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A Jewish Newcomer in Berlin (2000)

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We, being the first arrivals in Berlin, didn’t have to undergo any of this. Only one prick in our home came to grief, and that was Mischa’s. Berlin’s Jewish community discovered our settlement in Marzahn and invited us to dinner every Saturday. Their attentions were lavished on the younger emigrants in particular. Cut off from the outside world, and lacking a knowledge of the language, we led a fairly isolated life in those days. The local Jews were the only people who took any interest in us. Mischa, my new friend Ilya and I went every week. A large table was always set, with a couple of bottles of vodka waiting for us. There was not much to eat, but everything had been prepared for the occasion with loving care.

The principal of the community liked us. Every now and then he’d want to give us 100 marks, and insisted we visit him at home. I didn’t accept the money, because I realized that what was involved was not friendship pure and simple, though I found him and the other members of the community likeable. But they were a religious community in quest of new members. Once you enter into a relationship of that kind, sooner or later you are expected to give something in return. So on Saturdays I stayed in the home, roasting chestnuts in the gas oven and playing cards with the pensioners. My two friends, however, kept on going to the community gatherings and delighting in the presents they were given. They became friends with the principal and lunched at his home on several occasions. One day he said to them: ‘You have shown yourselves to be good Jews, so now you have only to be circumcised and everything will be perfect.’ ‘Forget it,’ Ilya shot back, and was gone. Mischa, who was of a more thoughtful disposition, stayed. He was tormented by his conscience on account of the cash he had accepted and the friendship of the principal, so now it was he who atoned for all our sins in the Jewish hospital in Berlin. Later he told us it hadn’t hurt at all and even claimed it heightened his sexual prowess.

For two weeks he was going about with a little tube peeping out of a surgical dressing. At the end of the third week, half the male residents in the home assembled in the washroom, hardly able to contain their curiosity. Mischa presented his prick to our view – as smooth as a sausage. With pride he expounded the nature of the operation: the foreskin was removed by laser, absolutely painless. But his prick left most of those present disappointed. They had expected something more, and their advice to Mischa was to let this Jewish business alone, advice he subsequently took. Some of the residents in the home were uneasy about the future and returned to Russia.

At that time, no one could understand why the Germans were choosing to accept us, of all people. In the case of the Vietnamese, say, whose home was also in Marzahn, not far from our own, it was perfectly understandable: they were the migrant workers of the East. But Russians? Perhaps police headquarters on Alexanderplatz had misunderstood something when they processed the first Jews, got it wrong, and ever since the worthy officers had been carrying on regardless, rather than admit their mistake? Much as they did when the Wall came down? But, like all dreams, this one was soon over. Just six months later, no more admissions were being made on the spot. Applications now had to be made in Moscow, and then you’d have a year or so to wait. Then quotas were introduced. At the same time, all Jews who had immigrated up to 31 December 1991 were granted refugee status and all the rights of citizenship except the right to vote.

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