A Late Journey: A Memoir

2013

PROLOGUE

In 1996, my niece Marina, who was living in my mother’s flat in Melbourne, Australia, came upon an embossed leather writing case nestling in the far left corner of a room she used as a junk room. My mother had gone into assisted living some years earlier and my father was no longer alive. When Marina opened the writing case she saw that it contained a large collection of letters written, she believed, in German.

Together with other odds and ends she found in the room, she passed the satchel over to her mother, my older sister, Noemi.

Noemi reads German and her interest was aroused by the handwriting that she recognised as my parents’ as well as by the sheer number of letters: 160. As my sister carefully lifted out a bunch to examine them more closely, two things caught her eye. Most of the letters bore a purple stamp and signature; and they all seemed to have been written in the 1930s, during the Nazi years.

When Noemi phoned me in Jerusalem to tell me about the discovery, I was as intrigued as she was. We’d both grown up knowing that our father had spent time in a concentration camp and we wondered whether his ordeal would be described in the letters and whether we’d find out other details about our parents’ past that we’d often pondered. As intense as my curiosity was, however, I was still in the early stages of acclimatising to a new country. In late 1992, I had moved from Australia to Israel to join my husband-to-be and although already in my late forties, I was now getting used to married life for the first time. I certainly wasn’t thinking about either my parents’ past or my own. In fact, I believed I’d long buried the traumas experienced while growing up as the younger daughter of a man whose suffering I had sensed for as long back as I can remember.

From the time I was a small child, there was no doubting my awareness of my father’s sorrows. They broke my heart and puzzled me, since I did not know much about their origins. At the same time, because he was unstintingly generous with his love and affection, I grew up with a strong sense that love and sadness went hand in hand. As a child, I reasoned that if my father was so burdened by some dreadful past experience, I could help make his life better by looking after him. Unwittingly, I reversed our roles, becoming in my own eyes something of his protector. I believed that by being a loving, obedient and undemanding child, I could ease his troubled spirit and share in his invisible burden. During adolescence, I made myself available as his confidante, listening sympathetically and uncritically to anything he might share. It was a demanding role that robbed me of my ability to grow up a happy and carefree child. Even though I experienced my fair share of childhood pleasures, I never felt entirely free and able to forget that my father was a wounded man.

My mother did not arouse in me such sympathy and compassion. She came into focus either as a loud, overbearing presence who ran us and our domestic affairs like a sergeant major, or as someone who didn’t really communicate and maintained an emotional distance. The older I got, the more I disliked her, and by the time I was a teenager, I remember telling my father that I hated her—her screaming, her impatience, everything. As an adult, I’d often asked myself why she behaved like she did with a husband as sweet and good-natured as my father. Furthermore, why did he never once in his life react angrily to her?

I did not put these questions to my father, because I sensed they were too threatening. Both my parents’ behaviour remained shrouded in mystery. As we were growing up, Noemi and I had occasionally discussed our parents’ marriage, and we’d come to the conclusion that my mother had taken over the reins of their relationship after my father was released from concentration camp. More than this we did not know.

When Noemi told me about the letters, she mentioned that a close friend could translate them in her spare time as a labour of love. That suited me, since my German was rusty and I didn’t want to get bogged down in the language. Over the next year or so, Noemi passed on some astonishing, though seemingly unrelated facts she herself gleaned from the letters, such as my father’s incarceration in a Nazi prison and his trial for an unnamed offence. There was mention of a baby that was neither me nor Noemi, and my mother had referred to an abortion. There were warm references to our paternal grandfather, whom neither of us had ever known. The language in the letters was frequently puzzling and elusive; it was impossible to reconstruct a credible narrative of my parents’ lives without further research. In fact, the letters raised more questions than they answered.

In several conversations that followed, Noemi and I agreed that I would eventually work with the letters and write about them as family history if they turned up anything of consequence. The immediate problem was that in 1996, as well as getting used to marriage and a new country, I felt emotionally unprepared to confront my parents’ past; I feared it would be terribly upsetting.

As it turned out, practical considerations also intervened. My husband and I were about to spend 1997 and 1998 in Washington for his work. This, unexpectedly, turned into a very unsettling period for me, pushing the letters far from my mind and when we returned to Israel after fifteen months in the United States, Noemi’s friend’s translations were still not complete. I accepted a part-time job at a Jerusalem cultural centre and guesthouse, organising artistic events with visiting artists and intellectuals. It was my first real job in Israel, and I was keen to prove to myself that I could find work, even though the pay was pathetically low. I also felt a need to contribute to my husband’s salary, though he did not pressure me to do so. I’d been supporting myself since my early twenties, and sometimes I felt uncomfortable living as a kept woman. We also wanted to buy a new apartment, a task that fell naturally to me because of my husband’s round-the-clock job as a journalist.

In 2001, more than four years after Marina had found the letters and nine years after I’d settled in Israel, I returned to Australia to pick up the originals and their translations. Somehow I felt ready to face the staggering job that I assumed lay ahead. Glancing through them and noting the myriad of unexplained references, I suspected I would also need to travel to Germany to verify some of the extraordinary facts that Noemi had mentioned. On the long flight home from Australia, with the heavy plastic folder of letters plus their translations tucked safely inside my carry-on, I wondered where the project would lead.

Reading and working with the letters was compelling. I got a chance to observe my parents’ private conversations and to know them in an entirely new way. My mother, especially, presented as a warm, loving, supportive woman, someone I barely recognised. In the comfort and quiet of my study, I felt a sense of adventure and also, in truth, a sense of revenge and victory. Because she had always refused to talk about the past, or about anything for that matter, now to a significant extent her letters would speak for her.

Yet something strange and totally unexpected happened. When the time came to write the Australian section of their lives I found I had an inexplicably tough time keeping myself out of the picture. I complained to friends, "I’m stuck. This is about them, not me. It’s their story." My fingers kept typing in traumatic scenes from my childhood, events that had caused me anxiety and suffering. I chastised myself for this. Although my own experience was inextricably interwoven with my parents’ lives, I believed it had no place in their story. Tearfully recollecting events that had caused me much pain, I deleted pages faster than my fingers had typed them.

Years of writing passed before I understood, and when I did I was more able to accept the inevitability of the process. What began as an attempt to understand my parents had also become a full-fledged effort to come to terms with my own life. I was past the age when most people face off with childhood demons, but what did that matter? In reading, probing, researching and reliving, these old letters had also served as the catalyst to help me uncover my own deepest self. I set out on a lengthy journey of remembering, and it’s never too late in a person’s life to do that.

One

An Invisible Burden

In my earliest memory, I am three years old and gingerly edging myself along a piece of timber furniture—a camphor box—by pressing my fingers into the spaces between figures carved in shallow relief. In 1947 my parents brought this box with them from Shanghai, where they’d been living since escaping Germany in 1939. While my fingers are enjoying the feel of the object, I’m thinking about my father. I ask my mother in German: Wo ist der Däddy? (Where is Daddy?)

Der ist zur Arbeit gegangen Geld verdienen. (He’s gone to work to earn money.)

I repeat what she has told me, pronouncing the German word for earning, verdienen, as adienen. I miss my father when he’s away, and long for his return.

In another recollection, this one from when I was six or seven, I am standing on the closed toilet seat beside the bathroom sink in our third-floor flat watching my father shave. In the mirror I see my childish face, next to it the image of a subdued man. I sense his limitless patience, a quality that suffering has taught him, as I was to learn much later. His singlet is pulled down over his trousers and he has a towel draped over his shoulders. I can get a good look at his kind, ingenuous, light brown eyes when he’s shaving, since he’s not wearing his spectacles. I am aware that he is indulging me, and I love him for it.

He hands me the shaving stick and brush and allows me to lather his face as best I can. I smear the foam over his wet cheeks while inhaling its pleasant scent. When he has finished using the razor and removing all traces of bristle and soap, I ask to comb his thinning black hair. Däddy, Ich will doch deine Haare kämmen. Ja, natürlich mein Schatz (Yes, of course, my treasure), he says, handing me the comb.

When I am finished, he of course must comb his hair again.

When I was six years old, my father and I walked down Acland Street hill in St. Kilda, the bay side suburb where we lived in Melbourne, Australia. We were on our way to a park that offered weekend pony rides. He held my hand and we chatted. I probably asked him questions about the safety of the ride, since I remember feeling apprehensive about it, as I did about all new experiences. Once we’d crossed Fitzroy Street—by the late 1950s an entertainment and restaurant mecca and a Bohemian location for painters and writers—we had only to walk a few more minutes before I could see children in the distance lining up for their rides. We had one more road to cross, The Esplanade, before reaching the grass that had been cultivated on reclaimed seashore. As we approached the pony, I could hardly wait to pat its smooth hide, yet I felt nervous about perching on its back. I worried that the stirrup would not take the weight of my chubby body. Somehow, my father and the young boy who was leading the ponies around managed to place me in the saddle, where I felt very high off the ground.

I was enjoying the ride until we turned to come back and I couldn’t see my father. My eyes scanned the area, but he was nowhere. For a terrifying instant I thought he had abandoned me. The world went black. Then he emerged, smiling, from behind a tree. Here I am!

Years later when I was in my thirties, he and I were observing my sister, Noemi’s, five-year-old daughter, Marina, playing in the park near her home. Father said, You remember the time I took you for a pony ride, Dagele? You should have seen the look on your face when I hid and you couldn’t see me! He didn’t understand what he’d done and I didn’t have the heart to tell him. For years, I was angry that he’d subjected me to that moment of terror in order to reassure himself of my love, but after working with the letters he and my mother wrote to one another, I had a better understanding of the depths of his insecurity.

In some mysterious way the awareness of my father as a victim seems always to have been with me. I see myself as a youngster of about eight or nine when, out of the blue, the back of his head struck me as unusually flat. It seemed a clue to something frightful he had once endured. I already knew that the Nazis and Hitler had done bad things to Jews, and as he walked through the room I imagined what I thought had been his formerly round head being speared and deflated by a Nazi.

Trapped in this invented scenario, I became sick with compassion and a permanent pity for my father. My blood began swishing in waves from my stomach to my head and back down again to my withering insides. I wanted to explain my feelings to a caring adult, thinking it might help, but I didn’t have the words. Silently, I endured intolerable discomfort until something or someone distracted me. It was the first of several anxiety attacks I would experience throughout my life.

Sometime after our family arrived in Melbourne from Shanghai, my mother set herself up in a pearl re-threading business. A German-Jewish neighbour who became her lifelong friend taught her the craft, and she and my grandmother used to re-thread pearls late into the night in a workroom that doubled as my grandmother’s bedroom. Most evenings, they sat at their table with bent heads and busy hands, sharing the light of a ceiling lamp. Noemi, whose memory is more complete than mine because she is four years older than me, says they attached a thick strip of brown paper around the circumference of the lamp shade to direct its beam and shield their eyes. A cylindrical black kerosene heater about seventy centimetres high stood in one corner of the room, with a saucepan of slowly evaporating water on top adding moisture to the dry air. My family attached great importance to hard work and financial security. What my mother never acknowledged was that she used hard work as an escape, a way to keep herself from dwelling on unpleasant thoughts.

Noemi and I took turns sleeping in a spare bed in my grandmother’s room, when we were not sleeping in our parents’ bedroom. Our beds were identical metal-framed fold-ups with crisscross wire bases and collapsible legs. My pillow and quilt were filled with duck feathers—the quilt so deliciously warm and light I could never get used to sleeping under woollen blankets. In this temperate cocoon, I fell asleep to the strains of classical music. The soothing background music came from an old-fashioned wireless tuned to the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s first network. It’s where I first heard the sublime voice of Austrian tenor Richard Tauber singing Dein ist mein ganzes Herz (You Are My Heart’s Delight), which I thought was the most beautiful song I’d ever heard. Our mother hummed along quietly with the music of her lost homeland.

Occasionally she broke into song or whistled along with a tune on the radio while tidying the house or changing the bed linens. But for the most part, her face expressed anything but pleasure and from an early age I felt wary of her.

Our dreary, cream brick, top-floor flat was one of twenty-four flats divided into two blocks of twelve by an ugly stretch of concrete that continued into the back yard. This barren area served as our playground, except when my mother hung her washing on either of the two rotating clotheslines. Then, so as not to soil the clean clothes, my friends and I would play in the larger yard of the flats next door.

My parents’ bedroom was considerably larger than my grandmother’s. Their huge double bed with their puffed-up European quilts occupied most of it. There was also a lounge room, which was about the same size as my parents’ bedroom, with a large, light brown upholstered sofa, a mahogany dining table and matching chairs, an armchair and, later, a piano. The dining table boasted one of my mother’s many beautifully hand-embroidered tablecloths; she knew how to sew, darn, knit, crotchet and embroider and, in fact, could rarely sit and relax without engaging her hands. There was something compulsive about her need to keep herself constantly busy.

A few years after our arrival in Australia, my family shifted into a first-floor flat with an extra room. My grandfather rented a small room next door and visited us for evening meals. The arrangement suited my grandmother, unwilling to share a bed with a man my mother once described as cantankerous and mercurial. It also protected us all from the unwanted smell of his pipe tobacco. I sometimes visited my grandfather after school in his shack-like room. There was a cupboard opposite a bed, and next to the cupboard a small table stood, covered by newspaper, on which my grandfather placed his large aluminium mug and a couple of utensils. I was very fond of this tall, thin, still good-looking man, and didn’t find him cantankerous at all. On numerous mornings and afternoons, he gently took my hand and led me to the other side of a busy street so that I could safely walk to and from school. Despite his rather stern expression, I felt his affection. He was one of those naturally gruff men who soften in the presence of their grandchildren, and our infrequent and brief conversations were in German. That was before I learned English.

In the new flat, my mother and grandmother continued to use my grandmother’s bedroom as their workroom. But now, Noemi and I shared a bedroom of our own. I enjoyed falling asleep in the company of my big sister—that is, except on those nights when Noemi insisted on listening to Inner Sanctum, her favourite radio program. This was a melodramatic weekly serial that broadcast stories of mystery, terror and suspense. I was so scared that I dove into her bed and covered my ears during the program’s familiar audio trademark—an amplified, eerily squeaking door followed by an emphatic series of organ chords that scared me half to death.

Looking back on it, not a single clue in our room would have indicated the presence of children. No colourful posters or pin-ups or even our own artwork decorated the walls. My mother said that things sticking to or hanging from the walls would damage the paintwork. The few surfaces in the room—our bed frames and a small book shelf—had to be kept ornament-free for easy cleaning. We had no collection of sea shells or other knick-knacks, no clothes strewn across the floor, no birds twittering in a cage, no fish swimming in an aquarium. And we were certainly never allowed to leave our beds unmade when we left the house.

In the middle of this lifeless room, a square glass-covered table took up a third of the space. At the head of my fold-up stood a glassed-in book case with a pull-down surface that was meant to be used as a desk, but rarely was. My mother’s instructions to tidy it and return it to its upright position every day seemed more trouble than it was worth. The only other objects in the room were two cupboards, one of which had a full-length mirror attached inside one of the doors. (Once I reached puberty, I wasted a lot of my time in front of this mirror scrutinising my appearance.) When guests came for afternoon tea, Noemi and I lost the use of our room for the day while it was transformed into a dining room. My mother could have entertained in the lounge but she preferred our room, I suspect because it was a smaller area to clean up afterwards.

My father set himself up in the rag trade with a friend he’d made in Shanghai. Their business, Up-To-Date Blouses, imported fabrics for manufacture as women’s blouses. The office, located on an upper floor in the heart of the central business district, contained dozens of bolts of material resting in stacks on open shelves around the room. On a high, polished cork bench, he unfurled his wares, sometimes to cut off a sample or display more of the pattern. He had a professional’s knowledge of fabrics; in his late teens, he’d done an apprenticeship as a buyer in one of Germany’s largest retail chain stores. In Melbourne, he closely followed new combinations of cloth as they came onto the market.

The office’s overhead neon lights cast an artificial daylight into the windowless space; even as a child, I found it oppressive. As I grew up, I felt the office reflected my father’s cheerlessness, and I often wondered how he could bear to work in such a depressing environment. I never heard him complain about his work place, but I felt grateful that I didn’t have to spend much time there. For the rest of his working life, he worked in that or similar offices in the textile trade either in partnership or on his own.

Noemi says that when she turned thirteen, she caught the tram into town after school to help him package small orders. She remembers the experience fondly and claims she’s never forgotten how to make up cardboard boxes. It surprised me to hear that she’d spent time alone with him; in my memories I always had him to myself.

Until well into my teens, I waited at home each weekday afternoon for the familiar three honks of my father’s car horn, shortly before six p.m. If he happened to be late, my mother would scold him the second he walked in the door. Gottfried, Du bist rücksichtslos. (Gottfried, you are inconsiderate.) Business appointments running overtime or unexpectedly heavy traffic didn’t concern her, since in our family arriving late was tantamount to breaking one of the Ten Commandments.

I had already laid out my father’s slippers inside the front door as my mother instructed; we were brought up to serve the man at the head of the household. The slippers also prevented tracking dirt onto her spotless wall-to-wall carpet. I would fly down the stairs and run outside to meet him, grab his satchel and begin chatting non-stop about things that had happened at school or at home. At the edges of my consciousness, I would register that he seemed disturbed by more than just his day-to-day worries at the office. Though I tried to cheer him up, I could never dislodge the invisible load that seemed attached to him and mocked our attempt at normal family life.

As he and I walked together to the entrance of our flat, I sometimes filed complaints against my mother, childishly exploiting the advantage of getting in ahead of her. Not that this was necessary. While he sometimes admonished me—under pressure from her—I knew his heart was never in it.

Within minutes of his arrival, dinner was served. Vegetable, noodle, chicken or barley soup would be followed by meat, a staple of our diet. Braised beef, boiled corned beef, lamb chops, beef burgers and veal sausages, often served with sauerkraut, came accompanied by potatoes, rice or noodles, cauliflower, beans, cabbage, carrots or spinach. Dessert consisted of mountains of fresh fruit, and on a Friday night, one of several cakes my grandmother had baked.

Food played a central role in our lives. For the family, a hearty meal could temporarily banish uncertainty and compensate for life’s problems. Eating also reduced a perceptible tension in our home that nobody spoke about. Food’s ready availability and affordability symbolised a type of normality and stability. Fresh, plentiful, quality food represented everything wholesome, healthy and secure. My parents never tired of reminding us that a balanced diet could prevent illness, and that its absence could cause it.

I knew nothing of the ways in which my father’s health had suffered when he’d been a half-starved prisoner under the Nazis, yet in some imponderable way the memory of that unmentioned deprivation worked its way into our family’s needs and emerged as an urgent, almost abnormal preoccupation for me. Eating at any time was an occasion to fill a painful emptiness that nothing else could. Food became my narcotic. I both loved and hated it. The visceral pleasure was immense, while its cost in terms of