Category Archives: history

November 7, 2016 · 10:08 am

Berlin, November 10, 1938

By Ellen Norman Stern (Willow Grove, PA)

Late on the afternoon of November 10, 1938 my mother and I were traveling home on the Stadtbahn, Berlin’s elevated train system. Fortunately we knew my father had already landed in the United States after the torment of a lengthy stay and an eventful release from the concentration camp of Buchenwald.

Now there were many details still left to be settled for the hoped-for emigration of my mother and me and we had just come from the headquarters of a government office located in another section of the city.

It was cold. Because of the winter month darkness came early. What I remember most clearly was that my mother suddenly decided to get off the train several stops before our regular one. She did not explain why, only said, “I saw something,” grabbed my hand, and pulled me with her when the train doors slid open.

What she had seen I did not understand until she and I had run down the steps at the train stop and headed toward an area which I immediately recognized as Fasanenstrasse, the street where our synagogue was located.

That evening as we got closer to the familiar building a strange scene unfolded.

A large group of people stood on the street in front of the entrance and stared silently at the magnificent synagogue illuminated by a bright glow from within. I had visited the building many times when its facade was splendidly lit, but I had never seen it so luminous, shining so brightly, as if its heart was on fire.

My mother was devout and frequently took me to services here at our synagogue on Fasanenstrasse, the home of Berlin’s liberal Jewish community. I had witnessed my first religious observance in its sanctuary and visited my first Sukkah in its enclosed rear yard.

I was introduced to the rituals of liberal Judaism here. The sound of its majestic organ and the brilliance of its choir had opened a portal to faith to me.

But its magnificent cupola had always fascinated me. When I looked upward, I easily visualized it as God’s throne. Its high golden dome became an umbrella of holiness and safety to me and I could imagine Him watching me from its heights. Under it I felt protected and sanctified.

My mother pointed her finger toward the sky. I followed her glance and saw flames shooting out of the cupola. They burned brightly in the cold evening air, sending down crackling sparks onto the synagogue roof. I thought it surprising that I heard that snapping, popping sound from so far away.

We stood at the rear of the crowd. There were smirks on many faces. What was more astonishing was the sight of several idling fire engines forming a circle around the front of the synagogue. Nearby, their crews in firemen’s uniforms stood in relaxed conversation. At a close distance there were watchers all around. But no one moved. It was eerie, as if the whole scene were a bad dream in slow motion.

It became evident that no one would put out the fire. We stood there for what seemed to me a long time.

Trembling from cold and fright, I stood in the crowd, strongly aware that something quite terrible was happening. I was heavily troubled by thoughts that ran through my head.

“Why is God allowing this? Why is He letting them destroy His beautiful sanctuary? Why is He not striking all these evil people down?”

I was an eleven-year old child living through a very upsetting time. I had already learned not to voice such dangerous thoughts.

When finally, my mother reached for my hand, we turned to leave, and silently walked back to the elevated train station.

When we reached the station, my mother said her only words.

“Remember this,” she said to me.

I have remembered. Through all these many years.

To this very day.

Born in Germany, Ellen Stern came to the United States as a young girl and grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. She’s the author of numerous books for young adult readers, including biographies of Louis D. Brandeis, Nelson Glueck, and Elie Wiesel. Her most recent publication is The French Physician’s Boy, a novel about Philadelphia’s 1793 Yellow Fever epidemic.

 

 

 

 

 

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October 24, 2016 · 6:20 am

Father’s Phantom First Family

by Sheldon P. Hersh (Lawrence, NY)

When it came to keeping secrets, few were as tight-lipped as my parents. Once these two Holocaust survivors decided to exclude any one particular topic from conversation, no amount of whimpering, urging or cajoling could convince them to reconsider. You see there were some wartime memories that proved just too painful to discuss and so keeping them under wraps was felt to be the only sensible thing to do.

One such prohibited topic dealt with my father’s first family, a wife and three small children, four innocent victims who perished during the Holocaust. They, along with thousands of others held captive in the Lodz Ghetto, had either succumbed to starvation, exhaustion and illness or were ruthlessly singled out, rounded up and taken to nearby killing centers. The story of this first family had become a closed chapter in a book of tragedies that was to be kept out of sight and out of mind. From my earliest recollection, I sensed that this was a subject that was strictly off limits and, though I was always intrigued, I knew better than to ask too many questions.

My father, who was generally an open and talkative sort, never spoke of this phantom first family. There were no details of their lives and no information as to how or where they died. Talk of their appearance, likes, dislikes, mannerisms and personalities was never forthcoming and remained under lock and key. My mother, perhaps fearful of not wanting to open old painful wounds, seldom discussed any subject that was certain to upset my father. “Your father is a nervous man,” she would often say, “he has suffered enough. There are things you should not ask.”

On rare occasions, mother would inadvertently let a word or two slip about the secret first family but there was never enough information that would amount to much of anything. She always seemed to catch herself right in the nick of time. It was like a pinhole in a drawn window shade that permitted a hint of light but resulted in little, if any, illumination or insight. The first family’s names were never mentioned and their faces never graced the pages of our emaciated photo album.

Growing up, I found myself trying to come up with likely names and images for this first family. I played with the possibilities. The color and texture of their hair, the color of their eyes and any distinctive facial features that would make them stand out in a crowd. In spite of a vivid imagination, my efforts failed miserably as these faceless spirits continued to elude me. Whenever emboldened by a jolt of curiosity, I would cautiously approach my father with questions relating to his first family. “Foolish child, how could you ever possibly understand?” was his customary response, a refrain he often used whenever feeling distressed and at a loss for words. I accepted defeat and never gave it much thought until my own children came on the scene.

While visiting my parents a number of years ago, I was determined to be a bit more forceful in my attempt to learn about this first family. Whether it had been the presence of my own children or the appreciation that I could no longer be put off, my father began to appear a bit more receptive to the idea of introducing his first family into our daily conversations. As the lone survivor of his extended family, he, and only he, could provide information about those who had not survived. No photographs, letters or mementos of the first family’s existence had ever surfaced after the war, making my father’s recollections all the more critical. I was well aware of his sensitivity and appreciated his vulnerability, and, at my mother’s urging, I proposed that we go slowly and proceed at a pace of his own choosing.

Father took a long deep breath and began to speak haltingly of the strife and struggle of life in the ghetto. He continued on this theme for a number of minutes before introducing me to his young daughter and two infant sons. Though details were quite meager, a milestone had been reached that, I hoped, would lead to more open discussion in the near future. A major hurdle was overcome and I could immediately appreciate that a bit of clarity had been sprinkled onto a distant blur. Visions of faint images were beginning to inch forward ever so slowly with the promise of additional advancement if time would only permit. But it did not. My father died soon after our initial breakthrough. This first small step had barely scratched the surface and now there was no one left to ask and nowhere else to turn.

Years later, I came upon a most remarkable work by Josef Zelkowicz, a witness to the horrific events that took the lives of so many in the Lodz Ghetto. In Those Terrible Days: Writings from the Lodz Ghetto, Zelkowicz describes how children were brutally separated from hysterical parents, forced onto transports and then taken to extermination centers:

“Hours have passed since these woes, these agonies, were inflicted on those wretched people, but the situation has not calmed down one bit. Mothers have not yet tired of shrieking, fathers’ wellsprings of tears have not yet sealed, and the silence of the night amplifies the reverberations of the screaming and sobbing. No sound reaches your ears, man, but that bitter wailing; no thought occurs to you but death; and your heart ponders, nothing but devastation.”

I will likely never know what became of this first family. I now, however, understand why it was my father could not relive a time when mothers and fathers, all terror stricken and desperate, wept uncontrollably as their loving children were savagely torn from their protective embrace. His common refrain—“Foolish child, how could you ever possibly understand?”—has now taken on a clarity of its own. My father had been right all along. I could not possibly understand. I could not possibly appreciate the horrors that had left him dispirited and at a loss for words. When it came to any talk, any mention, any recollection of the first family, I now realize that my father couldn’t and my mother wouldn’t. He succeeded in keeping his secret intact, thereby helping safeguard his sanity and keeping us, his current children and loved ones, safe from harm.

Sheldon P. Hersh, an Ear, Nose and Throat Physician with a practice in the New York metropolitan area, is the author of Our Frozen Tears (http://tinyurl.com/kuzlscb), as well as the co-author of The Bugs Are Burning, a book on the Holocaust.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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September 26, 2016 · 8:55 am

Auschwitz, August, 2016

By Chaim Weinstein (Brooklyn, NY)

I limp in the dark Eicha night with pain in my knee exploding, and I hear dogs barking in the near-pitch-blackness. Tears fill behind my eyes, not from my knee this time, though I say nothing to anyone. I quickly look at my wife and know we are each with private thoughts.

Several friends offer to get the wheelchair or my cane, and I curtly answer that I’m fine, though I’m anything but fine. I’m no martyr, and I don’t love pain. But in this place, my knee is not the source of my torment.

I walk in thin-soled non-leather sneakers where the rock-strewn road hurts the soles of my feet. I am aware that our people were beaten here seventy years ago, tortured, and beaten through hell in ways I pray to God no human being will ever know. So in this place where our people suffered relentlessly, how dare I complain about anything? I remain silent and worry only about how my wife and son are holding up.

Inside the infamous guard tower, we climb up, overlooking the vast Auschwitz acres, and we sit on the floor, leaning against the inside walls. I think of Germans who’d worked the searchlights here looking for “dangerous” emaciated Jews, often shooting them dead for no reason. I hate them all.

And then it hits me: this night it is we Jews who have overtaken this tower, we Jews are in control tonight of this place dripping with evil. We Jews are here: we have won, thriving in our Jewish lives and culture and religion. And the damned Third Reich? Under the ground. History. Pages in some books. In drerd arein, as my blessed father used to say. We Jews are flesh and blood and sinew and bone and we are here, accentuating our Jewishness right here in the lair of the most barbaric people in history.

And here we are, reading from inside this Nazi watchtower the Book of Eicha, Lamentations, over the destruction of the ancient Temple of the Jews. I need to feel sad, but I am nearly giddy with joy that this watchtower, this temple of evil, is in the hands of our victorious Jewish group tonight.

We return the next morning and daven shachrit in the woods of Auschwitz. I see several acorns on the ground, and I pick up a green one and put it in my pants pocket, my personal connection here, the green of it fresh and full of life in this kingdom of death. At home, friends will ask why there’s an acorn on a shelf in my bookcase that holds my Torah books and my collection of Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Hemingway and others. I will tell them it fell from a tree in Auschwitz where our group davened shachrit together. The customs people at the JFK airport will ask if I have anything to declare, and I will hold out my wrists and tell them to handcuff me because I’ve broken the law, bringing this acorn home in my pocket. The entire world has committed crimes against us Jews throughout history, and my little green acorn has silently witnessed the Nazi massacre of more than a million of my brothers and sisters and I want to own this teeny, silent witness.

Just a week before, we’d walked through Tikochin Forest, where Jews had been force-marched in, many already near death from weakness and starvation. There, the trees have no branches, no leaves. Nothing new grows, just mammoth tree trunks on either side of the dirt path leading to three mass graves, each site draped now in very large Israeli flags, where Israeli officers pay their respects.  In my imagination, Nazis bully us, smash their rifle-butts against our ribs, our heads, our backs to make us go faster. But we can’t, we are so near death. Some of us fall to the ground, lifeless even as we fall.

The Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and the remnant wall. Operation Reinhart. Chachmei Lublin. Treblinka. the Nozyk shul. The Tempel shul. The Rebbe Elimelech of Lezajsk. Majdanek. Crematoria. Krakow. The Rama. Tosafot Yom Tov. The Hocha shul. Schindler and ‘his’ Jews in his factory.

So many reminders of deep Jewish life and most painful Jewish death all over Poland. The Poles, the Lithuanians, the Hungarians, all Hitler’s willing executioners, often gleefully torturing Jewish people. And so many other places and issues and thoughts and pain.

We now have America, as long as that haven lasts.

But we definitely have Israel, our true home, where we Jews will be in charge of the fate of our people. And so it continues for us as Jews whose souls were in Poland, and for us as Jews, part of this mission, living in New York and elsewhere.

On a personal note: when I finished learning the Tractate Taanis in memory of my parents and those of my wife’s, I was excited to make a siyum in Poland. (A siyum is the traditional ceremony one makes upon completing a tractate.) I made a siyum in that very country whose populace sought to destroy the Jewish nation and our Torah, and here I was, in their face, showing them all that we Jews and our Torah live on.

For more than thirty years, Chaim Weinstein taught English in grades six through college in New York City public schools as well as in several parochial schools. His poems and stories have appeared on The Jewish Writing Project, and his short story, “Ball Games and Things,” was published in Brooklyn College’s literary magazine, Nocturne.

 

 

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July 4, 2016 · 7:00 am

Remembering Elie Wiesel

by Ellen Norman Stern (Willow Grove, PA)

“Permit me to tell you a story.”

These are the words Elie Wiesel often used to begin an evening’s lecture or one of his “college encounters”.

Why am I using these words? Because they tell best how it happened that I was destined to write a story about this man who has become the prophet of his generation, which is also mine.

A long time ago when I was a little girl pushing a doll carriage along the sidewalk of my Berlin street, a young boy my age sat listening to stories in the House of Study of his hometown in the heart of Central Europe. We were far apart in location, background, and upbringing, yet, without our knowing it, a common experience was being prepared for us which would affect both his future and mine. We did not sense the coming of this experience, because we were both still living in the world of childhood, where all bad stories have happy endings.

Then the whirlwind came. Nothing remained the same.

Destiny was kind to me. I was permitted to live and to grow up in the United States. There, more than two decades later, I picked up a booklet containing a number of stories by a writer named Elie Wiesel.

At some moments in life one knows one has just been struck a by a flash of truth. Everything comes together at that point: something happens, a new insight is born. Such a moment is not easily forgotten.. I was aware of my particular moment when I read “Face in the Window,” a passage its author called “a legend of our time.” With powerful graphic words it describes a man who watches without comment the deportation of the Jews of his town. He says nothing, he does nothing He only observes. He is the symbol of a person, a nation, a world’s inertia in the face of evil: the “I don’t want to get involved” syndrome.

The piece touched me deeply. I knew nothing of Elie Wiesel. Not who he was, nor where he came from. But I felt instant kinship with him. He felt what I felt, and he knew how to express his feelings. He had the gift, the power, and the strong urge to make the words come out. And he spoke to me.

I heard Elie Wiesel speak at public lectures. I saw him on television, knew his face from the covers of his many books.

He was famous.

When my publisher asked whether I would write a book about Wiesel for young people, I said yes, not because I am an expert on Wiesel, but because we both lived through the same unusual time and he expressed so many feelings which I could share.

On a bright January day I traveled to New York for my first face-to-face meeting with Elie Wiesel. My appointment with him was in a mid-Manhattan office suite where an organization had lent him space. In a prior telephone conversation, he had given me explicit directions how to reach his office.  I was impressed with his concern that I should not get lost.

I was properly nervous for this interview with a celebrity. The dark-eyed slender man in the trim gray business suit welcomed me with a sweet smile and did not act like a celebrity at all. With old-world courtesy he ushered me into the room where we would talk.

We sat in the small office and he spoke to me of his childhood, especially of his parents. I had brought along fragments of my manuscript-to-be, and he was particularly interested in seeing that I had the right “tone” in my opening pages. In his own writing, he told me, he must feel the words “sing” before he is sure he is on the right track and continue with the story.

Sitting on a hard chair facing me, Wiesel answered my many questions patiently. I had the feeling I had known this man all of my life: I was seeing a friend.I felt united to him by the fact that, as children, our lives were altered by the Holocaust.

After the interview was over, I wandered through the lunch-hour crowd on East 42nd Street. Originally, I had planned to spend the afternoon with friends in New York. Now, I found I no longer wanted to keep the date.

I had just experienced a homecoming. Those who have heard Wiesel speak at an “encounter” know the sensation: it is a feeling of understanding completely, and of being completely understood. For me, it was an experience I needed to hug to myself, to enfold and digest in private, before talking about it and sharing it with others. I took the next train back to Philadelphia.

“Make this book your own,” he said to me when shaking my hand in farewell that day.”Tell the story the way you feel it.”

My aim then was to tell the story of a victim traveling through hell and emerging as a victor. Perhaps you too, will turn to the stories of Elie Wiesel and understand just a little more clearly why the things he had to say concern you, too.

Born in Germany, Ellen Stern came to the United States as a young girl and grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. She’s the author of numerous books for young adult readers, including biographies of Louis D. Brandeis, Nelson Glueck, and Elie Wiesel. Her most recent publication is The French Physician’s Boy, a novel about Philadelphia’s 1793 Yellow Fever epidemic.

This piece is excerpted from Witness for Life, the biography about Elie Wiesel that Ellen Stern wrote for KTAV (1982), and is reprinted with the kind permission of the author. 

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May 31, 2016 · 6:31 am

Great-Uncle Moishe: L’dor v’dor

by Ellen Sue Spicer-Jacobson (Bala Cynwyd, PA)

My first conscious memory of my grandmother’s youngest brother, Moishe (Morris in English), is from 1945. My older brother and sister and I were visiting Great-Uncle Moishe Spicer and his wife Rose in Coney Island. My grandmother and her sister Molly were there as well, and, when the declaration of the end of WWII came over the radio, I found myself outside with one of the kitchen pots and a spoon, hammering on the pot to celebrate. It was a very noisy night and I can still remember that celebration.

For some reason, Uncle Moishe favored me more than my four siblings. I never asked him why, but I liked the attention, especially because my mother was always too busy to pay much attention to me and my father was always working. So I basked in my great-uncle’s attention whenever I saw him. He made me smile and feel special.

Uncle Moishe became a widower, and eventually retired to Florida where I visited him in the mid-1980s. He moved near my aunt, actually living in the same building, so when I occasionally visited Aunt Gladys, I could also visit my great-uncle. One sunny day, after visiting my aunt, Uncle Moishe and I took a walk in a nearby park and I began asking him questions about our family background. Where were we from? What was life like in Austria-Hungary? How did he come to America? I asked him so many questions, he began to lose his voice from talking, but I persisted, and being his favorite, he could not say “no” to me.

What I learned fascinated me. Uncle Moishe told me that his family had lived in a shtetl in Russia on the border of what was then Austria-Hungary, very close to the Tibor River. The family had no last name because in the 1860s last names in Russia were still in the future. (A child was identified as “the son of” or “daughter of” his or her father, using his or her father’s first name as part of their names.) Because the Russian Army at this time conscripted young Jewish boys into the army when they were very young, Uncle Moishe’s grandfather and great-uncle were sent across the river to avoid being drafted and converted to Christianity. The parents never saw their children again!

The boys fled to a small town called Tarpiluvka in Austria-Hungary where they were adopted by a family with the name Speiser (which means food store). Mrs. Speiser was unable to bear children and thought the boys’ appearance was a miracle from God. Moishe and his older siblings grew up in Tarpiluvka, and eventually half of them came to America to start new lives, never to return to their place of birth. Half of the siblings kept the name Speiser and the other half, including my grandmother and Great-Uncle Moishe, anglicized it to Spicer.

The sacrifice that my great-great-great grandmother Sorah (Sarah in English) made to send her sons away went straight to my heart. I cannot imagine anyone today making such a sacrifice out of a desire to have her children remain Jewish. Inadvertently, I think, her sacrifice led me to become more aware of my Jewishness. We joined a Reconstructionist congregation of mostly seniors and I have found a renewed interest in Jewish history and Jewish holidays. I feel if I abandon my Jewish upbringing, then I am somehow abandoning Sorah’s wishes to have her children remain Jewish. Her desire has been handed down to her children’s children and eventually to my generation. It’s a perfect example of l’dor v’dor.

While I consider myself a Jew, I am not ultra-religious, although I do attend synagogue and belong to a small congregation. But I realize that learning about the sacrifice that Sorah made also made my life possible. If Sorah had not made this sacrifice, I may have never been born! My sense of being Jewish became heightened as a result of her heroic act. (And I believe the second part of my Hebrew name, Sarah, is from this ancestor, which pleases me even more.)

I will always be grateful for the time Uncle Moishe spent with me. He helped me learn so much about my ancestors. I feel fortunate that he agreed to answer all my questions. Otherwise, my family’s history might have remained a mystery. Instead, it has become a legacy.

Ellen Sue Spicer-Jacobson is a freelance writer and author of four cookbooks, a children’s coloring book, a computer manual, and a children’s (fiction) book based on her ancestors’ trek from Russia to Austria-Hungary (and eventually to America.) She lives in Bala Cynwyd, PA, and has a health-oriented website, www.menupause.info  for older women.

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December 14, 2015 · 7:02 am

“Immigration – A Modest Proposal”

by Mel Glenn (Brooklyn, NY)

Let’s start off with the Muslims, shall we?
They’re all terrorists, you know,
everyone carrying high-powered rifles.
Then we go after the Jews.
They’re not to be trusted, you know;
besides they’re used to being persecuted.
Next come the Catholics.
They’re all puppets of the Pope, you know,
and their priests molest small children.
The Statue of Liberty now hangs her head,
awash in a sea of red vitriol.
Emma Lazarus rewrites the words of her poem,
and Neil Diamond chokes on the lyrics of his song,
as the man in the silk tie calls the political shots.
Make sure we all gather on the shore line
with barbed wire and protest signs,
declaring that nobody else shall enter
because we were here first,
and after all, this is our America, nobody else’s.

The author of twelve books for young adults, Mel Glenn has lived nearly all his life in Brooklyn, NY, where he taught English at A. Lincoln High School for thirty-one years.  Lately, he’s been writing poetry, and you can find his most recent poems in the YA anthology, This Family Is Driving Me Crazy, edited by M. Jerry Weiss.

If you’d like to learn more about his work, visit: http://www.melglenn.com/

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June 8, 2015 · 8:50 am

My Musical Mama

by Beverley Fingerhut (Toronto, Canada)

In Memory of Sonya Chula (1910-1999)

Music was woven into my life from a very early age. My mother came from a family of cantors in Poland and she herself had a beautiful voice and sang in choirs.  At the dinner table, I grew up with traditional fare such as names of famous conductors like Antal Dorati and Arturo Toscanini, the cantor Moshe Koussevitzky, opera singers such as Jan Pearce and Jussi Bjorling, the pianist Arturo Rubenstein, the violinist Jascha Heifetz as well as arias from “Madame Butterfly” and “La Traviata”. My story is a letter to my mother filled with memories of her musical legacy and how she transmitted her love of music to her children.

Dear Mom,

There you are, proudly in the front row, your voice soaring above the heavenly choir. How rich my life has been because of your beautiful voice and love of music. 

As a child, money was scarce in our house, but music was never scarce.  You had been a Hebrew teacher in Poland and dad had trained as an accountant, but when you and dad came to Winnipeg from Poland in 1928 and 1930, at the ages of 18 and 20, unable to speak English, you became factory workers in sweatshops. Dad, because of the terrible working conditions in the factories, was instrumental in forming unions to fight for workers’ rights and consequently was fired from many of his jobs. Despite the lack of money, you could still whip up savoury and geshmak meals from very little food and you saved pennies to purchase concert tickets. Because there was not enough money for all three of your daughters to attend, we picked the stalks from brooms to see who had the longest and who was the chosen one to accompany you to a concert.   I was often the lucky one, picking the longest stalk.

One of my favorite childhood memories is going to see the beautiful Madame Guiomar Novaes, considered one of the greatest female pianists of the 20th century. After the concert, you intrepidly took me backstage to meet her, whereupon she presented this shy, eight-year-old with a rose from the bouquet given to her at the end of the concert. I savoured this rose as if the queen had given it to me.  That year at our annual essay contest, I wrote my essay on this momentous event and won first prize, a lovely bracelet.

You walked around the house with your beautiful curly hair that dad loved and sang arias from “Madame Butterfly”, your favorite opera, or the Yiddish songs “My Yiddishe Mama” and “Oifen Pripitchik”. At dinnertime, along with your geshmak food, there was talk of famous conductors, stories of operas and composers. Our substantial record collection consisted of the likes of Beethoven’s “Emperor Concerto”, Grieg’s “Concerto in A minor”, Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture”, Chopin nocturnes, and Rachmaninoff’s concertos, as well as cantorial music by Jan Pearce. 

You never had a cleaning lady but instead you made sure that we had private piano lessons, and to this day your youngest daughter Marleyne continues to practice and play the piano. She recently reminded me that when we had our music and theory exams at the Royal Conservatory you determinedly asked permission to sit outside the door of our examining room (though it was not permitted).  When we emerged, shaken from the frightening experience, you smiled and were able to tell us exactly how we did, note by note.  Sure enough when we got our marks in the weeks to come, they were exactly as you had foretold.

Much to my chagrin and I’m sure yours, I did not inherit your musical gene. Two incidents stand out in my mind.  Firstly, the Jewish socialist school I attended from Grades 1-7 had a choir with a wicked choirmaster, Chaver Brownstone. We were terrified of him and his stick. I was necessary for the last row of the choir because of my height, but my voice was silenced.  I was instructed in a menacing voice that I was not to open my mouth to sing, but to mouth the words and if I dared to sing, he would wave the stick in front of my face.  

Secondly, my secret endeavour was to get singing lessons. I grew up thinking how wonderful it would be to be an opera singer and how thrilling it would be to hear beautiful music emanate from my body.  So when I was in my 50s I researched and found the name of a voice teacher who had a great reputation in dealing with difficult voices. I nervously went to the teacher and after she gave me some pointers about breathing I stood in front of a microphone and belted out what I thought was a knockout version of Patsy Cline’s “Crazy”. Well, they say that everybody can draw or paint, but it is not true that everyone can sing. 

When my oldest daughter got married in Toronto, you wanted to sing at her wedding. You always carried your song sheets in a special embroidered bag, but my older sister forgot to pack the bag in your luggage and so our plan for you to sing at the party in the evening went astray.  But you were a very strong-willed woman and you were determined to sing.  It was during the wedding ceremony as your granddaughter Natalie came down the aisle, with her arm linked with mine that you, sitting in the front row burst into song.  There was not a dry eye in the crowd and 15 years later, friends still remind me of that magical moment.                                                           

To the end of your life you sang in the Winnipeg Jewish choir, you were short and so you prominently sat in the front row and I was honored to see you proudly singing. You travelled with the choir to many cities in Canada and you were asked to sing at important Jewish community events. I remember that once you wore a long black silk dress with a shocking pink rose painted on it.  You had a flair for colours as well as music. 

The day of your funeral in Winnipeg the temperatures went down to -40. Riding to the synagogue, my family dressed in long johns and layers of clothing, double rainbows shone in the icy blue sky. We knew it was you, Mom, watching us. And at the funeral service when your grandchildren sang “Jerusalem of Gold”, one of the songs you loved, they ended by saying, Baba we know you’re up there telling us we were off key.

How rich my life has been. Over the years, Mom, I have seen the famous Rampal dance with his flute, Rostorpovich with his cello at one with his body, your Perly (Itzhak Perlman) making  his violin sing, and  your Pinky (Pinchas Zuckerman) with his beautiful grey hair.  I have been to the Met in New York, where I walked up and down the aisles in wonderment and listened to “Aida”.  I listen to the classical music station and sometimes I too can identify the music or the composer and it feels so instinctive and intuitive, because music has been such an integral part of my life.

To this day, I still have the thrill and pangs in my heart when I hear the opening bars of the Emperor Concerto.  And when I hear Chopin’s nocturnes, it brings back memories of the concert we attended when I was young, and saw the great Arturo Rubenstein famously bouncing up and down on his chair as he played.  Today, when I hear opera singers like Luciano Pavarotti, Jessye Norman, Monseurrat Caballe, and the Cantor Yaakov Stark, I turn the radio to its highest volume, the music envelops me and my heart soars.

Today Mom, I sing proudly and loudly at synagogue, oblivious and uncaring what I sound like.   And I am blessed with three handsome grandsons who love to dance and a little granddaughter Olivia, who has curly red locks like you, has an uncanny resemblance to you, is stubborn and strong-willed like you and best of all, loves to sing like you. Mom, your wonderful legacy has been strong and will endure through the ages.  

Beverley Fingerhut is program director at the Centre of Excellence in Business Analysis at the Schulich Executive Education Centre, Schulich School of Business, York University, in Toronto. As an academic she has been the course director for Entrepreneur Business Development Skills for the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies as well as an adjunct professor in the Professional and Technical Writing Programme at York University. Beverley enjoys painting, reading, art history (in the past she was a part-time docent at the Art Gallery of Ontario), knitting, and spending time with her grandchildren.

“My Musical Mama” was published in Living Legacies – Volume IV: A Collection of Writing by Contemporary Canadian Jewish Women, edited by Liz Pearl (PK Press, 2014), and is reprinted here with the kind permission of the author and publisher. You can read more about the collection here: www.PKPress.ca

 

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February 3, 2014 · 7:30 am

Haftorah

by Richard Epstein (Washington, DC)

One syllable at a time
with correct cantillation.
That’s how I learn
the portion of the Torah
I will read on my
bar mitzvah day.

Again and again
I recite one
maybe two
syllables
until
the cantor
decides
the melody
embeds
itself
into my small brain.

I’m sorry to say
I never learned
the meaning of
the sacred words
I so carefully sang.

Richard Epstein lives in the Washington DC area and is active in the Warrior Poets sponsored by Walter Reed Medical Center, the Veterans Writing Project and he hosts an open mic venue for veterans and friends of veterans on the National Mall 

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November 11, 2013 · 10:13 am

On Transformative Works

by Rachel Barenblat (North Adams, MA)

1.

My first experience with writing liturgy came when I was in college. A group of women gathered in a dorm room where we argued passionately over words and metaphors. The question was how to retell the Passover story — the central narrative at the heart of Jewish peoplehood — in a way that would speak to us.

What were the critical pieces of the original haggadah text that we wanted to preserve? Where did we want to make radical changes? How would those radical changes sit with us, year after year? One year we excised all of the God-as-king language, preferring instead to use feminine God-language in both Hebrew and English. Another year, we shifted all of the language of sovereignty to metaphors that reflected immanent power rather than transcendence: instead of King or Queen we wanted to celebrate our source, wellspring, creator.

The Williams College Feminist Seder Project is only a memory now. The college community there doesn’t feel the need for a specifically “feminist” seder anymore… though I’ll bet the standard seder they do there now is still shaped by the ripples my era of students set in motion. (That’s how it goes with third-wave feminism.) But the work of creating my own Passover seder has shaped the way I think about Pesach, and about liturgical language, and about creativity, and about my place within the broader sphere of Jewish life.

I’m grateful to the women of the Williams College Feminist Seder Project, because they taught me how to take up the tools of transformation in my own liturgical life. Transforming the text of that beloved ritual was transformative for me.

2.

In the years after college, I didn’t belong to a congregation. I hadn’t yet found Jewish Renewal, and my dreams of the rabbinate seemed improbable at best. But I wanted a connection with Judaism.

Because the feminist seder project had been so formative for me, I tried my hand at writing other pieces of liturgy. I wrote a seder for Tu BiShvat, the New Year of the Trees. I wrote prayers for Sukkot and for Chanukah. I wrote, and then performed, a baby-naming ceremony for the son of two dear friends. When my sister became pregnant with her second child, she asked if I would write and perform a baby-naming for him, too.

Writing my own prayers and ceremonies helped me feel engaged. I was shaping my own quirky, idiosyncratic Judaism. I started writing about the fact that I was doing that, and encouraging other unaffiliated Jews — other Jews on the fringes: intermarried folks, queer folks, those who didn’t have a congregational home or who felt that there might not be a place at the Jewish table for them — to write their own liturgies and prayers, too.

I took my MFA at Bennington. At the end of my time there, one of my beloved advisors (the poet David Lehman) suggested that I try my hand at writing prayers and psalms. Although I’d thought I was keeping my Jewish self and my writerly self somewhat separate, he saw right through that flimsy divide.

Active Jewishness is a writerly thing. We’re obsessed with texts, and our tradition includes the strong expectation that each of us will be in conversation with those texts all our lives. Sometimes that conversation takes highly creative forms, so there’s a sense that creativity is a legitimate way to respond to the texts we hold dear. All of this was fermenting in me in 1999, the year I was first introduced to fanfiction and fanvids: transformative works of a different kind.

3.

I was working at The Women’s Times in those days. I planned issues of the newspaper, hired writers, wrote articles, and helped women in my region tell our stories. Meanwhile, I was also beginning to engage with womens’ stories via the creative community of media fandom. (More on media fandom, and fanworks, in a moment — stay tuned.) Maybe because women’s voices were central to my professional work, and maybe because of my collegiate experience with the feminist seder project, media fandom — as a “predominantly female community with a rich history of creativity and commentary” (Our Values) — felt immediately like home.

In 2000 I left The Women’s Times to found Inkberry with Emily and Sandy, two dear college friends. Inkberry is a literary arts nonprofit organization which still offers writing workshops and a reading series to the Berkshire region. Before we launched the org, the three of us sat around my living room and argued about the wording of our mission statement as only a trio of committed writers could do. In the end, we settled on this: Inkberry’s mission was to strengthen the connections between writing and life, and to help every writer to find their own unique voice.

Our central theory was that everyone can write, that everyone can become better at writing if they work at it, and that writing can be life-changing regardless of whether or not one ever publishes the Great American Novel or makes it into the Yale Younger Poets series.

What I remember most from those early years are the people who entered our team-taught introductory mixed-genre workshop saying things like “I’ve never shown anyone my writing before” and “I’m not sure I’m a writer,” and emerged with confidence in their writing abilities and the value of the unique stories they had to tell. The act of writing was personally transformative for them.

4.

During the Inkberry years, I was also writing poems and doing liturgical work. I created a wedding for two dear friends; wrote other lifecycle events, prayers and psalms. I started studying Jewish liturgy, wanting to know more about the tradition of which my creative liturgy was a part. In 2002 I attended my first retreat at Elat Chayyim, where I found Jewish Renewal.

In Jewish Renewal we talk a lot about Paradigm Shift ([pdf]). The term has its origin in science, but Reb Zalman (and others) saw it unfolding in Judaism. Moving from Biblical Judaism (based around sacrifice of animals on the Temple mount) to rabbinic Judaism (based around study and prayer and a set of texts which are entirely portable) was an enormous paradigm shift. A lot of folks in Jewish Renewal argue that we’re in the midst of another paradigm shift now, from rabbinic Judaism to whatever comes next. The next turning of the spiral.

I see the groundswell of creative liturgy work as part of this paradigm shift. In today’s world we presume that everyone has the capacity to add our voices to the conversation, whatever that conversation might be. On today’s read/write web, (almost) anyone can start a blog, post photos to a flickr feed, participate in online culture. Why would we be any less proactive in shaping our religious lives than we are in shaping our relationship with the news or the blogosphere? People who are writing our own prayers and psalms, our own wedding vows and our own baby-naming blessings are taking the tradition into our own hands, shaping it as we allow it to shape us.

Of course, the work we do wouldn’t be possible if it weren’t for the broad base of the classical tradition on which we build. And that classical tradition matters a lot to me. I cherish the texts in the siddur as they’ve evolved over the centuries; I thrill to the melodic motifs of traditional nusach as they shift over the course of each day and week and year.

But I might never have realized how much I love the classical tradition if I hadn’t started writing my own prayers, and been drawn through that into learning more about the deep structure of the liturgy as it’s been handed down. I think that creative liturgy work has the capacity to enrich and enlarge that tradition, even as it also enriches and enlarges our own spiritual lives. Writing liturgy is an act in which both the pray-er and the prayer are transformed. Writing liturgy is transformative work.

5.

Judaism has long been a read/write tradition. (Indeed: one of the last commandments in the Torah is for every Jew to write a Torah scroll — see Deut. 31:19.) Most of us don’t have the intense training and focus required for sofrut (the scribal arts), but we can fulfil the commandment by each adding her own voice and interpretations to the body of tradition.

At the heart of Jewish life is the Torah, and the shell of commentary which surrounds it, and concentric circles of commentary and conversation which surround that. It’s entirely reasonable for an author in the sixth century to be engaged in a conversation on the page with an author who lived four hundred years before, and for a twenty-first century author to cite (and argue with, and respond to) all of them at once.

Torah has often been termed The Law, and yeah, there’s a lot of law there. But there’s also a lot of storytelling, and the Jewish textual tradition mixes the two all the time. Halakha and aggadah (law and storytelling) are like yin and yang. They complement and complete one another.

When I say storytelling, one of the things I mean is midrash, the body of exegetical stories which seek to delve into loopholes or explain idiosyncrasies in our holy texts. There’s a vast body of classical midrash, of course, some of which makes astonishing and delicious assertions. (I’m partial to the teaching fromMidrash Tanchuma that the Torah is written in black fire on white fire; the “black fire” can be understood as the plain text and its basic meaning, while the “white fire” is found in our interpretations, the ways we creatively read between the lines.)

There’s also a growing body of contemporary midrash, including feminist midrash which aims to restore women’s voices to the tradition. All of this arises out of and often comments upon the classical material, which in turn is arising out of and commenting on the Torah texts. Like an infinite set of Matryoshka dolls, with the Sinai theophany at their ineffable heart.

It’s possible to be a Jew without engaging in this infinite conversation. But from where I sit, the conversation is the fun part. Reading, writing, talking back, using stories to make arguments — this is the fabric of Jewish life. And it’s also the fabric of fandom.

6.

Just as Jews create community through engaging around our shared stories, so do fans. But instead of writing stories or essays or making short films which offer exegeses of Biblical or Talmudic texts, fans write stories and essays and make short films which explore pop culture texts. We respond and re-purpose, turning and turning all kinds of stories to see what might be found inside. Often what we find there — what we foreground, or what we add — says as much about us as it does about the book or movie at hand. That’s part of the fun.

Fanfiction is fiction which takes an existing story as its starting point and then goes somewhere new. (This happens outside the fannish world, too. You could think of Jo Graham’s Black Ships as Aeneid fanfiction, or the musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat as Bible fanfiction — part of the rich tradition of contemporary midrash.) Fanvids are short amateur films which use found footage and music to tell a story or make a point. (See What is vidding?, part of a series of short films on vids and vidding; if you want to learn more, read Remixing Television.) Historically, these are womens’ arts. In crafting fanworks together, with and for one another, we create community.

My years in the community of media fandom have helped me feel empowered not only to savor stories, but also to respond: with love, with criticism, with new stories which build on or diverge from what I’ve received. Learning to put on these lenses, to encounter story with/in this interpretive community of friends, has enriched my reading and my writing alike.

Creating fanworks transforms us from consumers to producers. Instead of just imbibing stories, we become part of the cultural conversation. It’s like the paradigm shift of remix culture and the read/write web, only we’ve been doing it a lot longer than even the most old-school of bloggers. (Media fandom has been around since the 1970s; the broader term fandom has been in use since 1903. And, of course, generating creative work in response to existing creative work is about as old a practice as I can name; just ask Cory Doctorow.)

Fandom is very like Judaism in a lot of ways. And fanworks are transformative work.

7.

Full disclosure: “transformative work” is a technical term, and I’ve been using it in a slightly creative fashion to mean two things at once. The primary meaning of transformative use is a use which, in the words of the Supreme Court, “adds something new, with a further purpose or different character, altering the (source) with new expression, meaning, or message.” (Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, 1994.) I think my customized liturgies and homegrown psalms fit that bill, as do fanworks writ large.

The other kind of transformation I’ve been talking about here isn’t a legal matter, it’s an internal one. In the four-worlds paradigm I reference so often, the legal definition of a transformative work is an assiyah issue, relevant in the world of actions and physicality. But I’m most interested in how transformation plays out in yetzirah (emotions), briyah (thought), and atzilut (essence.) I’m committed to supporting the kind of transformation we work in ourselves and in our communities when we allow our work to transform us in those realms. (Then again, legalism and storytelling do go together like chocolate and peanut butter in my tradition, so maybe the dichotomy isn’t so stark afterall.)

It seems to me that whether we’re writing rituals and psalms, or writing poems, or creating fanworks, the net result is both transformed works and transformed individuals. It’s a two-way street: we transform works, and the work transforms us.

Rabbi Rachel Barenblat was ordained by ALEPH: the Alliance for Jewish Renewal in 2011. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and is author of three book-length collections of poetry: 70 faces: Torah poems (Phoenicia Publishing, 2011), Waiting to Unfold (Phoenicia, 2013), and the forthcoming Open My Lips (Ben Yehuda, 2014), as well as several chapbooks of poetry. A 2012 Rabbis Without Borders Fellow, she participated in a 2009 retreat for Emerging Jewish and Muslim Religious Leaders in 2009, and in 2014 will serve as faculty for that retreat. Since 2003 she has blogged as The Velveteen Rabbi; in 2008, TIME named her blog one of the top 25 sites on the internet. She has been an off-and-on contributor to Zeek since 2005. She serves Congregation Beth Israel, a small Reform-affiliated congregation in western Massachusetts, where she lives with her husband Ethan Zuckerman and their son.

This piece first appeared on The Velveteen Rabbi (http://velveteenrabbi.blogs.com/blog/) and has been reprinted here with the kind permission of the author. 

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September 30, 2013 · 6:00 am

The Letter

by Ellen Norman Stern (Willow Grove, PA)

The knock on the door of our Berlin apartment came around five o’clock one dark May morning in 1938.

It was the Gestapo’s favorite time of day to make house calls. Their victims were usually asleep and not many other people saw them at such an hour.

When my mother opened the door two men in dark raincoats stood outside. One of them muttered “Geheime Staatspolizei”, pushed the door open and let himself and his partner in. Their clothing was as anonymous as their faces. Perhaps secret agents are picked for their faces. Only members of a Secret Service look like this, no matter what their country. No one ever remembers their faces afterwards.

It was a time of constant rumors, all of them threatening. Even I, a child, had recently heard of an impending roundup of Jewish men in our Berlin community. There would be a mass raid, a Razzia. Why and what was to happen later no one knew. A pre-dawn knock on the door was dreaded, almost expected that summer. The only speculation was when that knock would come and for whom.

Yet when it came for us, it surprised my father and mother.

Inside the apartment the agents confronted my father in the foyer and announced their orders for his arrest. My father asked permission to take a little of their time: he needed to shave and dress. There was no way of resisting.

Permission granted, one agent remained in the bathroom with him and took up a position by the window facing into the room. The other man stayed in the foyer with his back against the slightly open bathroom door.

I tried to be unobtrusive. From my spot in the small entrance hall I peeked into the bathroom. Inside I saw my father’s face in the mirror over the sink. I thought him calm and accepting. But I noticed how his hands shook while he freshened up.

My father had suffered several recent gall bladder attacks. My mother said it was bad nerves. Conditions in Berlin were more than favorable to nervous tensions that spring in 1938, especially if you were Jewish and in a prosperous business.

My mother went into the kitchen and got ready a dose of his medication. When she came out she held a small bag in her hand and said he must be sure to take it with him. One of the agents remarked drily that there would be little chance for using it.

I saw my mother’s eyes starting to blaze. I cowered as she turned on those the two Gestapo agents. Fearlessly she chastise them for barging in on our peaceful household at such an hour, for taking away an innocent man when everyone knew how wrong that was. How could they face their consciences performing such a mission?

I like to think the Gestapo men remembered that scene. I did, all of my life. It took incredible guts to speak out the way Mimi (my pet name for my mother) did. Mimi remained ladylike, even in her scolding. But she certainly exploded that morning. She had good reason. The Gestapo men knew that, too.

In later years when her health and mental strength failed she was often afraid of things that seemed childish.. But I remembered Mimi’s courage and I recalled how she stood in the hallway of our fashionable apartment, wagging her finger under the nose of one of the Gestapo men, backing him against our bathroom door. Would I have such guts were I put to the test?

That dark morning the man at the door just shrugged his shoulder, while the other one inside the bathroom ignored her. None of that deterred her.

“Where are you taking my husband?” she asked repeatedly until the second man finally answered.

“To the police station.”

The landing outside our apartment door was still dark when they took my father out. My father, wedged between both agents, turned to Mimi.

“I have a cousin in America. His name is Karl Nussbaum, he lives in Louisville (he pronounced it Lewisville), in the state of Kentucky. Try to contact him and see if he can help.”

Mimi dressed quickly, then she helped me with my clothes. We began the rapid walk to the police station a few short blocks away. Just as we arrived breathlessly at the precinct, several police vans pulled out. All the vans were fully loaded. Therazzia had already produced results…

Inside the station Mimi asked again and again about the destination of those departing vehicles.

“Alexanderplatz,” was the desk sergeant’s brusque reply.

She decided we would follow them. My mother held my hand during the long taxi ride that brought us to the center of Berlin. The driver stopped at a large dark, gray forbidding-looking building. Threatening, just like the mood of everything else that morning.

Many years later I saw the dreaded headquarters of the Gestapo in a television newsreel. Even after many decades that view crystalized into the special and horrible aura I once felt. I could not know what went on in that building, what unspeakable and excruciatingly painful acts people experienced there. What I sensed at age ten was that it was an evil place.

The day I entered it with Mimi I saw a warren of dark corridors filled on either side with windowless small brown cubicles. In one such sparse hole in the wall I waited quietly at her side while Mimi faced a heavy-set official behind a desk. The chubby man rustled some papers, pretending to look up my father’s name.

The prisoner Leopold Nussbaum, he informed us, was on his way to an interrogation center, but the family would probably have some news from him within a few days.

Not encouraging information, yet the official was a shade kinder than others we had encountered on our way in. Why that was I couldn’t tell. The way he looked at Mimi was definitely less insolent and arrogant.

On our return trip we stood waiting for the streetcar at its Alexanderplatz stop. Buildings just as dismal and forbidding as the one we had just left surrounded the traffic-filled square. I glanced across the street at another evil-looking dark tall structure. I felt Mimi shudder as she too, looked at it.

“The Volksgerichtshof, ” she volunteered without my asking.

In later years I learned more about the People’s Court and its use by the Nazi regime. Mimi might have known even then what kind of place it was. Few prisoners left it without an order for their execution, if they left the building alive at all.

The long ride home on the streetcar was bleak. Mimi looked discouraged and fearful and did not let go of my hand. My feelings, of course, were a reflection of hers. She was quiet and sad, and barely spoke. It was May, yet everything around us was still gray and cold. It started to drizzle. Times were suddenly desperate. I had a dreadful sense of foreboding.

In the days following my father’s arrest Mimi searched for the address of the cousin she was supposed to contact. There was a problem. Nowhere in my father’s papers could she find the address. But she did what had to be done. She wrote the letter and explained carefully and discreetly the urgent need for my father to leave Germany quickly. To accomplish that a relative in the United States of America had to grant him an affidavit. This document had to declare that my father would not become a financial burden to the state, but, if necessary, would be supported by his relative. The affidavit listing the sponsor’s assets was one of the requirements of the American consulate in Germany before it granted the desired visa that allowed exit from Germany and entry into the United States.

When she finished her appeal Mimi simply addressed the envelope to Mr. Karl Nussbaum, in care of His Excellency the Mayor of the City of Louisville in Kentucky, The United States of America.

It was a summer hotter than most Berliners remembered. The usually moderate climate had reversed itself. I suffered a heat stroke by just playing in the schoolyard. I lay on my bed in the dark with cold compresses on my forehead and hoped the room would stop spinning.

I thought of my father constantly. My throat tightened with fear when I did. We had not the slightest knowledge of his location or the circumstances of his whereabouts. I did not dare to talk about him to Mimi. She did not let on how worried she was. Perhaps we both hoped that by avoiding a discussion it would not -could not- possibly be as bad as we feared.

After two long dreadful weeks a postcard arrived. “I am healthy. Do not worry.”

Eight more weeks of silence followed. But there were rumors. My God, what dreadful rumors.

Some of them were uttered by the men who came to our apartment every night. Their presence was another baffling phenomenon that summer. No one explained it to me. Children were silent observers of a time which most adults did not understand. Perhaps it was assumed the less children knew, the safer were the grownups around them. Who knew what dangerous information could be leaked by a child who overheard conversations he was not meant to hear? I already knew, that Jewish people did not venture out in daylight unless they had to.

The strangers, different ones every night, came to sleep in our apartment. They slept on pillows, spare mattresses, and blankets, on the grey-carpeted Chippendale dining room floor, under the grand piano in the fruit-wood music room, or just on the carpet in the front hall. By sleeping away from their own homes and spending their nights in strange places these Jewish men felt secure. Our apartment was “safe”. Safe because its family head had already been “visited” and was now in the clutches of the Gestapo. Why would the authorities return and strike for a second time?

The feeling of being watched was constant and ominous. One afternoon the telephone rang. Mimi took the call. She said nothing, but her face showed great concentration as she listened to the caller.

Suddenly she spoke into the telephone with sharp, clipped tones.

“Herr Schmidt, I recognize your voice. Don’t dare to threaten me again. And if you attempt to show your face near me I will report you to the police precinct.”

When she hung up I saw that she trembled.

“It was that lout, the son of the concierge downstairs. That vulture. He thought he could frighten me. ”

The unemployed, sharp-eyed young man apparently surmised that we might be leaving the country before long. He had done odd jobs in our apartment and knew we had unusual and beautiful furniture. With a disguised voice he had claimed to be a government official and told Mimi that it was against the law to sell or remove any of it and that we would be prosecuted if we tried. He stated that every piece had to be left in place were we to move away.

At another time during those difficult days our doorbell rang for the delivery of a large and fancy food basket. It contained delicacies that had been hard to find in the strictly-rationed Berlin food markets for some time. A note in the basket read, “To Frau Trude, from your admirer, Herr Z.”

I did not know any “Mr.Z”, nor did I think Mimi did. And why would he send us such a splendid gift? There was never a definite revelation, yet I felt Mimi strongly suspected who the donor was. In later years she confided that it must have been the fat man behind the desk at Gestapo headquarters. “He felt sorry for me,” she said. “But he also appreciated my situation. Perhaps he even liked it when I spoke back to him and told him what I really thought.”

In Louisville, Karl Nussbaum met with his buddies every Thursday evening for a night of cold cuts and beer, and a round of their beloved “Skat” card game at Cunningham’s, the popular delicatessen restaurant that catered to the “heimatlich” tastes of its German-born clientele.

Karl Nussbaum was a wealthy businessman. During the long years since his arrival in Kentucky as a penniless escapee from World War I German military service his original scrap iron yard had expanded into a big business. His other ventures included the purchase of a whiskey distillery. He and his Gentile wife, Marie Louise, had raised a family of three sons and a daughter. All the sons and the husband of his daughter were engaged in the father’s enterprises. All were stalwart pillars of their Christian church communities. Karl himself, though he never officially left his Judaism behind, took pride in being the donor of substantial gifts to many Christian endeavors.

Among the “regulars” at Cunninghams were several men who had known Karl for many years. One of them was Louisville’s current mayor, Joseph Scholtz.

One Thursday evening during that summer of 1938 the mayor was greeting his friends before sitting down to supper. Seeing Karl Nussbaum suddenly reminded him of something. He pulled out an envelope from the pocket of his seersucker jacket.

“Oh, Karl,” he said, “here is something for you. It arrived at my City Hall office this week.”

Mimi’s letter had reached its destination.

That letter to Louisville bore fruit. Some time during that summer an amazing document arrived at our house. It was an affidavit of many pages vouching for the financial security of Leopold Nussbaum, his spouse and child once they had reached American shores.

After thanking God and the American relatives, Mimi paid numerous highly frustrating visits to the American consulate near Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate. I went along because as a Jewish child I was no longer allowed to go to school and was too young to be left at home alone.

The daily lines of applicants seeking quota numbers for American visas were incredibly long. It was obvious that the staff members of the consulate enjoyed feeling superior to all the pathetic souls seeking admission to the U.S. They made incredible difficulties for them.

Mimi had to apply for my father who was still in the concentration camp. This caused more obstacles. The person seeking a visa had to apply in person or his case would be deferred. In desperation Mimi hired an immigration lawyer to handle the situation. His enormous fee must have included an “inducement” to his personal connection at the consulate.

My father was incarcerated at Buchenwald for eleven weeks. Upon his release he came home to us in Berlin. He was allowed to stay exactly forty-eight hours.

My father was a different man after he came home. He looked so sad, defeated, and distant, I hesitated to go near him. Not the warm, affectionate father I had known before. No longer the man who took me, his only child, with him on Sunday mornings to meet his male friends at Berlin’s famous coffeehouses and treated me to special puff pastry delicacies at Kempinsky or the Cafe Dobrin. Now he was tired and for his two days and nights at home sat in our apartment silent, smoking and thinking.

He was so tired. “It’s from hacking out all those rocks,” he murmured to Mimi, speaking softly so I would not hear. He had worked in the stone quarries while at Buchenwald, had been forced to cut, move and carry heavy stones and rubble. He was a businessman and not used to such hard physical work. The food he had been given was minimal. At that time I did not understand why the camp authorities demanded such tasks from him, why he was treated the way he was.

What he had really endured he never told us.

During his time in Buchenwald he had relinquished the ownership of his business to the state. He told Mimi he was released from camp because he had signed a statement that he would leave Germany within forty-eight hours. But his captors had a departing message for him: “Don’t for a moment think you will ever escape us. No matter where you end up, we will find you. Then we will finish the job we started here.”

During his last day at home my father sat in his favorite chair in the dining room smoking one cigarette after another as he watched the man from the shipping firm pack his personal belongings. Several suitcases stood open on the thick grey carpeting where unfamiliar visitors had slept only a few nights before. On the dining table neat stacks of shirts, pajamas, and underwear lay next to my father’s papers, photographs, and medications. As he distributed the clothing neatly among the cases the mover glanced at the silver-covered porcelain coffee and tea set on the buffet. He picked up one of the silver pitchers and carefully wrapped some heavy underwear around it. Then he positioned it inside one of the suitcases.

“No, no, that set isn’t going,” I heard Mimi protest.

“Might as well send it along while I have the room here, Madame,” the burly man replied. He paid no further attention to her and continued to wrap the rest of the pieces and place them in the baggage. When he was done with the packing, he secured all the suitcases with the moving firm’s official seal. “Ready to go,” he announced. “They’ll travel on the ship with him and no one will bother to open them.”

Within only a few weeks after that a government order came through forbidding emigrating “non-Aryans” from taking gold or silver possessions out of Germany. To this day Mimi’s tea set has kept its special place in our family. When I married my parents gave it to me. When I look at it (and whenever I polish it) I remember the packer who must have known something we did not when he wrapped up my father’s winter underwear. And now, so many years later, I am still grateful to him.

At the end of his 48-hours with us my father left Germany thanks to a train ticket to Antwerp Mimi had been fortunate to obtain. From there he embarked on the S.S. Europa for the trans-Atlantic crossing and a new life.

It was only many, many years later that I understood how close he and Mimi and I had come to the destruction that so tragically annihilated the rest of our family.

And sometimes when I think about the way fate turned out for us I remember the letter Mimi wrote in those dark days. There is no doubt in my mind that letter was “beshert.” It saved our lives.

Born in Germany, Ellen Stern came to the United States as a young girl and grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. She’s the author of numerous books for young adult readers, including biographies of Louis D. Brandeis, Nelson Glueck, and Elie Wiesel. Her most recent publication is The French Physician’s Boy, a novel about Philadelphia’s 1793 Yellow Fever epidemic.

“The Letter” is an excerpt from Ellen Stern’s unpublished memoir, Surviving: A Family Journal, and is reprinted here with permission of the author.

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