The Woman in the Photograph

  PRAISE FOR

  The Woman in the Photograph

  “Mani’s evocative book unfolds like a mystery. The story has a heartbeat as she uncovers the power of secrets. I found myself rooting for her, and her mother.”

  —Sue Bender author of Plain and Simple and Everyday Sacred

  “This is an eloquent account of a daughter’s transformative journey into the heart of her mother’s hidden life. It will resonate deeply with anyone who has ever wondered about a parent’s untold stories.”

  —Elizabeth Rosner author of The Speed of Light and Blue Nude

  “Mani Feniger did such an amazing job of transporting me into her mother’s world that I had to remind myself several times that this was not a novel. Thank you for sharing this important historical truth with us.”

  —Deborah Layton, author of Seductive Poison

  “Mani Feniger’s heartfelt account of her journey into her family’s past-the moments of connection and alienation, the unexpected discoveries of family secrets-may well inspire readers to embark on investigations of their own families’ historical roots and hidden stories.”

  —Sarah Stone, author of The True Sources of the Nile

  “Mani’s elegant writing and compelling story captivated me and took me along on her journey. It felt as though I had been invited on a pilgrimage to discover my own pre-war European family.”

  —Raphael Shevelev, author of Liberating the Ghosts

  THE WOMAN IN THE PHOTOGRAPH

  The Search for My Mother’s Past

  Copyright © 2012 by Mani Feniger

  Keystroke Books

  El Cerrito, California

  www.manifeniger.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  Cover design by Carol Ehrlich

  Layout design by Patricia Coltrin and Karin Kinsey

  Quote from Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry, Copyright © 2004 by Tanya Amyx Berry. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint.

  Publisher's Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  Feniger, Mani. The woman in the photograph : the search for my mother’s past / Mani Feniger. - 1st ed. p. : ill., maps ; cm.

  Paperback ISBN 978-0-9851344-0-2

  1. Feniger, Alice, 1914-1987. 2. Jewish women-Germany-20th century- Biography. 3. Mothers and daughters-United States-20th century- Biography. 4. Jews, German-United States-20th century-Genealogy. 5. Immigrants-United States-20th century-Biography. 6. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)-History. I. Title DS134.42.F46 F46 2012 940.531/8/092 2012904935

  FIRST EDITION:

  June 2012

  For Sarah and Brett

  Contents

  Prologue

  PART ONE No Wall Lasts Forever

  1. The Wall

  2. Family

  3. Widowed

  4. Central Park West

  5. Escape

  6. A New Path

  7. Safe Passage

  PART TWO The Search

  8. The Letter

  9. A Vacant Lot

  10. The Photograph

  11. Diamonds

  12. The Cows

  13. The Girls

  14. Fez

  15. Tangled Web

  16. Juden Verboten

  17. A Broken Thread

  18. The Dinner Party

  19. The Swiss Account

  20. A String of Pearls

  21. The Settlement

  PART THREE Renewal

  22. A New Home

  23. Alice’s Photo Album

  24. Alice and Fez

  25. The Journey

  26. Ralph Rotholz

  27. Fritzi’s Tale

  28. The Call

  29. Landing

  30. Matthias

  31. Roots

  32. Stronger Than Death

  33. Crossing The Border

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Poems

  Acknowledgments

  Sources

  The Author

  Prologue

  The photograph of two young women seated close together on a loveseat transported me back to a lost era of my mother’s life. Suspended in time, my mother and her sister gaze into each other’s eyes. They seem unaware that outside their private world, the Nazi party is gathering momentum to sweep away the life they have known.

  I was stunned by the image of my mother, Alice, in a white evening gown. The light from across the room illuminates the soft tiers of silk that drape across her knee, brushing her ankle just above the narrow strap of her tapered shoe. Everything about her is graceful—her carefully shaped eyebrow, the playful curl of her hair against her cheek, her painted lips just on the verge of a smile, and the sparkle of gemstones that circle her throat.

  The woman in this photograph is not my mother, I thought. I recognized her proud profile; otherwise she bore little resemblance to the person I had known all my life.

  The mother I knew was frugal and practical. She bought dark, durable skirts and neutral dresses from the sale rack at Macy’s and wore flat, sensible leather shoes that would last many seasons. But it was not just the elegance of her attire that startled me so. The most striking difference was that the woman I knew was never still. Her eyes constantly darted around the room, monitoring every movement or shift in tone. She was on guard, jumping at the sound of a car horn, snapping with impatience if you kept her waiting. The woman in this photograph is calm, poised, self-possessed. She is at home in the world, and in herself.

  My mother never showed me this photograph, taken in Germany in the early 1930s. It was in a dusty envelope my brother found in the back of her closet. Although I had once steered as far away as I could from my mother’s past, the image ignited a spark inside me, an urgency to know more about the person who had such a profound effect on my life. Long after her passing, the omissions in her story still haunt me. What happened to her? Why didn’t she tell me? Who is the woman in the photograph?

  PART ONE

  No Wall Lasts Forever

  What is not conscious,

  comes to us from outside ourselves,

  as if by chance.

  CARL JUNG

  1

  The Wall

  As a crowd of 20,000 of his countrymen implored him to “Open the gate!” on that chaotic Thursday evening, Harald Jäger, head of passport control at the Berlin Wall’s Bornholmer Strasse checkpoint, kept shouting at the guards under his command, “What shall I do? Order you to shoot?”[1]

  It was the night of November 9, 1989. Earlier that evening, a reporter asked Günter Schabowski, head of the East German Socialist Unity Party, when travel restrictions to East Berlin would be lifted. In the heat of the moment, Schabowski answered: Sofort…unverzüglich (Immediately… without delay). Taking his words literally, and primed by months of demonstrations against the East German Communist government, waves of men and women poured into the streets of the Eastern sector and surged toward the Berlin Wall. The State Security Guards, Stasi, as they were called, were entirely unprepared for the advancing crowd. Some tried to reach their supervisors but got no clear instructions on what to do.

  At 10:30 p.m., the Stasi guards abandoned their post on Bornholmerstrasse. By midnight, hundreds of thousands of German citizens from both sides of Berlin converged on the Wall. Wielding hammers, makeshift tools, or just bare hands, men and women pummeled and smashed at the hated barrier that had divided communities, families, and friends for twenty-eight years.

  My husband and I sat in our Berkeley
living room, mesmerized by the astonishing news. I moved closer to the TV and turned up the sound. “The Wall as we have known it since 1961 can no longer contain the German people,” announced NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw, the first American journalist to report from Berlin that night. I knew we were watching a pivotal event in world history, but I had no idea that reverberations from this event six thousand miles away would find their way to my own doorstep; nor could I explain the tears trickling down my cheeks.

  “Doesn’t this remind you of the sixties?” Michael asked.

  Yes, I felt exhilarated on behalf of the protestors. I could see myself there, the tall girl with the long hair reaching her arm up to be pulled onto the Wall. But it also reminded me of something much more troubling. Don’t you get it? Don’t buy German goods, my parents used to say. Don’t speak German in public. The demonstrators were shouting in the language my parents used with each other in private moments. It was also the language of the Nazi commanders who drove them from their home and country.

  Nothing specific had ever been said in my presence about the Holocaust, and I knew even less about the relatives that I supposed must have once existed, but the staccato rhythms of German speech evoked dread in my chest. Its harsh tones and sharp edges reminded me of a dark place in my mother, the deep chasm where her sentences fell off and the subject changed.

  I remembered a remark my mother made when I was nine years old. We were walking to the A&P supermarket. I gripped her elbow to hold her back as a car whizzed by us on Hillside Avenue, a busy street near the Queens County Courthouse.

  “Stop,” I yelled.

  “I had the right of way,” she said, annoyed.

  “A lot of good that will do if the car hits you, Mom.”

  When we reached the other side, she turned to me and said, “I kiss the ground we walk on.” I looked up at her, confused, waiting for her to continue. It must have to do with Hitler, I thought, but I knew not to ask.

  “C’mon, I still have a bunch of things to do today,” she snapped, walking faster, and that was the last I heard of it.

  Every day I turned on the news to follow the events taking place in Germany. I found out that huge demonstrations had been going on for months in Berlin and Leipzig. The name Leipzig gave me chills—my mother’s birthplace. Until then, Leipzig had been nothing more than a void, a place locked away behind an Iron Curtain—one Wall built by the Soviets, the other erected by my mother to obscure her past.

  “What would Mom have thought of this?” I asked Michael. But I didn’t expect an answer because my mother had died of a stroke two years earlier. In the first months after her death, I felt at peace. Her stroke was swift and complete, “almost like a Zen master’s sword,” I told the friends at her memorial service. I was grateful she didn’t linger with her capacities diminished or have to depend on other people for her care. Both would have been her worst nightmare.

  But hearing the references to Leipzig on the news made me wish I could call her. I knew nothing about the city where she grew up, though I remembered an odd story she had told me after a trip to Berlin in 1959. It was the summer after she remarried her second husband, George, and he had taken her to Switzerland. It was also the first time she had traveled to Europe since the thirties, when she and her sister Erika escaped from the Nazis.

  At the end of August, George returned to New York and my mother went to visit an old school girlfriend who lived in Berlin. It made no sense to me that she would want to go to Germany, or that she had a German friend. Even more bizarre, her friend said my mother was lucky to be a Jew and get out when she did. She said the Germans who were left at the end of the war suffered horribly with no food or heat, and her family almost died of starvation.

  “A pretty insensitive thing to tell my mother,” I said to Michael. “The Jews were lucky?”

  Before leaving for Europe, Mom called the American Embassy in New York to inquire about going to Leipzig. Although it was less than a hundred miles south of Berlin, it may as well have been in another world. Leipzig was in the Soviet-controlled German Democratic Republic (GDR). The official told Alice that entering the Eastern zone would not be wise. Since she was born there, her American passport could not protect her if the East German police decided to detain her.

  My mother was not dissuaded. “I decided to take a chance,” she’d said, demonstrating her defiance with a familiar gesture of protruding her jaw. The Berlin Wall had not yet been sealed and it was still possible to walk through the Brandenburg Gate to the Soviet sector. On the eastern side was a broad boulevard called Unter den Linden, where in the spring of Alice’s youth the linden blossoms were sometimes so thick that when a breeze blew it looked like snow falling on the outdoor café tables and chairs. She winced at the memory of sitting opposite her sister at Café Kranzler, drinking a tall glass of hot chocolate.

  She’d taken a tram to the Mitte district of Berlin and then fallen in step with several British tourists and a German couple who were walking toward the crossing. A large sign alerted her that they were leaving the western sector: ACHTUNG! Sie verlassen jetzt West-Berlin.

  The minute she crossed over to the East, she was absorbed into a landscape of overwhelming drabness, as though all color had been sucked out of an old photograph. Security guards were posted at short intervals, and she clutched her purse with passport and camera tightly under her arm.

  The badly bombed area had seen little repair since the end of the war, and most of the buildings were no more than shallow facades with a restored entrance on the street. She took a few steps toward an alley where she could peek beyond to the next street. She saw piles of debris—bricks, concrete, and twisted metal that had still not been removed after fourteen years.

  She sensed the soldier even before she heard the thud of his boots on the gravel. She turned her head to meet his gaze. He was young and serious, but didn’t look cruel. He wore the green military uniform of the Volkspolizei, the People’s Police, and he carried an automatic rifle. A chill ran up her spine, but she forced herself to flash her friendliest middle-aged American woman’s smile. She didn’t say anything, preferring to be seen as an ignorant tourist, not a German Jew who should know better.

  He lifted his right arm to direct her back to the main street. She nodded to signify that she would follow his command. She wished she could take a picture to show Erika what miserable rubble was left of the glamorous street where they often spent their weekends and holidays, but she didn’t dare take out her camera. She turned around and walked back to West Berlin.

  Watching the scenes on the news, I thought about my mother’s story and wondered what it was like to see a pile of rubble instead of a street where you once strolled amidst flowering linden trees.

  “I can’t imagine why Mom would have wanted to step foot in that place again,” I told my husband. “I never would.”

  2

  The Family

  From my birth, in 1945, we lived in Jamaica, a working-class neighborhood in the borough of Queens, New York. My immediate family occupied the downstairs flat of a two-family house owned by my father’s older brother Nathan. Aunt Pearl sometimes invited me upstairs to taste her homemade marble cake or noodle kugel, rich with eggs and vanilla, and Uncle Nathan gave me Nacht Süß (night sweet), a square of dark, bittersweet chocolate, after dinner. But we didn’t live there because of the sweets. My father didn’t earn enough money to support our family and depended on his brother to provide a home for us.

  My mother never sat still. She waxed the kitchen floor, darned socks on a scratched wooden egg, replaced zippers, hemmed pants, and replaced buttons from a jar filled with every color and shape button I could imagine; she planted tomato vines that curled up wooden stakes on a little strip of earth next to the garage; she wallpapered the kitchen with a bright pattern of vines and leaves that made it look like an outdoor patio. She also was more affectionate than my father. She often invited me to climb into her bed in the morning and told me she loved me “as on
ly a mother can” while I showered her with hugs and kisses.

  I’m sure it was my mother who chose the name Terry for me, a cute American name for a daughter who would grow up far from the ghosts of her buried past. But I was also a child who never quite fit in with the other kids at school, not just because I was a head taller than most of the other girls, but because my parents peeled the skin off apples so it landed on the plate in long corkscrews, preferred Italian opera to football games, and spoke German in low tones when they didn’t want Tom or me to understand them.

  My father, whom everyone called Fez (his middle name, pronounced “Fates”), was a quiet, self-contained man who always had a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth or a pipe held firmly between his teeth. On the rare occasions when he spoke up in an argument, even my mother held her tongue. During the World Series of 1952, when the Brooklyn Dodgers played the New York Yankees, my older brother, Tom, wanted to watch the end of the inning but my mother insisted he turn off the TV and come to the dinner table. My father turned to her and said, “Let him watch,” and that was that. For Tom, that became the critical moment when Dad stood up for him.

  Dad crafted many pieces of furniture for our home: a beautiful dresser for my mother with smooth, contoured dividers for her necklaces, belts, and underwear; a desk for himself with compartments for envelopes, pens, and stamps; and a hexagonal kitchen table with a speckled green linoleum surface that matched the floor.

  Nathan and my father couldn’t have been more different. Uncle Nathan was stern, serious, and bossy. Perhaps he thought providing us a place to live gave him some special entitlement to yell at Tom when he slammed the front door or to criticize my mother for “running off” to play tennis. My mother bristled when he told her what to do. She once lit up a Chesterfield, exhaled a plume of smoke in front of his face, grabbed her tennis bag, and walked out the door.