For any new readers, I promise I will soon get to What Happens Next on the whole German Identity Tip.

For stalwarts who’ve hung in there, a recap.

Tonight, I went back and re-read No. 23: The Parable of the Queen, the Ant, and the Croissant.  This exercise was slightly like finding one of the notes you wrote to your best friend in high school, and confronting not only your i’s dotted with hearts, but the crush you had on your Honors English teacher, and the fact that you took his suede elbow patches seriously.

But here’s how some Big Things have changed — big, I tell you — since I wrote that blog post in October of 2009.

1)    Madame Y, who told me back then that this blog is a book, is no longer a professional associate of mine.  We parted ways.  I did the parting.

2)    Madame X, the New York literary agent who, regarding this blog, said: “I have no idea if what you’re doing is a book.  I have no idea if it can be sustained.  Keep going, but don’t let it swallow up your entire writing life.  I’m ready and willing when you’ve got that novel,” became my agent last week.  We’ll sign papers when my novel goes out.   Madame X anticipates two more drafts will be necessary, but she thinks I can nail it by the end of the year.  Madame X has a vision.

3)    Yup, I finished the first draft of my novel.  At 440 pages, it’s a hundred pages too long.  Back in October of 2009 my novel was an idea.  Now it’s a game plan.

Here’s another Big Change.

Back when I wrote No. 23, I’d cooked up an unwieldy parable to describe where I found myself, lost in a forest in the middle of my life and all that:

I become aware of how much of my life my absent father has gobbled, I wrote back then.  How much he has tormented and influenced me, from college applications to career moves to financial habits to love affairs down to what I have and have not allowed myself to write.  And what I think I am and am not “supposed to be doing.”

I thought my father was the ant on the croissant of the queen.  But my father was the queen.  (Not a queen – that’s somebody else’s blog.)  But the dominant force, the dominant voice.  My own spirit was the ant. 

And the croissant was the life I had built, on its way right down the gullet of the queen.

Or, here’s another interpretation.

Desire to be a recognized, lauded, wildly remunerated writer: the queen.

State of actual writing life: the croissant.

Connection to authentic voice: the ant.

I’m trying to go Buddhist with this parable, so that eventually, my life will look like this:  Voice, truth, creative flow: queen.

Dog-and-pony show of personality: croissant.

Bottomless need, infantile itch, asking esteemed father-figure proxies for permission and approval: ant.

Today, I recognize that the story I always told about my father – the story that launched this project – isn’t entirely true.  In my timeworn telling, I always played the innocent victim of What Happened With My Father.

But I was a participant in our relationship.  I was a scared child.  I was scared of my father.  And so I rejected him.  It was an understandable action, perhaps, but it was an action.

The phone rang this morning.

“Mrs. Ebel?” said the voice.  German accent, cheery.

“This is Kathy,” I reply.

“This is the German consulate.  I am happy to say that your passport has arrived in our office, and you can come to pick it up.”

“Wonderful!”  I cry.  “Thanks for the call!”

“Yes!” he echoes.  “And have a wonderful day!”  (This gentleman was much warmer than the bureaucrat who processed our naturalization and passport paperwork.  You can bet she will be discussed at length in an upcoming post.)

You think maybe Fatherland is leading me to the truth?  Or, you know. It could be a vice versa type thing, with the truth leading me to Fatherland.

Many years ago, I wrote poems and was involved in the Spoken Word scene out of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in New York’s East Village.  One night, I participated in a poetry reading.  Afterwards, a member of the audience approached me.

“Was that a real poem?” he asked, “or did you make it up?”

The envelope arrives by first class U.S. mail.

It’s pale grey paper, with a fine woven texture you can’t buy at Target.

From the Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany, Los Angeles.

The letter inside is printed on A-4 paper, you know, the longer and wider paper that everybody in the whole wide world uses except for us.  And Canada.  Which is sort of strange, because you’d think Canada would just go with the A-4 flow.

May 16, 2011

Dear Mrs. Ebel,

I am pleased to inform you that you and your child’s application for renaturalization has been granted.  Since the Certificate of Naturalization must be given to you in person, I kindly ask that you come to the German Consulate General any weekday between 08.00 and 11.00 am.  Please present a valid ID at the time of collection.

In regards of your child’s Certificate of Naturalization, please be aware that you, your husband, and your child have to appear in person.  All of you need to present a valid ID card.  In case your husband does not want to appear in person, you would have to provide a declaration of consent with his signature notarized by a notary public…

Yours sincerely,

Frau Bureaucrat

I stand in the foyer of my house, holding the letter.

Holy shit.

I stare at the piece of paper.

What is this?  How did this get here?  And what does it mean?

Paper.  Isn’t paper supposed to be over?  Doesn’t everything about us now fit on a jump drive?  Don’t we all have microchips implanted in our brains by Central Cffice, programmed with pre-approved spouses, shoe size, and favorite song?

My friend Dennis, senior management at an ad agency (and soon to enter this story more significantly, so here’s his introduction), comes to my office at the Major Media Corporation where I ‘ve worked as a senior copywriter for getting close to the last two years, to make a presentation.  He comments to me that whenever he walks into an office and sees file cabinets, he knows the business isn’t being run at the cutting edge.  Because there should never be file cabinets.  Not in the digital age.

But paper, Dennis.  It can’t be denied.  Paper still circumnavigates the globe, and it still has power.

This piece of paper is proof.  That I got me and my son through the hoops of a foreign country’s bureaucracy, through the hoops of history.  And now that country is going to become my country.  Or, one of them.

At least, on paper.

Without the paper that my fleeing paternal grandparents kept close to them, worried over, protected, and saved, 73 years ago, I wouldn’t be holding this piece of paper, now (See No. 12: The Number).

I barely knew my grandparents.  My gentle grandfather died, and my Teflon grandmother didn’t stick (See No. 26: Shopgirls; No. 32: Dust; No. 35: Yellow Menace).

But I still don’t know what it means.  John is home, down the hall, and I call to him.

I show him the piece of paper.

“Congratulations!” he says, but I am staring at the paper.  I can’t remember what I was thinking, and I don’t know what to think now.

“What’s the deal with this?” I ask, half joking, waving the paper.

“Something was taken away from your family,” he replies.  “And you and your brother got it back.”

I sigh.

Yes.

It all comes back to me now.

About 15 months ago, I’m in Berlin, and I’m slowly becoming grumpy as shit.

I’m on a Fantastic Family Holiday.  I’ve been down to London, taken my kid to Buckingham Palace to stare at the guards (it’s a classic, as we say in our family). I’ve ridden one of the last double-decker buses and watched Muslim school kids in headscarves talk smack and while eating crisps.  I’ve road-tripped up to Derbyshire to witness my oldest friend get married, and I’ve worn neon pink patent leather wedge heels while doing so.  I myself have eaten All Sorts and roasted hog.  The May weather has been glorious.  The meadows are dotted with gamboling lambs.  It was too hot on the wedding day to wear my spring-weight Liberty of London coat that was born to compliment my dress.

But it’s been two weeks, now, of Fantastic Family Holiday.

And that whole time, I’ve been with adored Husband, Son, Mother, or Friends, 24/7.

And now, in early June, it’s our last day in Berlin, and we add Distant Cousin D. to the posse.  Distant Cousin D – we’ll call him DCD – is way distant.  His grandfather and my maternal grandmother were cousins.  But since he and my mother share a last name, and he resembles everybody on my mother’s side of the family, which is to say wistful, artistic, intelligent, gentlemanly, and unlikely to come out on top in a bench-cleaning brawl, he seems more closely related.  DCD is Israeli, because his branch of the family got out and emigrated to Palestine when they could, but now he’s German, because he’s become a citizen, and he’s just finished art school in Berlin with a photography degree.  He’s fluent in English, Hebrew, and German, and he’s an incredibly nice fellow, and we’ve spent the morning in his spotless and appealingly decorated Mitte apartment, looking at his work (and his girlfriend’s shoes, fabulous, feathered and delicate, of the Jimmy Choo genus, she was elsewhere) but, like I said, it’s been two weeks, and there’s something I desperately need.

And that’s to be alone, just for a day, an afternoon – oh, hell, an hour or two.

I need to do my own thing.

I must cease coordinating, cooperating, waiting, providing snacks for, listening to, and tolerating others, what with their needs and personalities.  I must boycott wondering where the bathroom is, if there’s Wifi, or if anybody has a napkin.  I must cast off my large, Chilewich tote bag laden with jackets, travel guides, water bottles, and trail mix that was purchased in a Hammersmith Tesco for the flight and has since gone melted.

I just need to shake these people loose for a little while, these people I call family, so that I can do what I need to do.

And that, my friends, is look at clothes, shoes, and bags.

Looking at clothes, shoes, and bags, is pure pleasure, is what it is.   Don’t get me wrong, I can stare deeply and satisfyingly at a good painting for a long time.  I can tromp over meadows and sigh with appreciation at a cairn, and gaze at my child until I want to weep the miracle of it all, and tuck into a good book, and consider how many angels can party on the head of a pin.

But there is deeply contemplative state that can be achieved only by browsing garments and accessories – ladies, can I get an amen – and lawd it’s time.

You get that it’s my last day in Berlin, right?  That this is all the time I have left in my Woulda Coulda Shoulda Hometown.  As this last glorious day speeds along yet crawls past, the streets taunt me with their liveliness and their fascinating boutiques, and it’s looking less and less likely that I’m going to have a shot at breaking away.  Every cute bicycle that zips past, bearing a cute Berliner looking like a tear sheet from The Sartorialist, dares me to jump on and whither like the wind to the nearest bespoke shoe shop, Paul Smith storefront, or flea market.

DCD is showing us around his immediate neighborhood.  We are walking down narrow streets, past cafes crowded with tourists.  We are craning our necks to appreciate the vaulted ceiling of the Nikolaikirche, the oldest church in Berlin, recently reconstructed and reopened.  Everywhere, there are memorials. Under our feet, DCD points out burnished plaques, cast in bronze by artist Gunter Demnig, and scattered around Mitte – and other neighborhoods and cities as well.  Shaped like cobblestones, each one commemorates individual victims who were deported and murdered by the National Socialist regime.  Demnig has installed them outside of the homes where the victims once lived.  Demnig’s Stolpersteine (“Stumbling Stones”) illustrate the concept of “rememberance prompts,” an alternative approach to grand memorial art work, designed to make the passer-by stumble and think.  The plaques are beautiful and chilling.  We squat over them, reading the embossed details.  I glance up from a brass stumbling stone – Henriette Fischer was her name, she was 18 when she was deported — to glimpse a pedaling girl, in grass green stacked heel pumps and black knee socks, a slim jumper dress, sharp bob, and giant black sunglasses, not distracted in the least by the stone bearing her name, instead headed somewhere wonderful, perhaps a job at a newspaper, or off for strong coffee and plum cake with a new boyfriend…is she the same Henriette Fischer?  Could she have been? What separates these stylish Berliners I so want to hang with from the names on these brass cobblestones?  Only seventy years.

And yet, I’m peckish, I’m snappish, and I want to shop.

On Grosse Hamburger Strasse, DCD points out a gap in the tightly packed buildings, a hole like a missing tooth, where an attractive residential building once stood.  This is French artist Christian Boltanski’s work, The Missing House. Boltanksi researched the building’s former residents and discovered that the Jewish inhabitants had been expelled or deported by the Nazis. Plaques bearing their names, occupations, and dates they lived in the house are attached to the fire-wall of the adjacent building, a permanent shadow.

There are ghosts everywhere in Berlin, conjured beautifully.

That doesn’t mean I’m not growing ever desperate to scratch my fashion itch.

Suddenly, I stop in my tracks.  Because I’ve turned, and there, right behind me, is Rianna In Berlin.  A vintage store.  With a terrifically clever window display.  Needlepoint purses.  Really good ones, not dingy or sad, but vibrantly colored. And stacks of Bakelite bangles.  And…

“Listen,” I say to Mother, Distant Cousin, Husband and Son.  “You guys go ahead.  I need to go in here for a minute.  I’ll meet you up the block in fifteen minutes, okay?”

“I’ll go with you,” says Husband.  He is not one to shop.  But perhaps he needs a break, too.  We enter Rianna in Berlin, and life returns to my parched soul.  The clothes are extravagantly bright and well-curated.  The jewelry is chunky candy.  The proprietress, perhaps Rianna herself, speaks English.  We chat, and she wishes she lived in L.A., if such a thing can be imagined.  I offer to trade lives with her.  We laugh.  I ogle an utterly divine bracelet that costs 80 euros.   The proprietress fetches it from the case.  I turn the bracelet in my hands.  Oh, how I love bracelets, all piled on.  Bracelets primarily indicate that I’m not on the clock, because I can’t wear anything on my wrists when I’m writing, which is what I spend most of every day doing.  Am I going to spend 80 euros on a bracelet?

Oh, shit.  Seriously?  My fifteen minutes are up.  That was a mere nibble of the deeply focused retail contemplation of which I’m capable.  If this shop exists, right here in the center of town, what treasures await me in Kreuzberg?  Freidrichshain?  I will never know.  Not on this trip.

Husband and I leave the shop.  I vow to return.  We make our way up the block.  Mother, Son, and DCD haven’t gotten very far.  We see them sitting quietly on a bench.

“What spectacular treasures did you find?” my Mother asks.  But there is something in her voice.  I turn to see what she sees.  The bench my family occupies flanks the Grosse Hamburger Strasse Cemetary, the oldest of Berlin’s Jewish cemeteries.  Prominent Berlin Jews were buried here, including the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, and the Jewish School for Boys occupied an adjacent building.  But during Nazism, the Gestapo confiscated both buildings and converted them into internment centers or “Judenlager,” barred prisons that held Jews prior to their deportation.

More than 55,000 Jews were deported from this spot to extermination camps.

Fifty five thousand. 

In 1943, the Jewish cemetery was destroyed on orders of the Gestapo. The Nazis desecrated the graves and turned the grounds into air raid shelters, the walls of which were reinforced with demolished gravestones. In April 1945, the authorities used the grounds as a mass grave for soldiers and civilians killed during Allied air raids.  Today, a symbolic tombstone in honour of Moses Mendelssohn, as well as a sarcophagus filled with destroyed gravestones, are the only concrete reminders of the cemetery’s history. Approximately 3,000 war victims (only 2,000 are known by name) were buried there alongside approximately 3,000 Jewish dead.

Will Lambert’s bronze figural sculpture marks the site.  Past the bronze figures, there’s a simple iron gate, and beyond that, a bright green lawn rolls out. I walk to the gate and stare out at the grass.  I select a stone from the ground and place it on the memorial.

I feel sick with the thought of bracelets.

Longing for bracelets.  Fretting over bracelets.  Eighty euros for a bracelet.

Fifty-five thousand.  A horror that can scarcely be imagined.  Barely counted.

I sink onto the bench, ashamed of myself.

Flibbitygibbet.

How dare I want to shop when this entire city is a gravesite.  Not just of my people.  But also of My People.  My actual ancestors.  The Ebels.  The Hirsches.

Where once I was grumpy, now I am tired and sick with myself.

But also, I am not dead.

Hitler didn’t get me.  My parents made it out, and I made it back.  With euros in my pocket and a fashion itch that will never be utterly scratched.

So maybe it is my birthright to moon over bracelets in Berlin.  Maybe I must buy that bracelet, to prove how very alive I am, how much I am capable of enjoying myself, even here, in the very spot from which so many were swept away.

Maybe that’s the point of being in Berlin, and maybe someday of coming back.

To live, everyday, in that paradox. Live, goddammit.  To go about my business among the ghosts.  Rather than stumbling over remembrance, I could embody it, as I pile my bracelets on, one after the other.

This is all the time I have left.

Gerry Braithwaite, Second Magistrate at the Canterbury Council, grumbled as he finished the last bite of his cheese and pickle, tossed the waxed paper in the bin, brushed the crumbs from his thinning trousers, and made his way for the caged elevator that would lower him, most creakily, into the bowels of Records.  The department that had once been his launch had become, forty years later, something like a wife.  A constant, weighted, companion, comfortable and smothering.  The idea of a promotion, like the notion of divorce or annulment, had once thrilled him.  But he had long since given that up.  Either retirement or death would part him from his job, whichever got there first.

This morning it was an American request that interrupted his elevensies.  She had checked “family history” on the form, where an explanation for her request had been required.  It was hard to imagine what she would want with the old piece of paper.  The rows and rows of yellowed files, marching to the basement’s horizon under low ceilings and florescent tubes, were filled with innumerable, crumbling, births, marriages, and deaths, the individual milestones softening into dust.  “Henry Ebel and Julia Hirsch,” Braithwaite read off the mimeographed  form.  They sounded vaguely like Jews, but no matter, it was his job to prove they’d been wed, and send that proof off to the daughter in Los Angeles, and get back upstairs before he missed the tea cart.

Naw.

It’s called the Interweb, y’all.

You push a button, see, and you get to the Canterbury Council’s comprehensive website.

You select ‘Marriage Records,’ and you punch in your father’s name, and a range of dates – you happen to know the exact date of the civil union, January 15, 1960 — and up he pops, with your mother right beside him.

Add their marriage to your cart, lay down your Visa, and for 10 pounds sterling you are all good.

It’s so quick, so accurate, that you’ll cringe a little when you remember starting your day with a call to the British Consulate in Los Angeles, asking the lovely young girl in Public Affairs if she has any ideas about how to retrieve a marriage record from the Canterbury courthouse.

But that’s okay.  There’s no such thing as a stupid question.

How come you checked the box that said “family history” on the email form that required an explanation for your request?  Instead of “other,” followed by an explanation of Article 116, paragraph 2 of Basic German Law?

Because you thought if you told the Brits you needed their help to become a Kraut, they might very discretely and permanently misplace your parents’ file.

There are, after all, stupid answers.

So I do what any red-blooded, right-minded, self-sufficient adult woman with a business card and a Daytime Emmy nomination would do.

On the verge of tears, I call my mother.

I read her yesterday’s email.  (See No. 52: S.N.A.F.U., for the full text.)

“Don’t freak out,” my mother says.  “It’s just bureaucracy.”

“But but but,” I quaver.  “But why didn’t the Consulate contact me personally?  I would have provided this documentation months ago.  And why wouldn’t David let me know they contacted him?  It’s not hard.  You just hit “forward.”  You just type ‘FYI.’”

“Why don’t you call the Consulate?”

My mind racing ahead, I remind myself that David and I have different mothers.

So surely my application for restored German citizenship under Article 113, paragraph 2 of German Basic Law can’t possibly rely on proof of my father’s marriage to his mother.  As for my parents, they were married in New York City in 1959.  Their marriage license is right there on file at City Hall, a floor or two away from the office where I was married, 40 years later.  It shouldn’t be too hard to file for a copy.  Maybe I’ll need to go there in person.  An excuse to go to New York, that always works.

“I need to get my case file separated from David’s,” I say.

“The good news is that I’m going to England on Wednesday, and I will actually be in Cambridge.”

“Why is that good news?”

“Because your father and I were married in Cambridge.”

Inward groan.  Oh, shit.  What’s that going to be like?  Trying to track down a forty year old marriage certificate in Cambridgeshire?

“January 15^th, 1960.”

“You weren’t married in 1960.  You were married in 1959, right?”  It’s so cool how I know better than my mother when she was married, even though I clearly had no idea where.

“No, we graduated from Columbia in 1959.  We were married by a justice of the peace called Mr. Gentle.”

“Gentle?  As in, be gentle with me when you beat me over the head with a bureaucratic mallet?”

This whole time, I thought my parents had been married in 1959.  In New York City.

So there’s that.

And of all the gin joints.  I just happen to need some archival paperwork from Cambridge, England, and my mother, the interested party in the archival situation, just happens to be going there.

On Wednesday.

So there’s that.

I hang up, call the German Consulate in San Francisco, and get Frau B.A., author of the email.

“Frau B.A.,” she answers.  I have to admit I love the way German sounds, I really do, and yet…German-accented English really is clipped as a mofo.  Very Hogan’s Heroes.

“Frau B.A., this is Kathy Ebel.  You sent me an email about ten minutes ago.”

“Yes.”

“Um…in the email, you request proof of my father’s first and second marriages.  I’m the child of my father’s first marriage.  So for my citizenship application, will it suffice for me to provide proof only for the first marriage?”

“I have no idea.  I am Mr. Volgenbacher’s secretary.  You will need to speak to him directly.”

I call Volgenbacher.  Get his voicemail.  The kind of voicemail that doesn’t seem to take incoming messages, or at least, doesn’t invite them.  I hang up.  I send an email.

Dear Mr. Volgenbacher:

Your office replied to my inquiry regarding my application for restored German citzenship.

My file number is: xxx-xx-xx-xxxx-Ebel

Please read the email below, from Frau B.A., who states that my brother, David Ebel, has not provided the additional materials requested, namely, my father’s marriage certificates for his first and second marriages.

I have a few follow-up questions and would appreciate your reply.

• I was not contacted personally with your office’s request.  Do my brother and I share the same file number?  Is there any arrangement I can make so that my file is an independent entity?  Had I known about the gaps in the paperwork, I would have addressed them promptly.

• My brother and I have the same father, but different mothers.  If I provide a marriage certificate of my parents’ marriage, will that suffice to process my own application for restored citizenship?

Many thanks for your prompt attention.

Sincerely, etc.

I dial Volgenbacher again.  Get the voicemail.  Send my brother an email.

We haven’t spoken in about a year.

Hey David!

It’s been a long time.  I hope you’re well.  Happy Valentine’s Day.

Check out the email below, from the German Consulate.  I followed up with them last week, since it’s been 17 months since we applied for restored citizenship.  They say they contacted you twice, in July and November, but have never heard back from you…are you still interested in the citizenship thing?  I definitely am.

Just wanted you to know that there is missing information holding up our case file…I will now work on my end to provide the marriage certificate for Henry & my mother.

Curious where you’re at with it!

Be well, & etc.

I call Volgenbacher again.

Pushy Jewish girls of the world unite!

“Thomas Volgenbacher,” he answers.

“Hey, Thomas, it’s Kathy Ebel!” I announce brightly.

“Kathy!”  Thomas Volgenbacher’s German-accented English is positively bubbly.

“I’m following up on the email from Frau B.A.”  I recap the details, of which he is well aware.  “Do you think I could have my case file separated out from my brother’s?”

“Well, you came into the Consulate together…”

“I know, but…um…”

I’m not going to get into it with Thomas Volgenbacher, but how to say in English?

“Since we have different mothers, and Frankfurt is requesting documentation of our father’s marriages…I would like my application to be considered separate, so that I only have to provide proof of the marriage that I’m a product of.  Also, moving forward, I would like to be contacted personally with any correspondence.  If I’d known back in July what you needed, I would have provided it by now.”

“Your brother did not communicate our request?”

“No.”

“Ah.  We assumed he would do so.  Since you came into the Consulate together.”

“…Yeah.”

“Well, this is fine.  No problem.  I will contact Germany and we can separate your files.  I am going out of town next week, so –”

“My parents were married in England, so it may take me a few weeks to track down that piece of paper.”

“Ah. Well, once you do, I would add another two weeks for the processing of your naturalization paperwork.”

“So…the marriage certificate is the only piece of the puzzle missing?”

“Yes.”

“Would you recommend I put my request in writing, that my case file be separated?”

“Yes, absolutely.  I will send an email to Frankfurt, but in writing is always good.”

It’s 2011 and there are still pieces of paper floating around the world, in and out of files, crumbling at the edges, yellowed, being gnawed on by invisible mites…and they still have power.

I call my husband and relay the details.

“We’re all just people, doing the best we can,” he says, in answer to my complaint that David didn’t just dash off an ‘FYI’ and hit forward.

“What I want to know,” he continues, “is why does the German government need to know your parents were married? They have proof of your birth, so they know he was your father, and of your father’s, so they know he was German.  What if you had been born out of wedlock?  Would that disqualify you for citizenship?”

Dude.

Now why didn’t I think of that?

Next stop, the British Consulate.

Somebody needs to go down to a Cambridgeshire basement and see about what Mr. Gentle left behind.

To recap: I checked back in with the German Consulate.  It has been 17 months since the office in Frankfurt confirmed that my application for restored German citzenship under Article 116 of German Basic Law was received and put in the queue.

For new readers — or any of you in-the-loopians who’ve been following along all this time — may I please suggest that a review of the backstory may bring a certain je ne sais qumquat to the latest twist.

No. 1o: I Cannot Guarantee That I Am 100% Restored

No. 11:  I ♥ Thomas Volgenbacher

No. 44:  The Emoticon

The above-mentioned latest twist is the email I received today from the German Consulate.  It goes something — well, actually it goes exactly — like this:

Dear Mrs. Ebel,

David Ebel was contacted on 07-29 and 11-02-2010 in order to send the marriage certificates of his father’s first and second marriage. Up to today Mr. Ebel has not responded.

Kind regards
im Auftrag

Ms. B. A.

Deutsches Generalkonsulat
German Consulate General
San Francisco

Los Angeles, CA 90027 USA

Mr. Thomas Volgenbacher

Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany

San Francisco

Re:  Naturalization according to art. 116 German Basic Law

File No: xx-xxx-xxxx  Ebel

Dear Mr. Volgenbacher:

I received  written confirmation from your office on September 25, 2009 of my application for restored German citizenship for myself and my son, Clyde Crooks.  Your correspondence stated that the processing of my application may take up to 12 months, and that the Federal Administration Office may request further documents.  As 17 months have passed, I’d appreciate an update on the status of my application, and any additional information you may be able to provide.

In June of 2010, I visited Germany for the first time.  While I stayed at the northern edge of Tiergarten, the Berlin neighborhood where my paternal (Ebel) grandparents lived before fleeing the Third Reich, I also visited the town of Halberstadt, where, with the kind guidance of Ms. Jutta Dick, the Director of the Moses Mendelssohn Akademie, I visited the Rabbinical Seminary (still standing) and the late 18^th Century baroque synagogue (in ruins) built by my maternal family, the Hirsches.  I visited the two Jewish cemeteries housing graves of my Hirsch ancestors dating back to the 14^th Century, and had lunch in the Hirsch Café at the Berend Lehmann Museum fur Judische Geschichte und Kultur. My ancestor Aron Hirsch, an industrialist, founded his metals business, Aron Hirsch & Sons, in 1806.  The business grew internationally and thrived for five generations, employed thousands of local residents, and was a main supporter of the Jewish community of Halberstadt. 

Although I was able to provide the Federal Administration with detailed documents tracing the Ebel’s presence in Berlin to 1868, the maternal side of my family had a significant role in German Jewish society dating back another four hundred years or so.  Please advise whether providing the Administration with further details of my Hirsch ancestry may strengthen my application and our prospects for restored citizenship.

With great appreciation for your assistance,

Kathy Ebel

When last we left our heroine, she is on the tarmac at LAX, having just helped her family settle into its seats.  She discovers, jaw-droppingly, that she is sitting next to Curtis, the random man she has randomly met a few days before, randomly, on her cul-de-sac.  [See No. 49: Challah Back, Y'all.]   Curtis, it turns out, is a theater director en route to cast a play in London.  Curtis is friends with Nina Dietz.  Nina Dietz is an American expat thriving in Berlin as an influential novelist and hostess of the artsy set.

Curtis gives our heroine Nina Dietz’s email address.

Our heroine determines she will invite Nina Dietz to Shabbat dinner.

The first seeds of a sprawling Berlin social life have just been planted.

Wait.

Stop.

Note to my readers.

Bullshit alarm!

When last we left our heroine it is four months ago.

Am I just going to act like nothing happened?  Just disappear and then waltz back in like nothin happen?

So wha’ happen?

On June 9^th, I return to Los Angeles from three weeks in Europe with split loyalty.  I want to get the experience down, right away.  To immediately turn it into something.

Also, I want to finish the fourth section of the novel I’ve been working on steadily since November 2009, in the wee hours of the morning before toddling off to my full-time gig at the major media corporation that recently got bought by Kabletown, writing TV commercials for flour tortillas, NASCAR events, cross-training sneakers, insurance companies, and the new theme park attraction featuring an evergreen bespectacled teen wizard.  (Insert shot of Andy Rooney.  “You ever notice how full-time jobs are just…so…time-consuming?”)

For the novel, I’ve given myself a deadline for the first draft of “early in the new year.”  Eddie, my neighbor on the cul-de-sac and a screenwriter with a feature film about to open, has pointed out that the phrase “early in the new year” can be applied, you know, indefinitely.  Seeing as every year is new for sixty days or so.

But any old new year is not what I mean.  I mean 2011.

So that’s wha’ happen.

Ambivalently, I put Fatherland on hold.  I finish the fourth section of my novel.  I get a fantastic editorial note from Blanche, my trusted first reader, that suggests some minor plot re-tooling, and while I percolate on how to apply Blanche’s wise note, here I am.

And there I was, on a jet plane, next to a guy who I’d just met a few days before.   Determined to invite Nina Dietz to Shabbat dinner in Berlin.  With the newfound impression that, in fact, somehow, all roads are leading to Berlin.

Jump ahead with me, will you?  To May 25^th.  Our trip to London and our friends’ gorgeous, Jonathan Demme-worthy Peak District wedding has come and gone.  Another tarmac, another plane.  This one at Heathrow, headed to Berlin.  The family has been settled.  I lean back in my seat to check out the parade of travelers as they head down the aisle.

Here comes a remarkable specimen.

Far too slight to be a man, she must be a woman.  Or is she a man?  Dressed entirely in charcoal, olive, and navy.  Combat boots tied tightly up the ankle.  Cropped trousers, a voluminous jacket with an asymmetrical cut, reminiscent of a design from the New York City boutique Parachute (R.I.P.) circa 1983.  Cropped hair, except for the long tail draped around the shoulder.  A radically petite man has a vulnerability about him, whereas a slight, androgynous woman exudes defiance.

She is fierce.  She seems to herald what’s about to happen next.  (Spoiler alert! Yes, believe it or not, we will meet her again.)

Whoa, I think, as she passes.

We arrive in Berlin in the late afternoon.  Tegel airport is smallish, with a Burbankian intimacy, except, thank God, no men in shorts and flip-flops.

(Nothing promotes international scorn of American travelers quite like traveling costumes involving shorts and exposed toes.)

(Possibly just my international scorn.)

We pile into the taxi and my mother does the talking.  When in a foreign city with a native speaker, you get soft, quick.  Left to your own devices, you’d figure it out with hand gestures and map pointing, but since someone else can chat idiomatically with the driver, you can look out the window instead, a dreamy child on a long drive.

Dusk is falling as we arrive at our flat, on 18 Siemenstrasse, on the far-northern edge of the Tiergarten neighborhood.

The first thing I notice about Berlin are her trees and shrubs.  They are different from those of the other cities I know.  These are not the anthropomorphic plantings of New York, standing around like people.  Nor the structured greenery of London, with foliage as a dignified reminder of civilization. And certainly not the hyper-landscape of Los Angeles, where nothing was ever supposed to grow, but now it’s taken over, held back by an ever-advancing army of gardeners wielding leaf-blowers.

The trees and shrubs of Berlin are particularly loose.  Dark and refined, as one might expect of a major European city, but a little blowsy, a little unkempt.  A woman who can no longer afford the hairdresser every few days must learn to keep up appearances.  She is still beautiful, but resigned.  Rather than strain, she has let go.

A cyclist approaches as we unload from the taxi.  We have stepped inadvertently into the sidewalk bike lane.  He rings a curt, metallic warning on his bell as zips past.

Tall, dark apartments stretch far along the avenue.

A spray-painted scrawl decorates the doorway of our building.

“Does that say what I think it says?” asks Clyde.

“What the hell kind of apartment did I rent us?” I wonder.

“Fuck,” says the graffiti.

“Yup,” I reply.

In No. 46 (Open Letter Slash Personal Ad To The Progressive Jewish Expat Community of Berlin, Ties To The Ivy League, Terrific Children and Memories of Trader Joe’s Optional But Preferred), I cook up one of my tasty little fantasies, in which I travel to Berlin, meet the perfect expatriate role models who provide the keys to the city, or at least a picture of what it exactly is that I might actually do with this German citizenship of which I’ve been speaking and writing, for which I’m currently in line, thanks to Article 116, paragraph 2 of the Grundgesetz, the German constitution.

(The friendly German bureaucrats tell me it will take upwards of a year for my application to be processed, by the way.  So for those of you who’ve been following along at home…we’re at the ten month mark.)

The SELF magazine editor who bought my last magazine piece (http://www.self.com/health/2010/01/diary-of-a-dieter) suggests that I contact a friend of hers, Franny Rappaport, a writer, editor, and now translator who went to Berlin on a Fulbright 15 years ago, and stayed.

I email Franny, describe Fatherland to her, and ask if she by any chance knows Amy and Josh Halberstam and their three kids, Oliver, Harriet, and Po, who would LOVE to have us to Shabbat dinner on 28 May!  You know Amy and Josh…they met at Ramaz…Josh got kicked out of RISD for selling pot – oh?  You don’t?  Because they’re fictional?  Huh.

But I am surprised by Franny’s answer.

Franny explains that first-generation American German Jews have, it turns out, great interest in making roots trips to Berlin.  And when they get there, they want to have Shabbat dinner with appealing, Progressive, American expat families.  Like, it’s a thing.

Um…what?  I am not the first person to have this thought?  Really? 

Really. 

Turns out, these mythical Shabbat dinners are hard to find.  Turns out, there’s even a level of psychic exhaustion the appealing, Progressive Jewish expat families of Berlin feel, what with managing the ambivalent longings and expectations of their American brethren on holiday.  Franny offers to poke around on my behalf, but she’s not sure what she’ll be able to come up with.  The one person she can think of off-hand who might be able to host us is recently divorced, and Franny’s not sure on what Friday night said friend has the kids.

…Dang.

And then it occurs to me.

We’re renting a flat at the northern perimeter of the Tiergarten neighborhood. It’s big, so that the members of our traveling party can have the unique serenity that comes with space and privacy.  The photo in the listing on the holiday rental website shows a capacious living room with a big dining table and grand windows facing Siemenstrasse.

If I want a Shabbat dinner in Berlin so everloving much, I can host it.

Hey now.

I email Franny Rappaport and invite her to my place for Shabbat dinner.  Plus any friends she might like to bring along.  Franny loves this idea!  She is going to bring a challah from this place that she knows!  My mother puts out the word, too.  She’s been to Germany several times in as many years, and has made friends.

“So how many people are we having to dinner now?”  John asks warily.

“Fifteen,” I say.  I see the look on his face.  “We’ll make pasta.  Easy peasy.”

“And we don’t know any of these people,” he observes.

“That’s right,” I confirm.

Now it’s the last few days before our trip.  I’m on a whirlwind tour of my Los Angeles hot-spots (dry cleaner, Pasquale shoe repair, Nordstrom boy’s department, Sephora), looking after the petty, monumental details in advance of our three week trip.  We will be in London for a few days, then up to Derbyshire for the wedding of my oldest friend in the world, whose mother is my mother’s best friend.  Then we’ll go to Berlin for five days.  Then to western Ireland, where John’s sister and our brother-in-law have lived as expatriates for the last 40-odd years.

Slowly, I pull my car onto our little Los Feliz cul-de-sac.  A bunch of kids live on the road and on late weekend afternoons they tend to zip up and down on scooters and bikes.  I park my car, haul out my various packages, and spot Clyde at the end of the block, helmet on, scootering wildly.  He’s got a friend by his side.  I stroll down to say hello.

As I get closer, I realize I don’t recognize the friend.  Nor the man standing nearby, who appears to be the friend’s dad.  “Hey Clyde,” I call.  “What’s the haps?”

“Mom!” he cries.  “Watch this!  Watch watch watch watch watch!”  Clyde and the friend are ripping down a sloped driveway, then pulling sharp turns in the cul-de-sac.  “Are you watching???!!!” I approach the unfamiliar dad.

“Hey,” I say, hand extended.  “I’m Kathy.  Are you a dad on the block who I haven’t met yet?”  The unfamiliar dad shakes my hand warmly.  “Actually, no,” he explains.  “We live about ten blocks that way.  But we were just strolling the neighborhood, looking for a place to scooter, and we randomly decided to check out your block.”  He glances around at the cheerful scene, all the neighborhood kids out and about.  “What a great spot.”  The dad’s name is Curtis; the son goes to the local arts charter school.  We chat a little bit as we watch watch watch watch watch our sons.  Now it’s six o’clock, time to go inside and get supper going.  Curtis and I say a friendly goodbye.  “Come back and scooter anytime!” I call as Clyde and I climb the steps to our house.

Three days later we are loading on to our Virgin Atlantic flight, overnight to London.  The flight is full.  We’ve gotten three seats in a row, in the middle of the plane, towards the back.  “D’you need your laptop?”  John asks, preparing to shove my tote bag into the overhead, or not.  I was thinking I’d blog constantly on our trip, recording every impression, and here comes the first inkling that I’m actually going to live first and comment later.  That’s a new one. The laptop is whisked away.

I file into our row and help Clyde get settled, then take a seat and humpher around to find my seatbelt.  My neighbor to my right is settling in, too.  I look over to him and I freeze.

I know this guy…but how?

He’s the neigborhood dad.  The one who randomly landed on the cul-de-sac with scootering son in tow a few days ago.

“Curtis?”

He looks over, quizzically.  Yup, it’s him.  Shaved head, intelligent expression, reading glasses.

“Curtis, do you remember me from the other day?  I’m Kathy. We met on our cul-de-sac.  Our sons were scootering and whatnot.”

Curtis just looks at me.  “Oh.  My.  God,” he says.

“Oh.  My.  God!”  I reply.

Turns out, Curtis is a theater director, en route to London for the casting of a play that’s going up in the fall.  Turns out, Curtis is the head of the theater department at a major southern California art school.  His wife runs the acting program.  He’s only on this flight (and, I presume, only in coach) because he got bumped from another one on another carrier at the last moment.

“When you’re in Berlin, I know exactly who you need to meet,” Curtis says.  “An old friend of mine.  She’s an American expat, and she’s been in Berlin for about fifteen years.  She’s very involved in the Progressive Jewish community in Berlin, and extremely knowledgeable about Jewish cultural life.  And she’s a very successful novelist.  Her husband’s an attorney involved in human rights, and they have kids. She knows everybody in town.  You should really try and meet her.  Let me give you her information.  Email her, and tell her I sent you.”

I take a pause in my cramped seat in the middle of the cabin at the back of the plane at the start of my trip.  I glance over at Curtis, who has a milder dose of gob-smack than I do, but still.

To recap:  We are sitting directly.  Next.  To.  One.  Another.

Slowly, I dig for my Moleskine notebook and pen, to jot the pertinent details.  I turn to Curtis.  “Curtis,” I say.  “What’s your friend’s name?”

Because if it’s Amy, or Halberstam, then my head is going to pop off.

“It’s Nina,” Curtis replies.  “Nina Dietz.”

Actually, I’m relieved.  It would have been too much.

I click my pen.  “Lay it on me, Curtis,” I say.  “Frau Dietz is so totally coming to Shabbat.”