Free Fear of Flying by Erica Jong

Bundesbahn conductors.
    FRÄULEIN!
    E pericoloso sporgersi.
    Nicht hinauslehnen.
    II est dangereux …
     
    the wheels repeat.
    But I am not so dumb.
    I know where the tracks end
    and the train rolls on
    into silence.
    I know the station
    won’t be marked.
    My hair’s as Aryan
    as anything.
    My name is heather.
    My passport, eyes
    bluer than Bavarian skies.
    But he can see
    the Star of David
    in my navel.
    Bump. Grind.
    I wear it for
    the last striptease.
     
    FRÄULEIN!
     
    Someone nudges me awake.
    My coward of a hand
    almost salutes
    this bristling little
    uniform of a man.
    Schönes Wetter heute,
    he is saying
    with a nod
    toward the blurry farms
    beyond the window.
    Crisply he notches
    my ticket, then
    his dumpling face smiles down
    in sunlight which is
    suddenly benign
    as chicken soup.
    Before I lived in Heidelberg, I was not particularly self-conscious about being Jewish. Oh I have certain memories: my grandmother lathering my hands between hers and saying she was washing away “the Germans” (her punning synonym for germs). My sister Randy initiating a game called “Running Away from the Germans” in which we put on our warmest clothes, bundled our baby sister Chloe in the doll carriage, made applesauce sandwiches, and sat eating them in the fragrant depths of the linen closet, hoping our supplies would last until the war was over and the Allies came. There is also a stray memory of my Episcopalian best friend Gillian Battcock (age five) saying she couldn’t take a bath with me because I was Jewish and Jews “always make wee-wee in the bath water.” But in general, I had a fairly ecumenical childhood. My parents’ friends came in all colors, religions, and races, and so did mine. I must have learned the phrase “Family of Man” before my training pants were dry. Though Yiddish was sometimes spoken at home, it seemed to be used only as a sort of code language to hide things from the maid. Sometimes it was spoken to deceive the children, but we, with our excellent childhood radar, always sensed the content even if we missed the words. The result was that we learned almost no Yiddish. I had to read Goodbye, Columbus to learn the word shtarke and The Magic Barrel to hear of a paper called The Forward. I was fourteen before I attended a bar mitzvah (a first cousin’s in Spring Valley, New York) and my mother stayed home with a headache. My grandfather was a former Marxist who believed religion was the opiate of the masses, forbade my grand-mother any “religious baloney,” and then accused me (in his sentimental Zionist eighties) of being “a goddamned anti-Semite.” Of course I was not an anti-Semite. It was just that I didn’t feel particularly Jewish and couldn’t understand why he, of all people, had suddenly started sounding like Chaim Weizmann. My adolescence (at Break Neck Work Camp, the High School of Music and Art, and as a counselor-in-training at the Herald Tribune Fresh Air Fund) had been spent in the palmy days when a black was invariably elected president of the senior class, and it was a blazing sign of social status to have interracial friends and dates. Not that I didn’t realize the hypocrisy of this reverse discrimination even then—but still, I had my share of honest integration. I considered myself an internationalist, a Fabian socialist, a friend of all mankind (nobody mentioned womankind in those days), a humanist. I cringed when I heard ignorant Jewish chauvinists talking about how Marx and Freud and Einstein were all Jewish, how Jews had superior genes and brains. It was clear to me that thinking yourself superior was a sure sign of being inferior and that thinking yourself extraordinary was a sure sign of being ordinary.
     
    Every Christmas from the time I was two, we had a Christmas tree. Only we were not celebrating the birth of Christ; we were celebrating (my mother said) “The Winter Solstice.” Gillian, who had a crêche under her Christmas tree and a star of