The Woman in the Photograph Read online

  I had a feeling in my chest like a rock had lodged there. Willy looked down at his pad of paper.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “A note I scribbled that I find very symptomatic and important. I wrote, ‘Your mother was attracted to men who were successful and strong, but her tragedy was that she picked weak ones. Your father was weak in character.’ ”

  Tom leaned forward at the table. “What you mean weak in character?” he asked.

  “For instance, he was weak enough to get involved with a woman…whom he didn’t want to marry.”

  “Do you mean he didn’t want to marry Alice?” I asked, struggling to keep my voice neutral.

  “Fez didn’t have any ambition to have a family or earn a living. In Leipzig, his older brother Nathan took care of him. Nathan ran the fur business in Leipzig and Fez went in every Friday to collect his paycheck. In New York, he tried to start his own fur business. He used some of the money your mother brought—I assume about $15,000, same as Eri—a sizable amount in the 1930s but not enough to live on. He made himself a nice office with a big desk and plush carpets, but he had no idea how to run a business. He had problems with the union, and they pressured him to hire certain workers and everything went wrong. This gentle, sensitive person was thrown into a world where the requirement for survival was toughness, and he didn’t have it.”

  “But I remember Daddy coming home and his hands would be black because he was cutting pelts,” Tom said.

  “Yeah, maybe one or two of them,” Willy said with a shrug of his shoulders.

  “You know, if he could have stayed in Germany, maybe your father would have finished law school. With his intelligence and articulate language, he might have been a very persuasive attorney. Or he could have continued to be supported by his brother in the fur business and lived as the thoughtful, gentle person he was. But here he was in a new situation. He never quite found his place. He couldn’t cope with the pressures and responsibilities of a wife and family. At the end of his life, he felt like a failure. Your father always had one foot in this world and one in the next. I have the feeling your father didn’t die of heart failure. He died of a broken heart.”

  I wished I didn’t know what Willy meant, but as he spoke, I sensed the poetic sensibility of a man who read good literature, carved fine furniture, but who lacked my mother’s determination and resilience, the traits that helped her go on.

  I thought of Lynne’s comment that Alice was not bitter in the beginning, and of the photos of Alice and Fez in an album my mother made in 1936, soon after she arrived in New York. My favorite picture of my parents shows my father, a handsome young man with wavy hair, an open white shirt, and trousers rolled up to his knees, reaching out his arm to steady my mother on a rock outcrop over the waves at Coney Island. Her skirt is blown up by the wind, exposing her shapely leg and thigh as she grasps his arm. My uncle’s words could not erase the picture of my parents that I saw with my own eyes.

  But Willy repeated that Fez didn’t want to marry my mother.

  “Then why did he?” I asked, getting increasingly irritated at the insistence in my uncle’s voice.

  “Your father came to me for advice. He didn’t know what to do. He had been going out with Alice since she arrived in New York, but he was still in love with the other girl.”

  “Annalie?”

  “Yes. He had no idea when or if Annalie would come here. All night long we talked. Your father paced back and forth until dawn. But he had to face the reality, and by morning he had made a decision. You see, Alice was pregnant.”

  The day had started off so sunny and cheerful. I looked out the sliding glass doors and saw that clouds were gathering on the horizon. I felt too bruised to speak. It was not just the information, but Willy’s indifference towards my mother, his pity for my father.

  “You know,” my uncle said after a long silence, “when we think of the Holocaust, we think of the six million people who were killed in the concentration camps. Actually there are many more people who are victims. Your mother and father, Erika and I, are also victims, because everything that has happened in our lives is a result of being so completely uprooted.”

  15

  Tangled Web

  After Willy left, I sat down in the den with Tom and Harriet. Even though it was a warm evening I felt chilled, my spirits dampened by our conversation. I pulled a knitted throw over my legs and was grateful for the hot mug of tea that Harriet handed me. It was not that I had assumed that everything was rosy and romantic, Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart having a passionate love affair while escaping from the Nazis in Casablanca, but I did expect to hear of a happy time when my mother and father were young and in love. I felt as though a private treasure I had hidden away for safekeeping had been exposed and damaged. I asked Tom how he felt.

  “I don’t really have a strong reaction. I saw Mom as a very manipulative person and it didn’t surprise me that she was pregnant. The agonizing part for me was imagining what Bill and Dad said to each other that night. Bill made it sound like he was the one who convinced Fez to do the right thing.”

  “Yeah, he made it sound that way, but we don’t know what was really going on. You don’t get pregnant alone.”

  “No, of course you don’t. I see your point. I admit, I’ve always felt more sympathetic to Dad than Mom.” Tom paused for a moment. “But here’s this man who was the hit of Leipzig, good looking, charming. Every woman wanted him. Alice marries him, and he isn’t the husband she imagined. It really is another great disappointment for her. I can see how she must have felt cheated once again.”

  I felt my eyes well up when I heard Tom express some sympathy for our mother. I knew that he didn’t have an easy relationship with her. No matter how hard he tried, he could never make up for the husband who had let her down.

  “However it came about,” Tom said, “if you had asked me, I would have told you that Mom and Dad had a reasonably happy marriage in the beginning, at least when I was young. I have a memory of Dad swinging her around in the kitchen, and I remember them talking and laughing, or having Bill and Erika over to play bridge. And in the summer Dad drove us to Jones Beach, of course, with the two of them in the front seat smoking the whole time. I can see some truth in what Bill said, but I don’t see it as all true, not the whole story.”

  I agreed and, for the moment, chose to leave the subject at that. I was afraid that churning up the past would erode the closeness I craved with both my brother and my uncle.

  Before I got ready for bed, I called Lynne to apologize for not being able to come over once more before I left New York.

  “That’s too bad,” she said. “Don’t let too much time pass until you visit again…and bring that beautiful daughter of yours next time.”

  “I promise.”

  I heard a plane in the distance, probably on its way to JFK, and the hum of the dishwasher in the kitchen.

  “Lynne, just one more thing. Did you know…” I hated to say it but I really had to ask. “Did you know about Mom being pregnant?”

  “Yes,” she answered after a pause. Her voice dropped so low that I had to strain to hear her. “I remember the night your father came to our house in Mt. Vernon to ask my parents for advice. He sat in our living room for hours, talking and smoking one cigarette after another until the wee hours of the morning. You know, Alice was crazy about your father.”

  “I know.”

  Just before we said good-bye, Lynne said quietly, “Your mother lost so much, she could never look back.” I thought of the photos from Coney Island, the image of my parents’ exhilaration, fluid and alive as the waves crashing at their feet. I wished a person could store happiness the way a photo freezes a perfect moment.

  The plane ride home was turbulent, but it wasn’t the air. I tried to get comfortable in my seat, to watch the movie, to read the in-flight magazine. But no matter where I looked I saw Alice—a sensitive young girl who follows her older sister to the park to play with h
er friends, who tries to act with bravado but tiptoes across the dining room at home hoping her father will not criticize her that day, a high school girl who falls in love with a sensitive college student but knows she can’t hold on to him. Then in the turbulence of history, she finds him again on a cliff overlooking the sea, and they fall into each others’ arms to remain forever.

  But that isn’t what happened. A few days later Tom called to say he found their marriage certificate. “Their marriage certificate says February 24, 1937. I was born six months later.”

  “I guess that’s it then,” I said. “They never celebrated a wedding anniversary, did they?”

  “No, and I never really thought about it.”

  The following week, Willy called. He said I should talk to Annalie—the woman my father supposedly left behind. I was stunned. I wavered, feeling both nervous and curious. But I was determined to make some sense out of the tangled past, and Annalie was a thread I couldn’t dismiss whether I liked the emerging picture or not.

  “She’s married, of course, and lives in New Jersey. Here’s her phone number,” he said.

  My heart throbbed as I dialed her number. When she picked up the phone, I explained that my uncle had given me her number and I was the daughter of Alice and Fez Feniger. After a brief pause, she said, “Yes, hello,” in a German accent much stronger than my mother’s.

  “My uncle told me that you were close to my father in Leipzig and might be able to tell me about him.”

  “I won’t talk about your father,” she said emphatically.

  Her abruptness shocked me for a minute; then I found my voice.

  “You don’t have to say anything private. Just tell me about him as a person. He died when I was so young. I didn’t really get to know him.”

  “I have nothing to say,” she repeated.

  Then she told me that she knew Alice and Erika from their school days, though she was closer to Erika. “Their father was my dentist, and I was always afraid of him. I went to their house for birthday parties. The other children didn’t like to go to parties at their house because their father acted so peculiar.”

  “In what way?” I asked.

  “I have nothing more to say. I won’t talk about those who are not here to defend themselves. Good-bye.”

  She hung up. That was it. I was left speechless, empty, a knot in my chest.

  When I told my uncle that I was disappointed, he said, “I didn’t think she would talk to you.”

  “There are too many secrets,” I told Michael that evening, “too many omissions, way too much held back. I hate it. You used to hide things from me,” I continued, balanced on a narrow ledge between grief and anger. “I couldn’t stand it if you did that now.”

  “I don’t do that now. That’s why we’ve worked so hard to face difficult things. I’m not holding back anything. I promise. Come here.”

  I walked over to him and sat on his lap, but before I could let him comfort me, I needed to tell him something I never told anyone, not my mother or Willy or Tom.

  “I hardly have any memories of my father. He died so long ago, and any reminder of him was so completely erased. But there is one moment I still recall in vivid detail, as though it was carved into my brain.”

  Michael lifted my face so he could look into my eyes.

  “I was sent to Willy and Erika’s house the weekend after he died. A few nights after I returned home, something startled me awake in the middle of the night. I sat straight up in bed, my eyes wide open and alert. That’s when I saw him, my father, walk right through the door that led from my parents’ bedroom into mine. He looked just as I knew him, in loose trousers and shirtsleeves rolled up, but he was greenish and transparent. He took a step in my direction. I got scared and closed my eyes. When I opened them, he was gone. I didn’t say a word to anyone, because we never talked about him again. But I’ve always been angry at myself because I made him go away. I missed my chance to say good-bye to him. Maybe he was coming to tell me he loved me, and now I’ll never know.”

  16

  Juden Verboten

  Ich erkläre hiermit mein Einverständnis damit das meiner Ehefrau Erika Hella Rotholz, geborne Lewin, bevollmächtigt ist, das Grundstück Grassistraße 32 zu verkaufen.

  I declare herewith my consent that my wife Erika Hella Rotholz, born Lewin, is authorized by me to sell the property at 32 Grassistrasse.

  The statement was signed by Dr. Ralph Rotholz on November 19, 1935, part of the growing file of documents with their official seals of the Amtsgericht Leipzig (Leipzig District Court), that provided more evidence of the vanished past I sought to recover. Before, Dr. Rotholz was just a minor character in Erika and Willy’s story. But the court records revealed his true importance. As Erika’s husband, his permission had been required to sell the Leipzig property.

  The doctor’s name in print also made it impossible for me to ignore the disturbing image of a liaison between a displaced young woman and a much older man who later took his own life. Years after, I learned that Erika had told her children that her first husband jumped off the Empire State Building. I don’t know what surprised me more, the man’s bizarre death or that Erika had actually told her children about it. She also told them that she once bumped into Hitler on the street—literally bumped into him. She wasn’t paying attention to where she was running. He told his henchmen to leave the young woman alone.

  The Erbschein, the Certificate of Inheritance, of Nelly’s death on June 12, 1933, naming Alice and Erika as her beneficiaries, confirmed the story of my grandmother’s rash decision. I counted the months on my fingers: October, November, December, to June 12th, exactly nine months, almost to the day, from Max’s death. Her final act, which left her two teenage daughters alone in an unpredictable world, went beyond simply a failure to protect. Of course my mother didn’t want me to know.

  Nelly’s choice haunted me like a disturbing movie that played over and over in my mind. I imagined her life in the days after Max’s death. She was unable to think clearly or attend to the simplest household matters, unable to eat. She must have stayed in her bedroom, and when the girls went in to talk to her, she alternated between silent depression and near hysteria. Nelly’s life was in turmoil, the country was in chaos, and she believed she was destitute. Absorbed in her own dilemma, she would hardly have noticed that her daughters were confused and didn’t know what they should do.

  I sat at my kitchen table and gazed out past our deck as the sun sank under the Golden Gate, leaving me in shadows. I was overcome by a sharp pain in my belly, an urge to cry, then a numb sensation, an impression of emptiness in my chest. I had a perception I recalled from childhood, that I was experiencing my mother’s suppressed feelings. It seemed to me that there were things my body knew without her telling me.

  My inner turmoil was too great to manage alone. I called a friend.

  “Your grandmother committed suicide?” she said. “That’s awful. I’m so sorry.”

  The explicit word, suicide, made me recoil. I wasn’t ready to hear it or say it. I had a gnawing memory of my mother’s sarcastic references to death—“put me out on the ice”—and I wondered how much Nelly’s action had colored Mom’s thoughts.

  My friend brought me a book about Charlotte Salomon, a German Jewish artist, born in Berlin in 1917, who was the daughter of a prominent surgeon. Salomon’s mother jumped from a four-story window when she was a child of nine; her father originally told her the cause of death was influenza, but thirteen years later, when her grandmother made an unsuccessful suicide attempt, she learned the truth. Throughout Charlotte’s short life, until she was killed in Auschwitz in 1943, she used art to make sense of her life. She drew a picture of her mother filling a window frame, then a second drawing with only the empty frame. The author wrote, “The recovery of a silenced past became her project, her protection.”[3]

  I learned that suicide, Selbstmord, was widespread among the middle-and upper-class German Jewish women of that perio
d. Though educated and cultured, they often found themselves trapped in a situation that gave them no power over their lives and no opportunity to express their intelligence. Salomon’s biographer, Mary Lowenthal Felstiner, was considered a pioneer for writing about the devastating effects of sexism instead of minimizing its impact under the larger shadow of the Holocaust. Though I had hardened my heart toward Nelly on my mother’s behalf, the book gave me a new context and a glimmer of compassion for my grandmother’s despair.

  More documents surfaced, with more dates and details. When Tom had searched his basement to find our parents’ marriage license, he came across other papers. Among them was a Carte d’Identité, an identity card issued to Alice Lewin, age nineteen, in Paris, dated December 1933. Alice’s face is young, open, with soft sparkling eyes and a cheerful smile. She is wearing a jacket with a black Persian lamb collar, her scarf tucked in and secured by a pin. In her international driver’s license, issued in Berlin just one year later, 1934, Angaben über den Führer (under the Führer), her face is that of a serious adult, with worried eyes, a drawn expression, older than her years.

  I explored the history of Germany from 1933 to the end of 1935. As my uncle had indicated, everything started to change immediately after Hitler became Reich Chancellor on January 30, 1933. In March of that year, the Enabling Act gave him unlimited powers and the Reichstag became a mere rubber stamp for Nazi edicts. In April, the Nazi party proclaimed a general boycott of Jewish-owned businesses and passed laws to dismiss non-Aryan civil service employees and to deny Jewish attorneys admission to the bar. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels called for rallies and book burnings to protect German minds from being “tainted” by foreign and Jewish authors. In May, over twenty thousand books were thrown into a bonfire at Opernplatz (Opera Square), in Berlin. Juden Verboten (Jews Forbidden) signs were displayed in public facilities, businesses, stores, and restaurants.