For U.S. Ambassador, Ties To Prague That Transcend Diplomacy

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[URL="http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2014/02/18/279017558/for-u-s-ambassador-ties-to-prague-that-transcend-diplomacy"]NPR Link[/URL]

[quote=NPR]Three years ago, Norm Eisen made this journey in a motorcade. It was his first day as U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic. He was returning to the land where his mother, Frieda, had been born almost 90 years ago.

On his first night in Prague, after a whirlwind of formal greetings and arrival ceremonies, Eisen's wife and teenage daughter went to sleep. The new ambassador sat in the ornate, wood-paneled library, soaking in the reality of this strange new life. The head of the household staff, Miroslav Cernik, came into the room.

"Ambassador, there's something I'd like to show you," Cerník said.

The dignified majordomo led the ambassador to a small antique table with intricate, wood-inlaid carvings of vines and leaves. He asked the ambassador to look underneath.

[B]A Deeply Personal Connection[/B]

Eisen has more than diplomatic ties to this land. His mother grew up in Czechoslovakia. She survived Auschwitz and after the war moved to the United States to raise her family. For Eisen, this appointment in Prague is the completion of a family story that began almost a century ago.

Seeing the Nazi sticker on that table "was like a punch in the gut," says Eisen. "It literally took my breath away. I think that before I saw the swastika, I'd grasped what my life was going to be like here on an intellectual level. But that really struck me on an emotional and a physical level."

On Friday evening, Eisen's wife lights candles to mark the start of the Jewish Sabbath. She quietly sings the blessing in Hebrew, covering her eyes with her hands in keeping with Jewish tradition.

Eisen hosts Shabbat dinner here every week. This night's guests include the French and British ambassadors, the famous Czech novelist Ivan Klima, and the head of Prague's Jewish museum, Leo Pavlat.

"It's something almost unbelievable sitting at the table which was used by the Gestapo," Pavlat says in lightly accented English. "And at the same time, this is American Embassy."

[B]Keeping Kosher[/B]

In the basement of the house, a team of chefs is chopping onions and stirring bubbling pots for the festive meal. This is now a kosher home, with one kitchen for meat and one for dairy.

Revamping the household to conform to Jewish dietary laws tested even the fortitude of Cernik, a man who takes great pride in his job and identifies with the character Carson from Downton Abbey.

"Every kitchen has its own china, its own dishes, which cannot be combined and used for mixing together," Cernik explains.

When Eisen arrived, the staff members learned how to make traditional foods like challah and matzoh ball soup. They went into overdrive mastering the details of which fish are kosher and which are not. Prague does not even have a kosher butcher. The meat must be shipped in from Berlin or Vienna.

"We completely changed the purchasing philosophy," says Cernik. "We canceled all our relations and connections. And we have started new deliveries. New suppliers."

[B]A Special Role[/B]

That makes Eisen's role in this community as an active, observant Jew much more powerful.

When he arrived, he spoke to his mother every day from her retirement home in Los Angeles. He urged her to come and revisit her birth country.

"She promised me every month that she'd come the following month," he says. "And I just don't think that she was able emotionally to come back."

At the end of his first year in the job, Eisen went with relatives to see his mother's hometown. He met a man in his 90s who'd known his mother as a child.

The old man told Eisen a story. As a young boy, he was walking home with a pail of milk. "He spilled his milk and was terrified, started crying — terrified that his mother would beat him," says Eisen.

"My mother said — why are you crying? And she allowed him to milk her cow, filled up his pail again, so he wouldn't get in trouble."

Eisen also visited Auschwitz for the first time, keeping his mother on the phone from California as he toured the concentration camp.

"So I was able to have her voice literally in my ear as my cousins and I walked through Auschwitz," he says. "She guided us through which barracks she'd been in, and the exact spot where the train had arrived."

Soon after that visit, Eisen's mother died. He says she left the world with a sense of completion, knowing that after just one generation, her son returned to the place she was born, representing the most powerful nation on earth.[/quote]