Jumping Over Shadows: A Memoir

Ralph Bowden and Heide Weidner. Rev. Jumping Over Shadows: A Memoir by Annette Gendler. Berkeley, CA: She Writes Press, 2017.
Munich, Germany 1985. Girl, Annette, meets boy, Harry. Not an unusual story so far, but in Annette and Harry’s case things are anything but. She has an American mother and a German father whose family once lived in what is now the Czech Republic. Her family is Catholic although not practicing. Harry has a French mother, who spent her childhood hiding in the French countryside from the Nazis. His father hails from the “Russian-Polish border area” (24), and Harry has grown up in the Eastern European Jewish culture, his parents now members of the Orthodox Jewish community in Munich.
What might help this budding relationship is Annette’s great-aunt Resi’s marriage to a Jewish man in Reichenberg, after 1919 the unofficial capital of Germans in Czechoslovakia and now Liberec in the Czech Republic. What might hinder a future for Annette and Harry is the same great-aunt Resi since she divorced her Jewish husband in 1938 to keep their half-Jewish children alive during Hitler’s regime. Remembering her family’s story, Annette thinks, “But surely I cannot marry a Jew” (7). She is not surprised when Harry tells her that he cannot marry her either.
But the relationship develops, and gradually both she and Harry realize they belong together. She moves into his apartment while finishing her degree in political science. They can’t let too many people know, however, for word would spread quickly in the small (4,000) Jewish community in Munich and get back to Harry’s parents.
Living with Harry, Annette becomes more intimately aware of Jewish life, practice, and customs, and the pogroms and losses Harry’s people have suffered. She takes beginning Hebrew and reads classic literature dealing with Jewish culture. Together they visit the concentration camp in Dachau, synagogues, and Israel. Annette is shocked to learn what it means “to be on the other side of the fence” (101) where anti-Semitic words are casually spoken, even by people she has considered friends.
When they decide to get married, it is finally time to tell Harry’s parents. In an emotional conversation after dinner, his father talks about the tension between love for a son and obligation toward tradition. “I have to jump over my own shadow here, and I don’t know if I can do that. But I will try” (117).
After a small civil ceremony in Munich, Annette starts the process of conversion. It is more than reading books, she learns in those three months of study: “It is about adopting a way of life” (126). Aside from the lessons with the rabbi who had consented to be her teacher, she spends each day with his wife practicing the ordinary business of living as a Jewish wife—the traditions, ceremonies, symbols, dietary laws, and food preparations. A panel of rabbis examines her readiness and conversion commitment, and she passes just before she and Harry move to Chicago where Annette will study for a graduate degree in American studies. Eventually they come back for a fully Jewish wedding. In Chicago, they live as a typical Orthodox Jewish couple, raising three children in the faith and life.
While there are plenty of intimate details in Jumping Over Shadows—the sting of lemon juice in a cut, where Harry rested his left foot in the car while they talked— Annette Gendler leaves out much of what might normally be in a memoir. We learn almost nothing of Annette and Harry’s three children, for example, and little of her own parents.
Instead, the author uses the narrative to examine her mostly Gentile family ancestry and its relation to the Jewish condition in central Europe in the 20th century. It’s a big and instructive subject, worth focusing on. Though she doesn’t draw any comparisons, the parallels to, and differences from, racism in America and religious/cultural intolerance everywhere, are obvious. The memoir amounts to a case study in human hate, distrust, and discrimination.
Annette Gendler is the author of Jumping Over Shadows, the memoir of a German-Jewish love that overcame the baggage of the Holocaust. She has served as the writer-in-residence at the Hemingway Birthplace Home in Oak Park, Illinois, and has been teaching memoir writing at StoryStudio Chicago since 2006. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte and lives in Chicago with her husband and three children.