The Woman in the Photograph Read online

  In 1999, Michael and I decided to look for a house. By this time his son Key was married and Sarah had her own apartment in San Francisco, so we no longer needed the rambling house we had rented years earlier. We found a modest, two-bedroom in a friendly neighborhood in El Cerrito, just north of Berkeley. The house was built in 1945, the year I was born. It had “good bones” but needed substantial repair. Because of the extent of the work, our realtor asked us to be sure that we really wanted the property even after our offer had been accepted. I was sure.

  Our friend Christopher, who had done several renovations with Michael in prior years, before Michael turned in his construction tool belt for a data research job, came to see the house. He paced up and down, then began waving his arms around. “You could knock out this wall, and knock out that, and pop a new window in here.” Michael and I looked at each other in dismay, but after he left, we started to fantasize about what we could do. We had never allowed ourselves to dream like that before.

  For the next six months Michael worked on the house every evening and every weekend. I remember standing in the gutted house with a broom in my hand, seeing him covered with plaster dust. “I feel like we spent half of your inheritance to buy the house,” he said, “and the other half to haul it to the dump.” I knew his exhaustion made him wonder if we had gone too far, but I was thrilled with the improvements we were making.

  Christopher worked alongside Michael for the whole project. The two of them tore down walls, rewired, painted, and installed new windows, cabinets, and appliances. I dug up the front yard, which had been buried under black plastic and cheap red rocks, picked up debris around the site, and ran around with my camera documenting the transformation. When the building inspector came to check out the finished remodel, he couldn’t believe that we hadn’t added square footage to the original footprint. The house had changed from a small cottage with dark, tiny rooms to an open design with archways and sliding glass doors that brought in light and sky.

  I walked from room to room, marveling at the hard work Michael and Christopher had done. Then I thanked my mother, and felt a new wave of gratitude for the grandparents I never knew. How could I bask in the sunlight that flooded our bedroom in the late afternoon and still harbor resentment toward the source of this inheritance? This cherished house would not let me ignore the role of my grandparents in the circle of renewal that spanned three generations—from a home that was lost to a home restored. My heart felt bigger, as if it could embrace more than before.

  An idea came to me: perhaps I could find other people of my mother’s generation, her peers, who grew up in Leipzig. Their stories could provide a new window into the landscape of her life and the times she lived in.

  I called the Jewish Bulletin and referred to the article the paper had published two years earlier, in August 1997, about my grandfather’s Swiss bank account. I said that I had not been able to claim my grandfather’s bank account, but the experience had shown me that the real treasure was my renewed connection to my family roots. I suggested a follow-up article, and hoped it could help me find some people who had grown up in Leipzig in the 1920s and ’30s.

  On October 2, 2000, Jewish Bulletin reporter Andy Altman-Ohr came to my home. “It doesn’t sound like your family had it so bad,” he said. “After all, there are some people whose parents died in the camps, or worse.”

  I agreed with him. “I never thought of my parents as Holocaust survivors, or considered how I was affected by their history. But I’m beginning to understand how my mother’s past influenced my attitude towards the future. There was no point in having dreams; life was so unpredictable, so threatening. Her training was the message of silence,” I told Andy, “and lowered expectations. My intention is to break the silence and tell the story that was never told.” I added that I was seeking anyone born in Leipzig who might talk to me and give me a sense of the times in which my mother grew up.[11]

  Five people contacted me after the paper came out, and I spoke to all of them. The person who affected me the most was Dr. Fritz Schmerl, a ninety-eight-year-old man living in a nursing home in Piedmont, near Oakland. At the end of his life, he told me about his youth in Leipzig.

  Like my mother, Dr. Schmerl loved classical music, especially Schubert and Schumann. “There were swans in Augustusplatz,” he recalled. “We stood in line on Saturday morning to get tickets to the opera that evening. When I was a teenager, I sat on the floor of the gallery following the words in the libretto.”

  At the end of one visit, Dr. Schmerl asked me if I would like to hear a song about a bird who lands on his foot. “Kommt ein Vogel geflogen/Setzt sich nieder auf mein Fuß,” he sang. (A bird comes flying/It sits on my foot.) I understood a few of the words, and was touched by the last line: “Von der Mutter ein Gruß” (From my mother a greeting). He told me it was a song his mother sang to him when he was a little boy.

  My other contact from the Jewish Bulletin article, Eve Wechsburg, was born in Leipzig and immigrated to Los Angeles in 1939 at the age of seventeen. I spoke with her several times by phone, and she made my mother’s neighborhood come alive in my mind.

  In her eighties and full of zest for life, Eve said in spite of the disruption caused by the Nazis, she had many happy memories of her youth in Germany. “Even with what was happening in the outside world,” she told me, “my teenage years in Leipzig were full of positive memories. I had a close-knit group of friends who shared dreams of creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine. We were enthusiastic, motivated, and optimistic.”

  She talked about the neighborhood where my mother grew up, and was the first person to tell me it was called the Musikviertel, Music Quarter, “a very rich and elegant neighborhood.” Many of the streets, she said, were named for musicians.

  “I took the tram to my piano lessons on Grassi Street,” she said, “just a few steps from where your mother lived. I walked past the Reichsgericht, the big, imposing Supreme Court building, then on the next block the world-renowned Gewandhaus Orchestra Hall. One of my most wonderful memories is my sixteenth birthday, when my boyfriend invited me for a dress rehearsal at the Gewandhaus and they played Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.”

  Eve’s reference to the Gewandhaus triggered images of my mother resting on her bed with her radio turned to the classical station, WQXR, listening to concerts performed by the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. What was she thinking when she heard the announcer speak of a place that was once just a short walk from her home? Did she ever pause for a moment and wonder how her life might have turned out differently? She had no greater passion than her love for classical music. I was certain she attended concerts as regularly as a child today goes to the movies.

  The next time I spoke with Eve, I asked what she did for fun and where she bought her clothes.

  “When we were teenagers, we went to a beautiful park, the Rosenthal, where we played and flirted with the boys. In the spring, I walked there with my grandfather and we fed the ducks and swans in the pond. In winter it froze and we went ice-skating.

  “My mother had many of her clothes custom made by a seamstress, but my clothes came from the store. There was a famous business, Bamberger and Hertz, that sold menswear all through Germany. Ludwig Bamberger was a close friend of my parents. I bought my favorite winter coat at Bamberger’s—a blue herringbone tailored men’s coat.” She paused and cleared her throat. “The Nazis burned down the Bamberger store in Augustusplatz on Kristallnacht. There’s a plaque to mark where it once stood.”

  Eve had witnessed the destruction and violence to Jewish-owned properties on the night of broken glass, yet she had not lost her faith in life. I asked her what happened to her that night. She promised to tell me another time but never did. She said only, “We were very lucky to get out. By 1939, the law was that Jews were not allowed to take anything with them, not silver, nor valuables, nor money.”

  Eve was only eight years younger than my mother, and it was easy to imagine Alice crossing her path in Leipzig.
In my mind, I saw them brush against each other as they tried on fine, woolen coats at Bamberger’s, or when they passed each other getting on and off the streetcar at Grassi Street. They skated by each other on the frozen pond in the Rosenthal, and rubbed shoulders in the lobby of the Gewandhaus Orchestra Hall.

  It had been so long since I heard my mother’s voice. The remnants of Eve’s remaining German accent evoked warmth and familiarity. I just wanted to keep talking, about anything, but she told me she was done, so I thanked her and reluctantly hung up. I wondered why one woman had seen destruction but kept her faith in life, while another, my mother, became cynical.

  The conversations with Eve and Dr. Schmerl added color and texture to the tapestry of my mother’s life in Leipzig. It was as though Alice and Erika had stepped out of the framed photograph to walk on the streets of the Music Quarter with well-dressed men and women coming and going from the concert hall. They strolled hand in hand in Augustusplatz, throwing crumbs to the swans on their way to the opera. They went shopping at Bamberger and Hertz, and sat on the benches in the Rosenthal whispering to each other about the boys playing soccer on the grass.

  As I imagined these scenes, I had no idea that my mother’s history would soon come to life in yet another form, and that a vision of her youth from twelve to eighteen would be revealed to me—in her own hand.

  23

  Alice’s Photo Album

  I shivered as I held the fragile treasure in my hands-just 6 by 9 inches, sepia-toned memories on stiff brown paper, with three or four images on each page. These were the photographs my mother had chosen to preserve, vignettes of the life she once wanted to remember.

  Tom had found Alice’s buried photo album when he was sorting through more boxes in his garage. Knowing how important it would be to me, he sent it off right away. It occurred to me that maybe I was fortunate he didn’t share my fascination with our mother. He had no desire to hold onto anything of hers.

  I opened the cover made of teal blue card stock and carefully turned the pages, some with cracked edges or pieces broken off at the corner. A translucent sheet of onionskin covered each page to protect photos held in place by glue or tiny paper triangles. I ran my fingers under the captions below each snapshot, white pencil against a dark background. The vertical script reminded me of letters I got from my mother over a lifetime—sent to summer camps, college dorms, apartments, European American Express offices when I was traveling, and to my home in California, until her last note on Mother’s Day 1987.

  Why didn’t she ever show this album to me? When my daughter Sarah was making plans to go to Europe after college, I couldn’t stop myself from telling her stories of my adventures, whether she was interested or not. But my mother never said, “When Erika and I were teenagers, we went skiing in St. Moritz in the Swiss Alps in winter, and boating in Zell am See in the Austrian Alps in summer.” But now I could see that they had.

  I would have been fascinated by the exotic names of the resorts she frequented and surprised at her contemporary sense of style—skirts just above the knee, bathing suits and shorts rolled up that exposed her whole leg, and ruffled feminine sundresses with spaghetti straps. And I would have pointed to the unfamiliar people and asked who they were. I wondered if that was the very reason she hid the evidence of her prior life. She would have been forced to say that the woman with the fur stole around her shoulders was her mother, or the man walking with a cane, the trousers of his suit hiked up over his belly, was her father. Is it possible she actually forgot the existence of the photographs from that period, as though they belonged to someone else’s life, no longer to hers?

  Voracious, I devoured a collage of fleeting impressions that spanned the years from a twelve-year-old Alice with a classic cloche hat pulled low over her forehead at Blankenberghe, a popular beach resort on the Belgian coast in 1926, to Lausanne, where she and Erika went to boarding school in 1931.

  She was always with Erika, and often among carefully dressed young men with hair parted in the middle or slicked at the side, and girlfriends with scribbled names I had never heard—Liesel, Elsie, Friedel, Bly. One I did recognize, with a start, Annalie, who had told me that she wouldn’t talk about those who weren’t there to defend themselves.

  What was Alice thinking as she sat at the wheel of a Daimler convertible in Marienbad, a resort in Czechoslovakia? What were Alice and Erika laughing about as they skied cross-country in Oberhof, a German town still famous for its winter sports?

  A series of photos taken on the deck of the S.S. Bremen recorded Alice’s trip to England for her fifteenth birthday. In the first picture, her arm is linked through Nelly’s and her head is resting on Nelly’s shoulder. I hadn’t expected to see any sign of affection with her mother. It made me wonder if Alice’s relationship with her was not always as harsh as the impression she gave me.

  On the next page, Alice is posing with her sister on the ship’s deck. Erika wears a belted coat with a scarf thrown casually around her neck; Alice’s erect posture and hand on hip convey boldness. She looks contemporary in a striped pullover, blazer, and wraparound skirt. She carries a small shoulder purse with long straps and a beret pulled low on her forehead.

  Online, I found a brochure for the ship: “Its unsurpassed speed created the initial wonder, but just as wonderful were the reports of the luxurious appointments, the marvels of engineering, and the gaiety of its distinguished shipboard life.” The Bremen transported many famous people from its maiden voyage on July 16, 1929, into the 1930s—Marlene Dietrich, Cary Grant, Greta Garbo, even Winston Churchill. A caption in black ink under the photo told me that Alice and Erika were on the maiden voyage: “Auf der Bremen vor England 17 juli 1929.”

  They must have loved the gala send-off. Journalists and the public crowded the dock, hoping for a sighting from its illustrious passenger list. I imagined Alice and Erika waving wildly from the deck, as though they too had acquired fame by their participation in the event. Later, they strolled past men and women sitting in wicker chairs in the sunroom, sipped champagne with new friends under potted palm trees, or laughed together on the plush loveseat in their stateroom. I could see them that evening as they walked down the grand staircase that led from the balcony down to the dining hall. Many pairs of eyes would have turned their way, two tall, slender, dark-haired young women, just fifteen and seventeen, whose demeanor belied their young ages.

  The ship’s glamour evoked images of the Titanic, but fortunately it hadn’t achieved that ship’s morbid fame. It did leave its mark on history for the Erster Deutscher Katapultflug, the first German catapult plane. It carried transatlantic “airmail” that was catapulted off the ship before it reached New York, thus allowing the ship-to-shore mail to arrive fourteen hours ahead of the actual ship.

  Lynne remembered that “Alice wore diamonds from knuckle to knuckle” when she arrived in New York. But even Lynne’s stories didn’t impress upon me the affluence of her earlier life until I saw the photos. The woman who made this album came from an upper tier of society. I fantasized about how she and Erika would have been described in the society pages of Vogue, or the 1920s German equivalent:

  The Lewin sisters, Alice and Erika, were seen Saturday night at a gala ball for the opening of Wagner’s Tannhäuser at the Leipzig Opera House. Alice wore a fitted gown of tiered cream chiffon; Erika entered the hall in a floor length evening dress of blue silk.

  I believed that I had found my mother’s brightest years in this haunting album, the magical era of her life when she had the opportunity to savor the pleasures and passions of coming of age. But as I looked at the photos she had secreted away, I felt an ache in my chest, an uncomfortable mix of sadness and anger, realizing that she withheld from me the precious pearls of her youth.

  Then I turned the page.

  24

  Alice and Fez

  I stared at young Alice. She was on an outing to the countryside with Erika, Willy, Fez, and a fellow named Ernst Fisher who had been a close frie
nd of both my father and mother. The caption at the bottom of the page said, “Wir!!! in K, Mai ’31.” Wir meant we. I could not identify the place, but the three exclamation marks told me it was no ordinary event for my mother.

  “This is another missing piece of the puzzle!” I called to Michael as I pulled him back to the table and pointed to a photo of Alice and Fez lying on the grass, his arm around her shoulder, her head on his chest. “I can’t believe she already knew him. She was only sixteen here.”

  “What can’t you believe? Willy told you that your parents went out together in Germany and that your mother wanted Fez from the start.”

  “Yes, he did, but I didn’t get the whole picture. I didn’t realize how young and innocent she was when she first met him. Here she is, a young girl, out with an older man, a college student. Let me see—1931—he was twenty-four in this picture.”

  I saw a girl becoming a woman, naked in her excitement, discovering new feelings, especially for a man called Fez, eight years older. I saw her without the shield of armor that had always protected the mother I knew.

  “Your father looks lighter here than in any of the later pictures,” Michael observed pointing to another photo of Fez, Willy, and Ernst. My father was laughing, and Willy had a bandage above his left eye, presumably from a fencing injury.

  “Yes, of course my father was different then. He had few responsibilities except attending his university classes and dropping by the fur business on Friday so Nathan could give him a paycheck, at least according to Willy, who sounded pretty envious, by the way.”

  I was obsessed with the people in the photos. I wanted to be one of them, to hear their conversations, to eat their bread, to be as carefree as they were and to feel the earth under their bodies. What happened later shouldn’t cancel out the reality of these happy moments, I thought.