If Ohio also had Hansel and Gretel houses and little villages with some variety of church-with-steeple in its center, the bus ride from Berlin to Dresden looks like a bus ride through Ohio. Flat, lush and green farmland. The occasional new growth pine forest which, no doubt, frames the construction that seems everywhere in Berlin.
Every so often, we pass by tiny little houses – some quaintly decorated by a Christmas elf – attending equally miniature gardens. What are these things? Is this where the poor people live? Is this why I never saw any homeless people in Berlin? These buildings are the sizes of chicken coops or fruit stands. Gnomes? Our Berlin guide, Billie, explains that these are part of the allotment farming movement initiated in the 1800s by a physician by the name of Motiyz Schreber who advocated tending a little plot outside of city life, connecting with nature, eating something fresh. Billie herself rents a little plot, somewhere in a forest. It’s refreshing, she says. The house is the size of a single room, has utilities but no insulation, for the spring and summer only.
Refreshing. This trip has refreshed me. First and primarily it has refreshed the teacher in me by turning me into a student.
We are working hard here, having left behind our more ordinary griefs to consider great loss and darkness and tragedy and the glimpses of the heroism of the human spirit that can only be answered with tears. We walked solemnly through the deepening alleys of the Holocaust Memorial; the slabs of grey stone varied in size and remain unadorned. We descended into the tomb where the names of the dead are read aloud, where replicas of letters full of desperation and expressions of love flashed beneath our feet. An old woman sits on a bench with her face in her hands, weeping. No whispers. Mesmerizing silence and the yearning to comfort or be comforted, to touch – to reach back through time and lay hands on the sufferers.
So here is the second refreshing: the food. The sweet and savory mouthfuls of life that our director and teacher, Tsipi, spoons into our lives.
I had chocolate gelato in the Mannheim train station that was so chocolaty that I might never need to taste chocolate again. But let’s start with breakfasts. Fried eggs, watermelon, mango, yogurt, vanilla crème poured over fried apples, sausage, bacon, potato pancakes, croissants, chocolate croissants, juice, coffee, more. At the Orange Cafe, we are served pesto spaghetti topped with grilled chicken or slivers of salmon curling over a salad of field greens. In the part at the base of the statue of Bismark, we are served wiener schnitzel with potatoes and carrots and more fried apples with vanilla crème. We sample brats, curry brats, sauerkraut, pretzels, sweet wine, white wine, red wine and beer. A million kinds of beer. I had a shrimp and mozzarella and tomato sandwich on a ciabata roll in the mall. Late that night, after Shabbot at what had been the US military installation in Berlin, we had what one of us termed, “the best Italian meal I have ever had in my life.” Green olives, sun dried tomatoes, bread and olive oil, peppers, mushrooms, grilled zucchini followed by vegetable lasagna and curly pesto noodles and some kind of pizza followed by tiramisu and vanilla ricatta and biscotti and coffee and tea. Before we eat, the blessing of candles and wine of Kadesh. The blessings of life, the sweetness in our mouths, the joys of conversation, the laughter coming from the table of young people, the refreshing.