Sammy Gronemann

Sammy Gronemann was born on 21 March - at the beginning of spring - 1875 in Strasbourg/West Prussia. As the son of Rabbi Selig Gronemann and his wife Helene, he grew up in a religious household in Hanover and remained faithful to Jewish Halacha throughout his life: "I can't change my habits every three thousand years." At the same time, he exposed himself  to German-Jewish life in the modern age and, after completing his education at the Halberstadt "Klaus" and the Berlin Orthodox rabbinical seminary, he  also studied law in Berlin.

As a young lawyer, Gronemann experienced how Prussian judges and public prosecutors confronted Jewish life with a lack of understanding - and how numerous German Jews lost their Jewishness in their endeavours to adapt to society. Despite many doubts, this led him to the Zionist movement, which he served throughout his life as a speaker, lawyer and critic. The establishment of a Jewish state in the biblical homeland seemed to him to be the right solution, even though he himself only visited Palestine once (in 1929).

An important experience for him was the First World War, which he spent in the "Ober-Ost" staff in Bialystok and Kowno (Kaunas), especially after 1916. As a member of the "Club of Former Intellectuals", which also included Arnold Zweig and Hermann Struck, he encountered Eastern European Jewry for the first time, which he perceived as authentic. He wrote about his wartime experiences in the book "Hawdoloh  und Zapfenstreich", while his experiences in court are reflected in the book "Schalet. Beiträge zur Philosophie des wenn-schon (The Whatever…)“.

However, Gronemann celebrated his greatest success with the book "Tohuwabohu", which describes in his own humorous way the encounter - with Buber: "Vergegnung" - of Eastern European and German Jews in Berlin. During the years of the Weimar Republic, he worked as a lawyer and as an in-house lawyer for the Schutzverband Deutscher Schriftsteller. After the National Socialists came to power, he emigrated to Paris with his wife Sonja and became involved in helping Jewish refugees. In 1935, the couple moved to Tel Aviv, where Sonja unfortunately died in an accident.

He was unable to work as a lawyer under the British mandate, instead he wrote plays and finally, in 1946, his "Memoirs of a Jew", which first appeared in Hebrew translation and was first published in the original German by Joachim Schlör in 2002 and 2004. The reality of life in the Jewish "national home", characterised by the British administration and the incipient Jewish-Arab conflict, disillusioned him - after his experience in Germany, he was averse to any form of nationalism.

Sammy Gronemann died in Tel Aviv in 1952 and is buried in the old municipal cemetery. Shalom Ben-Chorin described him as the "Scholem Aleichem of the Jeckes", the best storyteller of his generation.