Jumping Over Shadows

by Annette Gendler

  “Well, if you must be that stubborn about it,” he huffed, and he walked away.

  Later that day when he was leaving work and passed by my office door, jingling his car keys, I called out, “Shana tova” to him. He stopped and looked at me, and his blank face told me he had no idea what I had said.

  “Happy New Year,” I said with a smile.

  “Oh, yes, yes,” he mumbled, walking on. “Happy New Year.”

  It was then not so far-fetched that this boss should have captured, with one offhand remark, who I was. I could never have come up with this definition myself. But, considering how others might see me and how, apparently, he saw me, I had to admit that the German Jew label made some sense: I spoke English with a slight accent, and when my husband called, I chattered in German, one of the few languages my boss did not understand. I had come from Germany. I had the tall bearing, work ethic, and orderliness (at least on the job) stereotypical of Germans. I was forthright about my Jewishness. I was, therefore, a German Jew. Never mind all the buts.

  THE PINTELE YID

  LOOKING TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE “GERMAN Jewish” side of my family, namely Guido’s, I discovered a collection of articles titled The Jews and Jewish Communities of Bohemia in the Past and in the Present, edited by Hugo Gold and published in 1934. One article covered the history of the Jews in Reichenberg, the typical sordid tale of discrimination, harassment, privileges granted and rescinded as Jewish peddlers started arriving there in the late Middle Ages. It also listed fifty-seven Jews who, in 1827, had been granted passbooks to do business in Reichenberg. I was skimming this list when my eyes caught the name Josef Rössler. I sat bolt upright. My heart was in my stomach. This was my great-grandfather’s name!

  It was spelled with an ss, but a quick search revealed that back then the German letter ß, for ss, had not been in use yet. Could it be? Could it be that Oma’s father, my great-grandfather, had been of Jewish heritage? Was this why he had killed himself in November 1938? To take that knowledge to his grave? To spare his family the shame of the Ahnenpaß and the dangers it would have brought with it? To save them from being classified as not quite Aryan?

  I knew that his mother’s family had not been Jewish. But his father’s? What did I know about his father? According to Oma’s written childhood memories, his father had died young and had owned a weaving business, not an atypical Jewish trade. His father could have been the son of this Josef Rössler, or otherwise related, and my great-grandfather could have been named after him. Generation-wise, it would work, and it is Jewish tradition to name children after deceased relatives, especially grandparents.

  This find shook me to the core. I had never believed that I had any Jewish ancestors whatsoever. There simply had never been any talk about that, nor any reason even to go looking for evidence. Could it be that my great-grandfather was to thank for that? That there was a pintele yid in me, that tiny Jewish spark that, according to Yiddish lore, is carried forward through generations and at some point reasserts itself? Could it be that my great-grandfather had killed himself in order to hide that he was a half Jew, a quarter Jew, or whatever the Nazis would have classified him as?

  What made me sit bolt upright, what made my heart drop to my stomach, was that with this find, should it be true, my great-grandfather’s suicide made sense. A noble man like him would have taken his own life to spare his family. Shooting himself on his in-laws’ oh-so-German grave could even have been a final gesture of claiming that German heritage he loved so much, or of diverting attention from his own lineage.

  Even the family explanation that he shot himself because the family was verjudet now made sense, as did Oma’s utter silence about her father’s death. If she had known something (I doubt she did, because wouldn’t she have told me upon my conversion that there was Jewish blood in our family?), if her mother had known something, they had kept the secret by essentially telling the truth: he had killed himself because the family was verjudet, except it wasn’t Resi’s marriage that was to blame.

  A VISIT WITH THE PAST

  HERTA, AS I KNEW HER, NEVER MADE A SECRET OF her Jewish heritage, something I did not appreciate until I looked and listened for it. After all, I was the grandchild of my grandparents, who benignly ignored anything Jewish, presumably, given their history, for the havoc it could create.

  When I visited Herta in the Wiesbaden nursing home she had moved to in 2002, she still wore her small golden Star of David pendant, but it now rested against a bony chest on the triangle of pale skin showing through the collar of her geometric-print polyester dress.

  “Nice of you to come,” Herta said, as she rolled her wheelchair toward me in the nursing home’s white hallway. I bent down to plant a kiss on her forehead. She used to wear a wig because of her extremely thin hair. On occasion, I had seen her without the wig—on hot days, or when we had shared a bedroom on our trip to Vienna all those years ago. Now there was simply a bald circle on top of her head and wisps of short white hair surrounding it.

  “There’s not much left of me now, is there?” she chuckled, referring to her weight loss and amputated leg. It warmed me to hear her chuckle, even though it lacked the rumble it used to have when she weighed a hundred pounds more. Thankfully, my sister, who had visited Herta before me, had warned me not to be too shocked by Herta’s appearance.

  “She is almost a skeleton,” my sister had said.

  Indeed, I could not help but study Herta’s sunken, wrinkled cheeks, which I remembered as rosy and so plump they used to squish her eyes.

  “Nice that you’re wearing this,” I said, caressing the Star of David pendant for an instant.

  “Ha! Yes,” she said, “I have to shock people here a little bit, don’t you think?” She smirked. Her mischievous streak was still there.

  “Come on in, Nettylein, come on in.” She swiveled her chair to return to her room.

  No one calls me Netty anymore, let alone the diminutive Nettylein. But in Herta’s voice, the name Netty was like a favorite armchair.

  In her room I sat on her teak chair, one of the few pieces of furniture I recognized from her old apartment. The only remnants from her former life were this chair, its matching secretary desk, and above it the petit point tapestry of two sailboats on a rough sea that Herta had needlepointed. I remembered how she had peered through a magnifying glass to tell one tiny stitch from another. Petit point embroidery had been her passion, and the sea voyage was her masterpiece.

  We sat around, reminiscing about the trip we had taken together to Vienna and how I had made her climb the 343 steps up the Steffl, the tower of Vienna’s main cathedral.

  “I never thought I’d make it,” she said, “but I did. If it hadn’t been for you, I never would have thought of doing that. But you insisted—you just wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

  Looking back, I thanked my fourteen-year-old, single-minded self, who had not considered that maybe it wasn’t the wisest thing to force a two-hundred-pound woman up the spiral staircase of a four-hundred-foot-high tower. We had made a memory then.

  Vienna was Herta’s favorite city. She had wanted to settle there in 1970, when she fled Reichenberg with her daughter (from her brief second marriage) after the failed Prague Spring uprising. But she could not obtain residency in Vienna, and under the Right of Return, the West German authorities granted residency to anyone who could claim German ancestry. She and her daughter had ended up in a refugee camp on the outskirts of Wiesbaden, where Oma lived. It did not take them long to make a good life for themselves, and Herta became a dear friend to Oma and a jolly aunt to us children.

  By the time I visited Herta in the nursing home, she was the only living relative left from the Reichenberg times. I had never met Resi, who had passed away in Reichenberg in the mid-1960s. But I did meet Ludwig after he retired, when he was finally able to obtain travel visas and spent entire summers visiting Herta. He would perch on the sofa bed in her living room, in baggy corduroys and a checkered short-sleeved sh
irt, chain-smoking, one arm propped on a knee, gazing out at the world through the blue of the smoke, his thin gray hair disheveled, his forehead wide and square as his sister’s, his eyes watery blue, friendly, and slightly amused at the world.

  I pushed Herta’s wheelchair to an ice cream café up the hill from the nursing home. It turned out she had never been there before. We continued reminiscing over goblets filled with scoops of chocolate and vanilla ice cream, topped with whipped cream and maraschino cherries. Then I had to rush her back to the nursing home, as the café’s restrooms weren’t wheelchair accessible.

  It troubled me that Herta’s life was confined to this nursing home, nice and comfortable though it was. From what I could tell, the only thing “wrong” with her was that she was missing a leg. She was mentally alert, and whatever brain fog she might have had stemmed from a lack of stimulation, rather than from any onset of dementia. Wouldn’t she have been capable of living on her own in a wheelchair-accessible apartment? Couldn’t she have done her own laundry, shopped for her own groceries, fixed her own food, dealt with all the little challenges of managing a household that give a person autonomy? Instead, they were managed for her. Then again, I had no say in the matter. I lived an ocean away, and even though I called her Tante (Aunt), I was only her cousin’s (my father’s) daughter. Herta was, first and foremost, her own daughter’s responsibility, and this daughter had decided, after Herta’s diabetes had necessitated the amputation of her leg, that this nursing home was best for her now.

  In her room, I picked up the German gossip magazine Bunte from her TV stand. Its cover was grimy. I looked closer. The issue was two years old.

  “You sure have an old copy of Bunte here,” I remarked when Herta returned from the restroom.

  “Oh, I don’t read that,” she replied. “I don’t even know who gave me that. Some people here aren’t very sophisticated, you know. But for the most part they’re okay. You can’t choose anyway, can you? People come here; they don’t necessarily have much education.”

  She paused, then continued, “I always wanted to go to university, you know. I would have loved that. But in those days it wasn’t possible, so what could I do? The Uncle even inquired in Vienna, but there was nothing to be done.”

  Characteristically, she did not say that in the 1940s, in a Czechoslovakia annexed by Nazi Germany, she was not able to study because, classified as a half Jew, she was barred from institutions of higher education. She did not mention this because she was not bitter about it. I could never detect a trace of bitterness in Herta, not at finding herself one-legged in a nursing home, not at past injustices. With her there was only good-natured complaisance. The inability to study or the reduction of her life to the white corridors of a nursing home warranted only a folding of the hands, a leaning back, a shrug.

  I started to wonder whether she had always been that way. Was the jolly aunt of my childhood, who had stuffed us kids with chocolate and good cheer, really someone who let others deter mine her life? Who was fine with being pushed around? Whose response to fate’s whims was, “Oh well—what can one do?”

  Herta and I in Wiesbaden, 2002

  After my visit with Herta, I asked my sister to dig out our grandfather’s memoirs, which had been stored in her basement along with other family documents. I wanted to see if they would provide me with my grandfather’s take on his niece, Herta, on her mother, Resi, and on their whole life in Reichenberg.

  Oma used to refer to his memoirs as “incomplete.” She dis-counted them not out of a lack of respect for her husband’s memory; her attitude was more one of “Why would you want to bother reading that old stuff?” And she was right—back then, when she was still alive, I didn’t bother. I had her to pump for the past whenever I wanted to, but mainly I was busy conquering the present and trying to define the future.

  Most of what I reconstructed of my family’s life in Reichenberg in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s is based on a chapter in my grandfather’s memoirs titled “My Sister.” I came to learn that while Resi was the resolute woman who was willing to do whatever it took to safely maneuver her two half-Jewish children through the Nazi horror, including divorcing her husband, Herta must have inherited her complacent disposition from her father, Guido. For her it was all right to be ferried through life by her mother and now her daughter, or, for that matter, to be pushed around by me, even if it was on such fun excursions as climbing a church tower or rattling up a hill in her wheelchair to an ice cream café. Thus, it was also all right for her now to be confined to a nursing home, just as her father had been. Thankfully, at least, no synagogue was burning outside.

  BRIOSNE

  “I THINK I FOUND THE VILLAGE WHERE YOU WERE hidden,” I said to Harry’s mother on the phone. I was sitting in our living room in Chicago, planning our trip to Europe for the summer of 2009. A Michelin map of northern France was spread out in front of me.

  “Eh oui?” (She spoke French with me as much as my command of it would allow.)

  “There is a place called Briosne-lès-Sables. It is next to a town called Bonnétable, a little north of Le Mans.”

  “It’s called Brionne?”

  “Well, yes, it would be pronounced that way, but it’s spelled with an s.” (In French, an s is sometimes silent.)

  “It’s next to Étable?”

  “There’s a town called Bonnétable, a little east of there, a few kilometers. It looks like it’s about twenty kilometers northeast of Le Mans.”

  “That could be it.”

  “Nana, this is not in Normandy anymore; this is south of there, but still about one hundred kilometers west of Paris.”

  “We weren’t in Normandy; we were in Mans.”

  Mans—she had said that before, and I had taken it as a reference to a region I could not find as I scanned the Michelin maps for the area northwest of Paris. Thankfully, I had a good grasp of French pronunciation because my Parisian teacher had trained me to write just about anything in French based on how it was pronounced, even if I had no clue what it meant.

  I finally realized, from Nana’s talking about “Mans,” that she might be referring to the city of Le Mans, rather than a region. Then it didn’t take me long to locate Bonnétable, north of Le Mans, and, west of it, that little crossing of intersections labeled “Briosne-lès-Sables.” This was most likely the “Brionne” she had mentioned.

  “Well, it is close to Le Mans,” I said into the phone.

  “Yes, yes, I think you found it!”

  “So, shall we go there? It’s immediately south of Normandy, and if we visit the D-day beaches, we could plan that into the trip.”

  “Yes, let’s do that,” she said. She paused and then added, “I’m looking forward to it.”

  You are? I was surprised. I had been worried she would be apprehensive about going back to where she had been hidden as a child during the war, but she sounded genuinely excited.

  “You know,” she said, “I haven’t been back there since we left. Jules went back once, and I wanted to go, too, but Chaim didn’t want to drive there in a car with German license plates.”

  Jules was her older brother, dead by now, and Chaim was Harry’s father, who had passed away in 2002. This was one of her explanations that didn’t make logistical sense. They had always taken the train from Munich to Paris when they went to France, especially in the ’60s and ’70s, when her family still had the summer house in Trouville on the Normandy coast, so they wouldn’t have been in France with their German car. And even if they had been, they could have rented a car with a French license plate. The bit about the license plate made psychological sense, however: it spoke to the touchy issue of Harry’s parents having remained in postwar Germany. Jews in other countries were prone to fault them for that, chief among them Aunt Rachel. Out in the French countryside, where many non-Jewish families had hidden people from the Germans during the war and had fought in the Resistance, someone driving around in a German car might not have been well received, especiall
y not in the ’60s, when the war was still a recent experience.

  It had been Harry’s idea to visit the village where his mother had been hidden during the war. That summer she was already battling lung cancer from a lifetime of smoking. The chemo treatments had weakened her, and she had to use a wheelchair to manage any kind of distance. We were racing to do the things we still wanted to do with her, and this trip was one of them.

  “It would be nice if the kids could experience her in her country and she could show us where she was hidden, so that this history is not an abstract concept for them,” Harry had said. Since Paris is my favorite city in the world, and it was definitely on my mental list of places the kids should experience, we made it happen: a trip to Paris, the Normandy coast, and the village where Nana had been hidden. At Charles de Gaulle Airport, we loaded the kids and the grandmother, luggage for six people, and Nana’s wheelchair into a giant van. We sped down the gleaming highways from Paris to the Channel coast and trundled up and down the narrow lanes in Normandy. Harry drove, I navigated, and Nana sat in the back, handing out baguette-and-cucumber sandwiches that she prepared with her pocketknife.

  After three days of touring the Normandy beaches of D-day, we drove south on a bright Sunday, past William the Conqueror’s majestic castle, in search of Briosne-lès-Sables. All three adults were a little nervous about whether that village was indeed the right place. As we approached, my finger inched along the winding roads on the Michelin map on my lap. Nana leaned forward, peering in between the driver’s and passenger’s seats, to watch the road. We were coming in from the west.

  “I don’t recognize these. These are all new,” she said, as we passed an obviously new cluster of single-family homes.