The Woman in the Photograph Read online

  “I designed this ring myself when I was sixteen,” she had told me, holding her hand up to the light. “It was a gift for my birthday.”

  “Mom, it’s beautiful,” I said. “I can’t believe you designed it.”

  “You’ll get the ring when I die,” she answered.

  “Mom, stop. Why do you have to talk about that now?”

  “I’m just being realistic,” she said.

  She had also talked about a Swiss bank account. Her father, a very successful dentist, had seen the threat of Hitler’s rise to power and hidden his money in a numbered bank account in Switzerland. But he died suddenly and the “guardian” ran off with the safe that contained his documents. Alice and Erika were never able to find the numbers to the secret account.

  “The Swiss are so honest,” Mom lamented when she told me about the account. “They’ll never let anyone get to that account without the numbers. That money will rot in Hell.” I remembered the hurt look on her face as she shook her head.

  Now I was hearing about a property, an actual home in Leipzig. In America, my mother never had her own home. It must have been salt in a wound to have to rely on her brother-in-law Nathan’s charity for a roof over our heads. Did she ever dream of this property that once belonged to her family? Was that what lurked in the shadow that hung over my mother in a quiet moment when she seemed to be pondering something beyond my reach?

  In the months that followed, I began to receive copies of the correspondence between the lawyer and the German court administrators. Most of the documents were faxes riddled with long incomprehensible words…Enteignungssachen…Kostenerstattungsansprüche…. They would have made me laugh if I wasn’t so eager to understand them.

  My mother didn’t want me to learn German as a child. I was surprised when Aunt Erika bought a little volume called “German through Pictures” and offered to teach her daughter Nikki and me some practical German phrases. I pretended to be interested and mouthed the words for fork (Gabel) and girl (Mädchen), but my primary motivation was the feeling of closeness I felt sitting on the couch tucked under her arm. My mother wanted me to study French, the language she and Erika had learned at a fancy boarding school in Lausanne, Switzerland.

  Now I wished I had paid more attention to the German lessons—I was completely dependent on my Pons German-English dictionary as I sifted through the pile of papers from the restitution lawyer. Then I came to a document that put all my senses on alert. It was a Certificate of Inheritance (Erbschein) dated September 10, 1932.

  It verified the death of Dr. Max Lewin (Verstorben: deceased) and identified his heirs as his widow (Witwe) Nelly Lewin, and their children (Kinder) Erika Hella Lewin born November 12, 1912, and Alice Ruth Ingeborg Lewin, my mother, born July 23, 1914.

  Max and Nelly Lewin. The names tasted bitter on my tongue when I said them out loud. These people were my immediate blood relatives, yet I knew almost nothing about them—and my mother’s silence convinced me that I wouldn’t want to know more. Other people had photos of elders and ancestors on their mantels, but we never had such pictures. I had no ancestors, and almost no family to speak of except the two sets of aunts and uncles who had immigrated to New York.

  I translated as many words as I could, hoping to find some clues that would tell me how Max died and what happened to Nelly and the girls afterward—Alice who would have been eighteen and Erika almost twenty. But all I found was impersonal legal language pertaining to the court procedure.

  Nor could Mr. Osen answer any of my questions. He explained that the newly unified Germany had not yet developed laws to deal with Holocaust-era property claims that were in territory formerly part of East Germany. “In effect,” he wrote, “nothing is definite until the Bundestag passes these laws.” In the meantime, it was his job to obtain the documents that traced the lines of inheritance from Max and Nelly Lewin to my mother and then to Tom and me. It was up to him to prove that no one else in the last fifty years had a legitimate claim to the property.

  Fifty years sounded like a long time, and I was unsettled by subsequent papers that made me realize my mother had seen more of Adolf Hitler than I previously imagined. I had always assumed that she and Erika got out early enough to be spared any of the atrocities of the Nazi regime.

  “Why didn’t she tell me more?” I asked Michael. “Were there other relatives I never knew? How did she get out of Germany?”

  I kept repeating questions he couldn’t answer.

  “Isn’t it weird,” I said as we were making dinner together one night, “that most of the people who tore down the Berlin Wall weren’t even born when the policy of Aryanization ruined my mother’s life, and the people who live in her house now may not even know it was taken from her?”

  “You’re getting obsessed,” my husband said quietly. “You know that this is a long shot and you might not get a cent. You shouldn’t get your hopes up.” He was pouring hot water into the filter for his evening cup of coffee, and I knew he was more tired and impatient than usual.

  “That’s not it,” I shouted. “Listen to me. It’s not just about money. I thought I didn’t want to know anything about my mother’s past, but I’ve changed my mind.”

  I became calmer as Michael paused and put his arm around me.

  “For all I know,” I said, “that house in Leipzig is the repository of our family skeletons.” I hesitated for a second. “Maybe my ancestors are calling me. They don’t want to be forgotten.”

  9

  A Vacant Lot

  In November 1991, a year after unification, I received a letter from Mr. Osen, the German claims lawyer. It said: “I have gone to Leipzig to review the property and found that it is a vacant lot.” A vacant lot! I wanted to find something tangible, a building with walls and doors. What could a vacant lot tell me about my mother’s past? The lawyer said the entire block had been bombed in the war and the building at 32 Grassistrasse had been destroyed. Had I been naïve to think I could discover my mother’s vanished life in a property that was bombed and buried behind a wall—not only a wall of cement and barbed wire but of secrets and omissions?

  I needed to talk to someone who could tell me about my mother’s past. Nathan and Pearl were both dead, and the obvious person was Uncle Willy, who knew not only Alice and Erika, but also my father from their student days in Germany. However, I wasn’t sure if he would be willing to talk to me about “the girls.”

  Erika’s death had been sudden and traumatic for everyone. My mother had said very little about it until she came to California three years later. On our second morning together, I set a soft-boiled egg and a cup of coffee on the breakfast table in front of her and sat down. Then I asked how she was managing without Erika.

  “I flew to Florida and stayed with her for three days,” Mom said. “She couldn’t speak, but we could talk with our eyes. The phone rang early the next morning, after I returned to New York. I didn’t have to answer it because I already knew. She had come to me at four that morning to kiss me goodbye.”

  I put my hand out to touch Mom’s arm but she got up to get the butter from the refrigerator. “What are our plans for today?” she asked.

  “Three years were too long for them to be apart,” I told Michael at Mom’s memorial service. “I can’t imagine Mom without her Soeurchen.” That was the special name they always called each other, a combination of the French word soeur for sister, and the German diminutive chen, a term of affection.

  From the ages of nine to twelve, I spent every Sunday at Willy and Erika’s house while my mother showed model split-level homes on Long Island to suburban “nouveau riche housewives” as she called them, whom she both disdained and envied. On the way to work, she dropped me off to play with my cousin Nikki. It was my favorite day of the week because I felt like a child, not a grown up, when I was there.

  Erika designed and sewed her own clothes, usually choosing bright colors or leopard skin patterns. I loved to look at her drawings on big sheets of tracing pap
er, long figures of women outlined in dark ink and filled in with blue, reds, and yellows. She showed us how to cut out cardboard figures and use tracing paper to draw outfits for them. Nikki and I had long ping-pong tournaments in the basement rec room or games of croquet on the back lawn with mallets and striped wooden balls. One afternoon we were playing hearts on the screened-in back porch and Erika came out to bring us some tuna sandwiches for lunch. I asked her if she wanted me to deal her a hand. I was really joking, but to my surprise, she sat down with us and played several rounds of cards.

  Willy came home from work, also in real estate, and greeted me with a big hug. His strong, solid arms made me feel safe. I rubbed my hand on his chin and asked him why it was so rough. I was embarrassed when he answered by explaining about hormones. I was really just trying to be affectionate. When I got older, I tried to impress him by quoting from books or magazine articles I had read. He gave me Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness when I was twelve, though I was not as intellectual as my pretense suggested and never got past the first two pages. (The thick hardback volume was still gathering dust on my mom’s bookshelf when we cleaned out her apartment.)

  Years later, when I started my own fledgling consulting business, Willy sent me a check to help me get stationery and business cards printed. The typed note he included ended with, “I feel you need a booster shot for a healthy outcome and so permit me to enclose it for you. You are very precious to us and we will always be available to you in whatever direction you go.” It was signed with brown ink in his sweeping script, “Affectionately, Bill & Eri,” with a handwritten “P.S. the same for me,” added by Erika at the bottom.

  After Erika’s death, I received another note on the same stationery. Its tone was very different from the uncle I had known, though he signed it, “Always Willy to you.”

  Eri’s passing has left a great sense of loss in my consciousness, and the emptiness I am forced to face seems threatening and endless.

  As long as Eri was alive I had always prided myself in being perfectly able to function by myself. But I have discovered that I have deluded myself. I need the companionship of another human being in order for my life to have a purpose and direction. Being alone I face nothingness.

  In his grief, Willy lost the confidence and optimism that had made him seem so powerful. Nor did my mother’s presence bring him any solace. After her death, I found a photo of Willy and Alice sitting in a canoe in a Florida swamp—both look drained and miserable. Alice, in the bow, faces the camera and attempts a weak smile. Willy, paddling from the stern, looks at nothing. His eyes, drooping at the corners, stare vacantly at the water, his mouth is also turned down, his shoulders hunch as if they have no backbone to support them. Every part of him is collapsed, seemingly dissolving into the gray brown water.

  But time passed and Willy moved back to New York to stay with a woman friend he knew from Leipzig, who had “been a great comfort to him after Erika’s death.” We spoke on the phone every few months, and he seemed to have regained some of his former spark. When I told him I had been reminiscing about my weekends at his house, he laughed and said, “Yes, you were a delightful guest except you had one bad habit—you ate too much!”

  When I found out about the property in Leipzig, I told him how disappointed I was that the house was gone, now just a vacant lot.

  “It wasn’t a house,” he said. “It was an apartment building that your grandfather owned, with four or five stories they rented out to other people.”

  “Oh, I had no idea,” I said. “You mean you were there?”

  “Of course I was there, many times. I went there to see Erika.”

  I held my breath. It seemed like he was willing to talk about my aunt.

  “Willy,” I said, “can I ask you some questions about Germany?”

  “Of course, my darling,” he said. “But I don’t know if I’ll have the answers.”

  “Well, mostly I was thinking of Erika and Alice? For example, how did you know my mother?”

  “I became friendly with Erika during her last year in high school. Of course I knew Alice too, but she was in a lower grade, and my friendship with Erika was on a different, more intimate basis. I was invited many times to their parents’ home.”

  “What were they like, the parents?” Here, finally, was someone who had actually known Max and Nelly.

  “Your grandmother, Nelly, was timid, quiet, unassuming, almost invisible. She depended on her husband in every way. Your grandfather, Max, was dictatorial. He considered his wife incapable of making financial decisions or handling money. Erika told me that her father was a disciplinarian, a moralist of the first degree. I knew her father as a man of propriety. To the outside world, he had a very respectable appearance and reputation.

  “But I remember there was a student ball, an academic ball, and of course I went with Erika. There I saw her father dancing and flirting and playing around with young girls. He didn’t care how it looked. I was appalled. On another occasion, when a friend and I brought the girls home late, Max was waiting up for them. He started pulling out their hair right in front of us.”

  I got goose bumps on my arms. I suddenly remembered the last note my mother had sent me for Mother’s Day, just a month before her death. It was a folded card with a picture of a kitten sitting on a wicker chair. She wrote:

  Dear Mommy,

  Today I received 2 Mothers day cards from you, which made me realize that you are my “mom” and I am your “baby.” I have this wonderful feeling that you would protect me from evil and take care of me.

  I am so busy lately, I have no time to moan. Nevertheless, I do wish you a well-deserved celebration in your pretty home on this commercial holiday.

  Love you, kisses,

  Mom

  My mother’s words were so odd. At the time, I wondered if she even realized what she had said. I had always assumed she was referring to Hitler when she said evil, but my uncle’s words made me wonder what else had happened to her. Before I could even digest these thoughts, Willy continued:

  “Let me give you an idea of the times and how unstable everything was. I was a senior student in the Institute of Journalism at the University of Leipzig. I was elected student president to serve the second semester, in 1933. But during intercession, Hitler became chancellor and the Reich announced that heads of organizations had to be Aryan. Immediately, somebody in brown uniform stood in front of me and told me to abdicate. Within five minutes, the new president was in and everything was dictated by Nazis.” I could tell by the way he raised his voice that he was still angry at the memory.

  “Soon after, professors that I had known for four years appeared in brown uniforms, the uniform of the Nazis. My thesis sponsor, who was anti-Nazi, was murdered. When I tried to get another sponsor to accept my dissertation, they refused it. I realized that this was the end of my education in Germany and the life I expected. I decided to go to Palestine.” He paused.

  “The reason I was able to leave so early was that your father, who was my best friend at the university, had a nephew who was in charge of immigration to Palestine. He was able to get me papers a year sooner than I would have otherwise. By then, all our hopes and plans for the future had dissolved. I left for Palestine in late 1933. The last thing I did was to help the girls sell the furniture from their parents’ home.”

  “The house…I mean the apartment on Grassistrasse?”

  “Yes, they had no emotional attachment to the place. They packed away a few things of value. Then I left Germany, not knowing if Erika and I would ever see each other again.”

  I realized I had to have more than a telephone conversation with Willy. I needed to visit him in person, and maybe also Mom’s cousin Lynne, who also lived in New York.

  “Come in the spring, my darling,” Willy said in response to my idea. “I’ll be back from Florida by March and would love to see you.”

  The door was starting to open.

  10

  The Photograph />
  Spring was four or five months away, but just after the winter holiday season, I got an unexpected look into my mother’s early life. One rainy day in January 1992, the postman rang the bell and handed me a large padded envelope. I pushed aside the pile of mail that had accumulated on the kitchen table and opened the clasp. Inside was a note from my brother. He had found some of Mom’s files and pictures he had stored in his garage and thought I would want to see them.

  I pulled out a plastic bag with passports and a few papers. The earliest passport had been issued to Alice Feniger in 1958, the name changed to Alice Dimenstein after she married George. It had stamps from London, the U.K., Belgium, Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, and from the police department in Berlin. That must have been from the summer she and George traveled together, and she stayed longer to go to Berlin on her own. Funny the things you notice—the careful arch of her narrow eyebrows, her hair pulled back from her face revealing a high forehead.

  The second passport had stamps from France, Malaysia, Argentina, and Israel. Every time things got too tense between Mom and George—he ridiculed her opinions and embarrassed her in front of friends, or he lay on the couch all day and “did nothing constructive”—she threatened to get a divorce. He responded by taking her on a trip. She loved to see new places and meet people from other cultures. She prided herself on traveling light and thought it was a weakness of character to have to check luggage (a belief that has continued to haunt me every time I prepare for a trip).