Every Sunday at 10:00 in the morning two guys walk up my street, one playing accordion, the other the trumpet. They usually cover classics like Bésame Mucho. This Sunday they opened with Tumbalalaika.
Walking past a local high school, I noticed a sign in front, proudly announcing that the school has become a Fair Trade school. This means that all of the supplies and cafeteria food is purchased only from suppliers who treat their employees well, pay them fairly, etc.
Wait, shouldn’t all companies do that?! Anyway, I love this. I feel like I’m in German California.
Someone told me about Rolf Eden last week. We had been talking about Clärchen’s Ballhaus, a still-standing, pre-war dance hall known for its extreme decadence (about which I’ve written here before), and it reminded him of Eden. Born in Berlin in 1930 as Rolf Sigmund Sostheim, his parents fled with the rise of the Nazis to Palestine, eventually opening a cafe in Haifa. At 14 he quit school and fought in the War of Independence with the Palmach under Yitzhak Rabin, alongside the not-yet writer Yoram Kaniuk. Nonetheless, by the ’50s he lived and worked at various jobs in Paris. He read a newspaper story reporting that anyone born in Berlin who returned would receive 6,000 marks from the government, so in ’57 he went to West Berlin, where he used the money to open a jazz club. This led to other establishments, including a disco (named The Big Eden) and a theater. Under his new stage name he acted in and made movies, surrounded himself with good-looking (non-Jewish) blonde women, lived the high life, and made himself into a kind of German Hugh Hefner. The trailer for a 2011 documentary about him can be seen here. A typical modern Jewish story?
A different face of Berlin (Köpernicker Straße)
Another Jew Back in Berlin 