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Iris Dan was born in Bukowina, Romania, in a family of Holocaust survivors. She grew up bilingual (German and Romanian), than studied Romance languages at the University of Bucharest, graduating with an M.A. in linguistics. She has been living in Israel since 1980. She is married, has a grown daughter, and works (quite happily) as a translator from and into a number of languages. From her (existential and professional) Babel Tower she sees the Mediterranean. She has written poetry for as long as she can remember, never publishing any, in the last 15 or 20 years, in English only. Recently she has begun to send her poems on their own way and has been published or is forthcoming in the Voices Israel Anthology, Magnapoets, Poetic Portal, Subtletea, and Poetic Diversity.
The following work is copyright © 2011. All rights reserved. No distribution or reprinting in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author.
Magic Mountain Second-Hand
It is 1995 and we are taking our first overseas trip. Frankfurt am Main is where we land. 15 years ago, we had come to Israel from Eastern Europe, but have never been able to take a vacation. Now we're making up for it, a full month of Germany, France, and Switzerland, not an organized trip, but an independent one, meticulously planned with the help of a Michelin guide, whimsicality included.
So we are in Frankfurt, for two nights only, as we know it's mainly a commercial city, not worthy of a longer visit – and the feeling is weird. It's a mixture of being, at the same time, at home and in an absolutely strange place (in German there are good words for it: heimlich and unheimlich – homely and un-homely, familiar and eerie) – a feeling known to me, at different degrees, from where I was born, and from where I went to University, and from where I now live; though never with this glassy, brittle intensity. The city – the medieval city, it is, absolutely resembles (or perhaps I'm determined to see it so) a place that recurrently appears in my dreams. The cathedral, the first in a long succession of cathedrals we are to see in the course of this trip remains in my memory as the most beautiful – lighter, rosier than all that followed. The Sauerbraten is fabulous. And so on.
We spend most of our time in the Römerplatz, getting just a glimpse of the glass towers (another novelty, but one that doesn't interest me at all), where deadlier business than mere tourism goes on; also a glimpse of poverty, in its progressing degrees. It's shocking to see, at 6 o'clock in the evening, a woman, obviously returning home from work, carrying heavy shopping bags. I can feel the thin plastic handles cutting through her hands. Her face is as wiped out as that of a woman in Bucharest having queued for hours for a bit of food; with the difference that this one has been able to get quite a lot of it, and probably without standing in a queue.
We also see the first homeless people. The homeless haven't yet reached Israel; there aren't even beggars in Israel, in 1995, and I'm proud of it. We in Israel don't enjoy the incredible social conditions they have in Western Europe, we aren't as rich, but at least everybody is housed. The Frankfurt homeless sit around in parks, approach you, ask for a bit of money or for a cigarette. One of them, as it turns out, is covered only in front. His back is naked. I mean, not only his back, but also his behind, and the back of his legs. To this day I cannot imagine how the rags covering the front half of his nakedness stuck to his body; they seemed completely unattached, though they must have hung from something. His skin is bluish-grey, like that of the chickens one could get in Romania, if one was lucky.
Everything is very expensive, but there is one thing I know I must buy: The Magic Mountain in German. The Magic Mountain is – and next to Group Portrait with Lady will remain – the novel closest to my heart. I have read it in a Romanian translation, and want to read it as it came out from Thomas Mann's head directly. On the airport they have a showy, but depressingly low-brow bookstore: not a single book by Thomas Mann in all this expanse of space. Or even by Heinrich Böll, or by Günther Grass. All they have to sell are touristy albums and cookbooks and German translations of Danielle Steel and Harold Robbins and stuff of that kind. I feel personally insulted. They don't carry classics, the woman in charge says. I want to point out that Thomas Mann is not a "classic", but rather a modernist, and Heinrich Böll a postmodernist – but that would be a pedantic remark. Perhaps all writers of some importance become classics as soon as they kick the bucket. I enter two or three more bookstores in the city, with as little success: all elegant and orderly and seemingly well-assorted, but again, no "classics".
When leaving Frankfurt for Koblenz, however, I see a bookstore sign that says "new and secondhand". I tell my husband to stop, and he does; I probably sound very determined. He instructs me to come back a.s.a.p., though, there's no time. Thus, I don't have the leisure to browse around, hardly have time to take in the surroundings. I can only say: this bookstore is an entire matter altogether. It is huge, and seems to be made up of several rooms. It is not sterile, it has an atmosphere. It seems to have struck some right balance, though I cannot say between what and what. At first glance, it isn't clear whether they carry "classics", but I can see some good contemporary authors. Our own Amos Oz is among them, and my heart soars. The bookseller – about him I am able to say even less than about the store. Of indeterminate age, about a head taller than me, and with a beard, I think.
I tell him I'm looking for the Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. He glances at me appraisingly. The Magic Mountain doesn't seem to be in demand, not even in this obviously high-brow store. Vielleicht antiquarisch, he says. Maybe secondhand. Would that be all right? Fine, I say, and mean it. I hope – am quite sure to get – one of those S. Fischer editions of the twenties or of the thirties, in Gothic letters, bound in yellow cloth. My parents used to have lots of these books. I read Buddenbrooks and Lotte in Weimar in S. Fischer editions. My hands remember the graininess of the cover, the shiny smoothness of the spine. The letters so black they seemed in relief. I can almost smell it in anticipation.
The bookseller returns – and says, somewhat embarrassed (or perhaps I make that up) that all he could find was a 1965 edition from the former GDR. It does not have its original cover, it has been rebound, but is in overall good condition. Bitte. The volume he hands me makes me smile. I know its kind. All the bookbinder shops in Eastern Europe must have used this kind of cheap, washed-out blue paper. It says poverty. It says shortage. But the way it has been salvaged also says love and reverence for books, for the "classics" and for the "great literary heritage". Someone must have queued up for it, as they would have done for meat, or sugar, or oil, carried it out of the store with an overwhelming feeling of achievement, of triumph, and taken it to the bookbinder when it began to fall apart.
I also know how it was taught: as a denunciation of bourgeois decadence – the immoral and protracted dying of the rich in an indecently luxurious TB sanatorium, at the expense of the exploited masses (a certainly over-simplistic and tendentious, but not necessarily wrong interpretation, as Thomas Mann had set out to write a satiric novella precisely on this subject, minus the exploited masses). All the figures, all the ideologies hacked to pieces with the primitive tools of Marxist criticism (forget the sharp scalpels of Georg Lukacs or Lucien Goldmann: I'm talking about the axes and pitchforks of the Stalin-Ulbricht-Honecker school); perhaps with the exception of Mr. Settembrini, who would have simply been relegated to the trash can of history for his lukewarm liberalism, for his failure to understand that proletarian dictatorship was the one and only acceptable form of government (I remember a lecture about Alfred de Vigny, given by our dean: how regrettable, he said, that a poet of this stature hadn't put his talent in the service of the working class). Yes, that's how it was. Literary theory and criticism were taught (together with some other highly sensitive disciplines, such as history) in exclusive "academies", where the new elites were formed; where you gained access by being a socially trustworthy element, and by your readiness to prove your devotion to the regime: i.e. by being an informer. The "classics" (including the modernists – inasmuch as they contained some social criticism; the feeling of isolation of the writer could also be interpreted as social criticism) were needed as cumbersome, if inevitable steps leading to socialist realism.
I should be disappointed, but, for some reason, I am happy. The bookseller, I'm sure, feels my happiness, for he smiles back. I hand him the money and our eyes meet. We have made a transaction, we have a deep understanding. He knows who I am, where I am from, why I love the book. He knows I suffer from the European disease. He knows I would gladly escape to a place where learning has no practical purpose, where illness releases you from responsibility – he knows all that, in this fin-de-millénnaire. I know that he knows me, in a sense deeper than the Biblical sense. He is my partner, forever.
In this month of July 1995, Europe, especially France, is hit by a number of terrorist attacks. At the moment of the Pont-Saint-Michel explosion, we are in the area. All the security services are alerted. When we leave Europe, also from Frankfurt, we undergo a rigorous – and embarrassing – search; although we are Israelis, or precisely because we are Israelis. The border control officer makes us open every suitcase, every bag. In my suitcase he finds the Magic Mountain. He leafs through it, almost page by page. Does he think I have hollowed it out and put explosives inside? Or that I'm smuggling whatever one can smuggle in a book? He is extremely surprised. Der Zauberberg, he says. I can feel the incoherent thoughts about crazy foreigners and damned Israelis and German cultural goods going through his head. Does he know that this book, too, was branded as degenerate art? Probably not, he is too young, he has other worries. Then he finds a zipped cloth bag that could hold something more interesting, and unzips it. It contains a small travel iron with foldable we have bought in Frankfurt. He begins to fiddle with it.
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