My father, who attended the "humanist" high school where Latin was taught as the first foreign language, always maintained that we had come to Germany with Julius Caesar. However, no archaeological proof of this has yet been uncovered.
The family was steeped in German culture. My father, an enthusiastic music lover, adored Brahms and Beethoven. His favorite piece was the overture to Wagner's Meistersinger. No work of classic German literature was missing from our bookshelves, and I had read almost all of them before my 15th birthday.
Father knew both parts of Goethe's Faust by heart. When he was engaged to my mother in 1913, he stipulated that before the wedding she must learn the first part of Faust by heart. Mother's condition was that my father must learn to play tennis. They both fulfilled the conditions, but a day after the wedding my mother forgot every word of Faust and my father never played tennis again.
What caused this family, the family Ostermann, to leave Germany in 1933 forever, and to go to a far-away, foreign country, the country of the Nusseibeh family?
One word: anti-Semitism.
It is true that my father had always been a Zionist. He was nine years old when the First Zionist Congress took place. The idea excited him. As a wedding gift he received a document confirming that a tree had been planted in Palestine in his name. But he never imagined that he himself would one day go there.
(A joke current at the time: "What is a Zionist? A Jew who takes the money of a second Jew in order to send a third Jew to Palestine.")
The Zionists were then a minuscule minority in the German Jewish communities. Among our relatives it was said that my father had become a Zionist only because he had a contrary disposition. (It seems to run in the family.)
Shortly after the Nazis' rise to power, my father decided to emigrate. The immediate cause was small. My father was a courtappointed receiver of bankrupt businesses. His honesty was proverbial; he was "straight as a die." One day, during a session of the court, a young lawyer cried out: "Jews like you are not needed here any more!" My father was deeply offended, and from that moment Germany was finished for him. I still believe that a feeling of insult played a large part in the divorce between the Jews and Germany.
Where to? For a short while, Finland and the Philippines were considered. But Zionist romanticism decided the issue. We went to Palestine, and since then, the destiny of my family has been irrevocably intertwined with the destiny of the Nusseibeh family. I was then ten years old.