Port of embarkation? Hamburg.
Christian name? Hermann.
Family name?
Had there finally been enough time, enough distance? Could this immigration official—this Dutchman or Englishman or even fellow German of the New World—possibly know or care what someone so long ago had done, or what had been done to him? For that matter, was this a portal through which he and his descendants might surrender the burden of being Jewish entirely? There were any number of common German names he might take up and not a single person to object. Muller, Schmidt, Hoffmann; in this new world he could be anyone. He could—his family could—begin again.
But that was to deny not only their religion or tribe; it was to deny the crime against that person, a hundred years earlier. Even now, even an ocean’s distance away, even at the edge of a continent Joseph Süss Oppenheimer had likely never even heard of.
Family name? Oppenheimer, said the first American Oppenheimer.
“It’s an important story to my family. And our company, I mean the business we’ve had since we got to America in like, the 1830s or whatever, is called Wurttemberg. Kind of in Joseph Oppenheimer’s honor.”
“Well, it’s cool to know how far back you go, and all the people in your family tree. Practically LDS, in fact.”
When Lewyn said nothing, Jonas looked up.
“I’m assuming you know I’m LDS, right?”
LSD? Lewyn thought, instead. ADHD? Was it a syndrome of some kind?
“Uh … no. What is that?”
“Really? Latter-Day Saints.”
Lewyn frowned, more lost than before. Seventh-Day Adventist? Jehovah’s Witness? The words swam in biblical gibberish. Wait: Jews for Jesus? Or those Nation of Yahweh people who hung out in Times Square and screamed at everybody? They were crazy.
“Or Mormon. I mean, officially The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. It changed over in 1982, but I don’t mind Mormon.”
“You’re a Mormon?”
He was shocked, himself, by how it emerged: disbelief and … was it distaste? He could barely grasp the fact that he’d been sharing space and time with an active proponent of a faith so … well, so cultish and strange.
Jonas was laughing. “What? Like, where are my horns?”
“No. I just…”
“Never met a Mormon. It’s okay. Not so many of your people where I come from, either.”
But Cornell was full of Jews. More Jews than any other Ivy, according to Johanna （though a smaller percentage than Yale, when you adjusted for size）。 This was a colossal development, Lewyn realized: Mormon and Jew, Jew and Mormon. And they were only just getting to it now?
“How come we’re just realizing this now?” he asked Jonas.
“Well, like I said, I realized. I just figured you’d bring it up if you wanted. And again, not an issue for me.”
Okay, Lewyn thought, but “not an issue” as in: I don’t care? Or as in: I’m not prejudiced? And if the latter why should Jonas think it was only his prerogative to be—or not to be—prejudiced? Was Lewyn also entitled to be “not prejudiced”？ But even as he conjured this bit of defensiveness he realized that he didn’t know anything about Mormons, certainly not enough to conceive of something that might warrant prejudice.
“Well, you’re not out to convert me, I hope.” He thought he was saying this ironically, but it came out sort of choked, and Lewyn suffered yet another wallop of embarrassment.
“No, man,” Jonas said. “Two years on my feet, that’s enough. Two years, five converts. It doesn’t sound like much, but a lot of people came home with fewer. If Heavenly Father wants more from me, he can let me know, but for now I’m all about fungal diseases of the hoof.” He said this with a little flourish of the hand, and with that hand he withdrew one of his spiral-bound Cornell notebooks and flipped it open on the desk. This was to be a caesura in the conversation, apparently. If not an outright severance.