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it.”
    â€œI don’t follow.”
    â€œNo. Of course.”
    â€œYou wish me to humiliate you? But that’s not the article’s intention. It perhaps even shows you in a flattering light.”
    We were on my terrace, on a cloudy day, with a view to the gray sea. So far away from my only real home, I suddenly felt lucky to have been found, like a runaway who will soon be taken back to the rude shelter he has always known, and who feels, despite the cruelties he may have experienced there, that it is the one place that knows him well. I sipped my own tea and decided to tell Nils Schreiber: “More importantly, Mr. Schreiber…you see, I am a fraud. The great Franz Rosen, one of the fairies who slept with the Nazis for the underground…all false.” I then supplied him with the various details, the coal bin, the haberdasher, my fear, my lies. “Now that would be a scoop, wouldn’t it, Mr. Schreiber? To replace the one that fell rather flat? I suppose you’ll be smart enough, I suppose I’ll not have to connect every dot of my shame. But…a man may wish to act once in his life with the moral courage on which he’s dined for forty years.”
    My words had their desired effect: tears in the gray eyes of this thoughtful man. It was as though, if you’ll pardon me, the sea beyond us was reflected there.
    At length I asked him if he thought, when his article appeared, that I could be charged with some sort of crime. He thought most certainly not. I insisted we drink to that, and got out a bottle of wine. He raised his glass but it was I who made something of a toast: “Be sure to write – I think this is good, perhaps – a small part of the guilt money the Germans gave the Jews, a Jew gave the Arabs. Or rather, tried to… You know when people are most easily made fools of, don’t you? When they wish to be the hero.”

SIMONA JASTROW
    Confusion
    WHEN I WAS BORN , and where I was born, divorce was rare. Nonetheless my parents seemed to manage it. It was the time of the yellow star and of being booted out of everywhere. You would have thought it was a time for sticking together. But no. I was too little at the time to understand all – I was nine – but what it seemed like, and from what they said, which was contradictory and not really to be believed, even by me, my mother wished to emigrate and my father didn’t, then subsequently my father wished to emigrate but not with my mother. This emigration business never seemed the whole story. Then my father, who always talked about the Socialists, said to us that the Soviet Union was our only hope. My mother thought this was crazy. Later she would say it was his way to get rid of her. My father said that was crazy. He went to the Ukraine and worked on a collective farm. My mother obtained passage for her and myself to Shanghai. We had little money left but we made it. Our life in Shanghai was not at all full of the fun and games that some authors have described. Afterwards we emigrated to Vancouver, B.C., where my mother married a high school principal. I grew up and found Vancouver and all of it, my mother’s life, our life, repulsively bourgeois. Shortly after the GDR’s founding, I myself moved back to Berlin, convinced of the need to build Communism in the land of its invention. My father, I learned, had fought in the Red Army and survived the war. We resumed an occasional awkward communication by letter. He had other children by now and what I took, sight unseen, to be a shrewish, fat Russian wife.
    My ardor for my new/old country was enhanced by being flattered. The fact that I’d come back from North America seemed to increase the stock that various higher-ups in the regime placed in me. I was installed on a journal. I was considered reliable. I was encouraged to write my own story. And in most aspects I was indeed reliable. I believed in equality. I believed we were