by Guy Stern
The evening started with a bang. Several persons associated with some of the films were invited to a garden party by Israel’s acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Two young Israeli women had volunteered to take us from our hotel to the party at the designated time. In their eagerness, they dropped us off thirty minutes too early. The two Olmerts were most gracious and unfazed. Until further guests arrived, we received a grand tour of their version of the White House and had a spirited conversation with Israel’s first couple; we thoroughly relished our conversation with Mr. Olmert, a heady brew of laying out his peace plan; we also enjoyed the artworks of Mrs. Olmert and listened to the couple’s sophisticated insights on world leaders. Then we shared Christian Bauer’s triumph when his film won the Jerusalem Municipality Prize in the category of Jewish experience.
A further trip, one year later, led us to Minusio, near Locarno in Switzerland. There my cousin’s daughter Renée Gelfer invited us to spend some days in her apartment overlooking picturesque Lago Maggiore. As a child Renée had survived the Nazis by being hidden by a Catholic family in Belgium. We are very close to this day.
In December 2005 Ingrid, my mother-in-law-to-be was diagnosed with cancer, after having battled with an autoimmune-disorder for twelve years. When we finally got our fiancée-visa in April of 2006, Susanna told her mother that she would not leave her, but rather postpone emigration and wedding to stay with her in those critical times. Her mother, by then very weak, protested vehemently and told Susanna, her only child, that she has but one last wish: She wanted us to proceed as planned and that Susanna should return to be at her side after the wedding. With a heavy heart Susanna emigrated to the United States on May 11, 2006; we were married on May 15. Immediately she tried to get special permission to leave the country during the ninety-day period of the so-called advanced parole. It took us twelve days to get this permission. Too late, it turned out—her mother died on May 19. This loss and also the death of my son Mark two months earlier overshadowed the beginnings of our marriage and it took Susanna a long time to adapt to her new life.
Several years later in 2008, I visited the area again without Susanna, and I experienced another chance encounter. I am glad to have witnesses; otherwise who would believe it? Upon my arrival, Renée’s apartment was already stocked and stacked with visitors. But a solution for my housing was at hand: her life companion, Ernesto Moos, had retained his apartment nearby. It was situated just a ten-minute walk from Renée’s spectacular apartment. I cheerfully took occupancy. One evening, spent at Renée’s amid friends and relatives, I was ready for bed. Not known for an acute sense of orientation, I was given a key to Ernesto’s apartment and elaborate instructions. I managed to get lost within minutes. I went forward and backward in vain attempts to get my bearing. Then I spied a building that held promise. The set of bells at the entrance were well lit, but no entry was listed for Ernesto Moos at the left. Let’s try the right side, I whispered to myself. Again no entry for Moos, but lo and behold, a familiar name jumped at me. Letter for letter it matched Susanna’s maiden name, by no means a common surname. It was too late to ring that bell. Besides I had to find my temporary home. Finally my wanderings led me to a luxurious hotel. I ordered a drink and a telephone (I don’t have a cell phone). Ten minutes later Ernesto turned up in his Volvo. I quickly told him of my discovery.
The next day I telephoned Susanna to ask what we should do. After that conversation I rang their doorbell daily for the duration of my visit, but with no success. Finally, on the last evening, I wrote a letter to the unknown person or persons, explaining our surprise and interest in whoever they might be. After having dropped my note in the namesake’s mailbox, we waited and waited for a response. The summer turned to winter—my discovery had not panned out. Then out of the blue, I received an email: “Sorry, we are answering so late. But we only use the Minusio apartment twice a year as a vacation home. We live in Germany! Let’s get together!”
We did so in Renée’s apartment, the following year. The first time Susanna laid eyes on Dieter, she almost fainted: He looked like an older version of her deceased father. It turned out that Dieter had been born in her parents’ Silesian hometown of Beuthen before the war. Susanna was born in the same town after the war, then went to Bytom in Poland! Even though they were not able to figure out if or how they are related, Dieter suggested that didn’t matter: Let’s just decide we are family! Since Susanna is in regular touch with only one of her relatives, a cousin who lives in Nuremberg with her husband, friendship is very important to her and she invests a lot of time and effort maintaining it. I, too, grew very fond of Joanna and Christoph Konopinski whom I see almost every year in Nuremberg and whose hospitality is incomparable.
Since 2009 we spend a week each year in Stratford, Ontario. Susanna always has been a theater aficionado and the Stratford Festival (formerly called the Shakespeare Festival) offers plenty of opportunities to indulge in world-class plays. We are lucky—friends of ours from Detroit have retired to this wonderful little town and become ushers at the festival. We are very grateful for their hospitality. This annual trip is—as Susanna calls it—the highlight of the year for her.
How to describe the last love of my life? I liken her, the writer, to the masterful technique of her short stories. They appear to navigate on the even flow of her narrative, and you figure that you can see her toss the anchor at a predictable harbor. But woe to you if you adhere to that assumption! In her stories, in her life—I mean in our lives—there is a sudden resetting of the sails. And you know you have been had! Examples abound. One year we joined a Christmas party of my department at Wayne State University. Close to the building in which it takes place, we witnessed an old beggar sitting in the snow. Susanna was devastated. When all the guests had arrived, she whistled loudly through her teeth and asked the crowd for a moment of attention. Within five minutes she had collected about seventy dollars and stuffed a bag full with food. This pittance she handed over to the old man, who was totally dumbfounded.
She is not just practically minded but also manually skilled. When she immigrated to the United States, she brought her huge toolbox along, fixing almost everything in the house except electrical stuff. She also shipped an immense number of books to her new home. This is her weak spot. Even though we literally live in a library, she still buys books. Both of us believe in exercise. My lifetime sport has been swimming. Susanna’s life sports are different. She is a walker, preferring nature walks. Yet while walking fast, she is fully attuned to her surroundings. There isn’t a plant, an herb, a bush in bloom, or a caterpillar or a bird that escapes her attention or fails to evokes her astonishment. Hardly a day goes by that she comes home from a walk without having found at least one coin.
She takes a fifty-minute walk through our subdivision almost daily, while nervously spotting the overly aggressive Canadian geese that have spread out in the last years. One day they made a foray into our short road for the first time: a flock of about forty were on the lawn in front of our house. To my surprise Susanna opened the garage door, grabbed a huge umbrella, and rushed toward her enemies, vigorously opening and closing the umbrella with raucous noises that swallowed up the tooting of the frightened birds. At last sighting, the geese were taking flight in the direction of the Canadian border.
Since 2016 she’s been playing ping pong again and enjoys it immensely, after having paused for about forty years. She has two partners, and for her it’s all about the fun of playing—no matter who wins—even though I have told her that if she loses, she needn’t come home. And as I mentioned, she loves to dance, and boy, she’s got rhythm—who could ask for anything more?
When Susanna wanted to get a divorce from her first husband, she waived her right to alimony, even though he was a well-paid physician. Before she and I married, she told me she didn’t want to inherit anything from me, arguing that she had entered my life when I was already in my eighties and had a son. As I continued to find out over the years, Susanna is a giver
rather than a taker. I quickly learned that Susanna does not want to receive any gifts from me. Even uttering a thought in this direction upsets her. Instead, she occasionally asks me to read a book that she likes. My taking the time to do so, and being able to discuss it with her, she considers a wonderful gift. She doesn’t mind—and actually is delighted—when I write her a poem. Also, when I sometimes dare to buy her a little something, for example a beautiful calendar with a squirrel on it (her favorite animal), she is deeply touched. Before joining me in my condominium in West Bloomfield, she uttered just one wish: to install a bidet. She got it.
Like me, Susanna is as punctual as a Prussian officer (that must be a German thing); she is very quick-witted, and we make each other laugh a lot. She hasn’t changed from that first evening in Minden, when I noted how smart, funny, cute, and creative she was. What I did not know then is how loving, caring, and highly sensitive she is—the latter, I assume, sometimes a consequence of a troubled childhood and youth with a bitter and very sick father who became an invalid at age twenty-four, due to undetected hepatitis. This fact actually allowed the small family (Susanna is an only child) to leave Poland in 1965 and move to Germany, where he underwent lifesaving surgery. He was also told that his maximal life expectancy was no more than ten more years. This had a huge impact on the family. Since early childhood Susanna has been a constant worrier, and she suffers from extreme sleeplessness. My wife lets nobody down: since her mother’s death she took over the financial support of a former colleague of hers in Poland, a woman Susanna had only known as a two-year-old prior to her emigration to Germany. But she didn’t just send parcels and money. For many years, until the woman’s death in 2017, she also wrote letters and called her.
Needless to say, we have a dishwasher. But from the beginning my wife told me she prefers to hand wash the dishes. That would warm up her constantly cold hands, she claimed, and at the same time she could indulge in audiobooks and NPR. That’s the story about the fate of a dishwasher that hasn’t been in use for many years. It serves as a repository for bakery goods, cookies, chocolate, and bread. Dark chocolate and Indian food, by the way, are things she scarcely can resist.
I have rarely been challenged so intensely by conversations such as ours; they are every evening’s bill of fare and they vary from taking a stand on world politics to the sophistication of Bach’s compositions. Some evenings we read our favorite poems to each other or sing together. When I met Susanna, I was very astonished and delighted to find out that she knows so many songs and lyrics of my time, especially songs from the Big Band Era. She had always loved this kind of music.
And what about our age difference? When we married I quipped, “My wife is half my age and has double my brains.” Of course that equation no longer holds because of mathematical stringencies. But Susanna drew even with her own aphorism. Quoth she: “I fear when I turn fifty, he, with his unbounded energy, will trade me in for two twenty-five-year-olds.” Well, her fiftieth has come and gone and that eventuality did not materialize.
Admittedly, the first years of our married life required some adjustments across different upbringings: my insistence on male prerogatives, reliance on diplomatic circumlocution, and indifference to outside appearances clashed with her distinct sense of justice and fairness (even if it is to her disadvantage), her insistence on straightforward honesty at all times, a meticulous adherence to nonclashing attire, and so forth, to mention just a few examples. But I guess we knew that give-and-take was the demand of the moment and minor differences had to be buried. We managed their entombment. Thank God we are aligned on the major issues that bedevil us today. We agree politically and economically; we see eye-to-eye on the need for women’s rights, equity of income, liberal ethics, environmental protections, and many more. And yes, we have a fondness for punning in German, the language we talk at home and when we are by ourselves. Both of us having the same sense of humor and being pretty good at repartee helps cope with a world that at times seems to have lost its compass.
On June 9, 1944, as a soldier, I conquered Normandy. On June 9, 2004, as private citizen Stern, I conquered what turned out to be my soul mate. Rodger’s and Hammerstein’s aforementioned song ends with the line, “Once you have found her, never let her go.”
I followed his advice.
CHAPTER TEN
Working Past Ninety
A Salute to the Holocaust Memorial Center Zekelman Family Campus
Transitions can be sprung upon us as slowly as evolutionary changes or in a blink of a split second. My transitioning from professor to department head to provost to professor emeritus traveled a course of about fifty years. Yet when each rung up the ladder (or down, as the case may be) occurred, it came about with some combination of excitement, sadness, hope, and fear.
As early as 2002, I realized that there is a time to teach and a time to retire (or perhaps it wasn’t early—I was eighty at the time). Yet I did not walk gently into that good night of retirement when I said goodbye to my university. I foresaw that I would miss my classes and my students—and I railed against that loss. Fortunately, my university career ended on a note of triumph: the College of Liberal Arts, on the initiative of its dean, had organized a retirement party that broke precedent. The triumph came first; in fact it had been preceded by a prelude of trumpet blasts. That same month a select committee of faculty and administration had named me an outstanding university citizen. Only four such awards were given out that year. My socially conscious efforts beyond the campus had been recognized.
Then came the retirement party at a filled-to-the brim festive hall, where almost all of the colleagues closest to me, including the president of the university, were in attendance. Among the array of speeches was one by Donald Haase, senior associate dean, and a student of mine as an undergraduate. He spoke of me as an adherent and guardian of academic integrity. But that led to an evening of self-examination, as I recalled an insightful German truism: “Lob verpflichtet.” [Praise puts an obligation on us.] An adherent of professional ethics? I thought that fit me. But had I also been its guardian?
When I was asked to become part of the Holocaust Memorial Center Zekelman Family Campus Academic Advisory Committee in Greater Detroit, I took it as merely another application of my educational expertise, coupled with my personal experiences and my supposed leadership skills. Rabbi Charles Rosenzveig, as the founding member of the Holocaust Memorial Center, spelled it out for me. I was asked to help the Center become “a world-class facility educating the public on all matters regarding the Holocaust and genocide.” I fully understood his stated goals and was, of course, fully familiar with the name Zekelman, the family that had not only most generously contributed financially to the Institution but had also benefitted it with its advice and wisdom. Yet I could not overlook my shortcomings when it came to tackling this new task. Though I was, beginning at age six, a lifelong museum visitor, what on earth did I know about the management of a museum? Fortunately, the designation “Advisory Committee” was somewhat of a misnomer. Neither Rabbi Rosenzveig nor Henry Dorfman, the chairman of the board, appeared to be in need of my advice as they were set in their convictions. But “my” committee became an aggregate of talent scouts for the Center, whose members throughout the years would lead colleagues and well-wishers within its orbit. We recruited Kenneth Waltzer from Michigan State University, head of the Jewish Studies Department and a well-known Holocaust historian with an encyclopedic knowledge of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp. We also gained the volunteer services of Melvin Small, who was teaching World History at Wayne State University. He caught even slight mistakes, including mine, before they could become the “gotcha” criticism of censorious visitors. These experts and others put their storehouse of knowledge at the Center’s disposal. And without noticing it, I myself became tied to the Center beyond escape.
Our gifts as talent scouts extended beyond the fertile grounds of academics. At a party I heard a razor-sharp debate between my wife Judy’s
friends—Alex and his wife, also named Judy—about God’s role during the Holocaust. Both had miraculously survived. From that outcome, Alex had drawn his own conclusion. “I followed every one of God’s commandments and I’m convinced that my conduct led to my being saved.”
“Nonsense,” Alex’s wife said, pointing to the loss of her family. “My parents and my entire family were decent people who helped others wherever they could. God should have saved them.” She concluded that God was indifferent to people’s actions or had died in the course of the centuries.
“Stop right there!” I said. “You are both mighty debaters! How would you like to appear before a general audience?”
They became spellbinders at an event before a large audience that, typical for HMC, represented the whole spectrum of Jewish observance from agnostics to undeviating traditionalists. Questions from the audience resembled debates more than queries. But what lent further piquancy to the proceedings was the well-advertised fact that Judy and Alex were (at that time) husband and wife.
Many of HMC’s loyal followers began showing up at neighboring campuses and contributing to their intellectual environment. One event lingers in my mind, perhaps because it recalls a time when one could respect a speaker’s opinion at a forum, even when it greatly deviated from one’s own. After a lecture tour through Germany, I convinced several German political leaders to pay a countervisit to my campus. Otto Schilly from the Social Democratic Party of Germany came, then West Germany’s Minister of the Interior, and also Countess Marion Dönhoff, a German journalist who participated in the resistance against Hitler’s National Socialists. I persuaded Joe Stroud, the editor of the Detroit Free Press, to come in as moderator, since the topic was “Fairness between Rich and Poor.” I tried to bring in a point-of-view representative from the Center.
