It all started with one of my first posts on the immigrant Avrom Nahum Stencl listening to the church bells of Berlin. The emails started to come. People asking for advice. First a trickle, emails here and there, and then last week they became a daily occurrence. Strangers pouring out the panorama of their souls to me. People, living in Germany: new citizens, old citizens, some migrants, others immigrants and long-time visitors. Sure, many of them seemed to be Jewish. Did it surprise me that some of them were not Jewish at all? These folks, like Zafer Şenocak, had seen similarities between the Jewish experience in Germany from centuries before and their own, new condition of Deutschsein.
Bewildered by life in their country, these email writers asked me advice about all manner of things. Questions of love and tradition, religion, the strange behavior of the people they see as German natives, and especially the confusing nature of the language. Some are separated from their family, or their family is with them in Germany but they don’t seem to integrate well.
Why are they coming to me, you ask, and why through the medium of the blog and email? No one on 60pages really knows who our readers will be when we make these posts public. I didn’t. I admit that on most days I feel like I should be asking other people for practical tips for living and not sitting here, publicly handing out advice on how to negotiate the German dream. Sure, I lived there, I go back and forth to Germany and I spend most days reading about it and watching its movements. I listen to what other people say about Germany. What Germans say about themselves. Yes, I am sort of like a spy.
But I am going to take this on. Why not me? As Rabbi Hillel said, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am ‘I’?” If I manage to guide even one of these souls in a useful direction, then it will be like I have saved the whole world.
I don’t have all the answers, of course. I think fellow 60pages contributor Fabian Wolff might, though. And so I have asked him to help me respond to some of these emails as they come in over these next days while we are on blog duty.
And thus an advice column is born, “A Bintel Blitsbrivlekh” – Yiddish for a bundle of emails. From our readers, and for our readers.