From the mind of Lenz Alter, age twelve: Where’s the problem? Everyone’s taking sides, von Treitschke versus Mommsen, but it seems to Lenz the two men are in agreement. Yes, it’s true that von Treitschke hates the Jews, while Mommsen only suspects them, but they both advocate the same solution: hatred and/or suspicion will vanish if the Jews become truly, completely German. What’s there to debate, then? Where’s the disagreement? Where’s the conflict?
And given that both of these men, respected and learned men, German patriots, agree that what the Jew must do to become truly German is simply give up Judaism — well, Lenz doesn’t understand why it hasn’t already been done. En masse, as a celebration, a festival. Has a less onerous task ever been asked of a people? It’s not as if he or his father or his uncles or any of the Jews he knows use their Judaism for anything.
Heinrich and Lenz sit at the polished walnut table in the dining room, draperies drawn, observing their usual prandial silence. The new housekeeper sashays in, seventeen if a day, her soup tureen held low by her hip as if she’s a milkmaid coming in from the cow barn. Heinrich observes the excessively long and somewhat perilous arc of her ladle as it carries the hot broth from tureen to bowl. He’s wondering if he should correct her form when Lenz unexpectedly speaks.
“I have a question of philosophy and conduct,” he says.
“Do you?” says Heinrich.
“Oh, my,” says the housekeeper.
“I’ve been wondering, given the general consensus that two of my three fathers cannot happily coexist, which of those two should I please: Chancellor Bismarck or God?”
“I thought Bismarck was God,” the housekeeper says. Heinrich, who likes his housekeepers quiet and reverent especially vis-à-vis Bismarck, decides he will fire this one later that evening. As it turns out, though, after dinner he’ll become distracted rereading his Mommsen and will forget all about her. Then one thing will lead to another, and within a year he and the housekeeper will be married, and Lenz will have a stepmother a mere five years older than himself, which will require extensive revision to the fantasies he’d been enjoying since she arrived.
“It’s not a matter of either/or,” Heinrich says. “In this house we stick to our own flag. You’re a Prussian Jew who does what I say. And thus do your fathers coexist.”
It’s not until the next evening that Heinrich suddenly puts down his knife and fork and says, as if no time has passed since Lenz brought it up, “I’ll say only this and I’ll say it only once. Convert, and you no longer have this father.” He picks up the utensils again, attacks his dinner, the only violence life allows him.
The man who practices nothing of his faith clings to it nonetheless. It makes no sense to Lenz; it never will. For now, though, he backs down. “I didn’t say I was going to convert,” he mutters. What he wants to say, but can’t, not yet, is that if he converts, yes, he may lose Heinrich. And of course this Yahweh he’s heard so much about but has never really been introduced to — he would also go by the boards. But Lenz wouldn’t be completely orphaned. He’d still have the best of the lot.
Sometimes we picture it carved into the bark of a tree:
Otto von B. + Lenz A. = true luv 4-ever.
1890
From the article “Appropriate Dress for Dancing the New Knickerbocker” by Alan Dodsworth, Dancemaster:
Many ladies are wearing the instep skirt for the evening dance, while others still cling to the long sinewy train. But those who wear the train for round dancing are advised to hold it up. . for to drag a train around the ballroom endangers the life of the gown, not to mention the lives of the other dancers.
Death by ball gown. Iris Emanuel wants no part of it. Anyway, you just have to look at her to know she’s an instep skirt kind of girl. The abbreviated hemline, the show of her boot. It makes her look a little taller, a little bit slimmer. Not that she cares about that sort of thing. What she cares about is that the short skirts allow her to peek at her feet while she’s trying to master a new step at Frau Geist’s. She also enjoys the new fashion’s ability to offend the type of woman who clings to the train — Frau Geist, for instance.
“Charmingly! Delicately!” Frau Geist, elderly now and fatter than ever, still wears her garish yellows. She bangs the floor with a cane. “Daintily, daintily! And here comes the glide!”
“And here comes the groom,” whispers Iris’s dance partner, her sister Lily.
Iris looks to the door. There stands Lenz Alter in his Prussian blue reservist uniform, chest out, shoulders squared, head held high. Iris lets go of Lily’s waist so she can wave to him. She hasn’t seen him since he left for university three years before. After completing gymnasium, he’d gone to work in the dye factory, just as he’d told her when they were children, where he’d implemented some sort of clever innovation that caused some sort of unmitigated disaster that resulted in the loss of a full day’s production of synthetic crystal violet. His father had fired him and sent him to Berlin, which was where he’d wanted to go in the first place. There he studied chemistry, but only for a single semester. Next he’d gone to Heidelberg, where he lasted a mere summer. Now he’s finally making something of a go of it at the Technical College of Charlottenburg.
Even before he left Breslau, Iris had run into him only rarely. At parties or concerts they flirted in the parlors of mutual acquaintances or in the lobbies of theaters, leaning against walls softened with velvet damask. They discussed politics and the sciences. He liked to talk Goethe — she had outgrown Goethe long before — but she’d been happy to listen, to ask the occasional question. Eventually, though, he would bow (exaggeratedly, facetiously), kiss her hand, and return to whomever he’d come with, a different girl every time, but always a girl prettier than Iris and simmering with jealousy in a corner.
He’s here on his own now, and only Lily’s simmering. Lily holds on to Iris firmly, twirling her overenthusiastically. Focusing on keeping her balance prevents Iris from breaking away and heading to Lenz at once. When the music stops, Lily takes Iris’s arm and escorts her to him, an attempt to control her sister’s pace. But there’s only so much Lily can do. “Unteroffizier Alter,” Lily says, nodding at him, setting an example, but Iris cries, “Lenz!” and that’s it for propriety and restraint.
He beams at her. He kisses her cheeks. He’s taller than she remembers, though he remains a short man. Still, she’s now the one who raises her chin to meet his eyes, which are deep brown with golden spokes, pretty enough to help her overlook his less felicitous features: the light brown hair already thinning and receding, but what’s left of it so densely curly it grows upward like a shrub; the bridge of the nose so broad, so prominent, so Jewish, that his pince-nez seem a size too small, ready any second to lose their grip and spring into the air.
She doesn’t mind his plain looks, though. She’s charmed by his enthusiasm, by how glad he is to see her. “This is the last place I thought I’d run into you,” he says. “I thought you were banned from dancing years ago. Just like a Catholic on Good Friday.”
“It wasn’t dancing our father minded,” Lily says. “He just didn’t like her coming home talking of marriage at the age of six.”