(1937) I know Katy has made sponsor of others and now she brings in her brother Fritz. He is a nice fellow and Carole knows him. I feel better about this with him there. We will tell Carole she can write but also tell her not to assume too much. It is a huge responsibility to bring in a girl and she must know a little what her life will be. It is not so easy, without a Mother or Father there, a home. Berta didn’t have to do like that. I had to leave to go to war.

I’m afraid Carole will want to leave. She is impatient waiting for things to get better and frankly, they get worse. Bertha and I have talked about trying to go to America as a family and Katy tells us this is hard. So I must tell Carole to ask Katy with her own letter, and hope for the best.

Now Katy comes back to us and says she will take Carole when she can come and not to wait too long. She will be able to have a job for her. Maybe she can take care of a baby or clean house for a family–something a young girl who does not speak so much English can do. She says there a many people who speak German in New York and Carole will learn fast.

Things are bad in America too, but not the inflation like we have where our money is worth nothing. Katy says it is not so easy to make money, like when she came—15 years ago. Her husband is a butcher so at least they will always have food. Also, New York is such a big city—there are all kinds of people. We will talk about this with Carole tonight.

I am filled with sadness to think I must send my child away so she can live the life every father dreams of for his child. I feel so defeated. A Father should be able to give his family all the things they need. Not to be wealthy but to be a family together. Now, just when we should be talking about boys and school, we send her off to a strange place. That is wrong. She already does an apprenticeship because they were so mean to her in school she asked to leave. The world here is closing in on us very tightly. This is no time to be a young person here. Not even my kind of person. Even older people are shocked at what happens to their country and they are not comfortable. Things are so bad and worse every day.

(1938) Berta’s family goes to Berlin and I think we might have to send Eva to school there. How can we send both girls away. Our hearts are tearing in two.

When I got the job with Bartons in 1940 I had to rent a room on my own. I remember thinking that was great—now I can live however I want. Only I had to pay most of my money on the room. I was finally in Manhattan, and I had the smallest room and 3 flights to walk up with just a hot plate to cook on. I didn’t mind not cooking. I ate from the automat mostly. Some of them were actually pretty good. A lot of people ate that way. The one near my house wasn’t so good but it also wasn’t as expensive as some of the good ones.

I learned how to run a shop working for Bartons. They were very demanding but then there was a lot of time when I was completely in charge, and I liked that. Sometimes I’d get too busy—especially around holidays. Then I was finally allowed to hire a part-time girl. That was better and someone to supervise. Sometimes it wasn’t worth the headache. Once I had a girl who stole. I cut that right out.

When I went to work at Macy’s I thought I’d really made it. The first job was way out in New Jersey. That was awful. I spent all my money and time on carfare. But within a month I was working in Manhattan. It was busy, fun, everything I wanted.

Family is so important. It’s where you come from. It’s who will care about you, no matter what. We all need that. We are lucky when we have that and now, my own daughter to be torn away from me by these terrible times. Why should she suffer and be called names and have stones thrown at her. But why should she have to leave to have a decent life.

It was hard to ask for things—it was better to wait. I was shy, scared. I tried not to presume or predict or take things for granted. She was flashing, passionate. She would walk long distances, attaching us to various bus schedules even though there was a perfectly good Chrysler Imperial parked in front of the apartment building. She didn’t drive. She had a license, but she was afraid to drive, afraid that she’d hurt the car and inconvenience my father. She never did anything that she wasn’t going to be good at.

I was kept by her side until I went to nursery school and there I encountered the world of other children—I world where I wasn’t at all sure of getting the rules right and relegated myself to a subordinate tier in some popularity system that I sensed and continued to apply to all situations in my life. As uncomfortable as I might have been at school, I treasured my time away from home. Mom wasn’t surprised by my non-popularity nor did she sympathize. I liked boys and wanted attention from them. I always had a crush on a boy—even in nursery school.

At age 4 I realized that her edicts were senseless and rigid and that I simply had to swallow myself and make do until I could leave home at 18. The subject of the conflict was a tangerine. But I abstracted easily. After that it was largely a waiting game with some recipes for allowable escape. She seemed extremely protective so I didn’t try much.

Once I broke away there were no issues of control—just visits—always punctuated by that teen aged nasty bitchy self-defended sort of attitude. Infrequent visits where I wanted so much to get a story, a connection and failed over and over.

Until my Dad was dying

Then there were moments of breakthrough. Real life happening in front of us was too sad and scary. This gave us—me—an entrée into the past. I got some good stories, some good times, I saw that even though Mom’s talk always sounded like a pessimistic give-up, she believed the most positive and acted on that. When it came to my Dad’s illness she would not admit death into her consciousness. We never talked about these things but that’s what I see looking back. We lost him. Me: a-blaze, a-busy, with my life not well reconciled or integrated away from here and her: a dream-scape of freedom and suddenly, he was gone leaving here alone. I didn’t get it nor did I respond to it particularly well, except to invite her to think about a move to my city. Just as she was getting to think about that her sister was diagnosed with cancer.

Here was the time to play out all that tension between them, the bossy older sister, the sister who was cheated by life yet again–this time on the other end of life. Her sister—the smarter, harder, softer and more hidden one–resented this.

She cranked along down and depressed by the endless 9 years of death and destruction. I stayed isolated in my little world.

But I never did the interview, the taping. I was busy—too busy to get to Mother, who had always just been there and who would always be there, right? I should have learned from my father’s death that that wasn’t true. But his death also made it seem maybe too late. 1990? Too late? Not really. But too preoccupied with a baby and the demise of my legal career and a marriage and life that seemed to impose an awful lot of rules. Rules that I made up–yes. Only now can I see how I might have said NO to the lot of that.

There were many stages of deterioration, but the mother across from me in the restaurant can still tell me stories that are more alive for her than a report of the day. They can move her, me, strangers. They have remarkable detail and remarkable holes. Every cut is jagged.

I feel a commitment to those stories, to that younger woman, to that sense of legacy, to all she went through to craft herself a life that paved the way for me. I am grateful that she made herself a life, a family, rebuilt her family and that I received the benefit of that. It becomes mine to hold, mine to comprehend, mine to share and mine to perpetuate. I feel almost a panic, as if I may already have waited too long, too nice, too respectfully, too remotely. She did her life in real time with no directions and without the luxury of planning or self-help. Hopefully my sons and I will never know the extremities that buffeted her and her generation. The strength and resilience that forged her life as an American—I want to get it down because it is my legacy and my strength.

It was so hard to marry in those days. There were very few young men and especially young Jewish men. In my town, we were mostly related and so that made it even harder. I didn’t want to get my hopes up. But when I saw him in our parlor talking to Daddy, I thought he was such an elegant man.

He was ten years older than me. I liked that. He was very dark and his hair was thinning. He would lose it very quickly, as it turned out. He had a mustache. His dark eyes made him look serious and kind, at the same time. But he was quick to laugh at my Father’s jokes. That was a very good sign. His laugh was a rich warm sound that told me this was a man who could forgive and forget. I knew that was important in a marriage. Lot’s of things don’t go as expected. But a good humor would help a lot.

I loved him that very day and I felt that he loved me too. He asked me if he could come to call again and I said I would be happy if he would. I made up my mind right then that I would marry Rudy Bernstein. My sisters were jealous. They had no beaus. But I knew I wanted to marry and Rudy would suit me very well.

I went to Borken to meet his family and that’s when we announced our engagement. Rudy’s father was dead and his Mother was very ill. He wanted her to have the chance to meet the woman he would marry. We didn’t know if she would last until the wedding. We had already spoken to my Daddy. My parents were very strict so I knew if they liked Rudy this was the thing to do.

Rudy and I started out in Dusseldorf. He had a position with Herr Salzman who had a china and glassware shop. Rudy already worked for Herr Salzman for a year, so he knew all about the shop and the business. The Salzman’s had no children and this would be a good opportunity to buy our own shop.

Dusseldorf was a much busier city than I was used to. I liked the hustle and bustle and I loved working in the shop. People were not free with their money—times were very hard. But still, being in a big city more people came in and bought things than I was used to from my apprenticeship in Ahlen.

I would dress the windows and we did have very pretty windows, once I convinced Herr Salzman that things should change a little. China and glassware is so pretty it is easy to make a display look good. Shoppers gave us compliments on our new window displays.

I was so young, so energetic and so repressed by my environment, you know, that I couldn’t imagine anything bad happening to me here or that there might be things I wouldn’t know or couldn’t figure out. I thought the hard part would be learning English. I took my family for granted—I think most children do that. I didn’t realize how important it is to have a safe place with a family. I didn’t realize that I wouldn’t have that anymore—a place where I’d always be accepted, where they’d love me and tolerate me, they’d take care of me as best they could. I think maybe I had already lost some of that because outside my home in Germany, things were dangerous. But I was going to be rid of all those dangers. I didn’t think about the dangers anyone would encounter living in New York.

When I lived in New York I had friends who were protected by their family. I saw how nice that was, how it was easier in so many ways, but then I got to really live in New York and that was what I wanted. Then I thought the girls who lived at home in their little neighborhoods were a little simple and that I was really living.

I did well with the few English lessons I had with the Catholic Priest before I left Dorsten. I had learned some French in school. It didn’t seem to me that learning a language was all that hard and everyone says German is a hard language and I already knew that. But it was different trying to do everything in English, especially when everything else was new too.

New York is so impersonal. That was good and bad. I could hide my problems because no one on the street really cared about me and my problems. But then that’s also very lonely. I was lucky I was so young and resilient.

I lived with Katy and Charlie. I could speak German at home with them—they spoke German a lot of the time and there were always a lot of people in New York who spoke German, if I was really frustrated. But at work, at the Israel’s house, I had to understand everything in English. These weren’t difficult things—things like what to make for dinner, how many people, arrangements for the baby. But when I knew all of that I was so bored. I’d take the baby to the park and all the other girls who took care of babies were immigrant girls too. They spoke Polish or Russian or some such thing or Spanish. They had no education, usually, and it wasn’t any good for me to practice my English. I didn’t want people like that for friends. I wanted to get on with it.

Then I worked for the Feldman’s. I kept house for them; they were an elderly German Jewish couple in Brooklyn. They were very nice to me. They loaned me money that I sent off to Uruguay to someone who was supposed to get a visa for Mama and Daddy and Ilsa to go to Uruguay. I can’t remember all about it. It was a lot of money. It took me a long time to work and pay back that loan and of course it was a scam, a con. We never got visas for them. It was impossible. When the war finally came in Germany, in 1939 when Germany invaded Poland, then it was impossible for anyone to leave.

The letters stopped and anything that did get through was practically all blacked out by the censors. I just had to think about having the money for when and if I could ever get them out. I wanted to be ready. That’s what I learned: you always have to be ready and act fast. I guess I did that with everything that ever happened to me after that time. That’s how I married your father too.

I thought all these girls must have that same core of loneliness I did, buried under the layers of wool and nylon. I could see it in the smudges of black liner gathered in on that little bulge beneath the outer corner of each eye on the ride home. Most of us were young; we didn’t have lines yet. Some did, the gals in their 30s who moved home to Mama after their husbands left for overseas. But we all had that little smudge, we all had a little outline of caked powder around the outside of our noses. Our cheeks had run out of any real color and the little circles of rouge stood out under the harsh lights. As the train jerked toward home our cheeks would flush again from wearing our coats in the train. Then we threw them back against the dark windy streets walking home.

We were beautiful, we were ripe, we were well put-together. We were hopelessly single, unhappy mistresses, or waiting for boyfriends who were far from home being shot at or playing around. We had mastered that New York style of invisibility. And we were lonely, buried in newspapers, cheap paperback books or fervent invisibility. Sometimes a girl let a sigh escape. It jolted the rest of us back on our guard.

I married Jenny right after high school. Not too long after that I got the job with Baird, carrying their women’s sportswear line and selling to all the big stores in the New York area. Suddenly I was making good money—I thought. It was good at the time. Almost of my friends got married to their high school sweethearts. We had apartments, sex, pots and pans, card games. I thought I was a grown up. This was 1935 and I was 19.

Within a year we had a baby. Our whole little group started having babies. All of a sudden the wives started to talk about houses and Queens and nothing but baby stuff. We moved into a duplex—that was fun, making a little nest for the new family—just like everyone else I knew. It seemed like a big party.

A few guys I knew went on to college. They got really intense—or maybe they always were. They’d come to visit and I could feel how the gap between my life and theirs kept growing. They were talking about Europe and war and Hitler—especially Frankie. He wanted to go to law school. I was just thinking Queens and rice cereal.

A few years later I got together with some of those guys. The girls they married from college were intense like they were. They weren’t in any big hurry to have children. They said things like “Maybe we shouldn’t bring children into such a difficult world.” Geesh, I really never thought about it.

Then I meet Carole—it must have been ’42 and the war is going on and I’m the sole support of my Mother and my wife and kid, so I don’t have to go. Carole was amazing. She was beautiful—curly jet black hair, a luscious little body and a fiery temper and wit. She was smart but she wasn’t all dried up like those college girls my buddies married. She was full of life a—really sexy, not just dolled-up. She would talk to me about what was happening in her life. She needed someone to talk to and someone to appreciate her. I’d feel like I could help, like I could be important to someone not just for the money I earned or being a basically decent guy. I felt like this was real love and friendship. I mean, that doesn’t justify cheating on my wife, but that’s what was so attractive to me. All this right at the time the second baby was coming and my wife was just one long whine.

I know its hard being with babies all day. Especially for my wife. Everyone else in our little group had the second baby two or three years after the first one. We didn’t. Our oldest was 7 when the next one was born. I didn’t think my wife was ever gonna want to have sex again after the first one. I’m not sure she really did—but she wanted that baby—she was the only one who didn’t have a new kid.

I did run around a little when Jenny was doing the no-sex thing—I mean who wouldn’t. And I suppose that taught me about how things were likely to go in the future. But those gals weren’t anything to me like Carole. I couldn’t get divorced or anything. That would kill my mother. I was going to stay with my wife and raise those kids. I didn’t really think there was any choice.

I knew Carole wasn’t exactly delighted being the other woman—I mean who would be. She really deserved a great guy—not a married boyfriend—and she knew it. She would break things off if I missed a date or something. Like I said, she was fiery. I could always get back with her, though. Then she comes up with this crazy idea to move to Hartford. Well, good luck. I’ve been to Hartford. Man, that is one dead town. Foxes is a nice store but Hartford? You can keep that whole Connecticut. Not my cup of tea.

I miss that gal a lot. She’s great and I really fell for her. She’s so interesting. She has a different idea about life and how to live it. But I mean she’s normal; she’s not crazy. I wonder if her family is alive, if she’ll ever find them. I’d like to help her. But I can’t. I’m really up to my ears in it between my wife and the two kids and my Mother and that mother-in-law of mine. They all want a piece of me. Carole’s the only place where I could feel like a whole man with my own thoughts and ideas. She was my sanctuary like I was hers. But it’s also pretty disheartening to know I’m always going to come up short there. I know in the long run there was no future there. So, fine.

It is almost the end of the year—1920—when our little girl came. It has been so exciting, watching Berta become big with her and now here is the baby, an insistent little girl with dark hair and eyes and a beautiful cherry mouth. I think she looks like Berta and Berta says no, more like me.

It is wonderful to have this new excitement in the house, because things with the business are not so good and we both worry. The inflation eats away anything I can put by. It is futile. I worry and work and only glance a bit at our future here in the cradle. But I cannot see what kind of future it is. Heisner says it is worse now than during the war. That is Versailles.

Now, in 1925 we are almost decided to try a smaller town. Dusseldorf seemed like a big and prosperous community but I thought it would recover from wartime much more quickly than it has.They say the small towns, where they manufacture, have more opportunity right now. We wait only for Berta to give birth again. Again she becomes huge, and in the same way so I think it will be another girl. I don’t really care so long as the children will like one another. I hope Carole won’t be jealous of the new baby. Things will be harder still and it will be some time before Berta will be able to join me in the shop. We have made arrangements for a wet nurse and a girl, but I can tell Berta is more tired from carrying this second baby. I am almost through with trying to make it in this city but I must be positive for our family. I don’t want to be discouraging for Berta when she has to bring this new life into the world.

Now it is February and we have a tiny girl—Ilsa—and Carole—our big girl. I had forgotten how small the babies are. Carole already goes to Kindergarten and is so active. She would have liked a brother but we do not have a choice. They are fine girls and I think they will get along. This makes it so nice in a family. I am glad they are girls—they will help their mother. And I would hate to send a boy to war. Already Germans are talking about troops and guns so much–they hate Versailles. Things are a little better in the store. I am hopeful again. Mr. Heisner is feeling fine but has learned to let me order and manage the shop. Berta will be in to make the windows, and that will help all of us. She will be glad for the time out of the house.

So my memories turned to cold water, rushing in through the gash the iceberg left. An iceberg—there’s a devil. How wicked to hide a towering city of thoughtless cold beneath the water’s surface–invisible and unknowable. The water rushed to evict air with drowning clarity. “It was this; you can’t control. You don’t even know. You may never know.” Irrefutable choking ignorance.

Warm or cold, these memories suffocated me. I became used to pushing them away from my throat, from my chest, from my eyes.

But now memory is hard to find and trickier still to hang onto. I do hang on as it tears across a field with me clutching at it’s mane, afraid to fall. It stills the world around it like that wild horse would do—with terror, hot steam and cold reality. Who cares if you ate lunch, darned socks, read the paper or answered the phone? Only this matters now: hanging on tight and noticing which way the fence goes. I could fall and even if I could hang on, this crazy ride might crush my legs against that fence. She has a will of her own and pays me no mind.

My own mind, my thin, sometimes not-there mind, knows only on the mane and the fence. I am in the memory. I live it again in the tell, I live it again in the show, I live it again in the steam of my breath, I live it again in the blood and the bone and the taste of stale kisses. And when it’s finally still, I let go, slide off, and wonder where I’ve landed.