When Leo Brunn in A Man of the World was a boy, he enjoyed the same kind of cultured and diverse life as most middle class German children. His family was nominally Jewish, but a Judaism that so assimilated to Christian norms that they conducted services on Sunday instead of Saturday and did not keep kosher. Since Germany unified as a country, Jews may not have been fully accepted into mainstream society but they had equal rights.
Leo grew up listening to Beethoven, reciting Schiller, and feeling proud to be a German. So proud, he was one of 12,000 Jews who fought heroically in World War One. Leo even won an Iron Cross, the same as Hitler.
When Nazis were elected into office in 1933, laws against Jews began. They were banned from teaching, the military, and the professions. Jews who had been prominent in society now had to get menial jobs or leave the country.
Leo, who was highly educated and intended to have a professional career, had to make ends meet by selling factory remnants of cloth like a peddler in a Sholem Aleichem story. This led to a natural cynicism and darkened his relationships.
By 1937, Jews were striking back. There were attacks against Nazis and an attempt on Hitler’s life. On November 7, 1938, a Jewish teenager killed two German officials in Paris.
In retaliation, the Nazis ordered attacks on Jewish people and property throughout their sphere of influence. During the Night of Broken Glass (Kristallnacht), November 9-10, Nazis destroyed thousands of Jewish businesses and burned hundreds of synagogues. They killed 91 Jews and sent 25,000 to newly forming concentration camps.
At the same time, Germany traded its Polish Jewish population for Poland’s German Jewish Population, leaving thousands of refugees, most of whom had been very successful in both countries, without an official nation or home.
Among the refugees would have been Marta Kohen, née Szubinski. Though a descendant of Polish aristocracy, her marriage to a German Jew negated everything else. When her husband, foreseeing the inevitable, killed himself, Marta set out to enact her own resistance to the forces of hate.
In August of 1938, a few months before Kristallnacht, Leo and Marta met in Breslau and discovered the power of love.
