How My Grandma Reclaimed Her Femininity and I Shed Mine

This is a three-part column by Jenna Zucker that explores Jewish identity and queer identity while they travel in Berlin.

*

Our wooden table and yellow chairs squeak on the floor as our group of twenty struggles to fit in our Berlin classroom. The building is in West Berlin, and the walls are covered in anarchist political stickers. In the classroom behind us, there are teenage boys in an anti-toxic-masculinity martial arts class. Every once in a while, they all scream and jostle against each other in the hallway.

Our guest speaker is a disability-rights activist and teaches us about the movement in Germany. She speaks about the history of sterilizing disabled people in Germany and how the Nazis sterilized people during the Holocaust.

I stop taking notes, my eyes facing out the windows that look into the courtyard. I should get up, take a walk, go to the bathroom, but I don’t. My head spins with reminders of my grandma.

They inject us, my grandma said. So we have no children.

The women were ordered to stand in one line facing forward, their bare bodies and wet skin touching one another. A German woman officer approached the women with a needle. She walked down the row of women and quickly inserted the needle directly into their chests. The shot entered my grandma, then her sister. Or her sister, then her.

My grandma told me the women did not know what the injection was. Before they could think about what had happened, they were immediately ordered to pick up a dress from the mountain of dresses a few feet away. I was lucky, mine fit. They had no hair, no period, bare skin—and another woman’s dress. I try to imagine the colors of pinks, blues, reds. A flowery finish.

The memories sit in the pit of my stomach. I look around at the table, at my classmates squeezed together. They ask questions about German laws, organizations, activism. I don’t want to share my thoughts; I bury the stories deeper into my gut.

Helena leads us toward the U-Bahn for our long journey to a university across the city for our next lecture. My friends share headphones and listen to Lana Del Rey, and I pop my own in. I scroll through my Voice Memos and click on an interview with Grandma. I hear her voice as the train travels above ground, past postwar buildings. I hear her laugh. I hear her sigh. We are together, sitting on the yellow U-Bahn car and looking out at the city that once dictated her life. The city she built bombs for.

*

I travel on the U-Bahn on Friday evening for Shabbat services at Fraenkelufer Synagogue. Joey from the Jewish study-abroad organization tells me this temple is progressive, which to me means people of all genders will sit together and women are counted as part of the service.

I’m listening to music and watching my dot on Google Maps wander down the residential streets. I reach a section blocked off by police cars and guards. The dot says the temple is very close. I look back at myself through Snapchat, wearing Ilana’s gray sweater and navy cropped collared shirt underneath. It is the first time I have worn pants to services. “A new and improved synagogue look,” I write to my home friends. I put my phone in my pocket and make eye contact with the police. I look to my right. They are monitoring the synagogue.

“Hi, I’m here for Shabbat services,” I say to the guard. He is standing in the entryway in front of the path that leads inside.

“You are a tourist; you are not Jewish,” he says. “Not Jewish, you can’t come in.”

I stare into his blue eyes and at his blond hair.

“I’m Jewish. I’m here for Shabbat to pray,” I say.

“No, you are not Jewish,” he emphasizes.

We go back and forth for a few more moments.

“My grandma survived the Holocaust! Do you want to know my Hebrew name? I am Jewish!” I exclaim. Isn’t this exactly the reason for my Jewish nose? I think to myself. My nose matches my grandmother’s on my phone’s screensaver. A stranger from inside the synagogue runs out and asks the guard to let me in. I show him my ID, and he begrudgingly steps aside.

Walking around the streets to services, I feel as if the police are staring at me. They are watching me, the Jew, try to find my way, get lost, and turn around again.

My Jewishness has never been actively questioned before. As a white Ashkenazi Jew, Jewish institutions have centered my ancestors’ experiences and traditions. I look down at my green pants. I see women gathered through the door ahead in long, traditional dresses and skirts for services. I do not have a dress to signal my Jewish femininity to the police.

I am greeted by young people and their children in the synagogue. The Jewish women in dresses smile at me. I approach a younger man on the opposite side of the sanctuary to make small talk. He tells me how the synagogue is young and open. His toddler runs around a few feet away and between his legs. A mother lifts a toddler, and they cling to the hem of the skirt on her hip. Many women begin to make their way over to the other side of the room, but their husbands do not follow them.

My Jewishness has never been actively questioned before.

I walk to the other side, to the stack of prayer books. I admire the sweaters and button-down shirts of the men for inspiration for my future Shabbat looks. A blue collar sticks out of a sweater. I look down at my own outfit. I wish my breasts would vanish; instead I attempt to cover them with my layered collared shirt and sweater. I do not belong in their men’s section. I stand at the front of the rows, prayer book in hand, scanning the room. In a sea of skirts and dresses, I sit by the door. A woman with short hair and an American accent sits next to me, and we talk about reform Judaism in New York and California, where she grew up.

Our conversation reminds me of the Friday nights I crave to find in Berlin. I miss dancing in a circle at Romemu, a renewal synagogue on the Upper West Side, surrounded by queer Jews, Jews with diverse backgrounds, and Jews from as far away as Australia. I miss singing the prayer l’cha dodi without wondering whether or not the prayer space is meant for me.

We chant traditional Jewish prayers. The woman next to me whispers about how she wishes there was more singing. More chutzpah. I learn that German Jews are more traditional in relation to progressive Judaism in the United States—they are reclaiming the Judaism that was nearly stolen from them during the Holocaust. The space is filled with Jews from many different countries and continents, but we are united by the Hebrew text.

My eyes stare at the arc where the Torah scrolls are kept. This Friday night, I chant the prayers my grandmother chanted over seventy years ago in her small Hungarian synagogue. In a few hours in New Jersey, she will light the candles with my grandfather and, before drifting into sleep, mutter her evening prayer. I look around at the ceiling during silent prayer and read some of the Hebrew text. My eyes dart between the Hebrew and the German translation as if they are a contradiction. I spot another woman wearing pants and smile.

I miss singing the prayer l’cha dodi without wondering whether or not the prayer space is meant for me.

The woman next to me invites me to the Shabbat dinner she is attending, and on the walk to the family’s nearby apartment I ask the rabbi host what progressive Judaism means in Berlin. He asks me what I would define as progressive Judaism, and my question is left unanswered. My friends are pregaming queer parties at the nearby gay bar, but I am trying to be Jewish.

*

A few nights later, I am with those friends, drinking with our homestay hosts in our favorite bar, Südblock.

Südblock is a queer haven with a mix of indoor and outdoor seating and artsy menus. The stalls of the gender-neutral bathroom are filled with protest stickers and posters. One friend puts up a poster to advertise her queer art interviews, and someone emails her! On Wednesdays, you can get your hair cut between drinks and fries. One night, Casey gets up the courage to do it.

Ilana and another friend are brainstorming the different tattoos they might want.

“If I get a tattoo it will be about my grandma!” I drunkenly scream. “Gotta remember Grandma!” In a few minutes, we hug our homestay hosts and scramble to the U-Bahn to party at a club called SchwuZ for womxn, nonbinary, and trans folks until the early hours of the morning.

*

Casey was with me, waiting outside of the changing room, when I tried on a masculine shirt for the first time. We were in a thrift store in the Netherlands, where there was less of a distinction between the men’s and women’s sections. The shirt was checkered and plaid, with snap-on buttons down the middle. They cuffed the sleeves for me and tucked it in to bring its finishing look.

Another day, we took a trip to the mall in Poland in an attempt to find some men’s pants. But we forgot about how it was Sunday, and in Catholic Poland all of the stores were closed. I reveled at the men’s pants and button-down shirts in the windows of stores, begging capitalism to work for me, just this one time.

Casey was also by my side in the Netherlands as I sobbed at the end of the Anne Frank house in front of the large Auschwitz sign that marked the end of the Frank family. The sign that marked the end of the lives of many of my own family members.

Now, after class one day in Berlin, we walk into a nearby thrift store and Casey helps me wade through button-up shirts. I’m not sure what I am looking for, but I look to Casey as my guide. They find a pair of masculine beige dress shoes that are perfect but tragically too small. The section of the store with masculine clothes is too small, too, and, other than the shoes, the clothes are too big. Ilana picks up shirts behind us and can tell even before I do that I have a crush on Casey. But I still need different clothes. I’m scared to face this task alone, but no one else is free, so I embark on the journey by myself.

*

The U-Bahn halts at Alexanderplatz, and I dash to the large Uniqlo. Above the sign in the sky is the historic radio hub, which marks the center of West Berlin. The large shops mark capitalism in its prime, in contrast to the still-gentrifying East Berlin. There are so many large glass doors that I struggle to find the entrance, and I finally follow the tourists entering on the other side.

I walk upstairs and dart to the button-downs. The boxy, multicolored men’s shirts make my stomach warm. These are the clothes that will make me feel like . . . me. I have been dressing for my boobs since they arrived when I was nine years old.

While I am shedding my femme clothes, I’m reminded of how in Germany my grandmother reclaimed her femininity, stolen from her by the Nazis, with a new dress. She was freed from her second concentration camp, called Allendorf, about two hundred miles west of Berlin, where she wore only a thin piece of cotton as a dress. She worked in a factory with about one thousand other Hungarian women to rebuild bombs with mustard gas, which rotted her teeth.

Was a girl, her name is Anot, had perfect German. She worked in the kitchen. Lunchtime, they [the officers] say [liberation] not too far, not too far. We thought, maybe we will be free. Her Hungarian accent rolls on the r in free.

About one week later, the women were gathered to walk out of the gate, for the last time, and into the forest. She turned her head to spot the older officer who she knew had saved their lives. When he was required to call his officers in Berlin, he told them they needed workers in the factory, even though there was no more work to be done as the war came to an end. Don’t want us to be put in back Auschwitz. He was really good. The work he created for them saved her group from being sent back to the gas chambers in Auschwitz, unlike the transports of women that came before hers.

We left the camp maybe nine o’clock. By eleven o’clock we don’t see any Germans. The women were released into the woods on their own. She became part of a smaller group that walked through the woods all night. They found a road at dawn that led them to barns. A few days later, they found a nearby village where Germans were moved from their homes to make room for the survivors.

One girl, she was a seamstress. She make us each a dress from the curtain! The women at the oven, they say, your dress was made from my curtain!

The roughly ten women with her wore matching dresses made by one of the German women who took them to the communal baking ovens in the German town. The woman whose home they were living in saw them at the ovens, wearing her curtains in the form of matching dresses.

My grandmother cackles each time she tells this story, and she laughed especially hard the first time, when we were in a loud New Jersey tavern. The men piling burgers into their mouths and devouring the football game would never guess that across the room, my grandmother was laughing about her liberation and newfound femininity after being a prisoner at Auschwitz.

These are the clothes that will make me feel like . . . me. 

Back in Berlin, the saleswoman at the dressing room shares my enthusiasm over my clothing. The men’s dressing room is far away from the skirts and dresses downstairs. I pull on a solid maroon flannel and hope this size can help hide my breasts. It doesn’t, but it feels much better than the femme shirts hiding under Robin’s guest bed. “Feeling like a fuckin badass,” I write to my Snapchat friends, tongue sticking out of my smiling teeth. Teeth straighter than me.

*

Robin goes away with her friend for the weekend to a German beach town. Ilana and I are growing tired of her passive-aggressive rules. We have messed up the rock-to-water filling ratio for her special filtered water, and we accidentally woke her up when we began screaming one night at 2 a.m. Robin, begrudgingly, helped us get the bat that startled us out of our room. Robin tells us to be good this weekend, and we nod diligently, wishing her a nice trip.

We meet Casey and the rest of our friend group for Vietnamese food near our house, and on the way back we pick up snacks and alcohol from the big red supermarket that carries brands we can’t recognize. Our friend group met when we swam in the dirty canals near Amsterdam and went to the beach in The Hague together at the start of the program. In the supermarket, we are preparing for the munchies from the last of our stash of special brownies from the Netherlands.

We divide the brownies and play King’s Cup, a drinking game with a deck of cards. We gulp and sip our drinks according to the different tasks.

One friend starts making clucking sounds and singing farm songs and we all cackle along. The combination of the brownies and our drinks is taking full effect. We run to Robin’s big bathtub and decide to take baths, the six of us hopping in and out in twos and threes. I hop in with Casey, and we giggle together, arms wrapped around our knees. When we get out, we wrap ourselves in Robin’s soft embroidered towels.

Ilana and I sneak into the blocked-off living room—Robin’s sacred Yoga space—and steal two pillows for our friends to use. The six of us drift into sleep late at night and wake up to group pancakes the next morning, a reminder of our communal cooking in the Netherlands, where food was expensive.

*

For weeks I have been admiring Casey’s binder. They share how it has helped them feel comfortable and more themself underneath their androgynous overalls and turtleneck shirts. I feel a tug in my stomach when I look down at their black Doc Martens that tie their look together, with their short haircut and round glasses.

A friend from home sends a binder to me in the mail, and, when I open the box, I sigh with relief and excitement. It’s a light tan that could blend in with sand on the beach. It could be mistaken for a crop top, but the front is made of a material that compresses your chest. The label reads: “gc2b transitional apparel.”

I pull it over my head and stare into the mirror, as if looking will make the material scrunched by my shoulders unravel. I reach behind and shimmy the material down my back and over my breasts. They are flattened but still sit on my chest in an organized lump. It feels clunky, and I don’t feel comfortable wearing it under my shirt on a video call I have scheduled ten minutes later. It’s not what I imagined. I had hoped, after some intense pulling and squeezing, my boobs could be poof, gone.

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