by Guy Stern
Perhaps in saying farewell to both research and teaching after fifty years of following their call, I feel I have erred on the side of self-congratulation. But then I checked with my bibliography to make sure I had omitted nothing vital. Any sense of pride vanished, drowned by the recurring question: “Did the world really need that article?” How could I have published a paper on an upstanding New England clergyman, but a decidedly lesser literary hero? In the files of a once prominent, now defunct Philadelphia publishing house, I found Charles Timothy Brooks’s unpublished translation of poems of a scarcely more prominent German poet, August Kopisch. The poem “Blücher at the Rhine” is not far removed from the blood-and-guts variety of lyrics. I had traveled to Philadelphia in search of bigger booty. Now ill-placed persistence made me want to publish the Kopisch-Brooks “collaboration” as a poor substitute for my original treasure hunt. A dozen rejections did not discourage me. A new journal, probably in need of submissions, finally published it.
I also take no pride in an arch paper entitled “How to Escape the Poorhouse, German among the Other Humanities: A Graduate Dean’s Perspective.” Had I, a mediocre manager, acquired the acumen of George Soros? To confirm that my financial expertise ranged somewhere between D+ and D-, I dredged up my first budget report as a department chair, submitted to the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Cincinnati. “Professor Stern,” Dean Weichert had said in a gravelly voice, “a budget report need not be poetic.”
And why did I, of all people, decide to write a story about an important geographic discovery and illustrate it? With glee someone pointed out I had left the most important geographic feature, the McClure Strait, completely unmarked.
I have lifted out, in somewhat anecdotal fashion, some highlights that accompanied those fifty years of teaching and scholarship. Yet this chronicle is, of course, anything but complete. One omission is in my enumeration of my models. I should have mentioned my wife Judy as one of them. Occasionally, when I was teaching abroad, Judy would hop a plane and surprise me by sitting demurely in my huge lecture hall. One time I turned the tables on her. I had accepted talking before the joint English classes of my former high school in Hildesheim. Judy had arrived a few hours before and I said, “You will be much more in tune with high school kids than I. Go teach them.” She did admirably. The students kept her for an additional half hour.
In time my eightieth and her sixtieth birthdays were approaching. The decennial birthdays inspired her to a giant conspiracy, arranged with nano precision behind my back. Under the pretext that we were going to celebrate our coinciding birthdays at a hotel with exquisite cuisine, together with her brother and his companion, she chauffeured us to an upper-class suburb of Detroit. My first suspicions arose when she rushed us not into but across the general dining room to a chambre separé at the back of the faux-Baroque edifice. I opened the door and my knees buckled. My world of respected and admired and beloved family and friends had assembled, arriving from two continents. My cousin Renée and her South American-born companion had come from Switzerland; my cousin Marianne from New York; my colleague Leo Fiedler was there from Germany, carrying a mammoth manuscript of a speech he was forced to cut; my colleagues from past and present affiliations were celebrating a reunion, mingling with the faculty of Judy’s high school. Her principal was there, and my president, and at least two dozen relatives of my wife, the conspirator. The German Consul General attended. He was a man I admired for his occasional departure from diplomacy when outspokenness was called for. Judy and I had scarcely gotten through embracing one and all, when we heard most accomplished piano playing, emanating not from the usual hired hands that played at parties but from my admired colleague, Professor James Hartway, composer and master pianist. With each handshake and embrace, as we later told each other, a phase of our lives became resurrected, both happy and tragic moments. My cousin Marianne’s presence stirred up Auschwitz, Renée’s evoked the incredible beauty of the surroundings of the Lago Maggiore, where she lived. Recalling all of the associations here would double the space of this narrative.
Two years after this celebration of our lives, Judy contracted that scourge, breast cancer. We fought against it as a team: I; her brother, a prominent physician; and most notably, Judy, herself. We visited cancer centers here and abroad: our local Karmanos and Beaumont Clinics, Sloan-Kettering in New York, and on a hunch of Judy’s, hospitals in Freiburg and Hinterzarten. During her daily life, Judy ignored her illness and—how to put it?—defied the possibility of death. She rushed from chemo treatment to her classes, and in the last months given her during her five-year battle, she planned a new course, “Modern American History through Feature Films.” When she succumbed she had just put her faith and resolution in yet another treatment center, to no avail.
Judy died on June 29, 2003. Relatives, friends, faculty, and students from Kimball High School accompanied her to her rest. Rabbi Schwartz, who had married us, surpassed his own eloquence at her gravesite. A good part of what has been written here was contained in his eulogy.
I missed Judy, even her shortcomings. I think arriving on time was anathema to her. She even reset the school clock, ringing in the first class of the school day. This clashed with my Prussian punctuality. And she was a collector. Our numerous closets were unable to accommodate her collection of dresses and our spacious basement was replete from her assembly of jewelry, most of it, but not all, costume jewelry. That clashed with one of my many flaws. I was mostly indifferent to clothes, but I am to this day addicted to clinging to documents, papers, other articles yearning for the wastepaper basket.
Aside from those admitted impediments, we appeared to be and were an ad for married couples. At a time when other variations of living together were becoming the vogue, I looked back in sorrow to her and our conventional marriage. I was sure I would not marry again. Yet the rollercoaster of life and love decreed otherwise.
During the summer of 2004, I was, as so often before, a houseguest of Ute and Dieter Blanke in Herford, Germany. I had met Ute, then a city councilwoman, and Dieter, the legal counsel of a utility company, about ten years earlier when Ute had been the prime mover in Herford’s efforts to bring to the city the surviving former members of its once thriving Jewish community. I came along as the traveling companion of my cousin Marianne, who was no longer able to travel alone. She had gone to a Jewish school in Herford, when Jewish children were no longer permitted to attend public schools in and around Herford beginning in 1937.
During that reunion, with many events taking place at the home of the Blankes, we discovered a whole set of common interests. A chance encounter became, across the decade, a close friendship, and I considered myself almost a member of the family of Ute and Dieter and their three sons, rapidly outgrowing adolescence. Now Ute and I were sitting across the table from each other at a museum of arts and crafts she had initiated. We were enjoying the obligatory German tea-and-coffee hour, replete with calorie-filled cakes and cookies. “Ute,” I said, confessing this feeling for the first time, “I have mourned Judy now for about a year. I think I am ready for another meaningful and lasting relationship.” I met Susanna the next day. And that calls for another chapter, because with that meeting, life and writing became one.
CHAPTER NINE
Susanna
It was bashert,” my Yiddish-speaking friends would exclaim. As a devotee of American musicals, I would sing the familiar words from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific when recalling our first meeting. In our case, the crowded room was located in the Westphalian town of Minden, a city familiar to me since boyhood. It is only a few miles distant from Vlotho—my grandparents’ home, my mother’s birthplace. During my early years, my uncle Max had repeatedly taken me along on his business trips from Vlotho to Minden. At that time car rides were still a treat for a youngster, so I remember them well. Now my friend and colleague, Professor Wolfgang Hempel, who is also a native of Minden (the plot thickens), arranged for me to lecture before the Mi
nden Literary Society as a way-stop on an ambitious speaking tour across Germany and the Netherlands.
The room was crowded; my subject, “The Image of Germany in Contemporary American Literature,” apparently had appeal. In the second row, I spotted a very nice-looking lady, and must confess that I addressed some of the choice passages of my lecture in her direction. She was all attention and, gratifyingly enough, joined unrestrainedly in the general laughter, provoked by my jokes. Some astute questions followed my lecture; one from the lady who had caught my attention.
The event’s sponsor, a formidable persona and wife of a Protestant minister, met me at the lectern after my speech and supplemented her complimentary remarks with the expeditious presentation of a check. Then she added an invitation: A reception was planned in my honor at a local restaurant, just a small circle, and would I join? I knew the routine; it would probably be quite formal and stiff. Sensing my hesitation, she made an alternative suggestion: “It’s such a lovely evening. Perhaps you would rather like to sit on our back porch and enjoy a Prosecco?” “Of course, let’s go to your house,” I replied.
To my utter delight, Mrs. Hirschberg had also invited the lady from the audience, who turned out to be a writer and had been invited to read from her short stories just one evening before. Soon after my arrival, snacks and drinks were served—and then fate proffered a hand! On the back porch, the writer was placed kitty-cornered to me at a table and introduced herself as Susanna. She had blond hair, green eyes, and a beautiful smile.
We started talking; the subjects were a potpourri. I mentioned Kurt Weill and she responded with an enthusiastic endorsement of the Threepenny Opera. She lobbed a reference to the Thomas Mann novel Doctor Faustus in my direction; I volleyed back with a quotation from the masterwork. And so it went the whole evening. We shamelessly monopolized each other. With every passing minute, I increasingly felt that something very special was happening.
When I asked Susanna about her professional background, she told me that she had studied law for some years, but then had switched to researching language learning and teaching. Her minors at college had been American Studies and the History of North America—how convenient for making headway with her, I thought. After working and teaching at a university in the nineties, she attended a journalism school and became a broadcast editor. In her free time, she wrote a desk-drawer full of short stories and poems, many subsequently published in well-known journals. For her work at a broadcast station, she had to write many book reviews as well, something that she even now loves to do.
Somewhere during that ebb and flow of conversation, I mentioned that I wore my wedding ring out of piety for my late wife. Susanna mentioned that she was divorced many years ago.
As I learned later, she had been a reluctant attendee at my lecture, but her good friend and host Gottfried Weidelhofer persuaded her to come anyway: that American professor might not be utterly dull.
At the end of the reception, we got up and hugged. Susanna offered to chauffeur Wolfgang Hempel and me to our hotel. On the way to her car, I started humming an aria from Mozart’s Don Giovanni: “Là ci darem la mano” (“There we will give each other our hands”). Immediately, even though I was just humming the tune, Susanna remarked that this was a very nice song with especially beautiful lyrics. “I knew you’d understand me,” I exclaimed happily and added: “I have to see you again! Can you come to my hotel tomorrow morning for breakfast?” With a big smile, she assented.
“How did you sleep?” I asked Susanna next morning in the lobby. She answered with a German equivalent to our American “like a log.” Suddenly she blurted out, “I have to make a retraction—I didn’t sleep a wink last night. The evening was simply too exciting!” It made me happy to hear her say that. I complimented her for her honesty, took her hand, and led her to our table (or I should say, rather, to my table, since Wolfgang discreetly failed to show up for the scheduled breakfast). I didn’t let go of her hand when we sat down but looked deeply into her eyes and joyfully made a confession that would change my life: “I love you.”
She stared at me in disbelief. “You don’t waste any time, do you?”
“No, not at my age.”
She looked at me for what seemed to be endless moments before she finally said, “I love you, too.”
“I am taking a train to Amsterdam this morning, but I will return to Germany, to Heidelberg to be precise, next week. Any chance of a further meeting?”
Susanna assented once more.
After dropping Wolfgang and me at the railway station, Susanna, as she was later to confide, had called her mother in Bochum, telling her that she had met the man of her life. Hinting at her daughter’s former marriage, Ingrid had just one comment: “Again?”
A week later I met Susanna in Heidelberg, touted by many as the most romantic town in Germany. Two months later I visited Susanna again and this time had a chance to also spend some time with her wonderful mother, who had been a kindergarten teacher for some decades. We got along very well right from the start. When Susanna later asked her about her impression of me, she answered kindly but bluntly: “That’s a very nice, likable fellow. But for me he would be too old.”
Our first trip abroad led us to France, where we stayed with a friend of mine before we travelled to Austria. The board of the Kurt Weill Foundation had been invited to the Bregenz Music Festival, where Weill’s early works took center stage. Neither Susanna nor I had ever been present at this, one of the most spectacular stages in the world. Enchantment gripped us as we viewed the open-air stage, which jutted out into the Austrian waters of Lake Constance. A recent travelogue by the Italian photojournalist Simone Zanetti expresses it all. It almost sounds as if she had seen the two of us sitting among like-minded concertgoers:
Can you imagine spending a romantic warm summer night with your sweetheart listening to a beautiful performance of classical music like opera, operetta, or musical? If you have not experienced this yet, I urge you to do it at least once. Maybe you want to surprise your special one with tickets to an open-air performance this year.
It is an unbelievable feeling to sit under the open sky not confined to an opera house or concert hall. Just visualize sitting under a blanket of stars, the moon is shining and you feel a cool breeze on your face and you cuddle with your sweetheart while taking in beautiful sounds—that is what it is like to be part of an open-air performance at the Arena in Verona, Italy, the Festivals in Bregenz at Lake Constance or at Moerbisch (Neusiedeler Lake) in Austria.
As befitting me, then secretary of the foundation bearing Weill’s name, I found the performance of his Seven Deadly Sins to be the highlight of the week of love and music. Susanna, who had seen Bernstein’s West Side Story several times and had cheerfully “conducted” a recording of it since childhood, declared she would never see a more enchanting production than the one in Bregenz. The experience was complete bliss for us two music lovers!
This trip also provided Susanna with an opportunity to meet the few remaining members of my family. My cousins once removed, Mario and Claudio Stern, whose father Heinz and grandfather David had the foresight to depart Nazi Germany for Argentina, had found positions as physicist and engineer at the European Patent Office in Munich, Germany. They enjoyed the Festival in Bregenz along with us.
The adventure of mutual discovery continued to accompany our courtship. Each Sabbath back at home, I had been attending the same synagogue for discussions of biblical passages and their modern relevance. Those recurring Saturday morning gatherings were among the first activities to which I introduced Susanna on her three week “getting better acquainted” visit in December 2004. As planned, we spent a few days in Greater Detroit and then embarked, via Miami, on a Caribbean cruise. On that trip we discovered not only the beauty of the Caribbean islands but also a great deal about each other. I found out that she is a marvelous dancer—her mastery of salsa brought forth some gaping mouths around the room. I also observed that she could talk to just
about every fellow passenger and that on the land tours she would discover exotic flowers, aquatic life, native customs, and architectural sights to which I had been oblivious. She has a great sense of humor and could have become a comedian. What she learned about me was that I could identify every rare seafood item brought to the dinner table. (I told her only much later that I wasn’t a connoisseur or bon vivant but rather had been a long-time waiter at a seafood restaurant.) To her persistent chagrin, she also discovered that I was a stentorian snorer, mostly in the key of C-major.
Also while we sailed the calm waters of the Caribbean or were in a submarine observing marine life, we learned of the shattering events following the most devastating tsunami in global history, taking place in Indonesia.
A new incentive had now been added to my flights to the Old Country. With Susanna, I was in the thrall of a chance encounter to equal all chance encounters of the past. I shared my feelings with my Detroit friends, and when I came back from Munich, where Susanna and I had last rendezvoused, I told my most intimate friends that they shouldn’t be surprised if transoceanic wedding bells might soon ring out. Some friends applauded noisily; others opined that I had gone completely meshuga, completely balmy: “Marry? But she’s more than forty years younger than you!” In April 2005, we started the application for a visa to get married the next year.
Shortly after applying, we had a most relaxing vacation during a trip to Slovenia. After some days in Ljubljana, the beautiful capital city, we spent some time in a seaside resort and went spelunking at a mammoth cave as Sigmund Freud had done long before us on a similar outing. We discovered that the country—also called “Prussia of the Balkans”—could produce incredibly tasty pastries, equaling everything sold in neighboring Austria. That summer we also visited Israel with my flamboyant friend, Fred Howard. Christian Bauer’s documentary, The Ritchie Boys, was competing for the country’s equivalent of an Oscar at the 2005 Jerusalem International Film Festival.
