American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest

by Hannah Nordhaus

  There were perhaps fifty Anglo women—white women—in Santa Fe when Julia arrived in 1866. The rest of the women were of Hispanic and Indian descent. They smoked cornhusk cigarettes and danced in the streets, their arms and necks bare, cleavage brimming, faces painted with a white flour paste to protect them from the sun. Their children ran naked. “I am constrained,” wrote Susan Magoffin, “to keep my veil drawn closely over my face all the time to protect my blushes.” Julia likely avoided Santa Fe’s nightly fandangos, packed with dancing women who painted their faces with the bright red juice of a flowering cockscomb—the current fashion.

  It was a good-time town. The dance halls had dirt floors, and when the dust got too thick, the music stopped and the serving girls sprinkled down the floor so that the dancing could resume. DON’T SHOOT THE MUSICIANS, begged signs on the walls. Whiskey flowed at all times of day, and on the streets and in the saloons the gambling never stopped. “The governor himself and his lady, the grave magistrate and the priestly dignitary, the gay caballero and the titled señora may all be seen taking their doubloons upon the turn of a card,” wrote Josiah Gregg.

  Parties often ended in gunfire. There were beatings and lynch mobs and ears bitten off. With the Indian Wars swirling around the city, scalpings were not uncommon, either. The Santa Fe New Mexican reported that a man killed his cheating wife with an ax soon after Julia’s arrival—but this did not seem at all shocking. There were shootings and pistol duels on the backstreets and in the alleys, even on the Plaza in broad daylight. At breakfast each day—if the newspaper in the nearby town of Las Vegas, New Mexico, is to be believed—citizens greeted each other with a resigned “Well, who was killed last night?” This half-civilized town was situated in a territory of the United States, but it was not yet American.

  Reading accounts of Santa Fe in the years after Julia’s arrival, I did begin to wonder whether Abraham had been completely honest about his circumstances when arranging for Julia to leave her known world. The home that Abraham readied for Julia—the adobe that she moved into upon arriving in Santa Fe—lay on Burro Alley. The street was only a few blocks long but housed all manner of iniquity: gamblers, drinkers, and whores, obvious and numerous. The city’s most notorious casinos and bordellos were all on Julia’s street, which also hosted the local market for donkeys and wood. A photo from the 1880s shows a bare dirt road closely lined with rough adobe walls, with cockeyed peeled-bark viga fences, wood-laden burros, and scrofulous men—no women, none outdoors anyway, and not a speck of vegetation in sight. It was no place for any self-respecting bride.

  Susan Magoffin, the young diarist and newlywed, lodged on a more respectable street. She stayed only two months in Santa Fe before continuing south into Mexico and finally home to Kentucky, but even in that short time, the city’s limited charms wore off. “I am most tired of Santa Fe & do not regret leaving,” she wrote. Julia was a slight twenty-two-year-old from a milder world, who knew neither English nor Spanish and nothing at all about the arid, naked place into which she had been imported. She could not comfort herself with the thought that this was temporary.

  five

  PROMISED LAND

  Zadoc Staab (center) with Jewish merchants and Kiowa Indians.

  Courtesy of Palace of the Governors Photo Archives, (NMHM/DCA), Neg. No. 7890.

  I can find no record of Julia’s first years in Santa Fe—no newspaper stories, no archived documents, no memories preserved in her hand. I don’t know if she came to love or fear Abraham, or if the marriage came to feel like a home or a prison to her, or if he simply remained a stranger. I don’t know if she always found the roughness of her new city to be a trial, or if there were moments when she relished the adventure and came to appreciate the stark beauty of the place.

  There were a only a few other Jewish wives when Julia arrived—mostly spouses of the Spiegelbergs and Abraham’s brother Zadoc. Some of the Jewish immigrants had wedded local women: one merchant, Solomon Bibo, married into the local Acoma tribe and became its governor. But others imported their mates from elsewhere—Jewish wives who had followed their Jewish husbands who had followed their brothers and cousins to America in a chain of family and village migration.

  It must have been a comfort to Julia when her younger brother, Ben Schuster, joined that chain, arriving in Santa Fe six months after her and moving in with the family, to work as a “drummer”—a traveling salesman—for the firm. Among family, perhaps she felt less alone. And it must have been a blow when, just months after Julia arrived, Abraham’s brother Zadoc and his wife, Fanny, who had come to Santa Fe as a bride in 1862, moved permanently to New York City, where Zadoc set up as the firm’s official East Coast and European buyer. Julia must have mourned the loss of her Santa Fe sister-in-law, who came as close as Julia could get to replacing the sisters she had left behind.

  Perhaps in this time she leaned on the other Jewish merchants’ wives, who also spoke German and bemoaned the dust and the dryness and tried to re-create some semblance of the world in which they had grown up. They paid calls at each other’s mud houses, walking the dusty streets with parasols or traveling by carriage. They took afternoon teas and late suppers.

  These women were strangers to each other—all from different villages and cities. But they were German and Jewish in a place where no other women were, and they became their own tribe. The first Yom Kippur service was observed in Santa Fe in 1860, shortly after the first Spiegelberg wife arrived. After the Jewish wives had borne children, a Denver rabbi traveled to New Mexico and “circumcised a large number of children at an advanced age.” The hosts, according to an article in the Ohio Jewish weekly The Israelite, were impressed with “the scientific manner in which the operation was performed.”

  This was a ritual that took place across the frontier. Jewish families laid down shallow roots in unwelcoming soil—strangers in a strange land—and hoped that they would thrive.

  It would not have been unusual for Santa Fe’s German Jews to feel as if they were strangers. They had always been outsiders. They had lived in Germany, after all. Though Jews had been in the German states since the time of the Romans—“It is terribly cold and the air is thick with the colossal chill” wrote a tenth-century Jewish merchant who plied the trade routes near Lügde—they weren’t at all considered to be German. Traders and merchants and moneylenders, they were set apart by their faith and their dress and their mercantile niche and their language—Judendeutsch, Yiddish. They were foreigners, an invasive species. It didn’t matter how long they had lived in Germany, which during Julia’s childhood was not yet a country but rather a constellation of feudal principalities ruled by kings, counts, dukes, bishops, lords, and margraves. Jews were tolerated within that constellation only because of their money. “The town of Beeskow” wrote one Prussian tax commissary to King Frederick William I in 1720, “would like to have a wealthy Jew.”

  The Jews loaned money to impecunious German sovereigns, bought and sold things that others couldn’t or wouldn’t, and funded and supplied armies—much as Abraham and the Spiegelbergs would later do in New Mexico. These were the things that Jews could do in Germany in the years before Abraham left. What they couldn’t do, depending on which principality they called home, was buy houses without special permission; walk on the sidewalks; farm; employ non-Jews; open stores; own stores facing the street; sell meat to Christians; make cheese or beer; ride in a carriage; trade in wool, wood, leather, tobacco, or wine; or practice a guild craft.

  In Berlin, kosher Jews were compelled upon their marriage to purchase wild boars bagged on the royal hunting grounds. Later, newlyweds were required to purchase china from the Royal Porcelain Factory—seconds and other pieces that wouldn’t sell, unloaded by the factory’s manager at above-market prices. It is said that Moses Mendelssohn, the great philosopher of the Jewish Enlightenment and the grandfather of the composer Felix Mendelssohn, acquired twenty life-size porcelain monkeys in this fashion. They were garish, foppish creatures, their paws
outstretched as if begging.

  In some German principalities, Jews were forced to attend church; in others, they wore yellow “Jew badges”; in yet others, they were required to doff their hats to anyone they met in the street who commanded “Jud, mach Mores!”—Jew, show your manners. If a local Jew went bankrupt, the other Jews in the community had to pay his debts. There were separate cemeteries for Jews, of course, and separate gallows.

  The rules were different from village to village. Lügde was ruled by the Catholic bishop of Paderborn. The town of Bad Pyrmont, only four kilometers away, was governed by the hereditary prince of Saxony. In Lügde, Jews were tolerated in various trades; in Bad Pyrmont they were forbidden from any business. There were kind sovereigns and brutal ones; good harvests and poor ones; times of health and plagues; moments of quiet acceptance and years of anti-Semitic riots, shop-burnings, and expulsions. “From time to time we enjoyed peace,” wrote Glückel of Hameln, a seventeenth-century merchant’s wife who hailed from a city twenty kilometers from Lügde, “and again were hunted forth; and so it has been to this day.”

  The first mention of a Jew in Lügde was in 1598—a man named Salomon, a moneylender in dispute with his debtors. He probably wasn’t the first Jew to reside in Lügde, however. Jews were often expelled from German villages, and allowed back in, and, when hard times hit, expelled again. They were blamed for plagues and bad harvests, and accused of poisoning wells, stealing Christian babies (to circumcise them), and using Christian blood for sacramental purposes.

  A butcher named “Isaac the Jew”—a Schuster ancestor, perhaps—appeared in the criminal records in late 1651 and for many years after that, accused of such atrocities as slaughtering animals fourteen days before Advent, selling veal to a woman “pretending falsely to be pregnant during the fasting period,” beating his wife on Sundays, marrying illegally, and allowing calves to be brought into the city on Palm Sunday. For each of these transgressions, he was issued a fine or thrown in jail (and also issued a fine). Other Jews were docked for similar violations: selling oil, inviting peasants inside their houses, carrying meat outside the city, brawling, mismeasuring, or carrying chalk on Christian holidays.

  The German Jews paid taxes, lots of them: they were taxed as Jews when they came to live in a new place, and taxed each year they lived there. When they traveled, they paid an extra “Jew tax” at each town gate they passed. A list of those items subject to customs taxes upon entering the city of Mainz during the eighteenth century included: “Honey, Hops, Wood, Jews, Chalk, Cheese and Charcoal.” In Berlin, Jews passed through a gate reserved for livestock and Jews. And paid a tax to do so, of course. They were taxed at births, weddings, and funerals; taxed to open a house of worship, and taxed to keep it open. Those who wouldn’t or couldn’t pay were “unprotected Jews,” and had no right to stay. Isaac the Jew was allowed to remain in Lügde in the mid-1600s provided he paid two talers every year for his “letter of protection” and eighteen groschen for his wife. The eighteenth-century Schusters would have paid for this “protection,” too—along with the head tax, and the levy to support the church’s sexton and pastor, and the fee required to keep their businesses open, and a hefty “goat’s-wage” to keep livestock in town. When Lügde’s firefighting equipment fell into disrepair, the two hundred Christians in town supplied the money to pay for four new buckets; the Jews financed fourteen.

  Jews in Lügde were relatively lucky, though. They could own their houses there. After the 1740s, they could also own land. But they couldn’t farm, unless they could do so with exclusively Jewish labor, which most Jews couldn’t. They couldn’t practice a craft, like lacemaking or woodworking—this was forbidden by law at first, and later by the guilds, whose charters excluded murderers, thieves, adulterers, blasphemers, and Jews. So they stuck to what was permitted: butchering, peddling goods, trading gold and precious stones, and later, horses. They lent money, but if the amount was more than five talers, they had to make the loan in court under witness, because Jews were known to lie.

  By the mid-1700s there were five “protected” Jewish families in Lügde, concentrated in the quarter south of the marketplace. Julia’s grandparents were among them. They weren’t allowed to attend Christian schools, though they all learned to read, regardless of wealth and status. Until the early nineteenth century the Jews of Lügde had no surnames. Jewish men were named after their places of origin, or their fathers, or both; women were named after their places of origin, or their fathers, or their husbands: Glückel came from the town of Hameln; thus she was known as Glückel of Hameln. Moses was the son of Mendel; he was Moses Mendelssohn. Julia’s father was Levi David Schuster: Levi ben (son of) David. His father was David ben Levi.

  The practice was confusing, even for the Jews, so when the royal government of Westphalia granted Jews citizenship rights and duties in 1807, it concluded that Jews should be named and counted—all the better to be taxed. Some were named for their villages, and some for their trades: Kramer meant merchant; Kaufmann, too; Staab was a term for “rod” or “staff” and indicated a person who held some authority; Schuster, Julia’s family name, meant shoemaker, though there’s no indication that anyone ever made shoes. A family genealogy suggests they were so named because their house looked like a shoe.

  Lügde’s Jewish population peaked at 130 in 1863, at the crest of the wave of emigration that swept Abraham and Julia—and many Lügde brothers and cousins—to the New World. By 1871, there were 105 Jews in Lügde. They all left eventually; those who remained would later, of course, be forced to leave.

  In New Mexico, the Staabs and Spiegelbergs and Schusters were Jewish by birth but American by choice. If the Jewish community had been small and insular in Germany, it was even smaller in Santa Fe. The dry land in which these ambitious merchants settled was a place of remarkable fluidity as Mexican rule gave way to American governance, a barter economy to capitalism, and community land to fenced plots. Jews had been dark-skinned in Germany. Now they were “white,” at least when compared with the Indians and mestizo Spanish and free blacks and Chinese who lived beside them.

  In the New Mexico that Julia encountered in 1866, nobody seemed to care whether she and her husband were Jewish. The newspapers of the territory—most of them, anyway, and certainly the ones in Santa Fe—wrote kindly of the local Jews. This was sometimes because they were advertisers and investors, and sometimes because there simply weren’t enough Jews to seem threatening. New Mexico’s papers marked the Jewish holidays (“Many of the best residents are of the Jewish faith and they will thoroughly enjoy the holiday”), and noted with approval the plans for the Jews to build a synagogue in the booming town of Las Vegas, New Mexico, which lay seventy miles east of Santa Fe—“That is right, the more churches the better. Let all the sects be represented.” Editorials in the Albuquerque and Santa Fe papers applauded efforts in Germany “to break down the last barrier separating Jews from Christians,” expressed dismay at the periodic anti-Jewish massacres in eastern Europe, and chastised any anti-Semitic screeds they came across—“that the Jews are a charitable race,” wrote the New Mexican, “is allowed even by those who have the strongest prejudice against them.”

  Abraham cared that he was a Jew. Marrying within the faith appeared to be important to him: he went back for a Jewish wife, after all, as did Zadoc, and Ben Schuster, and the Spiegelbergs. But there were limits—hard limits—to these Jewish merchants’ piety. Their stores remained open on Saturdays, and though most of them closed for the High Holidays, not all did. The Jewish newspaper Die Deborah noted a few years after Julia’s arrival that only eight Jews showed up for Rosh Hashanah services in the local Germania Hall because the merchants wouldn’t let their employees take the time off. “The Almighty Dollar is closer to the Jews of Santa Fe than our holy religion,” it lamented. There was, in Santa Fe, no temple, no Hebrew school, no kashruth. Indeed, there seemed to be nothing particularly Jewish about Abraham’s life in Santa Fe except the history, and the wife, he broug
ht from Europe. He didn’t need Israel; he had already found his promised land.

  He was American now. His children would be, as well. I imagine that he wanted the same for his wife.

  Joanna

  ON THE INTERNET, I ran across a blog written by a relative I’d never met before—a third cousin named Robby. “My great-great-grandmother was a profoundly unhappy woman,” Robby wrote in a post. A few years before, he had exchanged emails with a writer named Joanna Hershon, who was researching a novel based on the Staabs. It had recently been released.

  The book is called The German Bride, and it tells the story of Eva Frank, a wealthy German Jewish girl who falls into a relationship with an attractive, if morally unappealing, Gentile painter in Berlin. The affair ends in a horrible accident, and Eva’s grief propels her into the arms of a dapper, if morally unappealing, local boy gone west, Abraham Shein, who has made his fortune selling dry goods in Santa Fe and has returned to Germany to find a bride. Seeking to escape her sorrow and lured by promises of adventure and wealth in a place far away, Eva marries him, travels the wagon trail, and arrives in Santa Fe. It turns out, though, that Abraham isn’t the great success he has represented himself to be. Nor is he, as Hershon puts it, “the most fiscally conservative man in town.” Rather, he lives in an adobe hovel on Burro Alley, “scraping along in squalor amid large insects, peculiar cooking smells, and refuse from chamber pots.”

  There isn’t even a bathtub in the house—Abraham Shein orders one for Eva, the first in Santa Fe—but there is nowhere to put it, so it gathers leaves and rainwater in the back courtyard. Later, Eva and Abraham conceive a child in that tub. In Joanna’s book, Abraham isn’t a kind man: he doesn’t allow Eva to keep kosher, and he has a gambling, boozing, and whoring problem. He is deeply indebted to the madam across the street, and he measures his character by “the fact that he hadn’t ever come close to pawning his wife’s jewels.”