How to Be a Refugee, by Simon May
Jane O’grady
JANE O’GRADY
How to Be a Refugee By Simon May Picador £20 ‘Do you know how your father really died?’ the author (aged 11) was asked by his Aunt Ursel.
She then mimicked, in slow motion, his father’s gaping horror as, five years before, he had tumbled backwards in a heart attack during a visit to the German Embassy in London.
It was odd, she added, that he, a Jew, should have died in the embassy of the country he had fled 30 years earlier.
‘From that day on, Ursel was my favourite aunt,’ says May, for details of his father’s death increased the store of things he wasn’t meant to know. He was now determined ‘to square up to truth’.
How to be a Refugee recounts his search, over the years, for information about his relatives’ lives, and thus about himself. Born in London in 1957, he always felt ‘a hereditary exile’. He was forbidden to speak German, though his parents spoke it to each other and to most of their friends; nor had he any right, maintained his mother, to identify as Jewish – her own mother was Aryan.
Therefore, according to matrilineal Jewish law, so were she and her sons.
Often, though, she supplied reminiscences of both her parents’ distinctively Jewish families.
At primary school, May’s fellow pupils recognised his mother’s German accent and gave her Hitler salutes. At secondary school, he sought Jewish friends but, when they visited, he rushed around the house hiding the crucifixes. Increasingly he was drawn to German culture, but to discuss this at German-jewish gatherings where his mother, a famous violinist, rapturously played German music seemed ‘complicatedly impossible’.
Yet embracing Jewish identity seemed to betray her, and, worse, make him ‘an impostor’ – ‘a fake Jew’.
What does it mean to be a Jew? Is Jewishness a matter of race or of religion? Certainly, in Nazi Germany, it was the former. Even those fractionally of Jewish descent were calibrated accordingly; ‘Hybrids of the First [and Second] Degree’ were, ultimately, candidates for the gas chambers. But if religion is the criterion, is being Jewish optional?
May’s mother and her sisters were Catholic converts – yet what they converted from was Protestantism.
In 1910, their father, Ernst, had ‘with a single signature’ renounced his ancestral faith and ‘thousands of years of belonging’. Irritable with Jews who made a fuss about their religion, he felt protected by his.
But when he arrived at his legal chambers – in Berlin – one Monday in April 1933, his previously deferential clerk yelled, ‘Get out of here immediately, you East Asian monkey, you filthy Jew!’ and kicked him down the stairs. Abject, incredulous, he died soon afterwards. ‘ Sei froh!’ (‘Be glad!’) said his daughter.
But the paradoxes of identity so brilliantly explored in this memoir are intriguing and absurd, as well as tragic. Ursel, an actress, and 21 when her father died, was expelled from the high theatrical world in 1936, but had a riotous time performing in Berlin cabarets.
She married into the aristocracy, became a countess, contrived Aryan certification and was readmitted to the Reich Chamber of Culture. She lived in Berlin till 1943 when, tipped off that the Gestapo were onto her, she fled to join her husband (part of the occupying force in Holland), and persuaded him to desert.
Her older sister Ilse was a successful photographer, who had a film-composer Nazi boyfriend and lived in Berlin for the entire 12 years of the Third Reich, often dancing the nights away at Babelsberg (Germany’s Hollywood).
In 1941, when she saw her uncle Theodor in a Berlin street and ran to meet him, he, wearing a yellow star, begged her to ignore him for her own protection. But she didn’t even bother trying to get false papers.
Ursel had claimed to be the ‘uncontaminated’ product of an adulterous fling on the part of her Aryan mother. Ilse’s survival trick was ‘inner ethnic cleansing … deceiving yourself so deeply that not even you remembered – or could believe – who you were’.
A mark of its success was that, along with Christabel Bielenberg and other goys, Ilse was part of a network hiding Jews. Still, someone must have known. In 1942, she received a box from Sachsenhausen concentration camp containing Theodor’s last possessions. Would being a ‘hybrid’ have saved her?
Anyway she wasn’t one. In 2002, May found evidence that his mother’s mother was Jewish. This discovery was part of a more long-drawn-out restitution – of a Jewish textile business, ‘Aryanised’ in 1939, in which his grandmother had had shares.
May, a distinguished philosopher at King’s College London, now has a flat in Berlin, and is a German citizen.
In 2018, on the 51st anniversary of his father’s death, he was (coincidentally) invited to dinner at the German Embassy, along with the daughter of an Auschwitz survivor.
‘And the vegan option is for madam?’ asked the deferential waiter.
Oddly, reading this made me cry.