by Guy Stern
Invisible Ink
Invisible Ink
A Memoir by Guy Stern
Guy Stern
Wayne State University Press
Detroit
The excerpt on page 162 is from Hilde Domin, Vorsichtshalber.
In: Saemtliche Gedichte. © S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main 2009.
By courtesy of S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main.
Copyright © 2020 by Guy Stern.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission.
ISBN: 978-0-8143-4759-1 (jacketed cloth)
ISBN: 978-0-8143-4760-7 (ebook)
Library of Congress Cataloging Number: 2019957276
Wayne State University Press
Leonard N. Simons Building
4809 Woodward Avenue
Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309
Visit us online at wsupress.wayne.edu
Contents
Introduction
Invisible Ink
Chapter One
A Nearly Idyllic Beginning
Chapter Two
The Nazis Come to Power
Chapter Three
Coming to America
Chapter Four
A Ritchie Boy in World War II: Preparing for War
Chapter Five
Going to War
Chapter Six
Postwar: My Life as a Student and Beyond
Chapter Seven
Teaching
Gallery of Images
Chapter Eight
Research and Scholarship
Chapter Nine
Susanna
Chapter Ten
Working Past Ninety: A Salute to the Holocaust Memorial Center Zekelman Family Campus
Chapter Eleven
Thoughts after Visiting France, 2016
Chapter Twelve
In Pursuit of the Past
Chapter Thirteen
A Broken Promise
Epilogue
In Pursuit of the Future
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Invisible Ink
After I finished the irrevocably last sentence of this autobiography, I started searching for an appropriate title. Three different ones seemed to be worth exploring. One of these described a series of events that recurred throughout my life and invariably changed its course. Few of these events could have been foreseen. I called them “chance encounters” and for a while I thought my book would bear that title.
Here are some of the events that made the label so compelling to describe the roller-coaster ride of my life. Chance encounters abound, with strangers emerging at various turning points. At fifteen years of age, my life was saved because of a brief meeting with a kind, United States consular official. My family perished because of a half-hour encounter with a hapless, hidebound local attorney in Saint Louis, who thwarted their rescue. After World War II, my postwar plans were sent helter-skelter. A rare meeting with one of my superior officers, a senior editor of the New York Times, sent me scurrying off to New York. One short telephone call led to my discovery of the whereabouts of a long-lost cousin.
I found my present wife because she had been pressured at the last minute into attending a public lecture of mine. I unearthed a hitherto unknown branch of my wife’s family by taking a wrong turn during a nocturnal walk in a small Swiss town near Locarno. Finally, while writing this autobiography, some of my wartime experiences came rushing back to me because of a chance encounter with a British gentleman, a one-time resident of Bristol. That led me back in minute detail to those all-engrossing weeks, when we had been planning the most gigantic invasion of enemy-held territory in human history. Contrary to Einstein’s observation, God (or fate) may play dice after all.
Another idea was to call these recollections “Of Life, Loss, Love, and Literature,” for its euphonious alliteration and beyond. Love was lavished upon me by many people who walked alongside me during my long and variegated life. For all too brief a time, it was primarily given to me by my family. My losses can be summarized by the word Holocaust and the untimely deaths of my son, Mark and my wife, Judy. As to literature, my immersion in books started in my childhood and accompanied me all throughout my career as a professor of literature and is still clinging to me even beyond retirement. Language has been my life’s passion and my life preserver. The ability to use persuasive language was my intermittent ally at dangerous moments throughout my life. For example, as a dean in the 1960s, I squelched an escalating students’ riot via an impassioned appeal to reason. Earlier, in 1937, I stood before an American consular official, pleading for a visa to the sheltering shores of the United States. Fifteen years old at the time, I stammered forth the right answers to his questions in acceptable English, received the appropriate US stamp and seal on my papers, and was thereby spared the fate of my parents, grandmother, brother and sister—all victims of the Nazi Holocaust.
Throughout everything that has happened to me, language has been my mainstay and muse, my labor and leisure, lodestar and love. New words have always fascinated me; as a kid I soaked them up like a sponge and sometimes shattered the composure of the adults by my mature vocabulary. Owners of cigar stores in Hildesheim (where I grew up), whom we kids pestered for collectible pictures for our albums, ranging from postcard-like views of German cities to models of automobiles, usually shooed my playmates and fellow collectors unceremoniously out of their stores. But often they gave me a hearing, I suspect because my precocious eloquence entertained them, and some of the coveted cards of automobiles, animals, national flags, and city sites landed in my collection.
Two sources fed my insatiable appetite for delectable tidbits of language. There was my wildly indiscriminate reading, ranging from spurious Wild West stories to watered-down German classics. But even more important and enduring were the conversations with my mother. My German, then and now, comes from my mother—or rather my mother’s tongue. She was a luminous woman who had an unerring instinct for just the right word. She was, amidst our far-flung family, the occasional lyric poet. For my Bar Mitzvah she put together a multipage album of poems, in which she gently spoofed the foibles of twenty-one Bar Mitzvah dinner guests. Nor did she spare me: “Zigarrentabak schmeckt auch aus der Pfeife” (“You can savor cigar leaves smoked from a pipe.”) I had dismembered one of my father’s cigars, intended for customers, and had ignited the leaves in a clay pipe from the toy set.
My own attempt at humor was more boisterous. It came about because of my one and only and quite shameful encounter with foreigners. Come to think of it, we Hildesheimers were a bit provincial and xenophobic. One day when I was fourteen, I encountered two young French ladies, smartly dressed, with their faces stylishly made up. They were crossing the square in front of the Cathedral of Saint Andrew. A sizable group of youngsters and adults was following them like the satellites to the orbiting planets. Not having seen ladies with make-up before, we outdid ourselves with witty, nay, absurd remarks. I offered the ladies the use of my watercolor box. While recalling this bit of juvenile fatuity, my face turns redder than the rouge on the faces of those two poor French women. Only one year later, I and my fellow Jews became the targets of verbal insults. But my penchant for language on that occasion was served. One of the French women responded with an expression I had not heard in my beginning French class in high school. “Ta gueule,” she said to me. As I fled the plaza commemorating the saintly Andrew, it dawned on me that I was told to shut up in no uncertain terms. I was taken aback, of course, but then felt triumphant that I had acquired an expression that would have been banished from our French class.
When I reached the age of fourteen, my parents took me along to adult plays performed at our local theater. I can
still reconstruct isolated scenes, for example, from a drama called Uncle Braesig. I remember mostly the protagonist’s intermittent pratfalls, when least expected, and his inane, funny expletive, hurled repeatedly at a friend. “Why, just keep your nose in your face!” I didn’t understand why this remark made the audience convulse with laughter. But there may have been something in the context or the acting that was suggestive beyond the comprehension of this fourteen-year-old.
No doubt my visits to the Hildesheim Theater were an early stepping stone to my life’s work as a professor of literature. My parents, had they been allowed to live, would have been elated by my choice of career and their catalytic role in it. That saddens me, of course, but that regret is as nothing compared to my torment when I imagine how they, lovers of the German language, probably heard it in its most debased form in the moments before their deaths at the hands of their murderers. A sentence coined by my late colleague, Robert Kahn of Rice University, says all that succinctly: “I hate the language that I love.”
I can only speculate about how my parents or my brother Werner or my sister Eleonore were “liquidated,” to use Nazi parlance. Werner probably also heard the beloved and accursed language at the time of his death. It was the ultimate death knell of his youthful illusions. When I said goodbye to the twelve-year-old, I wasn’t aware of all his talents. But about ten years ago as of this writing, I received a letter from a person not known to me, who identified himself as a retired physician from the Rhineland: “I was a classmate of your brother at the Josephinum High School in Hildesheim. Your brother, I must tell you, was rather awkward at sports. But whenever our German teacher wanted the perfect recitation of a poem, he called on Werner. He could make even bad poetry sparkle.” I read that letter with despair, more than seventy years after I’d last seen my brother. It seemed that Werner had a distinct gift, so carefully nurtured in both of us by my parents, and it never came to fruition. I’m sometimes ashamed of my own privilege, that of being the sole survivor of my immediate family, and thus the only one to bear my parents’ legacy.
Finally I settled on a title that now appears on the cover of this tome and probably needs the most elaborate explanation. If there is an overriding caesura in my life, it occurred as early as age eleven, in 1933, the year the Nazis came to power. When the bitter news came at the end of January, that a dictator and demagogue was going to lead our native land, my father, rarely given to formal speeches, addressed his small family. An almost incurable optimist, he was neither despairing nor pollyannish. “We will be facing hard times,” he said. “During the next years it will be imperative we don’t call attention to ourselves. Wer auffällt, fällt rein. (Anyone who sticks out will get stuck.) We must all resemble invisible ink. Stay hidden till we can reemerge again and show ourselves as the individuals we are.”
I followed his advice all through the years of Nazi rule, from 1933 till 1937—and beyond. Yes, even after I entered the United States, the land of the free. You see, once you have drawn a cloak of invisibility around yourself, it becomes tough to divest yourself of it. The process proceeds in stages. A few of the more notable stages have stuck in my mind. The first partial shedding of that cloak happened within one day of my arrival in the United States. On my way from New York to Saint Louis, I was treated between train rides to a cursory tour of Chicago. It led to Maxwell Market, a sort of flea market whose majority was Jewish traders in their kaftans. Their free and easy ways, accompanied by good-natured but loud laughter, nay guffaws, gave me my first inkling of “freedom for all.” Then, at one point during my years in a Saint Louis high school, my government teacher, “Doc” Bender—Jewish, observant, and sensitive—took me aside one day. “I’m glad you smile at my attempts at humor. But feel free to laugh aloud like the rest of the class.” The lesson wasn’t lost on me.
I changed slowly, but I knew that part of my emergence into an extroverted youngster was still pretense or playacting. But that became more genuine a week before my high school graduation in June, 1939. I was prevented from going to our prom by having to be on duty that evening at the Chase Hotel as a hired busboy. The prom was also at the Chase Hotel, in one of the rooms right next to “my” Fiesta Grill. Well, I had the temerity, gall, chutzpa to walk in on the prom—busboy uniform and all—as conspicuous as though I had come in wearing the gym clothes of Soldan High School.
My years in the army and as a teacher did the rest. A sergeant, as well as a teacher of freshmen, had better be extroverted and assertive. And thus the last vestiges of the “invisible-ink” persona, my father felt the need to instill in me, fell by the wayside—or did they?
No, the last stage was writing this book. I am given to reticence, but writing one’s autobiography leaves no room for reticence. Thus, it is fitting that it sails beneath my father’s injunction to his family—and with the hope that future generations don’t have to suffer the kind of tyranny that makes it necessary to be like invisible ink.
CHAPTER ONE
A Nearly Idyllic Beginning
By the scales of the beginning of the twentieth century, the distance that separated the hometowns of my parents—approximately 128 miles—was considered formidable, the routes between them cumbersome, and the towns themselves were nestled away in the rural environment. It surprises me, even today, when recognition registers on a face, whether in the United States or Germany, when I toss the names of Vlotho in Westphalia or Ulrichstein in Hessia into a conversation. The former, where my mother was born, spreads out along the Weser River. Only one bridge led across in those times and Ulrichstein could boast of the fact that it was circling the highest mountain top in Hessia, and therefore, it was a “boon to the human lung.”
And yet, despite distance and inaccessibility, the two met, or else this chronicle would not have seen the light of day (nor me, for that matter). Nor could I report that at age fourteen, I swam across the Weser River, nor that I climbed the Vogelsberg, driven by my father’s ambition for my physical development.
How then did they meet, my mother Hedwig Silberberg, the daughter of a successful Vlotho merchant and my father Julius Stern, the son of a small-town clothing storeowner? He was parented by his older brother, Hermann, after their father had died when Julius was only ten years old. He first attended classes at the village school, supplemented by Jewish learning in a dwelling dating back to 1849, right next to another building, called unceremoniously, then and now, “das Judenbad,” the Jewish bathhouse.
Dad went to a somewhat larger city for two years of desultory high school instructions, but also learned the basics of his future profession by helping out in Uncle Hermann’s store. He knew textiles! I would never have penetrated the arcane vocabulary of clothing materials such as Beiderwand, Paletot, and Schlüpfer (woolsey, great coat and panties, respectively), if my father had not used them constantly.
Of course that was but a beginning. He needed mercantile experience. One of Uncle Hermann’s visitors, a traveling salesman, knew of an opening for a textile journeyman at the Kaufhaus Rüdenberg in a quaint place named Vlotho. Dad liked the place, he told me, and his position as premier salesman. But that was not his only reason.
Hedwig was the fair-haired daughter of Israel and Rebekka Silberberg. They had longingly awaited the arrival of a daughter after the birth of three stalwart boys, born in reasonably rapid succession. Hedwig and Julius met, so to speak, over the counter. To untangle that cryptic remark: my mother-to-be was making a small purchase at Rüdenberg’s. My father waited on her. They never told us children of their romance, while photos testify to a happy, handsome couple, much attuned to each other. They wouldn’t have dreamt of sharing intimacies. It was a time when the stiff collar my father wore five, even six days a week was not only a piece of apparel, but also a symbol of a social ethic. But there is evidence of the portent of that meeting across that fateful counter. Within half a year, my father had the temerity to face a seemingly impregnable obstacle.
Its name was Israel Silberberg, my v
enerable grandfather. Grandpa was the incarnation of a German patriarch whose word was law in the period following WWI. With the ousting of the German emperor, his unquestioned authority had evolved to the heads of households. Power and prestige transferred to less visible, but almost equally domineering successors. Since power abhors a vacuum, it now came to rest on the family patriarch. My grandfather, though by temperament a lesser tyrant than the emperor, was ready. Had he not banished Benno, his youngest son, to America, when the kid, in his adolescent rebelliousness, had sassed him? Now my father had to face him, ask for the hand of his daughter, the apple of his eye, whom he had sent, just a couple of years before, to a “Höhere Töchterschule.” That was an upper-middle class school teaching ennobling subjects such as art and literature in tandem with domestic subjects. As best as I recall, she was sent to such a modestly ambitious school in nearby Bielefeld. A book on girl’s education, fitting her timeframe, lends more substance to my vague memory. Undeterred, my father approached the patriarch. He prevailed. Two years later, in 1922, I made my entrance via Hildesheim’s Catholic Hospital, presaging my later exposure to Catholicism, when I started my career as a college student at a Jesuit university.
Writing this prelude was easy. I could rely on the narratives of my parents, relatives and friends. But thrown back on my own recollections, I quickly rediscovered a truism that the German poet Goethe proclaimed about three centuries ago. He called his retrospective “Fragments of a Great Confession.” I also deplore the fragmenting nature of those recollections, admit that occasionally they resemble “confessions,” which of course, never are far removed from introspection. And as an immediate confession, the mortar holding the fragments together are suppositions, makeshifts, and inferences. From the very beginning my parents’ lives were marked by untiring labor. Their hard work paid off—till the inflation struck. Years later my mother told me of its impact. “I stood by the door, already in my hat and coat, shopping bag in hand, waiting for your father to come home. He would race up the steps, press his day’s earnings in my hand, and I was off to the market. In another hour, your father’s earnings would have shriveled to nothing.”
