Judenstaat Read Online Free PDF

to find another project. There was nothing she liked more than sitting in the library all day with a bunch of documents no one had bothered to touch in twenty years. With her pencil between her teeth, she’d decode chicken-scratch until a little bell announced the library was closing. Then she’d find her way back to her dorm with a head full of the past.
    But now, Leipzig was about the present. In 1972, Judenstaat had just started getting exports from the West, French and American films, translation of poems by Allen Ginsberg, and of course the kind of music that throbbed through the floor. Everyone smoked marijuana. Young border guards bragged about gathering hallucinogenic mushrooms in the woods by the Protective Rampart. They’d make tea out of them, get sick, and brag about that too.
    Of course, there were courtyard parties every night, but after a while, girls stopped inviting Judit. They wrote her off as a prig, the sort of girl who’d belonged to the Junior Bundist League until she was old enough to be a Youth Leader, and kept all her badges and trophies. They would be right. One of those trophies was from Archeology Camp. It was a small brass spade in a block of sandstone: “Junior Excavator: First Class.” She brought it to college.
    She’d earned her Junior Bundist history badge by following the path of Elsa Neuman, a martyr from the Churban. The path began at Elsa’s home on Budapester Street. Each Junior Bundist had a different address and picture of a martyr, and some of the more ambitious girls brought cameras and handed over their photographs to Mr. Rosenblatt, the guard, who took those pictures with great ceremony and promised to make sure they’d find their way into the Churban wing of the National Museum.
    Judit loved the museum: exhibits on the Golden Age of Ashkenaz, and the portraits of Moses Mendelssohn and the Age of Reason, and then, through a passageway of glass, there’d be the Hall of the Churban, stuffed floor-to-ceiling with mementos, photographs of martyrs, accounts from the concentration camps and death camps, all lit by candle-stubs in cheap tin boxes. It was only by climbing out of that hall, and crossing an outdoor terrace, that they could reach the third wing and the final exhibition on the founding of the Jewish state. That moment on the terrace, where they shook away the horror and gazed across Stein Square to the clean, familiar Dresden skyline was like coming back to life.
    Elsa Neuman had been forced from her home to a Jew-house just south of the park and soon after, she’d been deported by train from Dresden to Thereisenstadt, where she was murdered. It was weird and moving how Judit and the other girls engaged in following the paths of different martyrs converged on the Dresden train station. Old Saxon ladies sold violets for the girls to leave on the tracks.
    Afterwards, there was a final ceremony at the Great Synagogue, an empty lot that—according to the photograph from a book held up by Youth Leader Charlotte Kreutzberger—had once been a magnificent nineteenth-century structure with a hexagonal dome and Moorish interior. The synagogue was burnt by fascists in 1938 on Kristallnacht, and then—Charlotte closed the book for emphasis—when British and American airplanes rained incendiary bombs on Dresden in 1945, the fire returned.
    Charlotte was a tall, stern girl with straight black hair and a sonorous alto voice that managed to carry even in the open, in front of the rectangle of grass where the synagogue once stood. She asked the group: “Why wasn’t the synagogue rebuilt?”
    Few of those girls had been inside a synagogue. They were for old people and black-hats. The question was obviously rhetorical, but Charlotte had the answer.
    She swept her arm across that empty rectangle and said, “This is our prayer-house. This is our monument.”
    When Judit found treasures buried in odd places, when she