Hidden Jews
Growing up as an American Jew in the Chicago suburbs, the notion of having my background be a fundamental part of my identity—one that I was open, proud and assertive about—was not only something I embraced but also the fulfillment of an expectation. As I mentioned in a previous blog, ethnicity is everything in Chicago, and one’s most distinguishing feature was inevitably one’s last name.
From my time in the UK, I knew things were different there, and more different still in Continental Europe, where there is still living memory of the Nazi Occupation and the Holocaust. But until I reached the Netherlands, I had no clue as to how different.
I remember from my days at London Business School one student, “Bert”, who told me this story: “I was in my teens when my parents broke me the secret that I was Jewish. But they told me never, ever to tell any one.”
Over 100,000 Jews disappeared from the Netherlands during the Holocaust. While the inference is that those Jews all died, the figure also includes those who hid during the war…and stayed hidden after the war.
I thought Bert’s story was a rarity. But two random encounters: one a beery exchange at a nearby Delft pub where the tone changed when the subject of Israel came up, the other an online date indicated perhaps otherwise. The stories bore a similarity to Bert’s—both learned of their Jewish origins in late adolescence—with the added element of their respective families attempts to raise them as Christians.
While three cases were hardly a scientific sample of the Dutch population, two other things rang out—that for all those who are aware and willing to talk, there must be some who are neither; and that perhaps many Jews who, having survived the nightmare of the occupation in often dire circumstances because of their Jewish backgrounds, would hardly be inclined to leave themselves and their children so exposed in the future.
This is not a topic that has been frequently discussed in Jewish circles—I watch the Jewish press semi-religiously and the other country where similar stories percolate into coverage most frequently is Poland. While the nature of the issue—the successful hiding and full-blown absorption of Jewish co-citizens—makes it impossible to develop meaningful statistics, the anecdotal evidence indicates that history should consider a kinder treatment of the Dutch, and for that matter, the Poles.
The Hidden Synagogue
Children of Holocaust survivors are not the only Jewish things hidden in the Netherlands. Because the nation’s vaunted religious tolerance in the seventeenth and eighteenth century had its limits, non-Calvinist religious buildings had to be hidden from public view. So, behind a front of classic Dutch rowhouses near embassies and corporate headquarters in The Hague is the 18th century Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, now home to the Liberal Jewish Community (LJG for its Dutch initials).
Joining the LJG has been an interesting experience. My entry was delayed by several months because of the difficulty in scheduling the mandatory interview with Rabbi Avraham Soetendorp, the 40-year incumbent in the role who, unusually for a Liberal rabbi, is a lead spokesman for the Jewish community here despite the larger Orthodox “market share”. When I was finally scheduled, my conversation with the unruly-haired clergyman was quite wide ranging, settling on a discussion of the potential of online social networks to reach the Netherlands’ population of “hidden Jews”.
A real challenge, at least from the perspective of attending services, is that my long-cherished Liberal tradition of conducting services in the vernacular does me little good here. While my two years of Belgian Embassy Dutch helps me through a newspaper, a menu, and through further lessons, it’s kind of useless for a stem-winding sermon of the kind Rabbi Soetendorp is known for here.
Quechup vs. Facebook=Evil vs. Good
Most, if not all of you, received e-mail invites for a so-called social network service called Quechup recently.
I want to apologize—to explain what happened—and invite you to join a real social network service that has proven to be fun, interesting, and an outstanding way to reconnect myself to people with whom I thought I’d lost touch forever.
First, the Quechup story. I received an invite from a trusted friend, and, being a social network junkie and evangelist, I signed up. I then made the bonehead move of “checking my address list” against Quechup’s database.
On a decent social network site, like Facebook, checking the address list on a monthly basis has brought me back in touch with people I’d lost touch with. But with Quechup…
…I was actually giving them my address book to use to SPAM my contacts with so-called invitations!
That’s what happened here. I have 1500 people on my list, and when I realised this had happened, there was no way to get a hold of everyone. I can only bulk mail about 200 people at a time, and the fact that I received 30 friend invites, 20 refusals, and ten “what the hell is this” e-mails indicates that the problem wasn’t too widespread.
Please join Facebook
What irritates me about the Quechup episode is that it may diminish enthusiasm for participating in real social networks. Facebook, unlike Quechup, allows you to find old friends, send them all kinds of messages, from e-mails to virtual cocktails to bear hugs to Zidane-style headbutts, to join regional and alumni networks, to form and join interest groups (I belong to groups ranging from Pro-Israel groups to a group seeking to save the job of Tottenham Manager Martin Jol to the Obama for President Campaign to the “People for Pigs’ Rights Society”, dedicated to stopping “the despicable slayings of our little pink friends”.) and to post photo albums, music, and video. I’m listed as “Michael Harry Klein” if you’d like to visit my rather animated profile page—would love to see you there!
De-Luxembourg
When I first crossed into and out of Luxembourg during the 1992 Eurail trip that eventually led me down the road to expatriation, I didn’t give the place much thought. It was dark, and all I saw were city lights and the faint outlines of hillsides and fortifications. And while I’ve seen much in what Luxembourg calls its “Grande Region” (so-called to encourage potential Luxembourg residents to opt instead to commute from France’s Lorraine, Belgium’s Wallonia and Germany’s states of Saarland and Rheinland-Pfalz), I’d never touched down in The Grand Duchy. But, faced with “strong encouragement” from my boss to take at least a long weekend away, and a desire to travel by train to somewhere that didn’t speak Dutch, Luxembourg developed instant appeal.
The train ride was hardly seamless, as the “Benelux Train” on my hour of departure was out with a pulled hamstring, and I had to successfully navigate from the Delft-Rotterdam to Rotterdam-Roosendaal to Roosendaal-Antwerp to Antwerp-Brussels trains. I made my Swiss EuroCity express to Luxembourg mere seconds before it departed Brussel Noord Station. Arriving 6 hours after I departed Delft with luggage and picnic, I landed in the Gare section of Luxembourg City. As it turns out, the Gare district was the only unpleasant area I saw in my four days in the Duchy.
I lucked out with my hotel, arriving at the Hotel Parc Plaza to be amazed at the stunning view of the Petrusse “Valley”, which is actually a plunging 200+ foot river gorge that is Luxembourg City’s defining physical trait. (The place had a wowza breakfast buffet, including smoked salmon, the Duchy’s outstanding Cremant de Luxembourg sparkling wine, served with a view of the Petrusse.) And while most of my time in Luxembourg City was spent in the late afternoons and evenings, involving the usual dining and beer-hopping I normally do in a new city, the city’s spectacular setting and architecture clearly spanning the gallic and teutonic (with nary a netherlandish trait to be found) made for a delightful change of pace.
But Luxembourg City strolling and nightlife were not the highlights. The big highlights were the country’s outstanding intercity bus system, which for $6 offered the ability to hop on and hop off in the many appealing towns and hamlets outside Luxembourg City which are home to the bulk of Luxembourg’s 500,000 residents, and the linguistic crazy quilt that manifested itself in some strange shopping experiences.
Using the bus, I was able to create two one-day itineraries that touched three of the country’s main scenic regions (Luxembourg has startlingly diverse landscapes for a country of its size.) Day 1 was Echternach, a picturesque resort town across the Sure/Sauer river from Germany, where I strolled, drank some local Elbling wine, and crossed the river into Germany, and Ettelbruck, a city forever identified with General George Patton, who had a fatal car accident nearby following the War and whose museum there I visited. Both towns had less than 10,000 people, but both had flourishing pedestrian centers, and abundant restaurant and café choices.
Day 2 was Remich, where I took a boat tour of the plunging Moselle valley, is the home of the Luxembourg wine and cremant (champagne-style sparkling wine) region. Lunch was a phenomenal seafood salad at the riverside Caves St. Martin, which served the tastiest sparkling wine I’d ever had. Luxembourg bubbly is pretty much only available in Luxembourg and Belgium, naturally I schlepped home a bottle.
Arriving at the Remich bus station, I learned that I was but a few minutes away from a bus to Schengen, at Luxembourg’s southeastern tip. Schengen, for my non-European readers, was the village where leaders of the Benelux, France, and Germany agreed to abolish passport checks and establish a common travel zone which now includes most of Western Europe. Schengen was not chosen by accident. Schengen is a kilometer from Germany across the Moselle, and two kilometers to France. Naturally, I crossed the bridge, walked across Germany, walked into France, walked back, and was back in time for a Riesling before my bus returned.
Polyglot Shopping
Aside from the geography, what’s amazing about Luxembourg is the relationship of the locals to language. Luxembourg has three official languages: Letzebuergesch (the local dialect-“LB”), French, and German. Unlike other multilingual countries, ethnicity plays no part in the language piece—the locals move effortlessly between the tongues, and many are passable to highly competent in English as well.
What makes this interesting is that Luxembourg is also a free-fire zone for sellers of products from France, Belgium and Germany, and is seen as part of one or the other for various companies doing business there. So, McDonalds in Luxembourg is provisioned out of Germany and everything is in German. Competitor Quick is provisioned out of Belgium, so everything is in French, with a few traces of Dutch. In supermarkets, different brand treatments of a single kind of toothpaste appear in French (Steradent-Regular Strength) and German (Kukident-Extra Strength), which both otherwise the same packaging and logo.
Most pronounced, however was the market area of the Luxembourg Schouberfouer, which dates to the 14th century. In the market were sellers from across the Grande Region. Interestingly, they sold things popular in their home base—and my enduring memory were the dueling demonstrations for the German equivalents of the infamous “Veg-O-Matic” vegetable slicer, still popular in Germany decades after being passed off as passé in the States.
Battin Extra
Finally, what’s one of my blogs without a beer review. Luxembourg beers are largely an undistinguished lot, mostly clean-tasting commodity lager/pilsners with no profile outside the Duchy. But there was one beer that I thought was terrific—Battin Extra. Battin Extra is brewed by locally owned Brasserie National, which is best known for the mediocre Bofferding Pilsner, and Battin doesn’t enjoy nearly a high enough profile.
Battin is similar to Belgian “blonde ales” and has the fruity spiciness endemic to the class. It also has a balanced sweetness, and very, very mild bitterness. It’s Luxembourg’s only Belgian style blonde, and for what it’s worth, it would do damn well in Belgium.
Until October, that’s FlightKL18!
