Correspondence

I clicked send and watched my email with the fourth draft of my memoir vanish from the screen. Would my editor open it today? She said she’d get back to me in six weeks. What would she think? Then I learned her father had died, upending her schedule. It was going to be months. Meanwhile, my dad’s health was declining. When my editor finally had time for my memoir, would I be too busy to revise it?

No one can believe how long I’ve spent writing Stumbling Blocks. Indeed, if you asked me two years ago, I would have assured you that I’d be done by now. But draft after draft I am told that too many of my scenes are stolen by a relative. In my memoir, I cannot be a supporting character.

I recently read The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, by Daniel Mendelsohn. One of his sources is old family letters. With my manuscript gone, I decided to look through the old letters I had saved. My archives went back to roughly 1980. I decided to hunt for letters from Grandma, who died in 1985. Had she written me any secrets? Anything that might be useful in my memoir? (Yes, there will certainly be corrections, revisions, call it another draft.) I flipped through the drawer until I saw Grandma’s tightly controlled script. One, two, five, fifteen: I found quite a few letters. I opened each and stacked them up so I could read them.

Then I thought of a chapter that I’d pruned from this last draft. It was a fabrication, pure and simple. I had imagined Grandma sitting in her kitchen in Berleburg writing letters to her relatives in America. It was a snowy evening in February 1938. She wrote first to her younger sister Anni, who had emigrated in 1937. She asked Anni to be sure to help their sister Frieda who was currently on the boat on the way to New York. Grandma wrote that Frieda and her family would surely need help. Neither Frieda nor Max nor their two boys spoke any English. As Anni had been to night school (and in a previous letter to Grandma, also fabricated, had bragged about her top grades), Grandma told Anni to help Frieda register the boys for school.

What Grandma didn’t write, and didn’t really want to acknowledge, was that she needed help. Grandpa had to sell the family cattle business in 1935. Perhaps the first of the loans from relatives in New York had begun to arrive. Dad told me that by the time he arrived in NY with his parents and grandfather in 1941, they owed two thousand dollars, roughly a third more than what the average American made in a year.

Even though I’d excised the letter writing chapter from the memoir, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. How frightened and alone Grandma must have felt when Frieda left. And it was not yet Kristallnacht. Her living room window had not yet been broken; her home ransacked. She had not yet sent her three children, including my dad, off to Belgium on a Kindertransport. Things got much worse for her, much worse, before they got better.

Even though my dad is currently 94 and in Rochester, New York, I pictured him that same wintry evening in February 1938. He was nine years old then, small for his years, and curled up in his bed dreading school the next day. He was, in Dad’s words, “the Jew” of Heinrich Brockmeier, his teacher, an Alte Kämpfer[1] Nazi. Dad was little appeased by Grandpa’s aphorism that “To be a Jew is to be a fighter.” Dad didn’t like sitting all alone in the back row of his classroom; he didn’t like wearing a dunce cap, saluting Hitler every morning, and being laughed at by his classmates. He was miserable.

Grandma didn’t write to Anni about Dad’s situation. Anni would have known. Grandma wouldn’t have complained to her brother Julius, her only sibling still in Germany, because he would have known. Everyone in the family knew trouble from the Nazis.

When I was in the kitchen with Grandma many decades later, she often spoke about her life in 1938. If the hair on my arms didn’t stand up when I heard about her mother and siblings immigrating, then Grandpa’s hernia operation a day or two before Kristallnacht certainly got me into fight or flight mode. By the time Grandma’s house was ransacked, and Dad’s toy soldiers taken away by the SA on November 9th, I was terrified. Then there were another three whole years of problems…. Grandma could keep going until it was time for her to fix dinner.

But Grandma’s letters rarely spoke of hard truths or difficult topics. Her third-grade teacher and mine must have read the same book by Emily Post (or the German equivalent). Form and politeness were top priorities. I scanned the old letters to see what they contained that was not about cousin X’s forthcoming marriage or cousin Y’s admission to a top college.

A letter from 1981 jumped out. I had sent Grandma an essay that wrote about the legacy of the Holocaust on my life (call it draft one of my memoir). Grandma had a mixed review. Though she “liked my story very much,” she set me straight on every detail that I got wrong: “Never and nobody gave birth in a bathtub” (probably something Dad said as a joke). Aunt Adele fell in love with a gentile teacher, not a poet. The Berleburg “duck pond” had swans and was a small lake (another joke of Dad’s?). “All the Krebs brothers and sisters had predominantly gentile friends, because there were few Jewish young people + they came along just beautifully with their gentile friends.” Finally, “Where did you get such ideas?”

I don’t know if I made up more details than the average listener to a story. Maybe my off-kilter ideas were all part of my attempt to figure out who I was at age 22, and what I should do with my life. Back then and still today Dad believes that hard work is the best way to fulfillment. Get a job and stick with it. Aunt Lucie, Dad’s oldest sister, was sure that a PhD would set me on a path to contentment. I didn’t think seventy hour weeks or stacks of money were the answer for me, and when I envisioned myself five years in the future wandering in musty library stacks, I saw a lost soul.

Looking back now, I can see that one foot of mine was stuck somewhere in 1938 (hence the essay of 1981, and today’s memoir). That the duck pond was a lake, was a minor editorial fix. But the questions of human nature raised by my family members, such as how people you come along beautifully with one day try to kill you the next, are questions I have spent my entire life to this point pondering. This is Stumbling Blocks.

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[1] An early supporter of Hitler. Dad’s teacher, Heinrich Brockmeier, joined the Nazi party in the 1920s, long before Hitler came to power.