The Latest at Goethe

Hannah Amir and Ilana Shmueli belong to a generation whose passing will mean the passing of the old European heritage in Israel. They are proponents of German poetry. They and the Goethe-Institut organize literature evenings together in an attempt to build bridges between generations. By Evelyn Runge


“We are the last remnants of European immigration and we are dying out,” says Hannah Amir. She is sitting in her one bedroom apartment at the L. A. Mayer Residence in the heart of Jerusalem. Coffee, biscuits and chocolate are on the glass coffee table in front of her. The walls are decorated with pictures she painted herself: bright yellow fields, black mountains, a landscape of blossoming almond trees. She still carries the land of her birth inside her. The German language and German literature are ties that were never severed.

The Goethe-Institut takes advantage of it to convey the immigrants’ wealth of experience to their progeny. They never wholly abandoned Europe and European culture, says Amir. “We brought it with us, you can’t take it away from us – that’s what differentiates us from others of our age.” Yet, today’s Europe is different. “The world was far smaller and slower. Today, people talk fast, they fly, the use computers.” Hannah Amir was born in Berlin in 1919. Until 1933, she lived with her parents and siblings near Kurfürstendamm. Her childhood was not easy; her parents were strict. Her father was a renowned construction engineer, who worked for the likes of Peter Behrens. “We weren’t brought up religious, but my father was a Zionist and very frugal,” relates Hannah Amir.

The immigration of German-speaking Jews, according to historian Gideon Ofrat, was a very special kind of immigration. “More than the earlier immigrants to Palestine, who mainly came from Russia and Poland, these immigrants had a distinctive relationship with European culture.” The Jews immigrated from Germany, Austria, Romania and Bukovina – from towns some of which are located in the Ukraine today – and brought with them “a wave of German culture, German cultural upbringing, German cultural awareness” to 1930s Palestine.

Thinking and living in German as an Israeli

The ship that brought Hannah Amir and her family to Palestine embarked on 2 November 1933 and sailed from London via Marseille to Haifa. In the summer of 1938 she met her husband Yeheskel in Palestine. After the war, he and partners took over a business for automotive spare parts. They were married for 49 years. After the death of her husband, Amir learned reflexology, shiatsu and painting. “I went to the university of life and none other.” She returned to the German language late in life. “I think in Hebrew, I spoke Hebrew with my husband, I speak German with my older sisters and only Hebrew with my younger brother.” She has fun with the German language. Expressions like “Da bin ich überfragt” were not used in her day. “And the word ‘Telefonat’ touched me in a comical way – what’s that supposed to be? It’s neither French nor German.”

The phone rings, it’s Ilana Shmueli who lives in an apartment on the same floor. Ilana Shmueli and Hannah Amir both moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem about ten years ago. “For a long time, the idea of being an Israeli but thinking and living in German,” she explains, “was an inner conflict and a schism, a linguistic exile – I’ve never gotten over it.” It took a long time until she began to feel she was an Israeli. Immigrants today have an easier time of it than she did in 1944. “We came at the last moment, not because we wanted to, but because we had to. That was not welcomed, nor was hearing German welcomed,” says Ilana Shmueli. “I spent most of my life learning to feel at home in the Hebrew language.” She describes her German as “archaic, but it’s the language in which I dream, think, feel.” She also spoke German with her husband Herzl and her mother. She impressively describes this “European inheritance” and her life in her book Zeitläufe – ein Brief (2009). She was born in Chernivtsi in 1924 to a family that spoke German. Her mother came from Vienna and her father owned a furniture factory. “He was a Zionist – not kosher politically – and, as a factory-owner, a capitalist.” When she was six years old, she met Paul Celan (Antschel), four years her senior, while playing table tennis. Her mother discouraged contact between them. “He lived on the wrong street…”

Poets’ circles

The family lived in the ghetto and in a residential district allotted to the Jews in Chernivtsi from 1941 until 1944. “Those years, oddly enough, were to be the most incredible, perhaps even the most important formative years of my life,” writes Shmueli in Zeitläufe. “They awakened thinking, feeling, hearing and seeing in me,” for in a group of friends and artists, among them Paul Celan and Rose Ausländer, she read her own poetry and discussed philosophy.

Ilana Shmueli’s family escaped in 1944. They travelled from Constanța to Istanbul “in a Bulgarian transport ship for chickens; it was a very dangerous voyage.” From there, they travelled over land to Palestine. Ilana Shmueli was placed in a British refugee camp near Haifa. She later studied music education, social science and criminology in Tel Aviv. She worked with criminal juveniles and trained social workers for 25 years. In 1965 she met Paul Celan again in Paris and promised to show him Jerusalem. In October 1969, Celan travelled to Israel – for the first and last time in his life – and Ilana Shmueli guided him through her Jerusalem. In ensuing letters, Celan enclosed poems: his Jerusalem cycle. After Ilana Shmueli retired at the age of 60, she took translation courses and began to translate poems – including poems by Celan – and to write poetry herself. In 2004 Shmueli published her correspondence with Celan at Suhrkamp and in 2009 she received the Theodor Kramer Prize awarded to authors writing in a context of resistance or exile.

For many years, Shmueli has been a member of Lyris; the title is short for Lyrik aus Israel. The poets’ circle was founded in 1982 by Annemarie Königsberger; members read their own poems, written in German. Other members of Lyris include Eva Avi-Yonah, Manfred Winkler and Haim Schneider, all of whom were born in Europe and immigrated to Israel. Every two weeks, Ilana Shmueli and Hannah Amir go to the Goethe-Institut Jerusalem together for the literature evening Heine erlesen with Jakob Hessing. The course has more than 20 participants, most of them women, and is held in the reading room and teachers’ room where the ceiling-high bookshelves hold both Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Perfume by Patrick Süskind. The literature course reads and discusses Heinrich Heine’s poems and the text of The Rabbi of Bacharach. “How can the rabbi abandon his congregation?” is the question most focused on this evening.

For many years the literature group met privately in the home of Ada Brodsky, holder of a 1994 Goethe Medal, who translated Rainer Maria Rilke’s poems into Hebrew. Since the summer of 2010, the group has been meeting at the Goethe-Institut and the number of participants doubled.

No lightweight parcels

Nonetheless, bringing young and old together remains a highly important goal for the Goethe-Institut. As the lingua non-grata, German is still not taught at schools although over 70,000 people in Israel have German citizenship. Thus, the generations often remain isolated. “The older people have a linguistic skill level that is very hard to attain by younger people,” says Simone Lenz, director of the Goethe-Institut Jerusalem. The knowledge and the stories of the older generation are in jeopardy of being forgotten. Last year, in cooperation with the Yad Vashem memorial and German schools she therefore initiated the project Keine leichten Pakete (no lightweight parcels). There was a time when the Goethe-Institut was virtually besieged with book donations, most of the lovingly kept books that had been brought from Europe at the last moment or were carried to Israel under great hardship. The most significant of them are now being sent to German schools for history classes in small, but precious book parcels containing biographical texts about their former owners and their personal reading habits.

Although German is still often “identified as the language of malefactors,” as Simone Lenz says, change is perceptible. “Every year, more than 300 students learn German at the Goethe-Institut Jerusalem. Berlin interests and fascinates people. Even those who only plan to travel there for a few days and not for a semester what to learn the language.”

The map of Berlin committed to memory

It was difficult for Hannah Amir to return to the city of her childhood. In 1995 she went back to Berlin for the first time, 62 years after emigrating, together with her daughter. “I was very unhappy. I had the feeling I was walking under a bell jar: nothing could reach me.” She remembers a Jewish hospital and a demonstration by German women demanding their Jewish husbands back from the Nazi regime. “Back then, I was very unhappy in Berlin,” says Hannah Amir, “horrible that there were people who calculated how many Jews can be burned.”

Amir still has the map of Berlin committed to memory. When she returned once again in 2004, she was disappointed by the Kurfürstendamm. “The west is aristocratically impoverished and the east is warm and bubbly.” She still feels a yearning for old Europe here in Jerusalem. “There was a different Europe before the Second World War and I carry that in my heart,” says Hannah Amir. “But I am completely at home here. Israel: that is my home. I live the country and I breathe the country even if I am unhappy with the politics and the orthodox people.”

The article appeared in the Goethe-Institut magazine on the topic “Wie geht es eigentlich den Frauen?” (How are the women doing?) (PDF).