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something to Stein, who turns his head away.
    A carnival in a Displaced Persons camp in ’47, Churban survivors pitching pennies next to girlfriends who are dolled up for the evening, looking proud in their high heels. Why was this one discarded? Were they too happy? How vulnerable they seem, as they flick American pennies into those bowls, neat as sharpshooters.
    Stein and Weiss and the flag. Weiss at Yalta, half-buried in a fur coat with his glasses flashing. Weiss standing by the ruins where the Great Synagogue of Dresden once stood, obscured by smoke. No, the film she’d screened a few days ago was not Stephen Weiss at the ruins of the Great Synagogue. It was Stein, pre-1947.
    That’s what she’d been watching the day that man broke in. Stein with his mouth moving through that full beard, his hands making that round, half-shrugging gesture. So you don’t like that story? Then she knew: she’d never seen that film before.
    They lied about the murder.
    That stranger—she could just make out the shape of him. He was not the black-hat from the junk shop. He wasn’t lean and frail. He’d shouted in coarse German and he’d slammed that note down with a force that shook the table.
    Judit held that note in her hand, and then that hand began to shake as she inferred another meaning. What if Hans was still alive?

 
    8
    From Helena Sokolov’s Inaugural Address: January 1986. Released in special video edition from the National Museum, November 1987.
    [Sokolov enters the Grand Hall. Standing ovation as she walks down the center aisle and shakes hands with representatives. She moves forward before turning back to wave at Anton Steinsaltz, on whom the camera lingers. She is at least a head shorter than everybody else, and once behind the podium, only her face and trademark ink-black pageboy are visible. She adjusts the microphone and waits for the applause to end, waving and gesturing happily, then raising her hand for silence.]
    I come to you as a true outsider. You knew this when you chose me, and I make no secret of my past. I am young, not much older than this country. I come from a foreign land, Birobidjan, that region on the border of Manchuria that has become a desolate wilderness. And I am a woman. How many women have ever sat in Parliament? I say to you that when a girl like me can stand before this body and tell the truth, everything is possible.
    Moreover, I am the leader of a party that breaks with tradition by its very nature, the Neustadt Party, that group of young upstarts from the Polytechnic’s School of Economics which itself was only created ten years ago. There was once a rule that no member of the Neustadt Party could be over forty. Then, two of us turned forty. [Some laughter.] Once, Anton Steinsaltz said that we would never be taken seriously until at least one of us had gray hair. I told him that if he joined, he would have enough gray hair for all of us. [More laughter. Camera briefly cuts to Steinsaltz, who isn’t looking at it. Scattered applause.]
    And why did you choose me? I know there are some among us who say that tradition is the very foundation of the Jewish state. I also know that there are some who fear that to break with tradition is to break a sacred covenant that binds us as a people and a land. What I will carry forward as we begin our work together is perhaps the greatest of our traditions. I speak now of the need to let go of fear, to embrace possibility, to chance an opportunity. I declare to the world: Judenstaat is a nation of opportunists.
    Have Jews not, in our long history, embraced opportunity? Did we not embrace it when we planted deep roots in this land so long ago? And have we not taken this greatest of opportunities, a return to our own land? Here at last, we can live out our destiny, we can be safe, we can be free. [Applause.]
    Who are we, citizens of Judenstaat? We are Jews. We are Saxons. We are united under one flag.