They Were Good Germans Once

By Evelyn Toynton

Delphinium Books, £12.99

Evelyn Toynton’s memoir comprises a series of reflections on members of her German-Jewish family, starting with her mother, a tragic beauty invalided for life by the botched removal of a benign brain tumour. Her father, unable to cope with his wife’s condition, married a Gentile woman who physically abused Toynton and her sister. Accounts of more distant family members make up the rest of the book.

Toynton, a novelist and biographer of some repute, cannot forgive her father for exposing her to her stepmother’s cruelty.

Yet he still emerges as a mensch, a successful, self-made businessmen who insists on providing health insurance for his South American employees and goes out of his way to hire black workers. In him the American dream is fulfilled. Conversely, his brother Hans is unable to shake off nostalgia for Nuremberg and the German culture he was forced to leave behind.

Hans likens himself to those Jews who complained to Moses that things were better in Egypt: “Your father got to America, he arrived in the Promised Land, but I never did.”

Toynton’s father is himself keen to exonerate ordinary Germans from guilt, perceiving the Nazis as an aberration. A third brother, Giora, a Zionist who became secretary general of Mapai, retrained German Jews as farmers and carpenters to make them useful in the emerging Jewish homeland, only to find his name later besmirched for denigrating Mizrahi Jews.

You could say that the banality of evil Hannah Arendt (an unashamed German-Jewish racist) identified among ordinary Germans afflicted even progressive-thinking yekkes (the Ostjuden term for German Jews). Toynton prefaces her memoir with a quote from Amos Elon whose book The Pity of it All is the definitive historical account of German Jewry: “The duality of German and Jew – two souls within a single body – would preoccupy and torment German Jews throughout the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th.”

Her book suggests this is a duality that yekkes would rather have erased in their desperation to become German, eradicating every trace of Jewishness (ground well covered by the novelist Aharon Appelfeld.)

Self-hatred emerges as a by-product of the traumatic German-Jewish experience, extending to violence and self-harm, from her grandmother’s beating of her mother, through Toynton’s own juvenile attempted suicide to her paternal grandmother’s successful one in Israel.

Toynton’s honest, elegantly written memoir is a welcome contribution to our understanding of the experience of 20th-century German Jews and its consequences for their descendants.