The Breslau Address Book

by Albert Lewkowitz, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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On the first of March 1950 Grete Ollendorff turned the wheels of her date stamp to the fifteenth, inked it, and tested it on the back of a tram ticket. The ticket said 15 MRZ 1950 in violet. Two weeks was the loan period. It had been two weeks in Breslau, on the Gartenstraße, and it was two weeks on Herzl Street in Haifa, in the back room of Benveniste's stationery shop, where the rain came under the yard door and the shelves had been built by her husband out of planks and the hollow bricks they used for the new blocks going up on the Carmel.

The fee was fifty prutot a volume. In Breslau it had been twenty pfennig. She did not convert one into the other any more. There was no rate of exchange for it.

Dr. Proskauer came in at ten, as he did every first Wednesday, shook the water off his umbrella onto the step outside, because she had asked him to in 1941, and put Effi Briest on the counter.

"Again," she said.

"It improves." He was seventy-four and had been a judge at the Amtsgericht. In Haifa he kept the accounts for a cooperative that made cardboard boxes. "Somebody has to read it, Frau Ollendorff. The young people read Hebrew newspapers and the Americans read detective stories."

"You could take something else. I have the Thomas Mann back."

"I know how the Thomas Mann ends."

She took the card out of the pocket inside the front cover. Effi Briest had come from Breslau in a lift with her furniture in 1936. Its card had been replaced three times. The present card showed his name eleven times, in his small upright hand, and two others: a Frau Wolff who had died in 1947, and a young woman who had borrowed it in 1948 and returned it unread, with an apology, because she was going to a kibbutz and wanted to learn the language properly.

He signed it again. She stamped it: 15 MRZ 1950.

Under the counter there were three cartons. He looked at them, as he looked every month, and said nothing, as he said every month. One was from Frau Lasker's son, one from a lawyer in Bat Galim whose clients' estates contained books nobody in the family could read, and one had arrived without a note on Monday, left in Benveniste's doorway with the rain already through its corners. She had dried the books on the kitchen table, one at a time, standing them open like tents.

"You have no room," Dr. Proskauer said.

"I have no room."

"Then refuse them."

"Yes," she said, and he went out with Fontane buttoned inside his coat and the umbrella held over the coat rather than over his head, because he was a man who believed that a book should be carried dry and a hat could take care of itself.

---

The young man came at half past eleven. He pushed the yard door with his shoulder because his arms were full, and the crate he carried was not a carton but a proper wooden case with rope handles and stencilled letters on its side: ARTHUR FREUND, BRESLAU — HAIFA, VIA TRIEST. The stencilling had faded to brown. He set it on the floor, not on her counter, which she noticed, and straightened, and was taller than the shelves.

He wore the khaki of the port, with a canvas jacket over it, and his boots left water in the shape of boots.

"Giveret Ollendorff?"

"Ja."

He went on in Hebrew. She followed most of it. His father had died in January. His mother was moving in with his sister in Kiryat Motzkin, where there was one room and no shelf. These were his father's books. Somebody at the Irgun Olei Merkaz Europa office had said there was a woman on Herzl Street who took German books.

"Took," she said in German. "I lend them. I don't buy them. I can't pay you."

He understood that, or understood enough. He shrugged. The shrug said: pay, not pay, it is all the same, I am not here to sell my father.

"Then I leave them on the street," he said, in Hebrew, and then in German, as though to make sure, with the accent of a nine-year-old who had stopped speaking it at nine: "Auf der Straße."

"In the rain."

"The rain is not my business."

She came round the counter. She was sixty-three, and the room was small, and he stepped back to give her the crate, which she knelt beside. The rope handles were dark from hands. She lifted the lid.

The top layer was what the top layer always was. Graetz's Volkstümliche Geschichte der Juden, three volumes in brown cloth. Heine in a cheap edition. Fontane, but not Effi: Der Stechlin, Frau Jenny Treibel. The Zunz Bible, the 1930s printing, the spine broken at Psalms. A Reclam Kant, the Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, with a pencil stub still inside it as a bookmark, two-thirds through. Two prayer books, one for the weekdays and one for the Days of Awe, with A. F. tooled on the cover of the second. A guide to the Riesengebirge with a pressed gentian in it.

"Your father walked in the mountains," she said.

"Every summer. Before."

Under these, filling the bottom of the crate on its side because it would not lie flat among the others, was a book four fingers thick, bound in grey boards gone soft at the corners, with a gilt title worn to a shadow.

She did not need to read the title. She had owned the same book. Every shop in the city had owned it, every doctor's waiting room, every office that needed to know where anyone lived. Breslauer Adreßbuch für das Jahr 1935.

"That one is not a book," the young man said. "Throw it away."

She put it on the floor beside her knee and did not open it.

---

The trouble was the shelves. Her husband had built eleven shelves along three walls and one free-standing case down the middle, and he had died in 1944, before anyone had thought there would be cartons. She had taken in Frau Lasker's books in December by putting the poets two deep. She had taken in the lawyer's estates by moving the travel books into the kitchen, where the steam from the kettle was bad for them. There was nowhere for a crate.

There was, however, the top shelf on the east wall, which was Julius's. The Cotta Goethe, forty volumes in green half-leather, which he had insisted on shipping, which had cost more to bring than the bed. Nobody had borrowed a volume of it in fourteen years. Nobody had asked. It was not on the lending list; it had no cards. It sat at the top of the room the way the name of a firm stays painted on a wall after the firm is gone.

She fetched the stepladder from behind the door.

"What are you doing?"

"Making room."

He watched her climb two steps and reach. She could take the volumes down only three or four at a time, and her shoulder did not like it. After the second armful he said something short in Hebrew that she did not catch, took the ladder from under her by the simple method of standing beside it until she came down, and went up himself. He handed the Goethe down in sixes. She stacked them on the floor against the yard door, where the rain could not reach, in the order of the volumes, because there was no reason to put them out of order merely because they were leaving.

"Where do these go?"

"Under my bed."

"And the bed?"

"The bed stays where it is."

He looked at the green spines against the wall, and at the gap at the top of the room, which was larger than his father's crate needed.

"These are worth more than his," he said.

"Yes."

"So why?"

She considered several answers. She gave him the one that was true and short. "Nobody reads these. Somebody might read his."

"Nobody reads German."

"Dr. Proskauer reads German."

"One old man."

"Then one old man," she said, and handed him up the Graetz.

He shelved them as she passed them, Graetz, Heine, Fontane, the Bible, the Kant. When he came to the Kant he took the pencil stub out of it and held it a moment, and then put it in his jacket pocket, and then took it out again and put it back where it had been, two-thirds through, at a page where his father had stopped. She saw him do this and kept her eyes on the crate.

The prayer books she kept back. She did not lend prayer books; people had their own, or had lost them, and if they had lost them there was a shop on Hechalutz Street that sold new ones. She set the two of them aside on the counter. A. F. in worn gold.

"Those I give back to you," she said.

He nodded and did not pick them up.

The address book she lifted onto the counter beside them, because it was heavy and her knees had had enough of the floor.

---

It opened by itself. A book that has been opened often at the same places opens there again. It opened at the F's.

The page was printed in Fraktur, in four narrow columns, name, trade, street, house number, the abbreviations of a city that had known exactly who it was: Kfm. for merchant, Wwe. for widow, Dr. med., Rechtsanw., Inh. for proprietor. Beside some of the names, in the left-hand margin of each column, there were marks in pencil. A small upright tick. A small cross. Here and there a short horizontal stroke.

Freudenthal, Max, Dr. med., Kaiser-Wilhelm-Str. — a tick. Freudenthal, Hedwig, Wwe. — a cross. Freund, Arthur, Kfm., Getreide, Tauentzienstr. — nothing.

She turned the page. The marks went on. She turned back through the E's, the D's, quickly at first and then slowly. Not every name. Out of a page of three hundred names, ten, twelve, fifteen were marked. The rest were the city: the bakers, the tram conductors, the Protestant pastors, the clerks at the Oder shipping office, the man who had sold her the coal. They were not marked. They had not needed to be. The marked names were the names an Arthur Freund would have known: the people from the community, the people from the grain exchange, the people from the synagogue on the Wallstraße.

"What is it?" the young man said. He had come down from the ladder.

She did not answer. She was turning to the O's.

Ollendorff, Grete, Leihbücherei, Gartenstr. 74 — a tick. And under it, Ollendorff, Julius, Prokurist, same address — a cross, and beside the cross, very small, Haifa 44.

So he had known that too. Someone had told him, at a meeting, at the Irgun office, in the street. He had come home and opened the book and found the line and made the cross and, because a cross alone said only that a man was dead and not where, he had written Haifa 44, which said: not there. Here. Of the heart. In his bed.

She turned to the P's. Proskauer, Siegfried, Amtsgerichtsrat — a tick.

She turned to the K's, because she knew whom she would find there. Kassel, Rosa, Wwe., who had borrowed every Vicki Baum that came into the Gartenstraße shop and returned every one with the corners turned down, and whom she had begged, in letters, in 1938 and in 1939, to come. A cross. Nothing beside it. No place. A cross alone.

The young man had come round the end of the counter and was reading over her shoulder, slowly, because it was Fraktur and he had learnt Fraktur at a German school for three years and then never again.

"The lists," he said. "The Aufbau lists. And the lists in the MB. He read them every week, after the war. My mother said it was bad for him. He used to sit up with them." He stopped. "I thought he was looking for someone."

"He was," she said.

She turned, because the book wished to open there too, to the section at the back where the institutions were. The courts. The schools. The hospitals. The religious communities, Synagogengemeinde, with its offices and its cemeteries. And under it, in the same small type as everything else, Jüdisch-theologisches Seminar (Fraenckel'sche Stiftung), Wallstr. 14, with its director and its lecturers in a short column beneath.

Beside the Seminary there was a cross. Beside each of the names beneath it there was a mark. Not all the marks were the same.

The young man put his finger on the cross beside the institution. His hands were wide and cracked across the knuckles from the cables at the port. "A building?"

"November thirty-eight," she said. "They came for it. And for the library."

He took his finger away.

There were names with the short horizontal stroke. She looked at those for a long time. The stroke was the mark a careful man makes when he does not know, and will not write a tick because he cannot prove it, and will not write a cross because nobody has told him. There were more of them on the Seminary page than she would have expected, and fewer on the F's than on the K's, and she supposed that meant nothing, or meant only which meetings he had gone to. A careful man. A man who did not round up.

"His own name," the young man said. "He didn't mark his own name."

"He was alive," she said, "when he was marking."

He looked at her then as if she had said something stupid, and then as if she had not.

---

It was nearly one. Benveniste would want the back room quiet while he ate his lunch in the shop. The rain had stopped and the yard was steaming in a thin sun, and she could hear a lorry changing gear on the Carmel road, going up to the building sites.

"So," the young man said. "You take them."

"I take them."

"And that?" He did not point at the address book. He did not need to.

"I can't lend that," she said. "Nobody in Haifa needs to know where the bakers in Breslau lived."

"Then I throw it away."

"You said that before."

He stood there in his port khaki with his father's crate empty at his feet. Through the yard door there was the smell of wet cement and of somebody's onions. He picked up the prayer books, the weekday one and the one for the Days of Awe, and put them inside his jacket against his chest, where they made a square shape. Then he put his hand flat on the address book and left it there.

"How much?" he said.

"What?"

"To borrow. How much."

"Fifty prutot," she said. "For two weeks."

He found the coins in his trouser pocket, a twenty-five, two tens, and a five, and counted them onto the counter in a row, as a child counts, because it was important to him that it should be exactly fifty and not change given back.

She had no card for the address book. She took a blank one from the box in the drawer, wrote across the top in her German hand Breslauer Adreßbuch 1935 — Nachlass A. Freund, and turned it round to him with the pen.

He wrote his name in Hebrew, from right to left, small, in the first line. Avner Yedid. She could read that much. Yedid: friend. So the father had been Freund and the son had made it into Hebrew. The same name, in the other alphabet.

She cut a pocket out of an old envelope with the scissors, pasted it inside the front board, put the card in it, and pressed it flat with the heel of her hand. Then she took the stamp, which still said 15 MRZ 1950, pressed it into the violet pad, and set it down on the card under his name, and held it there, the way Julius had taught her, a moment longer than seemed necessary, so that every figure would take.

---

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Octōbribus (1 October 2026), ab Albertō Lewkowitz per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Albert Lewkowitz, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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