Where From and Where To: One of the Last Self-Told German Jewish Life Stories

By Elizabeth Petuchowski

What impact did the rise of Nazi dictatorship and mandatory anti-Semitism have on a Jewish child and young girl in Germany? How did her family live a Jewish life in Germany? How did she reach England and, during World War II, attend a London school evacuated to the provinces and a university department evacuated to a coastal town?

In Where From and Where To, author Elizabeth Petuchowski narrates her story and answers these questions set against a background of contemporaneous events. She talks about her post-war work in London’s Fleet Street for a publisher of trade journals, her marriage to a Berlin-born rabbinic student with whom she came to America, how she coped with culture shock and got used to living in America.

Petuchowski recalls colorful characters; gatherings with students and with many others, well-known and not well-known; her own studies in Cincinnati, Ohio; and seeing England and Germany again years later. Where From and Where To shares a story of a most varied and fortunate life during times of momentous world happenings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Jul 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9781665708913

Elizabeth Petuchowski

Elizabeth Petuchowski, born in Germany, came to America via World War II England. She taught German language and literature in an adjunct capacity while a wife and mother. She published widely both in her field and feuilletons. Petuchowski authored two German books and translated extensively from German into English.

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Copyright © 2021 Elizabeth Petuchowski.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

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Scripture taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

The Luther Bible

The Buber-Rosenzweig Bible

The JPS TANAKH

The Schocken Bible Series by Dr. Everett Fox

ISBN: 978-1-6657-0893-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-0892-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-0891-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021913133

Archway Publishing rev. date: 7/21/2022

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 BOCHUM: SCHARNHORSTSTRASSE 1924-1933

Early Childhood—Some rooms in our flat—Some family members—Grandmother Julie and the day of her funeral—Early Gestapo intrusion—A carp, a bird, a new brother, my toys—Aunt’s wedding—Rottstraße 7 and Grandfather Leo—Grumme and other outings—Hitler’s rise and immediate effects; Nazi calendar dates—Jewish elementary school—Jewish families emigrate

Chapter 2 BOCHUM: NEUSTRASSE 1934-1939

Rooms and furnishings—Why we did not yet leave Germany—My brother—Movies, songs, singing—A songbook—Rathenow—Compulsory one-pot meals—Uncle Otto and horse races—Cigarette cards—Olympic games—Nuremberg Laws—Uncle Fritz and aunt Else—High school teachers and subjects—My Jewish life in Bochum—Visits to Berlin—Vacation destinations—Grandmother Bertha in Bochum and in Camberg—Grandmother’s house—Juda Elsas—Anschluss—Camberg: a prototype? Some thoughts—Red J—Kristallnacht at Neustraße 17—Helga Schmidt—Sneaking to Mönchengladbach

Digressions: Family holidays—Urfaust or Faust I?—Part B of a Bible verse—Assimilation, anyone?

Chapter 3 ENGLAND AND WAR YEARS AT SCHOOL 1939-1943

Narrow escape to England—Parents’ hard times—Some ways of getting acquainted with England—Uncle Ernst—Evacuation of London school children: arrival in Kettering—Outbreak of World War II—My first billet—My hosts and their parents—War in continental Europe—A most fortunate meeting—Dame Alice Owen’s Girls’ School evacuated to Kettering—My second billet—My host, his baby and baby’s nurse —Country walks, books, tennis—High school in wartime—English instruction—School prayers—Jewish contacts—Bombing of Coventry

Digressions: King Solomon—Digression from a Digression

Chapter 4 UNIVERSITY IN ABERYSTWYTH AND LONDON 1943-1945

University College London (UCL) evacuated to Aber (Aberystwyth) by the sea in Wales—Friends in the dorm—French subsidiary—A strange Passover Seder—German literature studies in wartime—Learning to see—Leibniz at Cwm—UCL back in London—My room: renters from Prague and Vienna—UCL: studies, New Phineas, social life—West London Synagogue—My future husband—Hiking in Lincolnshire, Surrey and Kent—Marriage proposal

Digression: Franz Landsberger

Chapter 5 LONDON; THE END OF THE WAR 1945-1948

Should I marry him?—My mother, her entrepreneur employer, her acquaintances—Signs of war in London—The three rabbis at our wedding: Baeck, Italiener, Reinhart—Jakob at the West London Synagogue—Edgware: Rabbi Ignaz Maybaum—Monday Morning Circle—Synagogue hopping—My work in Fleet Street—Jakob’s aunt Elsa—After our wedding—Cricklewood—Some London arts in wartime—London parks—America beckons

Digression: Fog

Chapter 6 CINCINNATI: THE EARLIER YEARS 1948-1961

Flying to Cincinnati—Some dates in Jakob’s life—What struck us as American—Carplin Place—Student congregations in Lawrenceberg, IN, Welch, WV, Roanoke, VA, Laredo, TX—Hebrew Union College (HUC and HUC-JIR[see below]) teachers and friends—Student Wives’ Club—More HUC teachers and friends—The American Israelite—Carplin Place (ctd.)—Rabbi Leo Baeck—Ordination—Wilson Avenue near the Cincinnati Zoo—A unique party—Queen’s coronation—Middleton Avenue—Washington, PA—Return to Cincinnati—East Mitchell Avenue—Visitors there—Seen on TV there—American vacations

Digressions: Steven Schwarzschild—Our first car—Book Club—Opera

Chapter 7 CINCINNATI: YEARS AT GREENLAND PLACE 1961-ca 1991

Our first house—Neighbors—Nearby Jewish Community Center—Nearby Congregation New Hope—Julia Child—Jakob’s epithets and jingles—Baptized Jews—Study with cake—Family routines—Christian friends—Musical Cincinnati—Old and new acquaintances—A surprising discovery—University of Cincinnati (UC)—First return to Germany: Berlin, Wannsee—Post-PhD—Literature of the Holocaust—Oral History project—Four events in the news—More HUC

Digressions: Jury duty—Hadassah—How not to

Chapter 8 TIME OFF

JERUSALEM 1963-64—HUC-Jerusalem—Israeli tour guide from Munich—Jerusalem housekeeping—Sardines, fur coats, and imported cars—Jerusalem, a meeting place—HUC-Jerusalem hospitality—Day of the khamsin—Trips to southern Israel—Trips to northern Israel: Jakob’s cousins

TRIPS TO ENGLAND: London, Oxford: Yarnton, Blenheim

SWITZERLAND: Poschiavo, Chur

SCOTLAND: East Lothian coast

ROME: For love of the world

NORTHERN SPAIN: An inn on the pilgrimage route

GERMANY: Freiburg in particular; Gertrud Luckner

CANADA: Laurentian Mountains; David Hartman

CAMBRIDGE, MA: 42, Francis Avenue

TEMPE, AZ

AUSTRALIA: Eagle Heights, Queensland; Rudi Levy

Digressions: Leopold Krakauer—Else Lasker-Schüler—Gertrud Luckner

Notes for the Images

Bibliography

Introduction

Or

A Chat with the Reader

It is not enough to recount experiences; they must be weighed and sorted; they must be digested and distilled, so that they may yield the reasonings and conclusions they contain.

Montaigne, On the Art of Conversation

Dear Reader,

You are right, this is a quaint greeting, a bit antiquated; but what is written matter without readers? Readers are an indispensable part of the book lovers’ enterprise. They should, I think, be valued accordingly and addressed respectfully.

This book took me a long time to write, not because I had trouble recalling incidents and fine-tooth combing names and dates to ascertain facts. It was the picture of the reader that kept swaying.

One impatiently looking for tidbits about members of the faculties at the UC and the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR) might get impatient with pages devoted to a childhood in Nazi Germany. One curious about the home front in England during World War II will not know what to make of street names in Cincinnati, Ohio. Art work in Coventry (England) will leave cold a reader who picks up the book for an immigrant’s first impressions of America.

Unless targeting a specific readership, an author knows nothing about the readers. How do they relate to texts? Some feel comfortable reading about something with which they can identify—Yes, I know exactly where that is,—while others—What? Not again!—look for something they did not know before. Not everyone is a cultural historian happy to find exemplifications for a theory. So, for what indistinct readership was I laying out an account of my life, chapter by changeful chapter?

Conflicting reader anonymities held me up for years. I decided at last to set things down without regard to their reception among diverse readerships, geographical or cultural. After all:

Our doubts are traitors,

And make us lose the good we oft might win,

By fearing to attempt.

Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

All readers will find something old and something new in the following pages which touch on disparate subjects and issues, joined only in that they impinged on my life.

Why this life story at all? What is its purpose?

I am aware of myself as a specimen of a dying species: a Jew from Germany. There is no shortage of studies about such a Jew, but they deal with earlier generations. Pre-Holocaust Jewry in Germany has been held up as a cautionary tale in which, according to . . . folk-wisdom, there lived in Germany a Jewish population that was more assimilated than any other in the world. The Jews of Germany distorted or hid their Jewishness in a desperate effort to win the acceptance of their gentile neighbors.¹ Statistics support this folk-wisdom. I do not recognize myself in these findings which may have been true for an earlier time. Whereas I have not been delegated to represent Jews of my generation—surviving or cut down before their time—my life is not unique. As has been said: "in und hinter dem Einzelnen soll die Zeit erkennbar werden, die auch viele andere denken und handeln ließ wie ihn" [within and behind any one individual, an era should be perceivable which made others think and act like this individual].²

We were at ease being Jewish—no, it was not Hitler’s anti-Semitism which recalled us to our Jewishness, abandoned earlier. Hitler found us in fit Jewish condition, as readers will see. We were no more German than American Jews are American when they toss whether to go to synagogue or watch a ballgame.

Nor, when I come to think of it, were my parents or grandparents desperate to tailor their Jewishness for German approval. Now, whether our family belonged to an unrecorded minority, too small to be caught in a net of statistics, or whether they were exceptional, or my view of them is wrong, I will leave to historians. I am confining myself to describing how we lived, and how the beginning of my life as a Jew in Nazi Germany affected my later life positively and negatively. Like a witness, I relate how it was, how World War II was experienced and, with those major events behind me, what I saw and see in America.

This book lacks certain features commonly found in an autobiography. Firstly, an autobiography originates with the premise that the author, a person of accomplishments, achieved success along a straight or a winding path as set forth in the book, perhaps even serving as a how to for potential readers seeking guidance how to steer their ambitions. An autobiography shapes the twists and turns of a lifetime into a piece of writing with one theme, namely how success was achieved. The vagaries of life are given form to point in one direction. Such is a proper autobiography, which mine is not.

Secondly, autobiographies are penned by people who believe their lives matter. My life matters only in relation to my era. That matters very much. It started in interesting times, as in the (assumedly) Chinese curse, May you live in interesting times. My formative years in Germany, with landmark events in the wider world, had lasting effects on my subsequent life and may be worth talking about.

German Jewish autobiography will likely be validated by strictures of historians whose sociological bent is de rigueur, without an ear for what did not need saying because it was taken for granted by the authors. Such autobiographical writing will be plumbed for proving the formulaic theory, stated above in down-to-earth terms, that Jews in Germany desired assimilation to their surroundings and deluded themselves that they were at home in Germany. Living a generation or more later than the period thus characterized, I describe how, as a child and teenager, ignorant of ensuing censure, I lived in a Jewish family with and among non-Jews whom I resembled in many ways. The reader may decide whether my story conforms to prototype, or is closer to the proposition that German Jewry, like all groups, was complex and variegated.³

My generation has not [yet?] been assessed from a statistical point of view. A short but noteworthy start has been made by Steven M. Lowenstein who, in an Epilogue, considers my generation in its dispersion:⁴ an epilogue to a period, presented in an epilogue to a distinguished volume. The volume may be the last word on German Jewry in every sense. It will be a while before research, based on responsibly assessed nuances, trickles down to Jews in America who will by then show as much or as little interest in Jews from Germany as they have, say, in the Jews of Spain. They will not have been acquainted with and as agitated by the phenomenon a German Jew as were their East European parents or grandparents. So, here am I, an ordinary Jew transitioning from Germany to elsewhere, aware of myself as one of the last native German Jews to author an autobiography of sorts.

Nobody ever wrote a dull autobiography, Leslie Stephen (1832-1904) is quoted as saying. He is writing about a topic in which he is keenly interested, and about a topic upon which he is the highest living authority.⁵ Mine, I hope, is not dull, while still an untypical autobiography. Untypical because, thirdly, an autobiographer has an agenda, an idea he or she wants to get across, beyond listing a series of events. My autobiography makes no point over and above description. Although I claim my fair measure of opinionatedness, I have no moral lesson as if my story were a fable.

Bild mir nicht ein, ich könnt was lehren,

Die Menschen zu bessern und zu bekehren

[I don’t presume I had something to teach you,

nor ever improve human kind and convert you]

Goethe, Urfaust. Nacht.⁶

An autobiography is written by one who thinks his or her life is worth knowing about. Mine is worth knowing about because of instances of unbelievably good fortune: vital turns making a difference between staying alive or not in perilous times, and being granted enviable opportunities. The awareness of much grace has colored my life. It molded my identity, and I spoke and acted with that awareness even when, in less contemplative portions of my life, I was not mindful of it daily. My attitude is tinged by knowing how much potential good there is, for all the dangers, problems and pain around us near and far. Like a counterpart to Job who is visited by misfortune without justification, good things happened to me without action on my part to merit them, as if—to grasp at a handy metaphor, in a book that, I promise you, is not a devotional tract—as if angels had been ordered to guard me wherever I go:

A thousand may fall at your left side,

ten thousand at your right,

but it shall not reach you.

Ps 91:7 (JPS)

The flow of such a life is told, loosely, as follows:

To bring to life the general cultural German and Jewish background, chapters 1 and 2 set out my early years in my native Bochum in northwest Germany. They picture typical domestic life almost a century ago, and at a time when Hitler managed to assume ever more power and issued now widely known decrees which affected everyone’s life. Persecution of the Jews arose and intensified; they adapted to a shifting normalcy. Meanwhile, I attended Bochum’s municipal Jewish elementary school for four years, followed by three and a half years at the public high school for girls. Readers are introduced to family members, to teachers, to our dog, to memorable vacations, as well as to Jewish life as I experienced it in Bochum and in Camberg. Any possibility of remaining in Germany came to an end on November 9-10, 1938, Kristallnacht. We could flee to England, and I relate the circumstances.

Chapter 3: We arrived in England two months before World War II broke out. Because we had had to leave all property behind, my parents in London were destitute and had a tough time. I was happy to be a schoolgirl again after missing a year of school. London schools had been evacuated to relatively safer places. Children, separated from their parents, faced wartime among families in country towns. Yet, the infectious confidence prevailing among the English people was evident.⁷ In addition, I found myself in a place without structured Jewish life, and I relate interesting things which developed.

Chapter 4: Like the schools, also my college, University College London, was evacuated, but returned to London when Allied victory seemed close. My studies, my professors, friends, extracurricular activities, Jewish contacts, and meeting my future husband, Jakob Josef Petuchowski (1925-1991).

Chapter 5: London. The end of the war. Our wedding and the three rabbis who officiated: Baeck, Italiener, Reinhart. Early married life in a London suburb. My work for a publisher of civic and trade journals. My mother’s job as housekeeper for the owner of a hat factory. Jakob at the West London Synagogue.

Chapter 6: Coming to a new continent, America, to Cincinnati with its Hebrew Union College, my contacts with some of its dynamic faculty, as well as with now forgotten folk whose memory is here prolonged. Our various addresses and people associated with them, our first son, our first car, our first television set and what we watched on it. My work at The American Israelite. Jakob’s bi-weekly and High Holiday congregations, and his pulpit in Washington, PA.

The many years we lived on Greenland Place in Cincinnati are condensed in chapter 7. By then, we had become US citizens. We had three sons: Samuel (Sam), Aaron and Jonathan. I talk about our neighborhood, about the Orthodox German congregation New Hope, more about HUC, about friends, many of whom occasioned Jakob’s epithets and ditties. Resumption of German Language and Literature at the University of Cincinnati where, after attaining a PhD, I taught in an adjunct capacity.

Chapter 8: Periods away from home: Jerusalem, England, Switzerland, Scotland, Rome, Spain, Germany, the Laurentians, Cambridge, MA, Tempe, AZ, Australia.

The book’s order, then, is chronological, with topical glances forward and backward.

I also indulge in digressions. They are asides about worthwhile subjects tangential to the topic under discussion.

And all those footnotes? They should make a scholar feel at home, and satisfy a general reader’s curiosity, and his and her appetite for more where this came from.

Easy was my decision to be brief about historic events: bookshelves buckle with information, not to mention the all-knowing computer. I describe how I reacted to some of these events.

I will let readers in on one difficulty I had with the telling. I had trouble with trivia. I always shied away from inflicting on readers trivialities, things not broadly significant, but remembered because of some oddity. But my aversion to dwelling on trifles was to undergo revision.

Lester A. Beaurline (1927-99), my instructor in a short story course (chapter 6), urged me to illustrate a general statement with material instances. Where I had shunned particulars, he wanted them to flesh out a pronouncement. Particulars, Beaurline said, could reveal a setting or the true nature of a character. A surprise ending could pivot on a detail.

Never neglect the little things of life.

Vladimir in Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot.

Details, paradoxically, can denote a world. Should readers of a short story—or a life story—be pestered with details, or puzzle out for themselves the blanks in a broad declaration? I went with Lester Beaurline’s advice. My particularized descriptions can serve as a cultural base on which readers will set up their preferred equipment: historical, sociological, psychological, ideological, Judaic, or just enjoy the scene. Readers should know, however, that my colorful details, minutia, inanities—call them what you will—are not fictions.

I have checked what could be checked, and have corrected mistakes which were pointed out to me. Even so, experts in a variety of subjects will undoubtedly find errors, and those are mine.

Conjectures and suppositions on my part are identified as such. I have tried not to be blind to the hazard of self-deception, and I am as mindful as I can be not to confound my views and feelings now with what I thought and felt at an earlier time. I have pointed to evolving perceptions where this seemed essential.

Sincere thanks to librarians at the Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati, for their unstinting courtesies, and to Joseph Galron-Goldschläger, Hebraica and Jewish Studies Librarian at Ohio State University, who came to my aid with bibliographical matter on several occasions.

01Threesons--.jpg

1 Three Sons

Numberless thanks to my sons Samuel, Aaron and Jonathan for their encouragement when I had my doubts, and for their editorial, technical, and financial help. Here, then, are particles that add up to a life story, with thanks, ahead of time, for the reader’s curiosity and indulgence.

1

Bochum: Scharnhorststraße

Shortly after I was born at the Regional Hospital for Women [Landesfrauenklinik] in Bochum, Westphalia, in Germany’s industrial northwest, my parents moved to a second floor flat at Scharnhorststraße 3 in Bochum. They had started their married life at Kanalstraße 47, the address on my birth certificate.

My uncle and aunt, Fritz and Else Ostermann, also lived on that street before they moved to nearby Essen, a city famous as the home of Krupp, manufacturers of steel products, including munitions. Bochum had the steel producing Bochumer Verein and coal mines. When, in response to people’s questions, I tell them I am from Bochum, they look puzzled, but when I add: near Essen, they understand. As for Kanalstraße: Fritz Ostermann’s parents, Moritz (1863-1929) and Regine Ostermann (1862-1937), had a flat on that street also, and I loved to visit them. Moritz Ostermann knew children. A well-respected educator, he had headed the School Commission of the Westphalian Synagogues. The Commission was charged with drawing up the first curriculum for religious instruction in public Jewish elementary schools in 1908.⁸ Teachers in German Religion Schools underwent professional pedagogical training; in Westphalia this started in 1810.

Scharnhorststraße 3 is the first home I remember. We lived in a flat that overlooked a well-tended small formal park with bronze statues on pedestals and a tall hedge all around. It was a stone’s throw from the municipal high school for girls which I would attend later, from Sexta until Untertertia, that is from fifth to eighth grade, although by that time we had moved to another address.

Dining room, living room and study, all spacious, were on the left, off a long hallway, and two bedrooms at the end of the hallway sharp right, creating an angle with the kitchen and a balcony. The balcony was roofed—and to my mother’s chagrin, tomatoes would not grow there, whereas on the Ostermann’s balcony they did.

The building with flats at Scharnhorststraße 3 is where—it must have been in 1928—all the tenants went to the attic to get an unobstructed view of the airship Graf Zeppelin as it serenely floated above the skylights on its first transatlantic journey to America, carrying passengers.

That is where my father (1892-1944), ahead of his time, imagined a telephone able to photograph the caller. That, he joked, would make it impossible for someone to boast: I am calling as I lounge by the sea, when he or she was really sitting around at home. He was a great joker with a vivid imagination but, unfortunately, he could not imagine that a madman like Hitler would actually attain power. We left Germany much too late.

That is where we lived when Germany was in an economic depression with severe unemployment.

My mother (1897-1976) had been looking for household help. When she and I returned from the market one day, we were greeted by two lines of young women in our corridor, looking for a job. My mother progressed between two rows to the right and to the left of her, with me toddling along. This gave me a very strange feeling; the situation struck me as out of place in this hallway, with my mother taking the salute, as it were, while the unemployed women must have been vying with each other to get a job in our household. I do not think that I am retrojecting a sensation here: it was my malaise that made this scene unforgettable.

I had a very similar feeling of inappropriateness in a different country, at a different time, on a different occasion. That was when I walked past rows of mourners at the cemetery after Jakob’s funeral held at the United Jewish Cemetery on Montgomery Road in Cincinnati. After our son Rabbi Aaron Petuchowski had stoically delivered his way through a eulogy for his father, and after each of us had thrown a spade of earth on the coffin, there was an indication that I leave, and I did, followed by—who was it? immediate family? During the shivah [week of consolation after a bereavement], an acquaintance, new to the ways of extreme Orthodox Judaism, was eager to spread the good word and took the occasion to admonish me: it was not Jewish usage for mourners to exit before the burial was complete. The admonition did not trouble me. The fact that, recognizing people on my right and on my left, I was upright on two feet, and Jakob was in his grave—that troubled me.

SCHARNHORSTSTRASSE: DINING ROOM

My father loved American jazz. Over and over, he played My Blue Heaven on the record player with a crank for winding which stood in the dining room. I think there was quite a bit of saxophone audible, though I may have heard that in later arrangements.

When I was approaching my teens, my father gave me what was called a jazz band flute. It had a metal mouth piece at the top of an end-blown ebony tube without holes. The length of the air column was varied by an interior plug, its position inside the column modified by pulling a metal ring at the bottom of the flute. An expert would have been able to produce blue notes. I lost my patience with this instrument long before I came anywhere near that stage. I regret that I gave away what now appears to be a rare flute which I might have learned to play, had I persevered.

My father had a record of Al Jolson singing Mammy, the finale of the 1927 film, The Jazz Singer, in which Al Jolson, born Asa Yoelson (1886-1950), appeared in blackface. Perhaps my parents had seen the film. The lyrics of these two songs were the first English I learned, although I heard a little English spoken. A British woman, my mother’s friend, often spoke English at our home and expressed her yearning for England. My mother, striving for authentic pronunciation, would imitate her saying Oh England! We also had a recording of Good Night Sweetheart, and the rhymes morrow and sorrow acquainted me with that English diphthongal o-sound which does not exist in German.

On the dining room windowsill, next to the record player cabinet, we kept an aquarium for a very green pet frog. His position on a ladder in the aquarium was said to predict the weather: he would be at the top, and that meant good weather, or at the bottom, forecasting rain.

An oil painting of a woodcutter hung on the wall above the buffet—more about that in the next chapter.

SCHARNHORSTSTRASSE: MASTER BEDROOM

On the day of my paternal grandmother Julie’s funeral—she died much too young, in her sixties—I stood in front of the full-length mirror in my parents’ bedroom with its off-white furniture while they were getting ready for the event. Julie had busied herself with social work both in the city of Bochum and in Bochum’s synagogue; death notices praise her communal work.⁹

Grandmother Julie, whom everyone called Julchen, had a smiling disposition. She talked to me slowly and soothingly, often impressing upon me that I should think of other people, that I should be kind. She set a good example. When people were looking for her on all floors in the house on the Rottstraße and could not find her, they would say: Julchen ist in der Synagoge [Julie is at the synagogue], meaning: she is doing good works in the community.

Julchen sang or hummed German folk songs all day, songs such as Mit dem Pfeil, dem Bogen, a song from Friedrich Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, set to music by Robert Schumann, known and sung by old and young. Or Julchen would sing Gold und Silber hab ich gern, a song written at the Eastern front in 1916 by Karl Maier, a soldier. Perhaps I inherited her habit of singing and humming. Jakob, my husband, would imitate me: tü tü tü, because I hum all the time, unawares.

There was a family tradition that Julie’s ancestors had been among Jews brought to Rhens (on the Rhine, near Koblenz), her native city, together with the Roman legions. I have no idea how one could ever establish the historic truth of this tradition, even as I cannot imagine such a story being fabricated out of nothing and nowhere if there was not a grain of truth in it.¹⁰ Our son Samuel knows of an influx of Roman Jews to the Rhineland 800 years later—her presence among them would be equally hard to substantiate.

Julie used to cook separate dishes for her four children to accommodate their differing tastes, and they were grown children when I was a child. She also made a point of serving for their birthdays the first taste of the fruit or vegetable then in season. On Rosa’s birthday in March, she served the first asparagus, and for Else, born in June, the first fresh cucumbers. Those were special treats in an era when fresh produce was locally grown and not available all year from distant places.

Julie used fresh eggs from farmers. A woman from the country brought them to her kitchen on the Rottstraße, counting them out with hands red from work on the farm, and placing the eggs on the wooden kitchen tabletop that was scrubbed almost white with age and cleanliness. When Julie cooked lamb, she would say: "ein Dieb im Topf" [a thief in the pot] because the piece of lamb was apt to shrink as it cooked.

Grandmother Julie baked Bolchen for festive occasions and without fail on Rosh Hashanah. Bolchen is a cake of rich buttery dough, shaped into strips which are filled with almonds and raisins before being rolled up and then stacked against each other in a spring form, resulting in a solid round cake. The closest I can find is Bola in an Israeli cookbook, though the strips are made of bread dough, a recipe said to go back to the time of Josephus. At what stage Bola was transformed into little Bolas [Bolchen: chen is a German diminutive suffix] I can only guess. Did German immigrants bring Bolchen to Israel where a tale of hoary authenticity was ascribed to it for status and for good measure?

But to resume: On the day of Julie’s funeral, I looked at myself in the mirror in my parents’ bedroom and wondered why they were not taking me with them—I was six years old. Presumably the loss was painful for them, and they protected me from the harsh things in life, including its certain end.

The reason why the day of my grandmother Julie’s funeral had persisted in my memory is because I saw myself in the mirror. Later, I became aware of the function of mirrors: their distancing, holding and isolating power. Today when I see myself in the mirror, I am startled by my resemblance to both of my grandmothers. I find that amazing because they looked quite unlike each other, and also differed in their temperaments.

My maternal grandmother Bertha Goldschmidt (1868-1953) was not what you would call an outgoing person. She may even have appeared unapproachable in her effortless dignity. She was serious and rarely laughed, though she was in no way unfriendly or unsmiling. Her build was slender, and the bone structure of her face was not far below her clear skin that had a naturally healthy color. A few white strands grew among her shiny dark hair, always coiffed to perfection, held in place by the most delicate of nets, invisible unless you knew it was there. My paternal grandmother Julie, by contrast, gave an impression of easy gentleness, as if ready to embrace you any time, no matter who you were. Her sweet, kind disposition was housed in an ample, cuddly physique. Her dark blond hair had a wayward way. It played about her face with its fleshy nose and fair downy skin. How could I possibly resemble them both? Yet I do.

On that day, the day of Julie’s funeral, when my parents were shielding me from the reality of death, they may not have been aware that in my nursery school I had been exposed to witnessing a burial. A group of us, preschoolers and teachers, had stood in the garden in front of the one-story school building for a bird’s funeral with a solemnity which I now think was out of place. Was that done to prompt little children’s questions about death and dying? Whatever its purpose, it stayed in my memory.

In my parents’ bedroom on the Scharnhorststraße I saw my father being picked up by the Gestapo in the middle of one night. The reason, I understood, was that he held a leading position with the local B’nai B’rith organization.¹¹ In my bedroom, I had been woken up by a commotion next door. I got out of bed and opened the door to my parents’ room where several men were waiting for my father to get dressed. I had no idea what was going on, nor do I know how long he was held.

SCHARNHORSTSTRASSE: MY FATHER’S STUDY

My father’s study, called Herrenzimmer, was off limits for me, except by invitation. To be there felt special. One visit was memorable.

A parakeet from nowhere had flown through the open window into my playroom. The parakeet had vivid colors, a lot of green. My mother immediately got a cage for it. The bird, however, was unexpectedly strong and bent the wire bars apart to escape. It flew freely around the whole flat, so that we never knew where it was.

One day, the bird must have arrived in the study ahead of me. As I sat down in one of the dark leather easy chairs, the bird got crushed between the seat and one of the upholstered arms. We had that parakeet no longer than a week. Small wonder that ever since then I do not really like birds except in distant admiration, and no matter how showy their plumage, I cannot help visualizing their skeletal structure, so marvelous and so vulnerable.

I wonder how Leonardo da Vinci, envisioning a flying machine, came to know the structure of birds’ wings. When, much later, in my English high school Biology class, we dissected a rabbit, I was glad we had a mammal on the table in front of us, and not a bird.

SCHARNHORSTSTRASSE: PARENTS’ SOCIAL LIFE

My parents had a full social life. Many a night I fell asleep while guests were at the house to make music. My mother played the piano, my father the violin, and Karl Felsenthal, a family friend, added his viola; his wife Grete came to listen.

The first joints on my mother’s fingers curled up slightly, and I always imagined that was from striking the piano keys. I know no one else whose fingers are shaped like that.

On one occasion, my parents gave a major dinner party. I was less than three years old because I did not yet share the bedroom with my baby brother in his white bassinet, trimmed with blue. The cook, with a bucket of water, walked through my bedroom on her way to the adjoining bathroom to retrieve the carp that had been kept swimming in the bathtub.

Filled carp, or filled fish, on my mother’s menu that night and generally on German menus, differs from the free-form mixture of several kinds of ground fish called Gefilte Fish in the United States, an East European favorite. The method of preparing filled carp required cleaning and deboning it, being careful to keep the fish whole. The resulting cavity was then filled with a blend of foods that included raisins; and the now filled fish would be baked and presented with a flourish, floating on a bed of jelly, decorated with slices of lemon and some joyful green: a pièce de résistance.

The next time I ate fish prepared in that manner was in Jerusalem in 1963 where we bided our time in a pension until our rented apartment became available (chapter 8). It was served as one of the dishes on their West European-style menu.

SCHARNHORSTSTRASSE: MY BEDROOM AND PLAYROOM

"Du hast ein kleines Brüderchen" [you have a little brother] is what my father said as he woke me from my sleep four days after I turned three years old. At the time I did not know what to do with that information which had warranted my being woken up, but my father looked pleased and excited, his blue eyes sparkled behind his sparkling glasses which I registered those few seconds before I went back to sleep. It was clearly not an age when siblings were made an integral part of the joyful anticipation of an addition to the family.

02FatherandI.jpg

2 Father and I

As I am now recalling those few minutes, I am touched that my father, at such an exciting time, shared his excitement with me—when he could have deferred the news until daylight. For him, it was a very special event which he rushed to tell me about while mother and infant were still at the Landesfrauenklinik.

Even now I feel happy when I think of my favorite game at about the time my brother was born. I do not recall with whom I played it. I think I played it chiefly on my own on the low table in my playroom or as I sat up in bed.

It was a game with questions and answers printed on colored sheets of paper loosely bound in a stack, each sheet devoted to a different topic. On each sheet, a vertical line separated twelve squares on the left from twelve squares on the right. In each square on the left was a question about that sheet’s subject, a choice of answers in each square on the right. The tip of a cord, much like a shoelace, was inserted in a hole for a question, and the tip of another cord in the square with what one supposed to be the correct answer on the right. If one had landed on the square with the correct answer, a bulb at the top of the sheet would light up. My favorite page of that favorite game was ancient history because of the strange-sounding names that quite literally came to light. There was, for instance, the name Hamilcar Barca, from the third century BCE. His name lit the bulb in answer to the question: Who was the father of Hannibal? I fear that few of the more mature additions to my knowledge of ancient history stayed with me so dependably.

Other eras of history were on other pages, as were multiplication, general literature, German literature, and general knowledge questions. I think I wore that game out.

In my playroom I played with a neighbor who was a little older than I. We played with my dolls, and she found reasons to discipline them because of all the bad things they had done; after a while my parents discouraged her visits. On my own, I rarely played with my dolls. I only arranged and rearranged them on seats that were part of my children’s wooden white furniture. The largest doll had pink cheeks; she closed her eyelids with long eyelashes. The limbs of a Käte Kruse doll moved less flexibly. Even so, I liked her best. Completely unmoving was a brightly painted roly-poly tumbler looking portly, with hands folded across his belly. With a mere touch, he would rock back and forth, but regain his upright position. He never fell over—is that why he smiled perpetually? The teddy bear had a Knopf im Ohr [button in one ear; brand name Steiff].

My father liked to play mathematical puzzles with me, e.g.: three times 37 is 111, six times 37 is 222, nine times 37 is 333.

My father took me to the cinema to see what were new, now considered groundbreaking films, such as the first Mickey Mouse film, black and white. Cartoons with sound were a novelty around 1927 or 1928. Sitting in the balcony of a cinema we watched the Norwegian skater Sonya Henie who wore a short white skirt edged in white fur. Shirley Temple films came a little later, and I still know the tunes of Animal Crackers in My Soup and Polly Wolly Doodle All the Day, although I had no idea what her words meant. I liked the way Shirley Temple swung her arms to the beat of her songs, her tap dancing, and her acting like an adult.

My mother’s brother, Ernst Goldschmidt, living in Berlin, visited us often. An orthopedic surgeon, he examined my feet every time he came—I think my mother wanted to be sure I would not grow up to have flat feet. As I was sitting on the baby dresser, uncle Ernst twisted and turned my feet and never found anything wrong. He directed, though, that for giving the support required for young, growing ankles, snugly laced boots were best.

My later fights with my mother were about these boots. My school mates wore pretty shoes in many styles, while for years I wore laced boots from the shoe shop Salamander. They were fine boots, but they did not qualify as fashion items, as did my friends’ shoes with laces and buckles and T-straps. The Salamander shoe store had an x-ray machine—now banned—for viewing the fit of a pair of shoes. This way, all my boots fitted well. Some of my present footwear is still kept in good shape by durable wooden Salamander shoe trees.

FLOWER GIRL

I saw my aunt Rosa, my father’s older sister, more often in my very early years than I did later. After Rosa married Dagobert Plaut and moved to Nuremberg, she came to visit Bochum. She and I had a great time swimming together in the city’s indoor swimming pool. She marveled how easily I could wriggle my ankles, whereas she could not. Later I understood that her husband had gambled away her dowry.

I was the flower girl at Rosa’s and Dagobert’s wedding at the Bochum Loge, premises of B’nai B’rith. I walked down the aisle behind the bride and stood behind her for the whole ceremony. At eye level—and that is all I could see—was her skirt. It consisted of layers of white tulle, and I was wearing a similar dress in blue. After the event, my dress was whisked away to save for a special occasion. I had grown out of it before such an occasion arose, and I never wore it again; my sense of regret was similar to that involving the dolls from my uncle Otto (in the next chapter).

Rosa (born 1895) and Dagobert (born 1887) had no children. Both died as Hitler’s victims in Riga.

BOCHUM: ROTTSTRASSE 7

That is where my paternal grandparents lived, and that is where the family business Leo Mayer Söhne [Leo Mayer and sons] was located: one building fronting the street, and a building behind it. The front building had the store and offices on street level, living quarters on two floors above that. The showroom had shopwindows on either side of the entry door.

Leo Mayer, though apprenticed to a plumber at age thirteen, had started one of the early telegraph and telephone businesses in Bochum. He had branched out into electric lighting, and eventually into lighting and plumbing, a customary combination of retail services called Installation. (The term Installation, with this connotation, has made it into modern Hebrew.) Leo’s two sons, Otto, the older one, and Alfred, my father, were Leo’s business partners. My uncle was a qualified engineer, my father had a doctorate in political science.

My grandfather worked in a small, unglamorous office. I loved visiting him there. He was always happy to see me and happy when I could answer arithmetic questions he gave me, such as What is two plus three? My father’s university degree hung framed on a wall. The family quoted Leo as saying: Man darf ruhig dumm sein, man muss sich nur zu helfen wissen [it’s all right to be stupid, as long as one can cope], and: Man muss sich auch mal utzen lassen [it’s advisable once in a while to let someone get the better of you].

A big office held two rows of high desks, with daylight from the yard coming from tall windows. Draftsmen and bookkeepers sat on stools correspondingly high. The bookkeepers wore Manschettenschoner, that is glossy black cotton cuff guards that reached to the elbow and were held in place by elastic. They kept shirt cuffs and coats clean when sleeves moved over inky drawings and ledgers.

In a small unused bedroom on the second floor hung an engraving depicting a Yom Kippur service on a battle field outside Metz before the battle in 1870. In the same room stood a snow globe which I never failed to pick up. It was of heavy glass, and, when shaken, stirred up fine snow inside. It amazed me every time.

The building at the back housed the workshop with machines, and served for storage of merchandise. The intervening yard got little sunlight. Yet, in that gloomy setting my mother took a photo of me on my first day of school.

There I stood with my brand-new leather book pack on my back, and cradling a Bonbontüte, a brightly colored cardboard cone almost my size, filled with candy. Closed at the top with a circle of white netting gathered by a drawstring, this was the must-have appurtenance of every six-year-old on the first day of school in Germany at that time. A leather sandwich bag lined with tin to keep the snack fresh was worn like a crossbody bag. The photo is what I remember, not the first day at school.

Once or twice, my widowed paternal grandfather Leo and my maternal grandmother Bertha vacationed together at the French Riviera—Cannes? Nice? Mentone? There was a photo in existence of the two of them strolling along a promenade—I think it probably was among stacks of photos that got lost. For lack of pictorial evidence, I may be the only one who still knows of their mode of living, that of some of the German Jews in that era.

BOCHUM: TRIPS TO THE SURROUNDINGS

When I was a toddler, we had a huge Mercedes Benz—my father was proud of this luxury car. Its interior strove to look like a living room: there was a narrow crystal vase for flowers, lilies-of-the-valley or a sprig of lilac. One afternoon, my father drove us to a beautifully situated inn overlooking the scenic Ruhr valley. My mother came equipped to take photographs, tripod and all. My father wanted a picture of me, seated on the hood of this monster of a car—or so it struck me, under four years old. I was terrified. Why? Because the hood is called Kühler [cooler] in German, and I was afraid that it would be hot: it needed cooling, didn’t it? Why would it need cooling if it wasn’t hot?

When I was quite small, still in my pram, we had a German shepherd called Remus. I was too small to remember him, but there was a photo showing Remus sitting alert next to my pram, guarding me. He was run over by a car one day when my mother had taken me to Grumme, then a rural area, part of greater Bochum. I did not see this accident; I knew it from my mother telling me, always at the same spot.

We continued going to Grumme after my brother was born. My mother liked taking us to a garden restaurant there for afternoon ice cream. My brother and I played on the seesaw shaded by trees. We brought stale bread from home to throw over a tall clipped hedge into a pond noisy with ducks. We stood on chairs to see them. My mother, keeping an eye on us, sipped coffee. Though technically part of the industrial city, Grumme felt rural to me. (It has changed since then.)

As for this photo of Remus by the pram: it was one of hundreds of photos stored in a most extraordinary chest of drawers cum writing desk, called secretary. I have not seen anything like it, and I have been on the lookout for it in museums.

The piece had a serpentine front, and was, I think, mahogany, a blondish wood, its grain forming patterns. The slanted door of the desk which opened as a writing surface covered slots and small drawers. A tall superstructure had solid wood shelves behind doors. At the bottom were three drawers, exceedingly heavy to open because they were filled to the full with photo albums and sturdy envelopes containing glass negatives, photos of the family and of my brother and me. I still have the keys to drawers of that cabinet, antiques in their own right. Miraculously, this piece of furniture survived Kristallnacht (chapter 2).

DATES, EVENTS AND PEOPLE WHILE WE LIVED ON THE SCHARNHORSTSTRASSE

Hitler took power on January 30, 1933, a date observed annually during the years of his leadership. January 30 was celebrated as Tag der Machtergreifung [day of power seizure].

On February 27, 1933, the parliament building was set on fire [Reichstagsfeuer], marking the end of political liberty. Hitler’s National Socialists took over, a date in the history of Germany. Whereas I was much too young to grasp its significance, I could see and hear some of its manifestations.

From an oriel window in our living room, disciplined rows of Nazis in the street below could be seen, banging the heels of their tall leather boots on the pavement as they marched, bawling aggressive Nazi songs, among them one with the refrain: Denn heute gehört uns Deutschland, und morgen die ganze Welt [Germany is ours today, tomorrow the whole world]. Is that what German soldiers sang or thought as they later marched into Austria? Czechoslovakia? Poland? the Low Countries? Paris? plunging Europe into a Second World War with their virulent ideology?

A brass Sabbath lamp hung from the ceiling next to those windows. The lamp was taken down for occasional polishing, but was no longer used. This kind of lamp is now displayed in museums. I find the thought of that sad, not because the object’s time is over—it is in the nature of utensils to be superseded—but because such a lamp was not the only beautiful Jewish ritual object in our home. The popular view among American Jews that all Jews in Germany were trying to shed their Judaism in favor of assimilation to their non-Jewish surroundings does not fit universally.

Under this museum-worthy lamp stood my mother’s cacti collection on a round brass tray that formed a table top. Rarely, one of the cacti bloomed; a joyful event.

After April 20, a national holiday because it was Hitler’s birthday, came another date that began to rank highly for National Socialists: the first of May, labor day [Tag der Arbeit], honoring workers, May Day in some countries. However, Nazi ideology combined that day with a return to pagan rites which included a sun wheel [Sonnenrad].¹² This symbol, originally stylized in Bronze Age rock drawings, was a fertility symbol, and National Socialists incorporated it into the observance of that day. How? Wooden wheels were set on fire on hilltops and then rolled down, ablaze. Dangerous. Or so I felt it to be when I saw it filmed for newsreel in a cinema, showing uniformed Hitler youths enjoying the practice.

Interestingly, Sonnenrad, such an important vocable from the Nazi era with its fondness for paganism, was omitted from Klappenbach and Steinitz, Wörterbuch der deutschen Gegenwartssprache (1975-78).

On March 23, 1933, the Enabling Act [Ermächtigungsgesetz] gave Hitler dictatorial power to enact laws without parliament [Reichstag].¹³ The state became synonymous with Hitler’s rule. He used a ceremonial occasion to proclaim that opposition to the state would be ruthlessly stamped out, and intimidation was Hitler’s unconcealed weapon. It did its job. The first concentration camp for opponents of the Nazi party was set up near Munich in March 1933 at the suggestion of Heinrich Himmler, then Munich’s Police Commissioner.

Sure enough, a month later, a street in Bochum was deserted, which startled me, although I knew nothing about a wider context. Hitler, eager to get on with persecuting Jews, ordered a boycott of Jewish stores. Already on Saturday, April 1, 1933, "Schlag zehn Uhr" [on the stroke of ten o’clock] as per Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda, a boycott of Jewish businesses started.

Our maid and I walked along the display windows of Bochum’s biggest department store, Kaufhaus Alsberg, Kortumstraße, owned by Jews. No other pedestrians were around. Notices on the windows read Do Not Buy from Jews [Kauft nicht bei Juden], with a small cohort of uniformed Nazis picketing to make sure no one did. No one wanted to be seen even near the store; that is why the streets were empty. I am surprised that I was only aged eight and a half at the time because, looking back, I thought I was older. Yet, April 1, 1933, was the date.

Of course, I had been in this department store and used its escalator, the first one I had been on, possibly the first one in Bochum. My father had introduced me to it. I was afraid, however, to use the Paternoster in some official building in Bochum. This is the name for a three-walled elevator, lacking the door. It ascended and descended without stopping, so that one had to catch the right moment to get on and off. I preferred the security of a door and the certainty of stops.

In July 1934, Hitler reiterated that anyone raising his hand against the state would be put to death—and this was a frontpage headline in the Völkische Beobachter, first a bi-weekly, then a weekly Nazi propaganda newspaper. News vendors displayed it, together with Der Stürmer, an anti-Semitic weekly with vicious caricatures of Jews on the front page. Everyone passing a newsstand saw them without even buying the paper. Involuntarily I turned my head when walking by. These publications were part of the German city scene.

On January 13, 1935, the Saar region became part of Germany—in defiance of the Versailles treaty. I retain a vague image of a commotion in the center of Bochum where trams converged, a vague image of being there and wondering why there were such crowds. I held hands with our maid who may have taken an interest in the event. My mother would surely have avoided going there, certainly not with her young daughter.

The same year, there were sporadic boycotts, and Jews were taken to a concentration camp on ridiculous charges.

My father’s reaction to the boycott was to open his own business in Berlin after having been a partner in the Bochum firm, Leo Mayer Söhne. He thought that in a metropolis like Berlin, a store with a Jewish owner would be less conspicuous than it was in Bochum.

May 10, 1933, was the date when books were burned in Berlin at the Opernplatz, now Bebelplatz. My parents did not tell me about that.

Phenomena of those nascent dictatorship years I experienced with my eyes. I saw columns of brown-uniformed Germans, the display of anti-Semitic cartoons, the boycotted department store. I could not yet grasp the overall threat of these sights; their significance I understood later.

Many Jews, including many in Bochum, heeded the signs of mandated anti-Semitism and left Germany. Those who came to the United States had made up their minds in good time because the preparation took months. To apply for an American immigration visa, they had to get a number. People with relatives in America could more easily obtain an affidavit. Many had an uncle in America. We, too, registered for and received a number from the American consulate, but the number was so high that, had we waited our turn, I would not be here to write about all this.

Some of my school friends left. Ferdi Schlamazanik was the first to leave our fourth grade and our school, Bochum’s Jewish public school [Volksschule], part of the