The Wedding Present

As a young woman, I had a friendly correspondence with a German soldier right after the war. I've been thinking about the silence at the core of our exchange ever since.

- By Cynthia Ozick

During my very first term of high school, I failed elementary algebra, and as a consequence was doomed to study German. It was 1942, when the war was well under way the Second World War, for my generation always "the" war, despite all that came after. Mine was a traditional school that claimed old-fashioned standards; today they might be regarded as archaic. Four years of Latin were required, and a choice between French and German. There seemed no need for Spanish; Cervantes notwithstanding, it gave off a faint hint of infra dig, of roiling Central and South American populations at a time when these were remote.

Together with nearly everyone else, I had opted for French. German, especially for a Jewish student in 1942, was a sinister tongue contaminated by its criminal speakers, repellent in its very substance. The massive murders of European Jews were already in progress when, in that same year, the infamous 90-minute Wannsee Conference systematized and codified the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question," a concealing German euphemism among others equally flagrant. The term deportation invokes a kind of authoritarian dignity-Napoleon on Elba, saypapering over the terror of outright savagery in the abduction of millions of defenseless Jews torn from their homes. Was I to be condemned to the penalty of learning German solely for the sin of flunking algebra?