by Guy Stern
The next hurdle had to be jumped—and at a dizzying pace. Two months later we were notified that I had a date with the American Consul in Hamburg. My mother was now torn between gladness for me and the sadness of separation. My parents had already worked out a modus vivendi. I would get a ride from another Jewish family scheduled to appear one day earlier at the Consulate and spend the night at a students’ pension. My trip to America started with the excitement of the longest automobile ride of my life and loaded down with a good portion of anxiety.
Here a bit of background is in order. We all had heard of the fearsome encounters with American consulate officials. Why? On little publicized orders from the American State Department, honeycombed with anti-Semites or personnel simply hostile to foreigners, these obedient or prejudiced consuls would turn down prospective immigrants for the slightest flaws in their papers or on trumped-up pretexts.
In early October, 1937, I stood, only slightly awed and for only fifteen brief minutes, before the man who, unbeknownst to me then, held my life in his hands. The name of the American Consul General was Malcolm C. Burke, a massive, impressive man of fifty. In German he asked me my name, date of birth, schooling and, apparently to keep America free of cretins, the sum of forty-eight plus fifty-two. My unexceptionable answers produced his stamp and signature to my “Jugendausweis.” I had acquired in a few minutes the papers that thousands at that time vainly coveted.
Only many years later, when I was fully aware of the near-miracle of those fifteen minutes, did I puzzle out my good fortune. My uncle’s affidavit, I had long realized, must have appeared all but worthless to a seasoned consular official like Burke. Uncle Benno was an unemployed baker with a family to support. He earned his living through the good will of his union, which sent him out on fill-in jobs. Burke must have seen through my uncle’s subterfuge. I wondered why this document passed muster. The answer came, as seems almost inevitable with an academic, through the pages of a book. After the war, when I knew nearly the full horror of the Nazi years, in part through the unfolding discoveries of my US Army Intelligence Unit, I, like so many others, sought explanations for the unexplainable, including the indifference of the many potential countries of asylum. And so I leafed through the first edition of Arthur D. Morse’s Why Six Million Died at the branch of our public library. And there it was; the indexed name Burke, Malcolm C., led me to a page that contrasted the American consul in Stuttgart, a bigot who kept Jews out under any number of legalisms, with the compassionate Consul Burke of Hamburg, eager to find loopholes which would allow the persecuted to escape to America.
And that is, in broad outline, my story as I would have told it. About seven years ago I learned that an essential part of my deliverance from Nazi Germany was hidden from me till the ripe old age of ninety-one. Of course, in retrospect I had often asked myself: isn’t the event of my deliverance an unlikely story? Recall that my rescue depended on all sorts of lucky turns. There was my uncle, an unemployed baker who had pulled the wool over the eyes of a seasoned consular official. Or why had the deputy consul in Hamburg pitched that ridiculous question, “How much is forty-eight plus fifty-two?”—something that a kid half my age could have answered? And why, during my immigration, did I encounter so many members of a committee of which I had never heard of before? Surely there were gaps in my story!
But I have rushed the calendar. The letter from the New York committee reached us promptly. A date had been set for my passage and I was to be at the pier on November 5, 1937, several hours before the ship’s departure.
A week prior to my departure my parents gave a farewell party for me and my friends—not a single non-Jew among them in this fourth year of National Socialism. The party boosted my sense of adventure. Looking back now, this roseate expectancy is expunged by the reality that followed. When I said goodbye to my parents, my brother and my sister, both younger, I thought we would soon be reunited, and that tempered the grief of departure. I saw none of my family again. I believed at one time I could also write of their death in the Warsaw ghetto. But then, during sporadic visits to Hildesheim, I heard from strangers shattering details of their last days at home. My long years of suppression closed in again. We must all cope as best we can.
My dad added his own instructions before my impending immigration. Throughout the Nazi years he had constantly hammered into the heads of my brother and me that need for remaining inconspicuous: “You have to be like invisible ink,” he cautioned. “You will leave traces of your existence when, in better times, the invisible ink will become visible again, but in the meanwhile. . . .” His voice trailed off. He also reminded me that my passage was booked on a German Hapag Lloyd ship and therefore I would not leave German territory until I had disembarked on American soil. My father’s admonition took root. For many years I carried its psychological burden with me. But my father’s words also became the metamorphosis from which I fashioned my life; to use the power of words in creating a career filled with teaching, writing, and speaking to thousands over the years about my life and the wisdom one possibly can extract from it.
CHAPTER THREE
Coming to America
No forebodings accompanied me on the Hapag Lloyd boat that carried us, a group of Jewish youngsters and a German Jewish social worker, from Bremerhaven to New York. In fact we were rather full of practical jokes and bad manners in general, the natural compensation of long unnatural restraint, years when we were told on a daily basis that we, as Jews, needed to be better than good and at any rate inconspicuous, as was invisible ink. My own ill-timed sortie into rebelliousness—one that still makes me cringe—is my sudden assumption of a blasé attitude as we steamed into New York Harbor. As all the other passengers rushed toward the railing to be greeted by the Statue of Liberty, I casually strolled toward her in a spirit of nil admirari.
Before disembarking we said goodbye to an American gentleman who had befriended us en route. His expansive manner and his munificence—he treated our entire group to an exotic drink called Coca-Cola—convinced us that he was one of those fabled American millionaires. Toward the end of our voyage he told us that he was a vacationing mailman who had hoarded his savings for a European trip. We didn’t believe a word of it; our “millionaire” wanted to stay incognito, we conjectured. My appreciation of the porousness of America’s social hierarchy—perhaps calcifying as I write this—did not crystallize until much later.
The two days in New York contributed little to my Americanization. I was met at the pier and shoved through Immigration by a representative of a Jewish committee and by a cousin of my mother’s from Essen. My Green Card was in apple-pie order and would, fifty years later, help illustrate an exile exhibit of the Deutsche Bibliothek in Frankfurt. No such notoriety accompanied my first day in New York. Aunt Klärchen took me in tow, speaking a hard-to-follow amalgam of German and English. “Wir fahren jetzt mit der Subway. Duck dich mal unter die Turnstile, dann brauchst du keinen Nickel zu bezahlen!” Keeping with her instructions I committed my first American misdemeanor by entering the platform without paying. My recollections of New York are a jumble of skyscrapers (“Look out, die Wolkenkratzer,” Tante Klärchen would exclaim), subways, and a curious type of gastronomy (“Automatenrestaurant,” said Klärchen), where you inserted money to obtain the item of your choice. The meals were indifferent. I learned early on in America that technology often outstrips substance. Tante Klärchen said “Mahlzeit, my boy,” as our ways parted at the exit of Horn and Hardart.
The committee in New York decided that my English would allow me to solo on my train ride to Saint Louis, the residence of Uncle Benno and Aunt Ethel. As we sped from the East to the Midwest my awe at the largeness of America’s geography—and of its vocabulary—increased in tandem. As to the latter, a curious omission of Mr. Tittel and “The Boxer” surfaced. After I had completed my main course in the dining car, the steward, the first black person I had ever spoken to, asked me monosyllabically: “Pie?” I thought that was his way of sa
ying “pay,” so I pulled out my committee-donated meal coupon. He then repeated his terse question two more times, his decibel level rising. The supervisor, called to the table, solomonically told the steward, after being equally thwarted by my apparent obtuseness: “Bring him some apple pie!” From that moment onward that word stuck to me like the gelatinous goo that held the pastry together. The experience came in handy. As a writer of textbooks I have always insisted on illustrations, even where pictures can’t tie memory to the taste buds.
Yet another side of America, undreamt of by Mr. Tittel, unfolded before me in Chicago, where the aforementioned sophisticated committee-woman provided a city tour in her car during a three-hour layover. She concluded the tour with a stroll through the Maxwell Street Flea Market. Both sellers and buyers, at least at that time, were largely Jewish; some of them even wore yarmulkas. As I watched them in their unselfconscious transactions and relaxed by-plays, years of inhibitions, the need to crawl into myself, slowly if yet incompletely, peeled off. I began to realize that in my new country I need not resemble invisible ink or that, conversely, I now had to rebel against my enforced inconspicuousness. Others, like those coreligionists milling around Maxwell Street Market, had already done that for me.
A bevy of relatives, familiar from diverse family albums, welcomed me at Union Station in Saint Louis. Uncle Benno, working a night shift, was not among them. I met him at midnight, an undersized, squat person, floored but not counted out by the Depression. What sustained him were flights into popularized mysticism; even that first night he tried to make me a convert to Rosicrucianism. He lived a hard life and didn’t apologize for the cramped flat, so different from his parents,’ my grandparents,’ spacious Westphalian house. Nor did he dwell on the fact that I had to share my bed with another refugee boy, boarded there, at some profit to my aunt and uncle, by the ubiquitous Jewish committee. Nonetheless my dreams of adventurous America didn’t collapse those first days. Rather they now played themselves out on a reduced scale. Infinity, today’s current chaos theory tells us, can be encountered in small spaces, if the measurements aren’t applied to the cosmos but to atomic particles.
My exploration of America via cross-country trains, begun on my trip to Saint Louis but not repeated until five years later courtesy of the US Army, shrank to treks across Saint Louis and environs. I had discovered America’s subsidiary, cost-free mode of transportation called hitchhiking. I discovered South Saint Louis with its “Dutch” (i.e., German) neighborhood, bordered by Italian Hill. I went swimming in Crevecoeur Lake, which I almost failed to identify to the kind lady who picked me up because I pronounced it the French way rather than in her Midwestern drawl as “Creavecar” Lake. I often thumbed my way to the downtown section of Saint Louis with its sheltering library (and the nearby White Castle, ten cents for an egg sandwich and a glass of chocolate milk), and to Forest Park with its art museum and Jefferson Memorial where a replica of Lindbergh’s Spirit of Saint Louis was housed.
Together with my new family I would walk on Jewish holidays to a small prayer house a few blocks away. Few of us in our neighborhood could afford the substantial membership dues for the ornate temples of Rabbi Isserman or Rabbi Gordon, both of them riveting orators. Our makeshift synagogue was bare. It was presided over by Mr. Ansky, a volunteer cantor. But despite the soon-familiar faces the holiday celebrations weren’t the same for me. I missed my hometown synagogue, even more the familiar ritual, the different pronunciation of the Hebrew vowels, and the annually intoned liturgical music. What I had imagined to be the easiest transition, from one Jewish service to another, turned out to be the most formidable obstacle course, in fact one never entirely mastered. Catholic exiles have told me that they found a spiritual anchor, wherever they went, in the “blessed sameness” of the then prevailing Latin ritual. I never sang the Hebrew melodies common in America with the same overtones of happy childhood memories that I had gathered in the oriental-style synagogue of Hildesheim. But that was a minor religious adjustment problem, which faded into utter insignificance after the traumatizing news of November 9, 1938. A newsboy, hawking the St. Louis Star-Times, to which we subscribed, was shouting, “Synagogues burning in Germany! Read all about it!” Sometimes I hear his voice, the shouts raised to screams, at the most unexpected times and places: at services, before becoming fully awake, and certainly when I am in Hildesheim. And then I relive each time the feeling of loss and my maledictions against the perpetrators.
Occasionally I would walk with my aunt—her treat—to the Plymouth Movie House. Tuesday night was Ladies’ Night at the Plymouth. That meant reduced admissions, coupons ultimately redeemable for “free dishes,” and a steady diet of B-movies. Their saccharine quality didn’t matter to me: the features with such faded matinée idols as Rudy Vallee, constituted lessons in English and very basic Americana. What I had missed by not growing up in America I picked up at the Plymouth or in other curious ways. From a film about a love triangle with an utterly predictable happy end I learned the folk tune “Who’s Coming around the Mulberry Bush,” sung by one of the swains about his rival. I became as distortedly knowledgeable about America’s West as an native-born, red-blooded American kid by walking to a sweltering outdoor cinema at the Wellston Shopping Center, where Gene Autry proclaimed, repeatedly and in song, that he was “a happy, roving cowboy.” I learned English nursery rhymes, with which my American contemporaries had all grown up, by reading the Mother Goose murder mystery by best-selling detective-story writer S. S. Van Dine. In the evenings we adolescents gathered in someone’s front yard, no less satisfying a gathering place than today’s night clubs, drank weak lemonade, mildly and innocently flirted, and sang traditional American songs, such as “On Top of Old Smokey.’”
During those heat-baked Saint Louis summer nights we confided to one another our own versions of the American dream. How ambitious we all were! Out of our neighborhood, confined to three to four blocks of Saint Louis’s predominantly Jewish West Side, emerged one of the city’s most successful businessmen, a leading conductor and musicologist, a prominent physician, and Missouri’s future lieutenant-governor, Kenneth Rothman. The dreams of my American contemporaries sustained and occasionally restored mine. That happened, for example, when my aunt and uncle, who were also my legal guardians, proposed taking me out of high school and enrolling me in a trade school. They had read somewhere that the path to later employment started with the learning of a trade. I fought the notion and won.
I knew instinctively that Soldan High School, where I had been enrolled within five days of my arrival in Saint Louis, was ideal for me. Simply put, it was America at its best. James Hotchener later wrote King of the Hill, a novel about the school set during the Depression. In 1993 the novel, with the name of the institution and its administrators slightly changed, was made into an inspiring film. It tells about a boy’s struggle, sometimes tragic, often wryly funny, to succeed despite a fragile family structure and against mounting debts. It is not quite my story; my life fortunately lacked that kind of drama and traumata. I was never completely broke. A distant, more affluent relative gave me an allowance of fifty cents every two weeks, when he didn’t forget, and my aunt and uncle were never threatened with eviction. But the film did re-evoke Soldan for me as it then was. Students from fairly affluent families rubbed shoulders with kids in threadbare clothes. And the teachers and principals, Mr. Stellwagen and Mr. Barr, were magnificent. They had set their sights on rivalling the best college prep schools, and on balance they succeeded. As an educator of some fifty-five odd years myself, I am sure that, in chronicling those two years, I have not yielded to the temptation of idealizing those golden school days.
At Soldan I soaked up American history, political structures, culture, and literature. Ask me today about Andrew Jackson’s Populism or the initial nonpopulist elections to the US Senate or the poems of Longfellow and I will still be able to regurgitate the teaching of Mrs. Mott, “Doc” Bender, and Mrs. Nagle.
The rules we
re as strict, or almost so, as those I knew from Hildesheim. No smoking within two blocks of the school building, no curse words (even mild ones) in class, no walking down the up staircase, and absolutely no unexcused absences. But these rules were tempered, nay, sweetened, by personal attention and care. Sure, we also had a few villains hidden in our idyllic environment. Mr. Patrick, an English teacher, disliked foreigners, and the girl students avoided one of the math teachers, who doubled as the football coach, and considered women unqualified for his discipline.
But in general the halls of Soldan echoed kindness. My first day at school betokened it. Mr. Stellwagen received me personally, told me that he had assigned me to the advisory (homeroom) of Mrs. Muller, the German teacher, handed me my program and asked me whether I was interested in going for any extracurriculars. My quizzical look elicited further explanations and a menu of activities. “Swimming and the school newspaper,” I responded. “Of course,” he said, “I’ll introduce you to the faculty advisors.” And he didn’t discourage me at all, despite the fact that my English, even to this day but then more pronouncedly, was tinged by an accent. “Our publications, the yearbook and the newspaper, are called Scrip and Scrippage,” he said. “Do you know where those names come from?” A puzzled silence on my part. “Well,” he explained, like a teacher would, “they come from Shakespeare’s As You Like It: “Let us make an honorable retreat, though not with bag and baggage, yet with scrip and scrippage.” And then he took me to Mrs. Rasmussen, the advisor of Scrippage.
My first class was Mrs. Carmody’s geometry class. “Ah, our new student from Germany! Well, we’re having a test today. Why don’t you show me what you can do? Just take a seat over there.” I read the test and stumbled over a few terms. I walked up to her desk and asked: “What is an isosceles triangle?” She went to the board and drew one. “Ah,” I said to myself, “Ein gleichschenkliges Dreieck.” I got a “G” (for “good”) on that test and still consider that a major triumph of my academic career.
