famous husband’s murder.

Sujets

• The Holocaust
• Israel
• Geopolitics
• East Germany
• Fascism
• Holocauste

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781629637778
• Langue: English

Extrait

Praise for
Judenstaat
A fascinating look at what never was
-Sacramento News and Reviews
Compelling The glory of Simone Zelitch s page-turning alternate history is the uncanny precision with which she has deftly transformed the threads of actual events into the stunning new fabric of her novel.
-BookPage
A daring alternate history noir that imagines a documentarian s investigation into her husband s murder in a post-World War II Jewish state in Saxony.
-Shelf Awareness
Zelitch beguiles us into rethinking the phenomenon of modern Israel in all its wrenching and poignant complexity.
-James Morrow, author of Towing Jehovah
Is the novel s placement of the Jewish state in Germany rather than Palestine a poke in the eye of history?
-New York Times
Also by Simone Zelitch
The Confession of Jack Straw
Louisa
Moses in Sinai
Waveland

E RRATA FOR T HE T OR EDITION
Pages 27 and 145 : The name Theresienstadt was erroneously spelled Thereisenstadt
Page 143 : The opening line of the chapter should read: Un spectre hante l Europe
Page 202 : sandstone was misspelled as standstone
Judenstaat
Simone Zelitch 2020
This edition 2020 PM Press
First published by Tor Books, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62963-713-6
eBook ISBN: 978-1-62963-777-8
LCCN: 2019933024
PM Press
P.O. Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
pmpress.org
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Cover by John Yates/ Stealworks.com
Printed in the USA
For Harold Gorvine, l shem shamayim
C ONTENTS
Author s Note
Map
Historical Timeline
Judenstaat
A S PECTER I S H AUNTING J UDIT
T HE S AXON Q UESTION
T HE B ATTLE O F T HE L ANGUAGES
A NGELS A ND D EMONS
T HE A GE O F R EASON
T HE D YBBUK
T HE B ORDER
J UDENSTAAT
Helpful Notes
Acknowledgments
Alternative History and Historical Amnesia
MysteryPeople Interview with Simone Zelitch
About the Author
Author s Note
O NE MORNING, I W AS LYING IN BED WITH MY HUSBAND, AND I A SKED, W HAT IF A J EWISH STATE had been established in Germany after the war? The very idea is a provocation, yet I continued to consider: If the founder of Political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, was right when he wrote Der Judenstaat in 1896, and the only answer to what he called the Jewish Question was a Jewish state, then what if that state had been established on German territory as a kind of national project of reparation and even retribution for the Holocaust? How would that shape its history, politics, and national character?
The result is the imaginary nation of Judenstaat, founded in Soviet-occupied Saxony in 1948. My novel is set in 1988 as that country approaches its fortieth anniversary. There is no single model for Judenstaat, but a reader will quickly find two parallels: Israel and East Germany, each founded within a year and a half of each other just after World War II. I borrow freely from the trajectory of both countries. The rough timeline of Judenstaat on the pages that follow is intended to provide a historical overview. In the back of PM s paperback edition, I ve provided notes that clarify where I ve adapted, altered, or utterly invented history as I went along.
There is no simple, single answer to the Holocaust-or as they say in Yiddish, the Churban. Certainly, the answer s not a Jewish state. As will become apparent, answers interest me far less than questions, and the question that most shaped what you re about to read is not national, but personal: What happens when you lose everything but have to go on living? Who do you become?
We all know suffering is real. But in the end, all countries are imaginary.

Historical Timeline
O VER THE LAST FEW DECADES, THE HISTORY OF J UDENSTAAT HAS BECOME, SHALL WE SAY, DISPUTED territory. The timeline that follows, taken from materials approved by the National Archives in Dresden in 1987, might serve as a foundation for some readers.
1908-1938: Birth of Leopold Stein in Munich. Theoretical and practical basis of Jewish state in Germany established through Stein s travels through his homeland and interaction with Jews throughout Central and Eastern Europe. Alliance with Socialist Labor Bund in Poland and Lithuania. Rise of fascism in Germany.
1945: Liberation of Germany and its conquered territories by Allied forces. Stein meets in Yalta with Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin and gains informal approval of plan to establish Jewish homeland on territory of Saxony bordering Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia.
April 4, 1948: The nation of Judenstaat established.
1948-1950: Occupation of Judenstaat by Soviet liberators, and loans for rebuilding of capital in Dresden and other major urban centers financed by the United States.
1949: Population transfer of Saxon-German fascist sympathizers across the Brandenburg border to Germany. In-gathering of Jews from Displaced Persons camps in Germany, and neighboring Central and Eastern European countries, most notably Chasidim and other strictly religious Jews. Small Saxon minority remains.
1950: Against opposition from Yiddishists, German declared national language of Judenstaat.
1951: Stein s advisor, Stephan Weiss, unmasked as U.S. agent and flees the country. American businesses barred from Judenstaat. Campaign against Cosmopolitanism begins, coordinated by the Ministry of State Security.
1952: New Parliament completed on site of the old Cathedral in Dresden. Bundists voted into power by an overwhelming majority.
1953: Stein suffers stroke on the flight back from Joseph Stalin s funeral. Successors cultivate closer ties with the Soviet Union. Factories and businesses expropriated. Further emigration of Saxon population into Germany.
1953-1956: Saxon fascists based in villages and hillsides attack civilians throughout Judenstaat, staging night raids in major cities. Area along Czechoslovak border, formerly known as Saxon Switzerland, a base for terror attacks on Dresden.
1956: Fascist cells are broken through a network of informers coordinated through the State Security Police. Leaders are deported or imprisoned. In response to reports of weapons funneled from Germany, the Brandenburg border sealed and the Protective Rampart constructed.
1957-1967: Period of relative stability. Growth of Bundist Youth Movement, Bundist culture, discovery of important archeological evidence of Jewish settlement in Saxony.
1968: Judenstaat Defense Force joins Soviet army to defeat fascist uprising in neighboring Czechoslovakia. Reactionary and Cosmopolitan elements in Judenstaat initiate misinformation campaign that leads to domestic upheaval. Universities closed; coal miners strike; general curfew. Ringleaders apprehended and order restored.
1968-1980: New policy of liberalization opens trade with the West.
1983: Helena Sokolov of the Neustadt Party elected prime minister. Judenstaat gains status as a base for banking and trade.
1987: Country prepares for Fortieth Anniversary celebration.
Out of this universal feast of death, out of this extremity of fever, kindling the rain-washed evening sky to a fiery glow, may it be that Love one day shall mount?
-Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
When you leave a graveside, you mustn t look back.
-S. Ansky, The Dybbuk
A S PECTER I S H AUNTING J UDIT

1
GERMANY was the birthplace of Jewish culture. A thousand years ago, we planted roots in Ashkenaz that flowered and brought forth the fruit of the Enlightenment embodied by the fabled Moses Mendelssohn and the Age of Reason.
THE CATASTROPHE-the great CHURBAN-which recently befell the Jews of Europe has demonstrated with new urgency that THE RIGHT OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE TO A HOME IN GERMANY IS IRREVOCABLE.
WE DECLARE that from this moment, the 14th of May 1948, under the establishment of Allied Forces, that the German territory once designated Saxony will henceforth be JUDENSTAAT.
PLACING OUR TRUST in the future, we affix our signatures to this proclamation, and commence with our national project. The very place we faced our death is where we ll build our lives.
Thus, the ghosts of 1948 surface on the editing machine in black and white montage: washed out faces of survivors, signatures on a declaration, flat-bed trucks, a lot of rubble. No audio. Given all the footage Judit had to edit for the Fortieth Anniversary Project, it was easy to roll through the film and make her cuts. And somehow, she was supposed to find something explosively prophetic, something worth keeping. Not this old stuff. The heavy feeder cut and spliced, and the cells floated somewhere else.
But those cells weren t the specter haunting Judit. It was her husband s ghost. That specter stretched its long legs on a work bench, and leaned in to watch her. Its gray eyes were assessing.
Judit said, I know what I m doing. There had been a time when she d been too self-conscious to address the ghost, but Hans had been haunting her for three years.
The ghost of Hans Klemmer never spoke, but its presence worked on her as sharply as her living husband s. It engaged her in a phantom conversation. It didn t like those cuts; it took a hard line against editing. It noticed things she didn t, like cells littering the floor, and it took stock of those cells as though she were an executioner. Every time she cut a frame, she slit a throat.
It isn t what they re after, Judit said. Everyone s seen the footage of the signing back in secondary school. How could silence not feel like rebuke? She could only say, I don t have time for this. I m on a deadline.
But Hans was dead. Maybe she could shake off Hans K