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Binnie Kirshenbaum is the author of An Almost Perfect Moment, On Mermaid Avenue, A Disturbance in One Place, Pure Poetry, Hester Among the Ruins, and History on a Personal Note. She is a professor at Columbia University's School of the Arts, where she is chair of the Graduate Writing Program.

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History on a Personal Note

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History On A Personal Note

A LEGENDARY YEAR: 1984
Whatever Happens, We Ought to See It Coming

Despite the theoretical knowledge that history repeatsitself, Lorraine was devastated by a second RonaldReagan landslide victory. In response, she declared herself aCommunist, as if that would fix something or someone. Thiswas Lorraine's take on Communism: Donald Trump wouldhave to buy every woman in New York a gold and diamondtennis bracelet.

Me, I saw Reagan's second term as an inevitability. Notthat the foresight made it any more palatable. It's just that Iwas prepared to be miserable.

Another thing Lorraine didn't see coming down the pikewas her falling in love with Peter. Lorraine was a corporate travel agent, a career she chose for the benefits. Lorraineliked to fly in planes and stay in complimentary hotelrooms. Peter was one of her clients, a middleman whoarranged jaunts for German tourists to places like NiagaraFalls and Busch Gardens. Peter was also a German, andLorraine referred to him as "that pain-in-the-butt Krautwho always wants discount rates and special favors." OftenLorraine responded to his requests by saying, "Hey, rememberwho won the war." Yet, one day she called me up andsaid, "Would you believe I've fallen in love with that painin-the-butt Kraut?"

Lorraine and Peter went mad for each other, but asGoethe once said, "The Germans are trouble to themselvesand everybody else." This romance came with predicaments.Peter's stint in New York was temporary. He could, at anytime, be transferred to some other country. He prayed itwould not be Romania, where he was last, or anywhere inAfrica because he had a fear of snakes. Another stone to tripthem up along the path to bliss was the cross-eyed girl in thefox fur coat. Although he was not legally married to her, sheand Peter had been living together for the past seventeenyears. Their families were old friends residing in the sameGerman gingerbread village, and that cheap-o tour companyPeter worked for shipped them off to foreign lands, as if theywere married, together.

Lorraine, hailing from south of the Mason-Dixon Line,would think about such things tomorrow. For now, shewas in love, and she told me -- although she never used such a word -- that she and Peter were soul mates."Southerners and Germans are one and the same," shesaid. "Both set out to enslave other peoples. We lost thewars we started. As a group, we're stupid as shit. And nomatter where we go to, we have a strong attachment to ourown soil, our land."

I, a Jewess, didn't know from such things. My peoplejumped like fleas from one place to another, never allowed tostay put long enough to form an attachment to the neighborhood.Even later, when history was kinder to my families,offering us haven in America, we moved a lot, upwardlymobile, until we wound up in a brand-new house, built justfor us, in a suburb freshly developed. Raised up in one clip, itwasn't the sort of house that harbored ghosts. It had no past,no roots. Rather, one day we were there, and the next day wecould be gone without a trace. My house could've been in thetown that Hitler built for the Jews.

Lorraine tried to bake a Flammkuchen but didn't have theknack, and Peter couldn't develop a taste for peanut butterpie. But still, love flourished because, Lorraine explained,"The cross-eyed girl flatly refuses to give him a start-to-finishblow job. She won't swallow. Why do you think that is?"Lorraine asked me.

How could I possibly understand a people who considerswallowing a gob of jizz to be filthy, but found it conscionablyclean to wash up with soap made from Jews, Gypsies, andpriests? I shrugged, and Lorraine guessed, "It's one of thoseGerman peculiarities, isn't it?"

WILLKOMMEN: 1985–86
Reagan Honored SS Dead at Bitburg/
Peter Transferred Back to Frankfurt

Lorraine and Peter wrote long letters to each other. Lorrainelamented that his English was slipping fast. "Sniks, hewrites," she told me. "He wrote that at least there are not sniksin Frankfurt. He meant snakes."

At work, Lorraine spent most of her days trying to finaglefree airfare to Frankfurt. In December of 1986 she scored apair of tickets from Lufthansa, and so I went with her toGermany.

While Peter and Lorraine made up for lost time in ourfreebie room at the Intercontinental Hotel, I went sightseeing.I did not go to museums and cathedrals. Rather, Iwent sight-seeing for Nazis. I sat around cafés clocking anyoneold enough to have been one and tried to guess in whichbit of nastiness they partook. Later, after Peter returned hometo the cross-eyed girl, Lorraine and I went out for dinner."Like that one there," I said, pointing to a table across fromours, indicating an old woman wearing one of those queerTyrolean hats. "She either worked at a camp sorting clothes,pocketing whatever she could, or else she indoctrinated children,gathering them around her to read them that version of'Hansel and Gretel' where the Jew tries to bake the littleGerman children into matzo."

Lorraine nodded and remarked, "And where is the justicein this world that she sits here now eating that sausage likenothing ever happened?"

THE FOLLOWING DAY : 1986
Giving You a Number and Taking Away Your Name

Even after getting trapped on the Geisenerring, drivingaround and around it as if it were a maypole, as if there wereno exit, and then having to stop for gas at the last-chance-for-gas station where the attendant stank from stale beer andlooked like a serial killer, we managed to reach the borderbefore nightfall ...

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