An American in Berlin
25 July, 2016
So last time, I called it quits on account of fatigue. This time I’ll try to finish what I started. Last time, I touched on Brussels and Rock Harz. That brings us to…
Italy:
So first of all, let me just say, I fucking love Italy. Every time I go there, I’m smacked in the face with this feeling of, “Oh, yeah, I could totally fucking live here.” This time was no different. I stepped off the plane in Rome, looked around, saw mountains and olive trees, and yup, I could totes fucking live there. But Rome was just the airport. That’s not where we were staying. And I say “we” because this was a group adventure.
The Reader’s Digest version goes like this. My buddy’s parents rented a magisterial villa in the mountains above Sorrento for a week. In their infinite generosity, I and several other friends of the children were invited to tag along, there being plenty of space for everybody. Having all grown up together, it made for a sort of extended-family vacation, so to speak.
To be perfectly honest, at first I was a little iffy as to whether or not I ought to go. There was a part of me that felt like I had already fucked off to Brussels and the metal festival and as a result was already missing the point of why I’d come here in the first place; namely to hunt down a job and get myself here on a more permanent footing.
However, when I brought this to some close friends in order to take their counsel on the matter, they uniformly looked upon as me though I’d had either several head or perhaps just one truly ugly one. ((Quiet down, you!)) “Are you mad?” they asked, independent one of one another? “You have the chance to go to Italy and stay in a house. With your friends. For free. And all you need to do is buy an airplane ticket? If you don’t go, you’re a bigger asshole than I thought.” ((Knowing well the extent to which mine own dear friends consider me an ‘asshole,’ this was really saying something.)) I quickly put aside my hesitations and booked the flight. And this was undoubtedly the right move because…
This place was, and I don’t mean to be crude, but this place was the tits. There was a Jacuzzi. There was a pool on the roof. The view looked out onto the Bay of Naples. Medieval kings might have had bigger palaces, but we had electricity. And a sweet kitchen. And, you know, running water.
Anyway, as you might have already guessed, this was a lovely couple of days. Wine was drunk by the barrel. ((Or would have been, had we been able to secure whole barrels of wine.)) Casablanca was watched. ((I’d never seen it before. (IKR?) )) The Jacuzzi was floated in. Glorious meals were cooked. Friends were outbehanged with. All the finer things in life.
And there was an added bonus this time. Last year, we did the same thing, but in Biarritz (Southwest coast of France). But last year, I was simply a guest, living off the largesse of my friends’ wonderfully generous parents. This year, however, I was able to make a meaningful contribution. They needed to rent a van, in order to accommodate my friends’ mom’s wheelchair. And this being Europe, the van was naturally of the manual transmission variety. And so, the only people who could drive it were myself and the father. Whereupon did I volunteer to offer my services as chauffeur.
And so it was that I found myself shepherding this big old van up and down the narrow mountain roads above Sorrento and through the tight city streets of that city (as well as Naples). It was harrowing and challenging, but also, in a masochistic sort of way, fun. Which is not to say I “enjoyed” it. But it was a pretty cool experience, taken together with the fact that I successfully avoided any kind of collision and kept my embarrassing stalls to a minimum, and largely in places where an experienced driver might nod and say, “yeah, that’s a tough one.”
The point is, when you go to such a luxurious place as somebody’s guest, and partake of the best wine and the best food and are asked for nothing in return, it’s easy to feel like a bit of a deadbeat or hanger-on. The fact that, this time around at least, I was able to make a contribution, which qualitatively made my hosts’ lives a touch easier, was rather gratifying. Well, so much for Italy.
Berlin I:
Oh right, the reason I’m here. When I got back from Italy, I finally settled into my old Airbnb from last year. I’ll come back to this presently. But first, two things from the preceding weeks I’d like to touch on. First, we finally found our metal bar!
Anyone who knows me knows that back home, our go-to metal bar is Duffs, in Brooklyn. Also known as one of my very favorite place on planet earth. For years now, I’ve been going there with Vinny and Joschka. ((At some point, Niki too became part of the Duffs family, despite not being any kind of fan of metal.)) It’s our metal home. It’s where we’ve spent so many drunken nights, only to walk over the Williamsburg Bridge to have “breakfast” at Wo Hop. ((Where I would proceed to drink tea by the potful.))
So for a long time, Joshcka and I have talked of trying to find “our” metal bar in Berlin. Well, we finally found it. I mean, I found it. But we went together to check it out. It’s everything we’ve been looking for. And I found it by accident too. It happened to be on the way from the Airbnb in P-Berg to Joschka’s house. When I walked past it, I knew this would be it. And it was.
When we walked inside, it was dark and Immortal was playing on the PA. There was a Lemmy signed Rickenbacker on the wall and life-sized Uruk-Hai statues standing ominously in the shadows. The tall, hot, skinny, red-headed bartender spoke something like 6 languages. They had good scotch. It was Duffs’ German doppelgänger. Praise be to the Blackland Metal Rock Pub! #Amen
The other thing I wanted to mention was that I found a Jewish bookstore.
*Flashback* Several months ago, I read a book called “Yiddish, a Nation of Words.” Yiddish has always been in the background of my life. Truthfully, I didn’t even realize how much so until I started learning German. Then, all of a sudden, things I’d been hearing my whole life started to make sense. Anyway, something happened when I read this book. It woke in me an interest and curiosity about the language of my ancestors. A language, which btw, was largely dumped when people started coming to America. ((I once asked my Great Uncle Art if his parents spoke Yiddish. His answer: “My father didn’t speak Yiddish. He always said, ‘If somebody spoke to me in Yiddish, I would answer in Yiddish. But I’m an American. I speak English.’” Noble, perhaps. But that’s how you lose a language, people.))
And so, being a ‘language guy,’ all of a sudden, Yiddish jumped up my list of languages I needed to learn. But there was something more than that. And I hesitate to write this, because I suspect it’s going to sound…I don’t know what the word I’m looking for is. There’s probably a Yiddish word. I think I’m going to sound like an asshole here. But I’m gonna write it anyway.
I feel a certain sense of responsibility. See, Yiddish was for a long time the lingua franca of the Ashkenazi Jews. Although it is essentially a dialect of German with a bunch of Hebrew sprinkled in, ((And also a greater or lesser degree of Slavic derived lexemes depending on where it was being spoken.)) it was spoken all over Europe and eastwards throughout Russia. I say “was,” because The War changed all that. Not to put to fine a point on it, but the Yiddish speaking population of Europe was exterminated, or at best, expulsed. With the foundation of Israel, Yiddish was consciously pushed aside – a relic of a humiliating past – in favor of the strong, muscular, ancient and sacred Hebrew.
Which brings me back to my overdeveloped – and probably obnoxious – sense of ‘responsibility.’ In the same way that we want to see Buffalo roaming freely once more over the plains of America, I want to see Yiddish cling to life, grow stronger, take its place, in its ancestral home. I was beginning to have fanciful ideas of sprinkling Yiddishims into my German. Afterall, Yiddish is basically German, and even if it was going to sound “wrong” to German ears, I knew people would understand it. So I was going to be a Jew in Germany. And I wanted to do my part to bring back מאמע לאשן, mama loshen.
*End Flashback* So I found a Jewish bookstore in Berlin, and the website said they had at least a few Yiddish books. I had to check this out. And so I did. What I found was perhaps a little – but not entirely – disappointing. I was, maybe, hoping to find some Sholem Aleichem. And indeed they had some. Translated into German. Damn.
But I did pick up a book of children’s stories, written in the 20’s and/or 30’s in proper Yiddish and yet also with a German translation in the back/front. ((When a book is in both Yiddish and German, which is the front and which is the back?)) So this is another of my new ongoing projects. First of all, obviously, I need to simply get good at reading the language phonetically. That will come with practice and exposure. But I’m hoping that between my knowledge of German and my ongoing Hebrew studies, I’ll be able to read it well enough to get the gist and learn something along the way. Of course, at some point I’ll require some actual instruction, be it from meetups, classes or books. But being able to tap into this on any level right now, connecting with my roots, it’s exciting. And if I can in any way do something, anything, to reclaim what was violently stolen from me, from my people, so much the better. Yeah, like I said, I probably sound like an asshole. So much for Yiddish.
Berlin II:
So here I am, back in Berlin, back in the same Airbnb where I spent two wonderful months last summer. And I’m positively delighted to be back here. I don’t know what else to say, other than that it simply feels like home. My hosts/roommates are fantastic. To wit:
On my first night back, they made me a welcome dinner. ((The main course was lasagna. Now, anybody who knows me knows I’m lactose intolerant. Well, these people know me. Mischa told me he went out of his way to find lactose-free whatever he need. I mean, wow. All the feels.)) And the pretty girl from upstairs was there too. The food was great. The company was great. I was able to keep my head above water, German-wise. Yadda Yadda. I’m not doing a good job of capturing the sentiment here.
I hadn’t seen these guys in about a year. And yet, they were clearly happy to have me back. How do you express how that makes you feel? They made a special meal, they poured me endless wine. We all sat around the table hanging out, eating, drinking, smoking. I brought them a bottle of limoncello from Sorrento, and so we naturally had a schnapps together. They didn’t have to do any of this. They wanted to. And I was so glad of it. I’m only here until the end of August. But I know, for as long as I’m here, I’m in the right place.
And the location is great. Since I’ve been here, I’ve spent afternoons in my old ‘secret garden’ (Körner Park) reading with a beer. I went exploring to the South, where there are trees and parks and cute, pretty little houses. I’ve eaten impossibly cheap yet impossibly good Turkish food. While it’s true that there are whole swaths of Berlin that I haven’t yet seen, nevertheless, Neukölln is my ‘hood. I feel about this part of town the way I felt about Chinatown. There are things about it that are kinda gross. But man, I f’ing love living here.
Berlin III:
One last thing, and I’ll try to keep this short. Saturday was Pride Day here in Berlin. Only they don’t call it Pride Day. They call it Christopher Street Day. Which is awesome. Not only for the obvious reasons, but just as a New Yorker. Like, yeah, we kinda are the center of the universe, ain’t we? All these people celebrating CSD. That’s my Heimatstadt, bitches!
Anja did herself up as Amy Winehouse for the festivities. But both her and Mischa also donned Bavarian-style dress, in solidarity with Munich after Friday’s bullshit. I thought that was pretty fucking solid. Anyway, they went on together, to make a day of it. I went a bit later by myself, simply to check it out.
What a sight. Here’s my overriding impression. I came out the train out the train at Brandenburger Tor. And all you see is happy fucking people. People celebrating, dancing, drinking, having a good time, loving life. Straight, gay, queer, trans – people from every point on the spectrum. And all they’re doing is being happy together. You look at Trump and all the garbage that floats in his wake. All the hate. And how? Why? How ruined a person do you have to be to look at something like this and feel hate?
By way of a coda, there was a lady giving out rainbow Israeli flags. I don’t know the politics behind it, I don’t know the “cause” or the reason. But man, lemme tell you. If there are gay Jews openly celebrating in the heart of Berlin, well, that is some kind of win. Baruch HaShem.