Up in the Trees

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:: FALL 2017 TRAVEL WRITING CONTEST FINALIST ::

Strawberry-rhubarb pie, contemplated residence, discounted steins, drifting seeds, stumbling blocks, the Black Forest, amateur sex, river runs, rawboned prisoners, beginnings and endings & the genocide.


I can’t sleep. My furnished apartment in Freiburg, Germany, has a TV that broadcasts a single channel, and since I’m too tired to read, but too wired to rest, I tune in for half an hour. I speak nicht Deutch—just a little Yiddish—but can still make out the tail end of a news program on an Auschwitz survivor, replete with images of rawboned prisoners and the eminent entry gate (“Work shall set you free”); a preview for a film called Female Agents, in which be-lipsticked vixens gun down unsuspecting Nazis; and the start of a sitcom called “Tel Aviv Rendezvous,” in which a guileless guest shows up at a Shabbat dinner with unkosher wine.

It is six hours earlier in New York. I call my husband, tell him about the triad.

“What is it,” he asks, “the atonement channel?”

Compass Rose

In the sunniest spot in Germany, rain clouds roll in, discharge and retreat. It’s July, and between short daily storms the sun blazes. One learns quickly in the federal state of Baden-Wurttemberg to travel with protection: sunscreen and sunglasses. A windbreaker and umbrella. Shoes that won’t soak through and subsequently squeak throughout the day.

I have a bag packed with such supplies on my mile-long walk to the University of Freiburg, where I instruct an English-language writing seminar. It is 2010. Through the canopy of trees above my head, the sky is intermittently yellow and gray, heartening and menacing. On Günterstalstrasse, the city’s main axis, I pass open-faced bakeries, one after the other, whose honey-sweet smell absorbs into my clothes. I am lured in like a bee and because yahoo! I’m in Europe, I order a slice of strawberry-rhubarb pie for breakfast and sit at the window and smile unwittingly at passersby.

The view is aggressively adorable: trolleys glide along cobblestone streets amidst buildings the shade and shape of lemon meringue. Narrow water-filled canals, vestiges from the Middle Ages, crisscross alleys and abut sidewalks. It seems every window has a box neatly packed with flowers and everyone, old and young, narrow and wide, rides their bicycle.


Gothic spires pierce the clouds. Gargoyles poise on the edge of the roof as though bracing to jump.


I sip espresso and watch folks cluster at the crosswalk. I try not to think about how I jaywalked the day before and an elderly man berated me, all consonants and knitted brows. (Reproach requires no translation.) Nor do I dwell on a German friend’s supposition that the man said this: Ordnung muss sein. Order must be maintained.

I let a piece of pie dissolve in my mouth and try to decide if it’s more sour or sweet. It is impossibly both. I note that I should do this more—make a meal of dessert. Perhaps I’ll start baking in New York, despite my wee aisle kitchen and temperamental oven. Even though I don’t own proper bakeware. Even though I’m not so good at following directions. Above the rooftops, the Black Forest seems to float, a wooded island in the sky.

I never expected my 92-year-old grandmother to sanction my trip to

Deutschland. In fact, I held off telling her that I’d accepted a summer teaching post in part because I didn’t want to upset her. Grandma has a brain tumor. She is prone to passing out. When I finally confessed a week before leaving—at top volume due to her near-deafness—she barely blinked. I assumed she hadn’t heard me.


On Günterstalstrasse, the city’s main axis, I pass open-faced bakeries, one after the other, whose honey-sweet smell absorbs into my clothes.


“Germany,” I re-shouted. Nothing. Had I stunned her into silence? Like so many Jews in the diaspora, my grandmother’s family fled pogroms in Eastern Europe and shed their Ashkenazic surname in the States. She and my late grandfather, who helped build our local synagogue, ensured that I was thoroughly versed in the Holocaust.

“I feel guilty,” I offered, hoping to diminish her disappointment or assuage a fidgety conscience. Grandma puckered her penciled-on brows and shooed at the air with her hand.

“Forgive and move on,” she said. Then she hunched over a glass and took an uneasy sip of water, a drop of which dribbled down her chin.

Compass Rose

At the University of Freiburg, where philosopher and Nazi Martin Heidegger rose from professor to chair to rector, my students discuss their stories-in-progress.

Subjects vary from loosely true to admittedly contrived: amateur sex, domestic abuse, Satanism. All have signed up to learn how to write fiction, to learn about plot and structure and endings and beginnings. They want to master language. (Cue Heidegger: “Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.”)

The students’ drafts are raw and rough. Some are overdramatic and don’t convince us. To the writer of a knife-throwing protagonist, a classmate gripes, “That wouldn’t happen in real life.” Other narratives lack tension. “Where’s the obstacle?” we press. “What’s at stake?”

Most students hail from the States: Pennsylvania, Nebraska, Texas. A few are German. One’s from South Africa.


Everything is so delightful. Isn’t there some kind of Biblical story like this? A community that’s too comfortable, too incautious, and God strikes it down?


That afternoon, Nadja, a department assistant, takes the group on a walking tour. She points out popular beer gardens and restaurants and a cinema that shows English-language films for only four euro. She guides us to the Münsterplatz, the center of the city, designed around the mammoth and intricate red sandstone cathedral. We tip our heads back and marvel. Gothic spires pierce the clouds. Gargoyles poise on the edge of the roof as though bracing to jump.

An art history student notes the statues adorning the façade: prophets, demons, imps. She explains that several of them feature “attributes.” Like Saint Catherine, virgin princess, gripping the spiked wheel with which she was tortured.

At cafés along the periphery where diners schmooze under umbrellas, an accordion player pumps vaguely familiar tunes. Nursery rhymes, maybe. Show tunes? The sky is graying over. Nearby, a guitarist croons Red Hot Chili Peppers and several students, American and German, chime in: “I don’t ever wanna feel, like I did that day!” I tongue the salt in my teeth.


Grandma puckered her penciled-on brows and shooed at the air with her hand. “Forgive and move on,” she said. Then she hunched over a glass and took an uneasy sip of water, a drop of which dribbled down her chin.


When Nadja pauses to plot her next move, I ask if we can go see the synagogue.

“The what?”

Temple, I offer. House of worship. Church for Jews. I point to the street sign at the corner: Platz der Alten Synagoge.

Her face lights up with understanding. Mine does at being understood. Then she shakes her head. “It was burned down.” The war, she says. The sign is simply pointing to where it used to be.

Compass Rose

Saturday and cloudless: U.S.-born, German-based Emily takes me on a hike along the Dreisam River. Locals loll in the sunshine. Women go topless. Kiddies swim nude. All around us, the forest swells skyward, interrupted only by mounds of vineyard.

“Isn’t it charming?” says Emily. It’s not charming. It’s Eden. Ducks bob on the current and egrets wade in the shade. “Here,” she says. She’s picked a wild raspberry off the vine. Then a blackberry. I swallow. Everything is so delightful. Isn’t there some kind of Biblical story like this? A community that’s too comfortable, too incautious, and God strikes it down?

We emerge from a tunnel in which someone’s graffitied “Fuck the police” and into a cloud of white fluff, seeds drifting on the wind. The hope of a new plant generation.

Emily tells me how the German population is in serious decline, how deaths are outpacing births. There’s an incentive, she says, that provides men with a year of paid paternity leave for every child they produce.


In the sunlight, the bellies of floating seeds glow like fireflies.


“A year?” I shout. She laughs at my enthusiasm. My husband and I hope to have two—maybe three with that kind of offer. “Fully paid?” I fill my lungs. Freiburg. Why not? The rent is so much cheaper. Healthcare and education are practically free. Not to mention that the city’s eco-friendly even by Brooklyn bohemian standards: vegetation sprouts from rooftops and solar panels decorate storefronts and farmers’ markets pitch tents nearly every day. The Green Party has a stronghold here.

In the sunlight, the bellies of floating seeds glow like fireflies. We could hike through the Black Forest every day and bike along the Dreisam. My husband, a runner, would love it.

On a nearby bench, an elderly woman watches us. She is old—older than the war.

The sight of her fills me with suspicion. Church bells echo through the trees. A duck buries its head in the stream, revealing only its tail and pedaling feet.

Compass Rose

Dinner with friends at Oma’s Küche, Grandma’s Kitchen. I do not conjure my own grandma’s kosher-style kitchen; this menu has a whole page of pork. Instead I feast on spinach- and cheese-filled crepes and buttery white wine from a local vineyard. (All listed in English! I wouldn’t even need to know German to get by!) Afterwards we wind our way through the university square, past a clock tower and a Starbucks and a jewelry store with crystals twinkling just out of reach. It’s the weekend of the Schlossbergfest and as I climb a hill into the edge of the forest, I bump into a few of my students buying shots from a veil-wearing bride-to-be—a tradition, I’m told, that helps new couples pay for their wedding. The Americans love it here. What’s not to love? I say.

The music festival is packed. Locals and tourists and teenagers and retirees crowd around performances and beer stands, clapping and smoking and shouting. We push our way to a paved pathway that takes us to a slightly less-congested section in back. On stage, Van Halen lookalikes croon Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb.” “Germans love American rock,” someone says. I seek out beer, and though I can’t understand what the vendor says through his discolored teeth, I pretend I do. The stein is twice the size of a stateside mug and I walk extra slowly so as not to disturb the foam.

“So cheap,” I say.

“No,” says a friend, “you got the cute-girl discount.” When I turn around, the vendor is giving me a hyperbolic thumbs-up. Prost! It’s too dark for anyone to see me blush.


Above the rooftops, the Black Forest seems to float, a wooded island in the sky.


Should I be ashamed or proud to know every song the German Van Halens cover? Aerosmith, the Eagles, Creedence Clearwater Revival. After a second stein, I am singing aloud. Everyone is giddy by the time we tumble down the mountain and into the desolate residential streets where we bid each other auf wiedersehen. (Is it the New Yorker in me that feels threatened by the dark?) The forest is my guide: if I keep it on my right, I’ll eventually find my way home. In the full moon, the canopy is impenetrably black and my shadow overtakes the sidewalk. I note how the air tastes purer and more oxygenated than it does at home, how I’m so used to inhaling exhaust fumes, how this town is inconceivably quiet—no sirens!—how I could live here, I could totally live here, why couldn’t I live here?, how I could write and teach and grow tomatoes and get a dog—two dogs!—and send my kids to the international school and there’s something shiny on the pave, something glowing, and when I bend down, I see it’s a cobblestone-sized plaque, a brass “stumbling block” at the base of a residential driveway.

Here lived Robert Grumbach. Born 1875, arrested, deported to Dachau, then to Gurs. Beside it is a brass memorial for his wife: Hier wohnte Berta Grumbach.


“It was burned down.” The war, she says. The sign is simply pointing to where it used to be.


I’d read that some residents in victims’ homes protested the installment of these Stolpersteine when a German artist first proposed the project in the 1990s. The value of their property would depreciate, they said. And who wants to be reminded of the genocide every time you go in and out of your house? It wasn’t the current tenants’ fault that certain groups were scapegoated. That the Grumbachs disappeared.

Beyond the metal gate safeguarding the property, two Volkswagens sit head to toe. There’s a figure watching me from the upstairs window. Or maybe it’s just a curtain shifting in the breeze. I rub my heel on the brass to help it shine. I am still humming “Comfortably Numb.” I am waiting for the rain.


Courtney Zoffness won the 2018 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, the most valuable international prize for short fiction. She also received fellowships from The MacDowell Colony and The Center for Fiction, and the 2017 Arts & Letters Creative Nonfiction Prize. Her work has appeared in The Southern Review, Indiana Review, The Rumpus, Los Angeles Review of Books and elsewhere, and is forthcoming in a #MeToo anthology from McSweeney’s. She directs the creative writing program at Drew University This story originally appeared in Indiana Review 33.2 (Winter 2011).

Lead image: Vincent Giersch

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