The Emigrants

by W. G. Sebald

  Theres, Kasimir and I, said Aunt Fini as we leafed through her photo album, emigrated from W at the end of

  the Twenties. First, I took ship with Theres at Bremerhaven on the 6th of September 1927. Theres was twenty-three and I was twenty-one, and both of us were wearing bonnets. Kasimir followed from Hamburg in summer 1929, a few weeks before Black Friday. He had trained as a tinsmith, and was just as unable to find work as I was, as a teacher, or Theres, as a sempstress. I had graduated from the Institute at Wettenhausen the previous year, and from autumn 1926 I had worked as an unpaid teaching assistant at the primary school in W. This is a photograph taken at that time. "We were on an outing to Falkenstein. The pupils all stood in the back of the

  lorry, while I sat in the driver's cab with a teacher named Fuchsluger, who was one of the very first National Socialists, and Benedikt Tannheimer, who was the landlord of the Adler and the owner of the lorry. The child right at the back, with a cross marked over her head, is your mother, Rosa. I remember, said Aunt Fini, that a month or so later, two days before I embarked, I went to Klosterwald with her, and saw her to her boarding school. At that time, I think, Rosa had a great deal of anxiety to contend with, given that her leaving home coincided so unhappily with her siblings' departure for another life overseas, for at Christmas she wrote a letter to us in New York in which she said she felt fearful when she lay awake in the dormitory at night. I tried to console her by saying she still had Kasimir, but then Kasimir left for America too, when Rosa was just fifteen. That's the way it always is, said Aunt Fini thoughtfully: one thing after another. Theres and I, at any rate, she continued after a while, had a comparatively easy time of it when we arrived in New York. Uncle Adelwarth, a brother of our mother, who had gone to America before the First World War and had been employed only in the best of houses since then, was able to find us positions immediately, thanks to his many connections. I became a governess with the Seligmans in Port Washington, and Theres a lady's maid to Mrs Wallerstein, who was about the same age and whose husband, who came from somewhere near Ulm, had made a considerable fortune with a number of brewing patents, a fortune that went on growing as the years went by.

  Uncle Adelwarth, whom you probably do not remember any more, said Aunt Fini, as if a quite new and altogether more significant story were now beginning, was a man of rare distinction. He was born at Gopprechts near Kempten in 1886, the youngest of eight children, all of them girls except for him. His mother died, probably of exhaustion, when Uncle Adelwarth, who was given the name Ambros, was not yet two years old. After her death, the eldest daughter, Kreszenz, who cannot have been more than seventeen at the time, had to run the household and play the role of mother as best she could, while their father the innkeeper sat with his customers, which was all he knew how to do. Like the other siblings, Ambros had to give Zenzi a hand quite early on, and at five he was already being sent to the weekly market at Immenstadt, together with Minnie, who was not much older, to sell the chanterelles and cranberries they had gathered the day before. Well into the autumn, said Aunt Fini, the two youngest of the Adelwarth children sometimes did nothing for weeks on end but bring home basketfuls of rosehips; they would cut them open, then dig out the hairy seeds with the tip of a spoon, and, after leaving them in a washtub for a few days to draw moisture, put the red flesh of the hips through the press. If one thinks now of the circumstances in which Ambros grew up, said Aunt Fini, one inevitably concludes that he never really had a childhood. When he was only thirteen he left home and went to Lindau, where he worked in the kitchens of the Bairischer Hof till he had enough for the rail fare to Lausanne, the beauties of which he had once heard enthusiastically praised at the inn in Gopprechts by a travelling watchmaker. Why, I shall never know, said Aunt Fini, but in my mind's eye I always see Ambros crossing Lake Constance from Lindau by steamer, in the moonlight, although that can scarcely have been how it was in reality. One thing is certain: that within a few days of leaving his homeland for good, Ambros, who was then fourteen at the outside, was working as an apprenti garfon in room service at the Grand Hotel Eden in Montreux, probably thanks to his unusually appealing but nonetheless self-controlled nature. At least I think it was the Eden, said Aunt Fini, because, in one of the postcard albums that Uncle Adelwarth left, the world-famous hotel is on one of the opening pages, with its awnings lowered over the windows against the afternoon sun. During his apprenticeship in Montreux, Aunt Fini continued, after she had fetched the album from one of her bedroom drawers and opened it up before me, Ambros wasl

  not only initiated into all the secrets of hotel life, but also learnt French to perfection, or rather, he absorbed it; he had the special gift of acquiring a foreign language, without apparent effort and without any teaching aids, within a year or two, solely by making certain adjustments (as he once explained to me) to his inner self. Along with very accomplished New York English he also spoke a most elegant French and an extremely dignified German, which astounded me the most, since he could hardly have had it from Gopprechts. Furthermore, Aunt Fini recalled, he had a far from elementary knowledge of Japanese, as I once discovered by chance when we were shopping together at Sacks' and he came to therescue of a Japanese gentleman who knew no English and was embroiled in some unpleasantness.

  Once his Swiss apprentice years were over, Ambros went to London, with excellent recommendations and testimonials, where he took a job at the Savoy Hotel in the Strand in the autumn of 1905, again in room service. It was in his London period that the mysterious episode of the lady from Shanghai occurred. All I know of her is that she had a taste for brown kid gloves; although Uncle Adelwarth did make occasional references later to what he had experienced with this lady (she marked the beginning of my career in misfortune, he once said), I never managed to find out the true facts of the matter. I assume that the lady from Shanghai - whom I always associated, doubtless absurdly, with Mata Hari - often stayed at the Savoy, and that Ambros, who was now about twenty, had contact with her professionally, if one can put it like that. It was the same with the counsellor from the Japanese legation whom he accompanied - in 1907, if I am not mistaken - on a journey by ship and rail via Copenhagen, Riga, St Petersburg, and Moscow, right across Siberia, to Japan, where the unmarried gentleman had a wonderful house set in a lake, near Kyoto. Ambros spent almost two years, partly as valet and partly as the counsellor's guest, in that floating and well-nigh empty house, and as far as I am aware he felt happier there than he had been anywhere else until then. Once, at Mamaroneck, said Aunt Fini, Uncle Adelwarth spent all of one afternoon telling me about his time in Japan. But I no longer remember exactly what he told me. Something about paper walls, I think, about archery, and a good deal about evergreen laurel, myrtle and wild camellia. And I remember something about

  an old hollow camphor tree which supposedly had room for fifteen people inside it, a story of a decapitation, and the call of the Japanese cuckoo, said Aunt Fini, her eyes half closed, hototogisu, which he could imitate so well.

  After morning coffee on the second day of my stay at Cedar Glen West, I went over to Uncle Kasimir. It was about half past ten when I sat down at the kitchen table with him. Lina was already busy at the stove. My uncle had produced two glasses and poured out the gentian brandy I had brought. In those days, he began, once I had managed to steer the talk to the subject of emigration, people like us simply had no chance in Germany. Only once, when I had finished my tinsmith apprenticeship in Altenstadt, did I get work, in '28, when they were putting a new copper roof on the synagogue in Augsburg. The Jews of Augsburg had donated the old copper roof for the war effort during the First World War,

  and it wasn't till '28 that they had the money they needed for a new roof. This is me, said Uncle Kasimir, pushing across the table a framed postcard-size photograph he had taken down from the wall - at the far right, from where you're looking. But after that job there was nothing again for weeks, and one of my mates, Josef Wohlfahrt, who still felt confident about things when we were at w
ork up on the synagogue roof, later hanged himself in despair. Fini wrote enthusiastic letters from her new homeland, so it was no wonder that I finally decided to follow my sisters to America. Of the rail journey across Germany I remember nothing, except that everything seemed unfamiliar and incomprehensible to me - the country we passed through, the huge railway stations and cities, the Rhineland and the vast flatlands up north - most probably because I had never been beyond the Allgàu and the Lechfeld region. But I do still see the offices of Norddeutscher Lloyd in Bremerhaven quite clearly in front of me. The passengers with little money were obliged to wait there till they could embark. I particularly remember the many different kinds of head-gear the emigrants wore: hoods and caps, winter and summer hats, shawls and kerchiefs, and then the peaked caps of the shipping line's stewards and the customs officers, and the bowler hats of the brokers and agents. On the walls hung large oil pictures of the ocean liners of the Lloyd fleet. Every one of them was cleaving a course full steam ahead, the bow rearing up out of the waves, conveying a sense of an unstoppable force driving onward. Above the door through which we finally left was a circular clock with Roman numerals, and over the clock, in ornate lettering, was the motto Mein Feld ist die Welt.

  Aunt Lina was pushing boiled potatoes through a press onto a floured pastryboard, and Uncle Kasimir, pouring me another gentian, went on to describe his crossing in the teeth of the February storms. The way the waves rose up from the deep and came rolling on was terrifying, he said. Even as a child I used to be horrified when the frog pond was frozen over, and we played curling on the ice, and I would suddenly think of the darkness under my feet. And now, nothing but black water all around, day in, day out, and the ship always seeming to be in the selfsame place. Most of my fellow travellers were sea-sick. Exhausted they lay in their berths, their eyes glassy or half closed. Others squatted on the floor, stood leaning for hours against a wall, or tottered along the passageways like sleepwalkers. For a full week, I too felt like death. I did not begin to feel better until we cleared the Narrows into Upper Bay. I sat on a bench on deck. The ship had already slowed. I felt a light breeze on my forehead, and as we approached the waterfront Manhattan rose higher and higher before us out of the sunshot morning mists.

  My sisters, who were waiting for me on the quayside, were not able to be of much help, nor could Uncle Adelwarth find anything for me, because I was no use as a gardener or cook or servant. On the day after my arrival I rented a back room that looked out on a narrow air shaft, from Mrs Risa Litwak in Bayard Street on the Lower East Side. Mrs Litwak, whose husband had died the year before, spent the whole day cooking and cleaning, or if she wasn't cooking and cleaning she was making paper flowers or sewing all night for her children or for other people, or as a supply sempstress for some business or other. Sometimes she played on a pianola very pretty songs that I seemed to know from somewhere. Until the First World War, the Bowery and the whole Lower East Side were the districts where the immigrants chiefly came to live. More than a hundred thousand Jews arrived there every year, moving into the cramped, dingy apartments in the five- or six-storey tenement blocks. The so-called parlour, which faced the street, was the only room that had two windows, and the fire escape ran past one of them. In the autumn, the Jews would build their sukkahs on the fire escape landings, and in summer, when the heat hung motionless in the city streets for weeks and life was unbearable indoors, hundreds and thousands of people would sleep outside, up in the airy heights, or even on the roofs or sidewalks or the little fenced-off patches of grass on Delancey Street and in Seward Park. The whole of the Lower East Side was one huge dormitory. Even so, the immigrants were full of hope in those days, and I myself was by no means despondent when I started to look for a job at the end of February '28. And before the week was out I already had my place at a workbench, at the Seckler & Margarethen Soda and Seltzers Works near the sliproad up to Brooklyn Bridge. There I made stainless-steel boilers and vats of various sizes, and old Seckler, who was a Jew from Briinn (I never did find out who Margarethen was), sold most of them as "catering equipment" to illicit distilleries where the concern was far less about the asking price than about doing business with the utmost discretion. Seckler, who for some reason took a liking to me, said that the sale of these steel vats and all the rest of the plant

  vital to the distilleries had developed as a side-line almost by itself, without his doing anything to encourage it, alongside the main business of the soda and seltzers works, and so he simply did not have the heart to cut it back. Seckler always praised my work, but he was reluctant to pay, and gave a poor wage. At least with me, he would say, you are on the first rung of the ladder. And then one day, it was a few weeks after Passover, he called me in to his office, leaned back in his chair, and said: Have you got a head for heights? If you have, you can go over to the new Yeshiva, they need metalworkers like you. And he gave me the address -500 West 187th Street, corner Amsterdam Avenue. The very next day I was up on the top of the tower, just as I had been on the Augsburg Synagogue, only much higher, helping to rivet copper bands that were almost six metres wide onto the cupola that crowned the building, which looked like a cross between a railway station and an oriental palace. After that, I worked a lot on the tops of skyscrapers, which they went on building until the early Thirties in New York, despite the Depression. I put the copper hoods on the General Electric Building, and from '29 to '30 we spent a year on the sheet-steel work on the summit of the Chrysler Building, which was unbelievably difficult on account of the curvatures and slopes. Since all my acrobatics were done two or three hundred metres above the ground, I naturally made a lot of money, but I spent it as fast as I earned it. And then I broke my wrist skating in Central Park and had no work till '34. And then we moved to the Bronx, and life up in the dizzy heights came to an end.

  After lunch, Uncle Kasimir became visibly restless and paced to and fro, and at length he said: I have got to get out of the house! - to which Aunt Lina, who was washing up, replied: What a day to go for a drive! One might indeed have thought that night was falling, so low and inky black was the sky. The streets were deserted. We passed very few other cars on the road. It took us almost an hour to cover the thirty kilometres to the Atlantic, because Uncle Kasimir drove more slowly than I have ever known anyone drive on an open stretch of road. He sat angled up against the wheel, steering with his left hand and telling tales of the heyday of Prohibition. Occasionally he would take a glance ahead to check that we were still in the right lane. The Italians did most of the business, he said. All along the coast, in places like Leonardo, Atlantic Highlands, Little Silver, Ocean Grove, Neptune City, Belmar and Lake Como, they built summer palaces for their families and villas for their women and usually a church as well and a little house for a chaplain. Uncle slowed down even more and wound his window down. This is Toms River, he said, there's no one here in the winter. In the harbour, sailboats lay pushed up together like a frightened flock, rigging rattling. Two seagulls perched on top of a coffee shop built to look like a gingerbread house. The Buyright Store, the Pizza Parlour and the Hamburger Heaven were closed, and the private homes were locked up and shuttered too. The wind blew sand across the road and under the wooden sidewalks. The dunes, said Uncle, are invading the town. If people didn't keep coming in the summer, this would all be buried in a few years. From Toms River the road ran down to Barnegat Bay and across Pelican Island to the eighty-kilometre spit of land that stretches along the coast of New Jersey and is nowhere more than a kilometre or so wide. We parked the car and walked along the beach, with a biting northeasterly at our backs. I'm afraid I don't know much about Ambros Adelwarth, said Uncle Kasimir. When I arrived in New York he was already over forty, and in the early days, and later too, I hardly saw him more than once or twice a year. As far as his legendary past was concerned, of course there were rumours, but all I know for certain is that Ambros was major-domo and butler with the Solomons, who had an estate at Rocky Point, at the furthermost tip of Long Island
, surrounded by water on

  three sides. The Solomons - with the Seligmanns, the Loebs, the Kuhns, the Speyers and the Wormsers - were amongst the wealthiest of the Jewish banking families in New York. Before Ambros became the Solomons' butler he was valet and travelling companion to Cosmo, the Solomons' son, who was a few years younger than himself and was notorious in New York society for his extravagance and his eternal escapades. On one occasion, for instance, they said he had tried to ride a horse up the stairs in the lobby of The Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach. But I know stories like that only from hearsay. Fini, who became a sort of confidante for Ambros towards the end, sometimes hinted that there was something tragic about the relationship between Ambros and the Solomons' son. And, as far as I know, young Solomon really was destroyed by some mental illness in the mid Twenties. As for Uncle Adelwarth, all I can say is that I always felt sorry for him, because he could never, his whole life long, permit anything to ruffle his composure. Of course, said Uncle Kasimir, he was of the other persuasion, as anyone could see, even if the family always ignored or glossed over the fact. Perhaps some of them never realized. The older Uncle Adelwarth grew, the more hollowed-out he seemed to me, and the last time I saw him, in the house at Mamaroneck that the Solomons had left him, so finely furnished, it was as if his clothes were holding him together. As I said, Fini looked after him till the end. She'll be able to give you a better idea of what he was like. Uncle Kasimir stopped and stood gazing out at the ocean. This is the edge of the darkness, he said. And in truth it seemed as if the mainland were submerged behind us and as if there were nothing above the watery waste but this narrow strip of sand running up to the north and down towards the south. I often come out here, said Uncle Kasimir, it makes me feel that I am a long way away, though I never quite know from where. Then he took a camera out of his large-check jacket and took this picture, a print of which he sent me two years later, probably when he had finally shot the whole film, together with his gold pocket watch.