by Whitney Otto
What her letters left out was her happiness with Ines. She neglected to mention that she had reopened her old studio—her equipment exactly as she had left it the day she walked out, almost two years prior. And she said nothing about her and Ines contacting old clients and pursuing new ones.
They had fewer émigrés than before, having heard that the Nazis were making it impossible to stay but also impossible to go. A Jew was permitted to deal only with other Jews—except there were no Jewish-owned businesses anymore. On the fashionable Kurfurstendamm, signs everywhere blocked Jews from entering. One émigré told them that all you saw, on every door, every window was “JewJewJewJew. Like it’s one long refrain, this ‘Jew’ that appears everywhere. I can live without the luxuries,” said the émigré, “but not without bread and meat and coal.”
They were told that in Berlin all Jews had to add “Israel” or “Sarah” to their names. Stars lost all their meaning of dreams and aspirations when affixed to clothing.
Jews were being told not to bother looking for apartments. Possessions were sold for nothing, and even those who could get permission to leave were not allowed to depart with any money, guaranteeing their impoverishment and being turned back by various countries. It was a desperate, confusing state of affairs to be so unwanted and so unable to go.
Ignacio was getting impatient. Barrie was three months old, and he wanted his daughter and his wife home, with him. Charlotte and Ines had fallen back into their easy “wife” routine, now expanded as a small family. Charlotte’s life was doubled as a legal, conventional wife and an emotional, unrecognized “wife.”
Bruno and Marcelle Blum were in Toronto, having left London just as Charlotte arrived. Though her parents said nothing about Charlotte returning to her husband, she knew them well enough to know that this omission was their way of saying Ignacio was her husband; he was Barrie’s father. Their empathy for Ignacio ran high in light of their separation from their son, daughter, and now granddaughter. So many families they knew were being involuntarily torn apart.
The tension of living day to day without making any sorts of long-range plans wore on the young women. Charlotte and Ines pulled a little away from each other in anticipation of Charlotte’s inevitable, they thought, but did not voice aloud, departure. They really weren’t each other’s wives; they would never be seen as a family. Words like wife, family, and mommy would always be in quotes for them, and they knew it.
Charlotte thought about the meaning of wife; she thought about the brokenness of her life without Ines. She thought about Ignacio, and she thought about Barrie’s little smile, which looked nothing like Ines’s or Charlotte’s.
On an otherwise unremarkable day in November 1938, Charlotte and Ines received word of Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. Synagogues looted and burned; homes looted and burned; women and children brutalized. Countless Jewish men sent to camps, tortured and killed. The entire city smashed to shards of jagged and crushed glass. Someone neglected to tell the thugs who demolished the Blum GlasWerks that it was no longer a Jewish-owned business; it had been owned by Aryans for over a year. They were idiots destroying their own property.
Charlotte remembered her brother’s office, previously her uncle’s office, and the fragile glass models of houses and windows and sculptures. She thought of the little glass ice cube with her portrait, taken by Ines, one of the only things she had brought to her Buenos Aires studio.
Charlotte thought about her father and his passion for glass, his belief that glass was the way to utopia, the best possible world for all men, the spiritual possibilities of glass. The Glass Chain. Bruno Blum and the other architects would never think of the glass chain again without hearing it shatter. The smashing of the Blum GlasWerks. The smashing of the family’s glass house. Charlotte covered her face with her hands as she stood in her London studio, whispering, “Trilby.”
And then it was time to go.
This time it was Charlotte who stood on the ship’s deck, holding little Barrie in her arms, gazing down at Ines. This time Ines and Charlotte didn’t watch each other, not daring to move; this time Ines, on the dock, mugged for Charlotte. She blew kisses, threw her arms wide, then settled her hands back over her heart in romantic exaggeration. She fluttered her eyes, waved wildly, mouthing the words “Don’t forget me.”
Charlotte watched her lover’s antics with amusement; Ines had always been the more expressive of the two girls. She’s the one who should be living in Argentina, thought Charlotte.
When the ship pulled away from the dock, Charlotte stood there, watching Ines grow smaller and smaller until she was lost in the crowd.
There was relief in knowing that Ines made it to America. London no longer felt like a refuge; Europe felt precarious enough for Charlotte to book passage back to Buenos Aires and for Ines to marry a young New Yorker she had known for six months. When Ines arrived in the States, she picked up her camera and began taking portraits and art shots, making a small living but a living nonetheless. She no longer shot advertisements. My heart is not in it, she wrote to Charlotte, though she didn’t have to say as much.
The war came and still no word of Trilby Blum. Charlotte’s parents stayed in Toronto and their relatives in England weathered the Blitz. It was strange being in another country because you could no longer stay in your own. Hannah Arendt wrote that it isn’t enough to enter a new country and willingly and happily take on its nationality, because you will never be French, or Swiss, or English, or Czech, you’ll only ever be a Jew. Patriotism, you learn, isn’t an option. She said of Hitler that no one wanted to know that these times had formed a “new kind of human being,” found in concentration camps, and in internment camps—sent to each by enemies (the former) and friends (the latter).
Persecution erased all the differences of nationality, social class, religious or secular beliefs. Your social alignment was no longer your own; you became Them. And immigration wiped away your professional identity. If you can’t practice law, are you a lawyer? To go from “somebody” to “nobody” takes its toll.
Somebody who, at a very young age, had her own photography studio, kitten + kohl; somebody who made avant-garde advertisements and won a prize; somebody who had friends who worked in films, flew planes, and raced cars; somebody who fell in love, lost that love, regained it, then had to surrender it. Somebody whose famous father believed so absolutely in the spiritual and utopian properties of living in glass that he began an ongoing epistolary conversation called the Glass Chain among ten brilliant, like-minded men.
Steady yourself.
Then break the chain.
Charlotte stepped onto the dock in the sunlight of Buenos Aires’s January summer, still a little disconcerted by the reversal of seasons. The jacarandas were in full bloom, dropping their papery purple blossoms all over the sidewalks to be crushed underfoot, often attached to the soles of shoes.
Charlotte used her time at sea getting over Ines, trying to reconnect to the life around her. Little Barrie forced her to move outside of herself and her sadness, except for the nights when she was unable to stop thinking. Then she arrived in Buenos Aires, Ignacio meeting them at the dock, his smile meaning even more to her now that it was reproduced in the loved face of their daughter. Their mirrored smiles made Charlotte reconsider (again) being a wife and mother.
In the three months that she had been back, the only times Charlotte picked up her Rolleiflex was to take the infrequent picture of Barrie, sometimes Ignacio with Barrie; the two were like a mutual admiration society, which pleased Charlotte more than it gave her feelings of exclusion.
She cooked, oversaw the maid who cleaned the house. She made a halfhearted stab at gardening before hiring someone for that too. All around her she saw untaken pictures, which still didn’t move her to pick up her camera. Ignacio rather liked Charlotte’s devotion to their family; though he didn’t say it, she could tell. There was a shadow of formality between them now, a bit of distance that she tried to bridge by
supporting his work, and spending her energy being domestic. In this way they were almost normal by Argentine standards. No one seemed to notice that she wasn’t making pictures anymore.
If anyone had, she would’ve told them that she’d lost her voice. She was so derailed by news of the war, her friend Maria’s death (she never got to build her houses), and the imprisonment of Giselle Weiss (who was Jewish) and her husband (who wasn’t). She heard a rumor that mentioned a baby; Charlotte hoped it was just a rumor.
Still no word of Trilby.
Ines wrote that she liked New York because it was so eager to please and guileless. Charlotte, she said, we would be great here.
In 1948, with the war behind the world (Trilby living in Zurich with Bruno and Marcelle Blum, too broken by his years at Dachau to live alone), Argentina had become the unlikely destination for Germans. Charlotte imagined that most expatriates, upon hearing their native language, sought out the speaker, just to talk to someone with a shared knowledge of a lost place. Not so in Argentina, where the German voice could be Jewish or it could be Nazi, and so the expats lived side by side as if the other didn’t exist at all.
Charlotte still wasn’t seriously taking pictures, even though Barrie was getting older and more independent. What no one tells you about having children is that it isn’t the physical demand they make in your life that affects your art, it’s the emotional space they fill, crowding out your art. So even when you have the time to work, you’re still mentally occupied.
She referred to herself as the Dilettante, something that she could see irritated Ignacio, who said it was just a way of feeling sorry for herself.
“You have everything,” she would say. “A career you want, a child, a wife. I think we can all agree that I am the Perfect Wife.”
“No,” said Ignacio, before storming from the room, “you’re the Dilettante.”
A dinner party at Ignacio and Charlotte’s could include architects, a magazine editor, two college professors, and all their wives, along with one professor who had a wife and mistress in attendance, though one knew about the other while the other remained in ignorance. Charlotte liked these parties made up of colleagues and intellectuals, people they knew mostly through Ignacio. Some were people he had known in school; others he’d met professionally. The women always ended up together near the kitchen, even when none of them were cooking. And no matter if they had professions of their own, it was always understood that their careers came second. No one questioned this arrangement, not even the women.
When they were together one-on-one, or if there was enough wine and the men were out of earshot, the conversation made enough turns to arrive at locations of discontent. This, it must be said, didn’t mean that a wife didn’t love her husband, especially since some of their husbands (and lovers, as it sometimes happened) were far more broad-minded than society at large. Then again, these were the sorts of men who would be drawn to women who wanted more than domesticity even when they made no significant move to change the status quo.
Then everyone would thank the Martíns for a lovely evening and life would continue accordingly.
Charlotte wasn’t unhappy with Ignacio, and their arguments were infrequent. Then one night she dreamt about Ines; it wasn’t only the particulars but also the quality of the dream. They were in Berlin, before the war, surrounded by Neile, Grete Grun, Giselle Weiss, and Maria at the Wannsee. The sunlight hit the water of the lake. Then they were in New York, and Charlotte had been living there for months.
When Charlotte woke up she was crying.
And all because she had received a letter from Ines that said, Charlotte, we would be great here.
Charlotte sent a letter to Ines while she was out shopping for the dinner party that night, that read, Anything is better than this lonely fate. I love you and I miss you and I’m leaving him.
On this particular night, her decision to leave had the effect of making her more relaxed than she had been in years, and also more energized by happiness. What was the point of surviving Germany if it was to settle for a life marked by an absence? Barrie was old enough to spend summers with Ignacio, and she would love New York; the Martins were lucky enough to have an adaptable, curious child who enjoyed novelty.
It was in the spirit of the relief (and anticipation) of her decision that, when the magazine editor casually asked to see some of Charlotte’s pictures she took him to her studio, where he quietly studied the kitten + kohl work—portraits and advertisements, some photomontages—as well as some of what they had made in London.
“How old were you?” asked the editor.
“A mere child,” said Charlotte.
“And the other photographer?”
“Also a child.”
“This work,” he said, “it’s new, I think, and exciting.”
As they returned to the party, the editor said, “May I call on you next week? I have an idea that I’ve been wanting to do for some time, and you may be just the person I’ve been looking for.”
Charlotte agreed to meet, since she still had some months to figure everything out before she could arrange her journey to New York.
Idylls of the Queen, edited by Charlotte’s dinner guest, was a magazine for the middle-class Argentine housewife, the one who had aspirations and longings but who could use practical tips on cooking, cleaning, dressing, taking care of her husband, and child rearing. The editor wanted to run a column called “Psychoanalysis Will Help You.”
“I want to get someone who knows something about the subconscious—we’ll call him a psychiatrist, even though he won’t technically be a psychiatrist. We’ll ask our readers to send in their dreams, and our ‘doctor’ will offer analyses of the dreams.”
“Am I the psychiatrist?” asked Charlotte.
“No. You’re the photographer. Your pictures already have that strangeness, that feeling of the fantastic.”
“Whose dreams?”
“Those of our readers. You know, the ‘typical Argentine housewife’—you’ll show her her own dream.”
The title of the magazine section was
“Les Son los Sueños de la Ordinario Una alma de Casa” (Such Are the Dreams of the Everyday Housewife)
The stars can line up for an artist in ways she could never have imagined; Charlotte Blum’s assignment at Idylls of the Queen was such a celestial occurrence. Her photomontages were the visual embodiments of all the anxieties and fears of the middle-class Argentine housewife: the lack of identity, the loss of autonomy, no control over one’s fate, the confinement that is home, husband, and child. The worry over society’s reaction to a woman who isn’t happy being married, who may never have desired marriage, who may not want children, or think she is a good wife or mother, or maybe she loves other women. Maybe she wants something other than this life, even if it is a very good life; wrestling those feelings of acting on the stage of another’s life. Imagine going through your day thinking, This is not me.
Charlotte made photomontages of miniature women putting giant keys in giant doors that opened on deserted, winding mountain roads. A woman gazes at herself in a hand mirror, only to see her husband looking back at her. A baby lives in an enormous lily held by his mother’s oversize hand, with horses in the background, calmly grazing. A kneeling woman is the base of a lamp (a lampshade held over her head as if to cover her) while a man’s hand turns her light on and off. A secretary is shocked to look away from her typewriter and see that her legs have turned into trees, her feet roots sunk into the floor. Another woman kneels inside her own gigantic open mouth, her hands resting on her teeth.
A woman is stung by a huge wasp. A married couple skate on top of crashing ocean waves. A woman is tied to a chair by a web of string.
Women beseech ancient Greek statues, or try to play a violin with a broom instead of a bow, or try to escape a vat of soap suds, climbing a washboard as if it were a ladder and unable to get traction.
Women in birdcages, sitting on living room chairs. Women
window-shopping for husbands posing with price tags dangling from their wrists. A biplane crashes and burns in a garden. A paper boat holds a woman sailing out to sea. The salon drapes are made up of a dozen eyes. A ladder going up leads only to a ladder going down.
There are recurring images of the solar system, boulders, mountains, roads, mirrors, musical instruments, men, violent seas, flying, and falling.
Anselm Cooper was the real name of magazine’s “psychiatrist,” a sociologist called Dr. Roberto Obermann. He was the man who told the women what their dreams meant—it was as if the editor of the women’s magazine still didn’t quite understand that a man interpreting a woman’s subconscious was not that different from the liberal-minded husbands of Charlotte’s friends allowing their wives’ careers as long as they didn’t interfere with their wifely duties. The real dream interpretation was Charlotte’s. Only her photographs captured the experience with whimsy and a wink and a touch of sadness for anyone looking closely enough; it all comes tumbling out.
And the readers of the magazine loved them.
• • •
Six months passed in which Charlotte had the success she didn’t even know she wanted until it finally found her. The column was renewed for another year, announced at a party given in honor of Charlotte Blum and Anselm “Dr. Roberto Obermann” Cooper. The upper-class women readers were clamoring for Charlotte to take their portraits. A handful of companies, looking to change their images, came calling. Charlotte spent her days taking pictures to cut and paste into her montages, as well as searching for images in newspapers and magazines. She thought of Hannah Höch, the artist she and Ines loved, as she looked and cut and looked and cut.
