Reviewed by Donald H. Harrison

Eleven-year-old David Weiss left Wiener Neustadt, Austria, shortly after the Anschluss with Germany because his father, the town's main rabbi, was able to read the writing on the nazi wall. The family made its way to the United States, where Weiss went on to serve as a professor of immunology at UC Berkeley before deciding to make aliyah to Israel. He became professor of immunology at Hebrew University, where he founded the Lautenberg Center for General and Tumor Immunology.

Ichthys is a comparatively new Christian sect which believes that God has a continuing covenant with the Jewish people, and that it is the duty of Christians through acts of atonement and love to build an alliance of equals between Christianity and Judaism.

The group invited Weiss and other former Jewish residents of Wiener Neustadt to return to their home town, tell their stories, and join with them in attempting to bridge the deep chasm between Jews and Austrian Christians. The Jewish survivors were at first suspicious, but were impressed by the sincerity of Ichthys members who --unlike many of their countrymen -- never tried to discount or minimize the horrors of the Holocaust. So the former Jews of Wiener Neustadt decided to return for a week a week of activities in May of 1995.

Facing an unknown building on the Baumkirchnerring in the center of the town, Weiss felt stunned. Once another shape had taken form on this lot -- the Tempel where his father had been the rabbi. He flashed back on what the Tempel had looked like after its insides were torn out by the nazis to make room for a lumber company. Even that was less shocking then seeing another building entirely: "Rubble betokens a past and challenges a restoration. In a shell the spirit of something sacred, of something dear, can reverberate, can be felt," Weiss suggested. "But tears in contemplation of a trade union's bureaus? In that, there is no seed of renewal. Only a dry absence."

Another stop on the tour was the Allerheiligenplatz, where shops, cafes and crowds have replaced what once had been the medieval Jewish quarter. "The one Jewish remnant is a house, cramped in a row of others, that was home to Rabbi Israel Isserlein, the great fiftteenth-century talmudic scholar and communal leader," Weiss reports.

Next it was to the Hauptplatz, the town's main plaza, where in Number 11, the Weiss family once resided. "The Mariensaule towers in the middle of the main sector," Weiss writes. "It is an elaborate construction of religious statuary encircling a column from which a figure of the Virgin Mary gazed over roofs and fields; the monument was erected in gratitude for her guardianship when the town was threatened by a visitation of a plague. I avoided the spot as a child, averse to approaching a shrine so impressively, compellingly, idolatrous. The Virgin is gone, demolished by Allied bombs; only her pedestal, the column, has prevailed."

And at the Neunkirchnerstrasse, almost back to the Allerheiligenplatz, he notes, "there is another, almost unnoticeable relic of the early Jewish community. Chest high, a thick iron ring projects from the corner building's masonry. It is the anchor link of what was a chain that on Friday nights and Saturdays marked off a segment of the street to form an eruv, the symbolic circumscribing of a precinct that gives it the quality of a private domain, permitting observant Jews to carry things within its bounds and not transgress the laws of the Sabbath. ...In more recent times it has been used to tether horses."

The sightseeing was prelude to an emotional meeeting later in the week between the band of Survivors and students at the Bundesrealgymnasium in which the Survivors told their stories, of their lives before the nazi era, of the imposition of various anti-Semitic laws, and then -- for the families who were not so lucky as the Weisses -- the imprisonment, torture and murders. 

"More than an hour passes," Weiss writes in his engaging style that brings us right into the meeting. "The delegates of the witnesses are finished. The stillness in the room has been absolute, uncanny because it is so unexpected. These are adolescents. One hears their schoolmates from other classes rampaging cheerily through the hallways outside during recess. But these in the assembly hall seem to have lost speech and movement. They sit upright, their attention fixed on the faces of the speakers. As if they, the students, were witnessing the unveiling of something from another planet, something so overwhelming that it robs them of speech and mobility."

One girl raises her hand. "What was done to you ... you can only feel hatred as you look at us." Another: "How can you not hate us?" Yet another "Why do you want anything to do with us at all?" The other Survivors look to Weiss -- the son of the Oberrabbiner -- to make their reply.

He states that he could not hate them, for they, the children, are blameless. He felt admiration for them for being willing to listen to something so hard. Yes, if there were an SS man from the camps, he would gladly smash his head -- if he had the strength for such violence -- "but you....no! I could see you dropping by for a bite at my home in Jerusalem. Perhaps one day you might." 

Weiss tells us, "I hear myself say that, and, to my astonishment, realize that I mean it."

A week of incredible encounters continued -- not only with the grimness of the Holocaust but with the humor and warmth that the Weiss family enjoyed in the days before the storm clouds gathered. 

His son and his grandson had been told and retold every Sukkot the family story of a mitzikatz -- a cat whose color defined blackness -- and now they were in the city where the incident that gave rise to the legend had occurred. They were determined to see if they could verify any of the story's details.

As Weiss retells the family heirloom story, it was on a brisk October evening in 1935 that everyone was gathered in a sukkah. "My mother in her best silk dress placed an enormous -- enormous! bowl of chicken soup with knodel--dumplings--before my father at the head of the table. The broth was boiling, as my children and grandchildren have been reliably informed, boiling as if it were a kettle of liquid steel flowing from the foundry's crucible, pillars of seething steam rising sacrificially through the bulrushes straight to heaven and obscuring my father's face as he bent over, spoon already lifted and blowing at the bubbling soupcon on its intended passage between beard and moustache. 

"But at that very fateful moment, a tomcat was also on the prowl or its supper. The mice were scuttling on the sukkah's precariously smooth reeds, perhaps in flight from another feline patrolling the premises. The tom pounced, missed, the reeds parted, and the beast, black as hell, descended into my father's soup. With a piercing, Stygian shriek it leaped out and raced the length of the table into the nigrous night. My father, paralyzed for a fraction of a second, the spoon, now emptied, arrested in middair, white shirt and rabbinic frock bespattered, shouted into the shocked stillness: Der soton hott a groisse gevureh ! --Satan has great power these days -- the only time I heard him in Yiddish, a tongue not his, until we came to New York's Lower East Side, as if the devilish apparation of the singed cat evoked memories of his days on the Galician front where that was the language of the impoverished Jews for whom, as in Isaac Bashevis Singer's fantasies, demons and dybbuks roamed the alleyways and imaginations of the shtetl."

Weiss -- do you not agree? -- is a fabulous story-teller. On so many levels, this is a book well worth reading and savoring.
 

David Weiss, author of Reluctant Return will address UJF's Ranch Breakfast Club at 7:30 a.m., Wednesday, Nov. 10. Information and reservations may be obtained by telephoning Rena Monge at (858) 792-9043, Ext. 20.