Undeterred, I Made It in America

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© 2009 Charlotte Kahn. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 1/15/2009

ISBN: 978-1-4343-8740-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4678-7475-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2008905002

Bloomington, Indiana

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1

In The Beginning

2

Mountains and Seashores

3

From Calm to Storm

4

Leaving Home

5

And Still Pursued

Ancestor Charts

6

Starting Over

7

On My Own

8

The See-Saw of Sparkling Delights and Somber Despair

9

Finding My Way

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

THIS IS AN ACCOUNT OF some of the events that were crucial in shaping my life, and some others that seemed especially meaningful to me. I present it to honor my parents, who modeled initiative, self-discipline, practicality, respect for culture, and a deep concern for their children. I record some family history to remember those who perished and those who suffered. I offer these memoirs to my grandchildren so that they may appreciate their origins and heritage.

It was my daughter-in-law Lauretta’s persistence in her requests for an account of my experiences that persuaded me actually to set them down on paper. I am also grateful to her and to my daughter Beatrice for their careful reading of an early draft of the manuscript and for their suggestions. Both Beatrice and my son Leonard recognized the significance of my experiences to today’s adolescents, many of whom have also emigrated or relocated. Thanks also to my sons Alfred, who focused me on the title, and Jonathan, who often steers me to greater empathy. My loyal husband Jerry deserves thanks for frequently rescuing me from computer disasters during the process of preparing this manuscript. Elaine Arenwald-Barella and her son Daniel performed near-miracles in restoring old photographs, as did my granddaughter, Audrey Rudolf.

Karen Ulrich, Amy Sickels, and Nan Mooney, each in her special way, was effective in helping me to improve the manuscript; they and the supportive readers in our writing groups encouraged me. Later, Lorna Lentini’s skillful editing greatly refined the text.

All who helped, I thank you, and hope that I’ll be forgiven for the remaining imperfections.

Introduction

IN 1936, WHEN I WAS eight years old and living in Germany, the family planned a summer vacation at the Dutch shore, where Jews were not restricted. My brother fell ill; my mother stayed home with him; and even so, I was allowed to accompany my father. Mutti (Mommy) packed up my things in a suitcase. And in the rucksack on my back she stowed a lunch as well as my favorite baby doll, securely fastened by the strings around the opening but with its head and arms hanging out.

On that day, not many people were waiting on the railroad station platform. A man walked up to my father to ask permission to take my picture. When Papi (Daddy) agreed, the photographer requested that I wear my father’s hat set jauntily on my head. My blonde braids dangled down beneath it.

Weeks later, my picture appeared in a Nazi newspaper, the Duisburger General Anzeiger, on the very same page as a photo of a brown-shirted SA (Sturm Abteilung) officer giving the Nazi salute. Beneath my picture was a four-stanza poem entitled Ohne Puppe keinen Schritt (Not a Step Without a Doll), which ended with the line, Was einst ‘ne Mutter werden will! — roughly translated, On Becoming a Mother — a German mother, of course. Little did they know! Blue eyes and blonde hair had fooled them.

We all laughed. This joke was on them!

The subsequent years, especially from the end of 1938 to the autumn of 1940, were not jokes at all: nothing to laugh about and so much to fear and weep for. In retrospect, however, I appreciate the enormous Glück — the luck — that has wound through my entire life so far. I was lucky to be endowed with a sturdy constitution and an optimistic temperament, lucky to have had competent, caring parents. It was my Glück to meet up with rescuers at trying times. Finally, I had several admirable models in my family after whom to fashion my life.

Some years ago I added another person to that list: a Jewish memoirist in Germany, Glückl von Hameln, who in the late-17th and early-18th Centuries recorded some of her experiences, her thoughts, and her feelings. Widowed at a fairly young age, she succeeded in her ambition to expand her husband’s business — not only to support her twelve children, but also to provide substantial dowries for her daughters, so that they might marry well. To accomplish this, Glückl von Hameln journeyed far and wide throughout Europe by horse and coach.

Similarly, two hundred years later, my grandmothers conducted their separate businesses, and prospered. Coming from such families, it was natural that I would also plan to work, as well as to become a mother. Indeed, it was expected. Perhaps somewhat unrealistically, my father encouraged me to follow in the footsteps of Anne O’Hare McCormick, a New York Times foreign correspondent whose columns he read assiduously.

Our world today would be almost unrecognizable to Glückl von Hameln. At this point in time it is no longer unusual for women to become literate, and some travel is the norm for most Europeans and Americans. Yet basic human concerns remain unchanged: the need to belong and be appreciated, the struggles of adolescence, the passionate caring for our offspring, and the intense striving for personal achievement.

These are also the personal themes threaded through my memoir of a 20th-Century Jewish girl growing up in Germany who, by circuitous paths, reached the United States to mature, fashion a creditable career, and then to be blessed with four healthy children, shepherded into adulthood with the help of my husband.

And like Glückl von Hameln, I would like my grandchildren and great-grandchildren to know from "what sort of people [they] have sprung."

Am I — the author of this story — the same person as that lucky young girl on the railroad station platform? In the core of my being I know that to be true. I can still feel the enthusiasm about that journey my father and I were embarking upon. And although I don’t carry a knapsack these days, a large pocketbook regularly suspended from my shoulder contains most of what I might need for an overnight trip, and of course a little food to sustain me along the way. Nowadays, it’s not a doll peeking out from the rucksack, but one or another of the grandchildren holding fast to my hand.

— New York City, February 2008.

1

In The Beginning

[I write so that you may know] … from what sort of people

you have sprung, lest today or tomorrow your beloved children

and grandchildren come and know naught of their family.

The Memoirs of Glückl von Hameln

(1690–91 and 1715–1719 [1977, ix])

"WE HAVE A SHABBOS-KIND!" ANNOUNCED Robert Rottenstein, calling it out from the window of his newly built three-story sandstone house on a residential street of Duisburg am Rhein, Germany, on the evening of March 2, 1928. A healthy, blond, blue-eyed baby girl, born at home on a Friday night — the beginning of the Sabbath — presaged a life of Glück. It might be said that I was born under a lucky star.

The ruddy-faced, smiling father, my father, my Papi, having married late, fifteen months before, was soon to be 38 years old and I was his first offspring. Two of his older brothers, Siegfried in the house next door and Emil across the street, were still bachelors. So my appearance was a big event.

Geburtsurkunde (birth certificate) and Robert & Trude with baby Charlotte

As in all legends, fact and fiction are inextricably meshed in the story of my parents’ meeting, courtship, and marriage. My father, who generally kept me in the dark about matters both financial and sexual, told me: "We held hands. We kissed. We kissed in the park on the hill, am Kaiserberg." Then, evidently, he asked Trude Davids to marry him. How romantic. How innocent. How pure! My father was thirty-six; my mother, twenty-five.

Was that the first time they kissed?

Back from the war in 1918, my father Robert briefly resumed his work as a journeyman in Leopold Kaufmann’s grain-import business, before establishing a similar firm of his own. Prior to his soldiering he had been an apprentice there, and had worked his way up. At that time, Robert had met his boss’s niece, Trude, who was still in her teens.

It was at a social gathering in Leopold Kaufmann’s home that Robert first heard Trude’s sonorous Wagnerian soprano voice, amplified by her generously be-bosomed chest. Then and there he said to himself, It’s this one or no one. She was not yet twenty. He waited.

And Trude Davids, my mother?

Trude, the name a diminutive of Gertrud, attended a musical conservatory, socialized with poets and painters, and made music. I never found out: Did they ever kiss? Did this group of friends only play and listen to music? Write and read poetry? Paint and enjoy the arts?

Trude was born in 1901, the elder of two children of Henriette, or Jenny and Moritz Davids in Steele, located in the industrial Rhein-Ruhr area of Germany. In 1875 her grandparents Wilhelm and Amalie Kaufmann had established the first retail store of factory-produced footwear in the area. They catered to the families of coal-miners: sturdy boots for the men, and dainty Sunday-best shoes for their young daughters.

Jenny (pronounced Yenny), the youngest of their children, eventually inherited the establishment and managed it until she had to escape from Germany in 1939. The store bore the name Kaufmann to its very end, in the 1990’s.

My grandfather Moritz, Jenny’s husband, was fun loving and never ill until an ear infection killed him in 1929, at a time when antibiotic medicines were not yet available. While Jenny and Moritz ran the business, her mother Amalie Kaufmann helped raise Trude and her younger brother Wilhelm. The family lived in the city center in a solid house, three stories high above the store.

Trude was the good, the gentle child. Wilhelm often so enraged his father that he’d reap a beating, but he sparkled like his mother, wrote poetry, and would go on to become a lawyer. Yet it was Trude who was put in charge of the cash register at age thirteen, when her parents took off to vacation in Italy. And it was again Trude whom her mother called home from the conservatory when my grandfather Moritz was discovered having a fling with another woman.

Inside, behind the large store-display windows, floor-to-ceiling shelves were stacked with shoeboxes. As a child, whenever I visited my grandmother’s store, Schuhaus Kaufmann, I liked to put the shoes customers had tried on back into their boxes, just so — toe to heel, with tissue paper covering them. Chairs lined the center of the floor, and in the corner, representing the children’s brand "Elefanten Schuhe," stood a large wooden elephant, upon which it was great fun to ride. My grandmother Jenny — my Oma Steele, to distinguish her from my paternal grandmother — approved of Elefanten Schuhe with their supportive firm counters. The shoes, she counseled me, should be eased for comfort by stretching the inside of their backs over a doorknob. To this day, one of my American grandchildren wears this brand, purchased right here at home in New York.

I did not serve customers of course, but even before I could write my letters and numbers legibly, I tried to write out bills on the printed pads and deposit them at the cash register, which was located near the front door. Partly hurt and insulted and partly understanding that my efforts were inadequate, I watched as the salesladies in their black uniforms rewrote the bills.

I recall that in the back of the sales floor, hidden from view, was a modest, windowless office where Jenny kept her records.

A set of carpeted stairs led to a mezzanine area above the store, and from there it continued up to large, comfortable, bright living quarters. Bedrooms were located on the top floor. A cook and maid took care of the household, although before every meal, Jenny went into the kitchen to taste the food and adjust the seasoning.

A hairdresser came each morning to comb and arrange Jenny’s hair. A photograph shows my grandmother wearing a huge hat decorated with an ostrich feather. Despite this elegance and attention to her appearance, it was rumored that Moritz accompanied her when she went clothes shopping, so that he could tip off the salesladies to remove the price tags. He wanted his wife to buy the best, rather than the most reasonably priced, garments.

Elegant Jenny

Yet thrift was neither Oma Steele’s only virtue, nor business management her sole talent. She was intelligent, wise, funny, and accomplished. She read and wrote verse.

She once composed a poem just for me, when I was four or five years old. Preparing to visit her, I had insisted on packing my child-sized overnight suitcase by myself, insisted I could do it. I chose pajamas, a pinkish dress, and ankle socks and shoes to match. But where were my slippers, hairbrush, toothbrush and toothpaste? The poem my Oma composed, a guide for packing, was reproduced by the show-window decorator on a red poster in white calligraphy and affixed to the wall above my bed.

Trude’s great grandmother with her nine children

Whatever happened during my father Robert’s patient wait for my mother Trude to mature, and while he built a substantial business so as to be able to offer financial security to a bride, will forever remain a mystery to me. At age nine, I, his daughter, smiled sweetly at the morality tale of the romantic kiss up on the hill, but I was still too innocent and naïve (and later too repressed) to ask him this and other obvious questions. For instance: How did you meet the two spinster sisters in town who have become family friends? Whom did you meet during the war? How could you