It’s almost a year since Isca, Raphael’s and my second mother, died. At her house last night, amidst the sadness of teacups no longer set out for visitors and books no longer read, I found a small wooden case, perhaps originally a jewellery box, except that it was full of letters. Curiosity overcame me. I took them out and was immediately struck by the dates: 1915, 1917, 1923.
The Nazis stole virtually all my grandparents’ possessions. But the only items over which I ever heard them lament were the love letters they sent each other during the First World War. They became engaged shortly before hostilities commenced, (after a long philosophical discussion as to whether their love was objektif or subjektif.) Soon afterwards my grandfather volunteered to serve as Feldrabbiner, army chaplain, and was stationed at Verdun on the Western Front for the duration.
But the Nazis can’t have stolen all the letters, for there in that small box I found tens of them. I spent the late hours staring at them, thick paper, thin paper, poems, mere scraps, dispatched from the front by my grandfather to his beloved.
They’re written in tiny writing, many in faint pencil, in Suetterlin script, so I’m struggling to decipher more than the odd word. But here and there I can make out a phrase. ‘My dear bride,’ one of them begins. It’s headed Traurede, Wedding Speech, and dated 31st May, 1917. My grandfather had finally given up waiting for the war to end, and obtained a furlough to marry his beloved.
A letter dated March 1918 begins ‘Maigloeckchen, Lilies of the valley’. Those were my grandmother’s favourite flowers; she had their wedding tables decorated with them. My grandfather nostalgically recalls their beauty and sweet scent. By then he was back at the front, aware that Germany was losing the war. ‘When I returned to Frankfurt,’ he said, ‘all my best students were dead.’ The local authorities recently rediscovered rows of Jewish war graves, which the Nazis had smothered away behind thick hedges.
I’m asking myself why I’m writing about these matters in the week of Remembrance Day, when Sunday brings the Whitehall parade of AJEX, the Association of Jewish ex-Servicemen and Women; when we’re constantly worried about what’s being done to Israel, and what Israel is doing, and about Gaza; when there’s been a vicious orchestrated attack on Jewish football fans in Amsterdam; when the future of the world is at stake at COP 29, with its untrustworthy hosts in Azerbaijan… Aren’t there more important things to say? Why bother with love letters from a hundred years ago?
This is my reason. Amidst all the strife, hatreds and calumnies, (‘the perfidious English,’ even my grandfather wrote, little knowing that one day Britain would save his life); amidst the bombs and brutality, people are still struggling to keep going, find love, make a home. Thus it was then, and thus it is now and we, who watch horrors happen in fear and dismay, don’t have the power to make the violence stop. But we do have the capacity to side with life and care for those who care for life, whoever they are, because they, and we, are human too.
Among the letters in that small box was a tiny diary, scarcely the size of a thumb, miniature pencil still attached. It was for 1915 and had only one entry, by my grandmother, Nanny Caro. I’m far from confident that I’ve made out the words correctly, but it went something like this:
Let not our grudges and hatreds
Rule over us.
It’s so little time that life has to give us,
Yet every day has so much to offer us.
Better then to grasp
The love that it proffers us.
15 January, 1915
‘Choose life,’ says the Torah; that’s all we can do, and what we must do.