This is My Song Read online

  The only journey is the one within.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  My child, I am dying.

  Do not be sad or afraid for me. When the time comes I will welcome my departure as natural and proper – even, as you will see, somewhat belated. I have stolen a great deal of time! But know this: as I close my eyes I will allow the last of the light to stay upon my best fortunes, your mother – and you, my child. You.

  Before then, however, I must deal with the secrets.

  Too many secrets.

  How it is, how it must be. After all these years the decision is remade. I will break my silence to give you the truth, written onto this paper, in English, so that you may properly understand your father’s life – and his corresponding shame.

  When and where is the correct beginning for this retelling? Already I wonder. There are many choices:

  I was born in 1929 in the Bavarian town of Bamberg –

  Once upon a time there was an Old Man who owned a music shop –

  What makes an artist become a tyrant and murderer –

  None of these. We must begin with my father.

  His name was Josef Ullmann. He spent his childhood in Kaplice. This market town was in the south-west of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, part of which became Czechoslovakia, now named as the Czech Republic.

  Straightaway you have some ancestry to deal with! You will have suspected that there was something. You will also have wondered – of course you wondered, I recall your many questions – why I have never told you of my past. Why not lay out, like a picnic spread, our glorious Czech heritage?

  My child, I pushed it away. Buried it, I had to! I did not wish for you to be burdened as I have been burdened. Inside my obstinate head I felt that it was better for you (and less difficult for me) to believe in an impossibility, that your family line had begun with your mother and me. There was nothing before, nothing! We had simply happened – snap! – come from thin air.

  Was I misguided? No doubt. Despite my effort to do so, I know – I have always known – that it is beyond reason or fairness to deny the past. As we move towards the inevitable, our heritage patiently awaits us.

  My father once said of his own childhood that it was ‘a waiting room’. He said, ‘I knew that I was destined for greater concerns. I simply had to bide my time.’

  You may think this comment to be vain and perhaps representative of a foolish man. If so, you are correct. My father was both vain and foolish, and certainly not the genius that my younger self had imagined him to be. Nevertheless, for a long time I loved him deeply.

  His own father made and sold sweets from a shopfront. His special skill was in creating bonbons. They were mixed colours, green and pink and orange. When I ate the bonbons they stuck to my teeth like a gooey rainbow, their delicious taste staying in my mouth for the whole day.

  My father regularly told me about his childhood before I went to sleep. I think he was trying to inspire me to rise above the everyday. More than once he said words like this: ‘The children from our neighbourhood were envious that I had a father who sold confectionery, but I felt that it was a very ordinary occupation. I would have preferred that he was a poet.’

  My grandparents lived with us during a summer holiday in Prague. I remember my grandfather as a very round-bellied, heavy-faced, serious person. I thought that he should have been a butcher or perhaps a judge. Certainly not a bonbon man.

  Anyway, the more important point is this. His wife, Josef’s mother, my grandmother, was German.

  Kaplice is close to the borders of Germany and of course Austria. It is not surprising that there were more Germans than Czechs.

  For many years, this was a peaceful arrangement.

  My grandmother’s name was Lena. She who loved reading and music. These were the qualities that she passed on to her only child, Josef.

  I should mention, before continuing, that the family was Jewish.

  To be fair, my vain and foolish father did study hard. He began at a Hebrew school but was soon transferred to a more prestigious school with the German curriculum. His mother had taught him to speak and read German from a very young age. Of course, he continued to study the Torah and Avodah, but only when he wasn’t listening to his mother’s music or reading her books. She tended towards those written by a group known as the Romantics. My father once told me that his mother’s heroine was Bettina von Arnim, a German singer and writer who spoke out on behalf of the Jewish people. He also mentioned his own early obsession with the author Goethe and a book to do with sorrows. My child, you will see the importance of this later on.

  I will not dwell on this period. It is enough to know that Josef Ullmann was a Czech-born Jew with a free-thinking German mother and a growing love of Teutonic literature and music. Our lives are shaped by our early years. Whatever joys or calamities may befall us, we do not lose that shape. This was how it was with my father.

  In 1920 or thereabouts my father was offered a place at the university in Prague.

  This was obviously very exciting, and not just because it meant leaving Kaplice. The way he told it, my father felt that his destiny as a famous man of letters was under way. Finally he was to break free of the waiting room and – to use the words that I heard many times throughout my childhood – enrol in the raptures of life.

  After World War One and the defeat of the Empire, Prague became the capital city of the new country, Czechoslovakia. There were more Czechs, more Jews and fewer Germans. Despite the horrors of the war and the general feeling of mistrust flowing towards Germany, my father was unwavering in his love of that country’s culture. As his studies developed, his goal became more precise. He wanted to be a translator. He wanted to translate his beloved German poetry into Czech so that his fellow citizens could enjoy these great and noble philosophies. Already he was obsessed with the works not just of Goethe and the more radical Heine, but also with those of the modernists, in particular, Rainer Maria Rilke.

  Do you detect a jarring note here? You would be correct to do so. To this day it has remained difficult for me to understand the strength of my father’s misdirected passion. What has poetry ever done to advance the world? More so, German poetry? Why champion literature from a nation that has wallowed like an obese bather in its own terrible arrogance and selfishness?

  It was around this time in Prague that Josef Ullmann met my mother, a beautiful, honest, kind-hearted woman. Her name was Anna.

  Again I will quote my father, never with absolute accuracy – for no memory can hold every word in its correct tonality – but I believe the intent will be clear.

  ‘I took wing,’ he said, ‘and soared.’

  This was his fanciful way, his use of poetic metaphor. Of course, he was referring to my mother and his first sighting of her at an outdoor café beneath one of the many bridges that cross the Vltava river.

  My mother was also Jewish, which was both a blessing and a difficulty. It was a blessing because Hebrew law states that Jews should only marry Jews. It was a difficulty because my mother, whose family was much more observant of Jewish custom than my father’s, had already been ‘matched’ to another man. He was older, a schoolteacher, a decent enough fellow apparently, although I did overhear my mother once laughingly reminisce that her match had ‘more stomach than brain’.

  Nevertheless, she had been promised. To break this match was obviously a painful act, but this was what my mother did. Clearly, at this time she showed great strength. For years afterwards her parents refused to even acknowledge her or my father, let alone provide blessing to their union. However much this damaged my mother’s heart, she persisted because of the great love that she felt for Josef Ullmann.

  It was perhaps fortunate that, upon graduating from
university, my father was offered a position at the University of Bamberg, in Bavarian Germany. He and my mother gathered their small quantity of possessions and left Prague, which had become very busy and industrialised since the first war. My parents were determined to start a new life under their own terms. They would always be Jewish, in whatever way they could, but more significantly they would always be together.

  My child, I know that when you read this retelling you will experience a series of surprises. Many of these will be unpleasant, some less so. This next, I hope, is in part a pleasing surprise.

  For fourteen years I had a sister.

  Why so pleasing? Because having finally admitted this, I can tell you of Marika’s spirit! She was a girl whose only course was to seek and speak the truth. She was indomitable. Courageous. Thoughtful. Challenging, yes, but in a vigorous and refreshing manner. To adopt and extend one of my father’s many metaphors: she listened for the music of life and well understood its varying tunes and melodies. Given time and opportunity, Marika would have changed, for the better, the symphonies of entire nations. This I truly believe.

  In so many ways, daughter, she was like you.

  A brief illustration of Marika’s character: we had returned to Prague and moved into a bigger apartment block on Široká Street. Our apartment was on the uppermost floor, my father having insisted that as a brilliant man of letters he could only live at the building’s summit. The apartment was large enough to have two windows opening to the street. It was also conveniently close to the synagogue (for my mother) and a kosher butchery (for my father).

  There was a boy who lived in one of the basement flats. His name was Heinrich and he was disfigured. He had a hare lip, a large empty bow at the centre of his upper lip that exposed his teeth and gums. He was teased endlessly by other boys in the block.

  One day, when Heinrich’s parents were asleep, these boys persuaded him to come onto the street to play football. Of course, it was a trick. They had made a sign, asking for money in return for a chance to kiss the ugly frog and see if he’d become a prince. There was already a queue of curious girls from the neighbourhood. When they saw Heinrich’s hare lip they made terrible, hurtful comments, and one girl even pretended to faint with shock.

  My sister Marika heard the commotion. She ran downstairs, saw what was happening, took the sign and ripped it to pieces. The boys were angry and threatening. They called her a ‘stingy Jew bitch’ but Marika didn’t care. Nor had she finished. She grabbed the couple of coins and gave them to Heinrich before escorting him back to his flat and telling him from that point on they were friends. They were too, until Heinrich and his family moved back to Germany, to Stuttgart I believe, in 1939.

  Marika had great zest and compassion. Unfortunately, I could never be like my sister. I admired her greatly and wanted to follow her example but my character was different. I was shy and hesitant, much less confident with making friends or attending big public occasions such as Bar Mitzvahs. As a child, I often felt overwhelmed. The Jewish faith, with its many customs and observations stemming from a history that seemed as dark and deep set as a Bavarian forest, was often too much, the rabbis especially. But most overwhelming was my father. Why? Because I grew up believing that he was a genius.

  You see the difficulty of such a belief? If it is true, then it is impossible to be that person’s son. Who can live up to the example set by a genius? If it is false, then it is also impossible to be that person’s son. Who can love a pretender, or worse, a liar?

  In 1934, as I have already indicated, our little family left Bamberg and returned to Prague where my father took up a lecturer’s post at the university, again specialising in Teutonic literature. I was just five years old, so I do not recall the move in detail. However, I do know that there was another event from around this time that mattered greatly in the passage of our lives.

  President Hindenburg of Germany died.

  My child, I do not wish to patronise you by writing a lengthy account of the history of this era. Time and my failing health do not permit me to do so and besides, the cold-hearted actions and intents of certain groups and individuals in 1930s Europe have already been well documented and publicised. I will, however, note some simple, obvious links.

  The death of a President led to the birth of a Führer.

  The birth of a Führer led to the murder of a civilisation.

  Our early years as a family in Prague were happy. I remember slices of bread with jam spread thickly, the quiet sharing of the Torah and the sweet smell of candle smoke. My father singing folk songs that he knew from his time in Kaplice or humming along with the music of Dvořák that played on the radio. My mother sewing my new bed quilt with pictures of clowns, or cross-stitching a cloth for the table. Studying photos and learning about distant aunts, uncles and cousins. My sister telling me scary stories; we both liked the one about the trickster fiddler who was saved by an axeman after some animals decided to avenge their capture. Our games; playing dominoes and chess, and acting out stories using Marika’s wooden dolls (soldiers or rebels) and my bear (the hero or victim) as the characters. My father bringing home a canary for a pet – he insisted that it be named Rainer – or reciting poetry in such a loud voice, the families from other apartments would knock on the walls or the floor and yell out, ‘Quieten down, we’re trying to sleep!’ – even if it was the middle of the day. Of course, he was very dramatic in his recital, standing on a chair, grabbing me from behind and lifting me as he chanted:

  He holdeth the boy tightly clasp’d in his arm,

  He holdeth him safely, he keepeth him warm.

  Other memories: my mother scolding my father about his lax Jewishness – he would be late home before Shabbat or he would go against custom by grabbing a pencil and starting to translate a poem or he would forget to bless Marika and I before dinner, sometimes even forget the words to the Kiddush – and I recall his comical response: pulling faces, jumping long-legged around the room like a scared grasshopper as he pretended that she was chasing him, yelling, ‘Keep her away from me, she’s mad!’ My sister and I laughed, even Mama laughed. Once again the neighbours would complain but my father never took offence. Instead he would tap out a rhythmic reply on the walls or the floor, trying to engage the Erbens or the Pflegers in a coded conversation. Sometimes he was even successful in this.

  S-O-R-R-Y-D-E-A-R-F-R-I-E-N-D-S.

  You see how I admired this comical, passionate genius?

  But while our home was a cocoon of happiness, the outer world was darkening with fear. Soon enough this began to intrude. Without us knowing when or how it had happened, the music on the radio set was replaced by shouting. This was Adolf Hitler screaming his vile propaganda. Then, one evening, a man came and took away the radio set. He said that it was forbidden for us to own such a device. My father was heartbroken until he decided that no radio set meant more time to devote to his great love. I thought that meant his family; he was actually referring to the poetry of Rilke.

  I began to notice that, as we walked streets that were outside the Jewish district, people pointed and whispered. We saw new signs on the shops: ‘no Jews, no dogs’. Children whom we had considered to be friends now called us names or swore at us. There was a new rule about not going to the cinema. Another new rule about not going to cafés or restaurants. A special identity card with a large J printed on the top had to be carried at all times.

  Rainer, our canary, caught a chill and died. I thought my father would be sad, but he just took Rainer’s body from the cage and dropped him in the trash can.

  One day I got out of bed to go to school as usual when my mother said, ‘No, Rafi, today you must stay here with me.’

  I was happy to spend time with my beautiful mama but also perplexed. My parents were great believers in the power of education. They would never approve a day off unless I was sick.

  In another room, Marika said glumly to me, ‘We’re not allowed to go.’

  ‘To school?’
r />   ‘Yes. What do you think?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘An order. The government. I don’t know. We’re Jewish, I suppose.’

  That made more sense. Even to a shy child like me who took little notice of the wider world, it was obvious that being a Jew in Prague was becoming increasingly difficult. I only had to look at the increasingly unhappy face of my mother to know that something was seriously wrong.

  Marika said, ‘Hey, Rafi, I’ve got an idea.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m older so I know more. I can teach you, if you like. We can have a classroom here.’

  ‘Yes!’

  I was ten years old at the time. I never returned to what might be termed as ‘proper’ school. Instead I learned from Marika, my mother, the Old Man and his nephew Michal, and, later on, from two kind people named Dominik and Mr Haas.

  I have already mentioned my father’s obsession with Rilke. Throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s, his focus was a new anthology.

  The story went like this. At the university, my father had set himself up as an expert on Rilke’s poetry by publishing scholarly articles claiming the international significance of the poet. He told my mother that he did this because the poems had many positive and rapturous messages, much needed in a fractured world. He said, ‘Rilke’s poems are life-changers.’

  My mother was already annoyed with her husband because once again he was late home. She said, ‘Josef, new laws are life-changers. New laws, and the armies that enforce them. Not the poems of a dead man.’

  My father was most offended. He said, ‘Wrong! Laws exist to make politicians happy and lawyers fat, whereas poetry – poetry hugs the heart.’ He went on, ‘Here is the difference. Law is the keeper of order, poetry is the keeper of love. Hey, what would you rather have, an organised life or a romantic life?’

  ‘Both,’ said my mother firmly. She gave up the argument, but later that night, when I was supposed to be asleep, I crept along the passageway and heard my father reciting the work of his beloved poet to his beloved wife: