It was not unusual to find books in German lying on the streets in Israel in the eighties. Thomas Sparr (Hamburg, 1956) verified this first-hand when he came to the country "in search of adventure and a job", as he admits to La Vanguardia. From the quiet terrace of the Alma hotel in Barcelona, the editor and essayist remembers how on one occasion he saw a neighbor throw away a selected library that had old volumes of classics, including Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, or neither was a first edition of Thomas Mann's Tonio Kröger. The scene seemed so grotesque to him that he could not avoid saving a copy of Meeting in Telgte, by Günter Grass, and a copy of Billiards at half past nine, by Heinrich Böll, which he still has today.
The bookish episode took place in the Rehavia neighborhood, in Jerusalem, which means 'plain of God'. The Yekkes lived there, the Jews from Germany who came to the country, for the most part, escaping from Nazism. But it's been years since Einstein's language was barely heard in those streets, since almost none of those who came to the country from the Weimar Republic or National Socialist Germany are still alive. The language was also reserved for private use and was lost in the following generations, so that “those novels no longer said anything to the Israeli grandchildren and nephews. Hence, they ended up in such a fateful fate. They were the image of an era that was ending”, explains the author, who publishes in Spanish Grunewald en Oriente (Cliff), in honor of the nickname by which this German-Jewish microcosm born under the British Mandate for Palestine was also known.
Beyond the features and language, the way they dress already differentiated them from the rest. In fact, the name yekkes comes from “the jackets they wore, Jacke, in German. Both men and women were always elegant in their dresses, ties, and suit jackets. A fashion that was far from what the residents of other neighborhoods wore at that time, ”says the author. But what truly makes this narrow space unique is that “there is no other place in the world like it. It is not comparable to other ghettos, nor is it comparable to China Town or New York's Little Italy. Rehavia is a historical concept of neighborhood. They are people who, beyond their place of origin, share values, opinions, traditions and ways of thinking, and who also have a common past and destiny. A neighborhood forged by people who fled their country for different reasons”.
It is impossible to talk about Rehavia without mentioning its creator, the architect from Germany, Richard Kauffmann, who emigrated in 1920 to develop residential areas and settlements for the Zionist movement; and to his assistant, Lotte Cohn, who maintained a large historical archive from which Sparr obtained much documentation for his essay. “She was partly responsible for it being planned as a garden city with Bauhaus-style buildings, since she brought plans from Germany with some examples that inspired the new project. What neither of them imagined is how much that area would grow in terms of population, especially during and after World War II, and how much it would evolve in a short time”.
In addition to the day-to-day life of its people, in his book Sparr also points out some curious facts, such as that many of the streets are named after Jewish poets and wise men from the Spanish Golden Age, or that the SS officer Leopold von Mildenstein, Eichmann's predecessor in the Reich Office of Jewish Affairs, traveled there in the early 1930s “to advocate that 'the Jewish problem' be resolved by removing them to their historic homeland. Although he never publicly admitted it, it is fair to say that on this expedition he became fascinated with Rehavia. We know this from Kurt Tuchler and his wife, a Jewish couple who guided him there and who did not lose contact with the officer. Decades later, the son of this marriage told the story of the officer's passage through the country and the filmmaker Arnon Goldfinger captured these experiences in the film The Flat (2011)”.
Beyond providing all this documentation, another of Sparr's wishes is that Café Atara, the cradle of intellectuals in Rehavia during that period, reopens its doors. “It is a utopia, I know. But who knows if this book can help revive it again. Although everything that the essayist writes throughout its 197 pages is one hundred percent true and documented, in that idyllic place he allows himself the license to write a fictional scene: the meeting of various intellectuals, such as the philologist and historian Gershom Scholem or the philosopher Martin Buber, who coincided in the same period.
Did they all find what they were looking for there? "As often happens in life, there were many who idealized a world that did not correspond one hundred percent to reality. Of course, those who escaped managed to survive, and that is already much more than they would have imagined," Sparr concludes.
