Crossing Over

My German Trousseau

When I was little, I begged both of my parents for stories from their own childhoods. I knew that my father grew up with servants, which seemed very exotic, and I wanted to hear all about it. I knew that on laundry day, the cook did not have time to prepare a regular meal but always made Rote Grütze, a red currant pudding my father loved. When I was a teenager, I learned to make this dish when my father lost his appetite before being diagnosed with colon cancer. I became a Rote Grütze expert and prepared the dish with vanilla sauce to tempt him to eat.

The cook's husband served as the chauffeur, and there was also a groundskeeper and a governess. I knew the garden was large enough for a pond and tennis courts. Besides playing tennis, my father mentioned hunting with his father and skiing. He let me look through boxes of the photographs he took on ski trips to the Arlberg Alps in Austria in 1928 and to Norway in 1936. Many of the photographs look like they were taken from an airplane window, as all you see are mountain peaks and great, sloping expanses of untouched snow. There are no crowds or ski lift lines. In fact, there are no lifts. My father spoke of hiking up and skiing down — from the look of the Alps, there must have been much more hiking than skiing! There is the occasional photo of a ski lodge and many pictures of his skiing companions — mostly photos of attractive women in woolen skirts, although a few wore pants. They were all lean, muscled athletes — no snow bunnies on those slopes! My father was in his twenties and early thirties at the time. I later learned that his family worried that he might never marry because his friends were mostly Christian, and after 1935, it was illegal for him to marry a non-Jew.

In thinking back, I see that there was a major difference in the autobiographical stories told by my father and by my mother. At bedtime, after reading from the fairy tale and poetry books I loved, my mother was willing to share detailed stories of her childhood. My father did not do this, but he knew how to invent stories and plied me with tales of funny rabbits and goats. I loved his made-up stories and forgot to ask for the real ones. My favorites involved three rabbits. One was named Fft, one was named Fft Fft, and one was Fft Fft Fft.

My father was freer with stories about his early years in this country where he embraced his new life with gusto. He told of watching movies to learn English and of his newly acquired obsessions with ketchup, which he poured liberally on everything, and baseball. In an envelope labeled "New York 1938," I found photos of my father swinging a bat while sporting a button-down white shirt tucked into belted slacks. His teammates are similarly dressed, but with rolled-up sleeves. They appear to be playing on an urban lot, perhaps on a work break. I have the certificate granting him secret clearance for his job with the United States Army during World War II in the Division of Chemical Warfare and a photo of him in his tan army uniform. For most of his career, he worked in private industry for a chemical company where he also met my mother. He was forty-nine and she was twenty-nine, a first and lasting marriage for both until my father's death from colon cancer in 1980 at the age of seventy-eight.

As the child of a first-generation German immigrant, I learned early on that, in some eyes, to have German genes was to be tainted with a lingering evil. When occasional anti-German remarks would be made in my presence, I remembered my father had helped the Allied efforts against Hitler. To my great relief, his German hands seemed clean of Jewish blood. My first-year college roommate, who was Jewish, later told me how upset her father had become when he read the letter with roommate assignments and saw my name. How could the school match his precious daughter with a German?! When our son, named Hans Gregorio for his grandfathers, remarked that he was thinking about getting a tattoo of the German and Argentinian flags to honor his dual ancestry, he was warned that some people might think he was a neo-Nazi. He didn't get the tattoo.

While I was growing up, we hung no flags but definitely celebrated our German heritage, which was on my mother's side as well. Three of her great-grandparents emigrated from Germany in the nineteenth century. I knew my father arrived on these shores with little beside his trunks, his education, and the address of a family friend. In the trunks were some treasures from the home he grew up in — linens and silver, books and some art — nothing more. My mother called it his trousseau.

I had German children's books, song books, dolls, and dirndls. My parents taught me a little German, but to my regret, I did not become fluent. My parents were told that speaking two different languages would confuse me and they accepted this thinking. The only books I could read in German were written for toddlers, like Wo Ist Bubi? — "Where Is Bubi?"

Confusing cuisines was never a worry. My parents gave German- themed parties filling our house with the smells of grilling wurst and homemade sauerkraut simmering on the stove along with big pots of kale and potatoes. My job was to chop the apples and onions and add the juniper berries to the sauerkraut. At Christmastime, I helped my mother make the cookies my father remembered from his childhood. Family friends always sent us marzipan, for which my father's hometown of Lübeck is famous, and there was stöllen for Christmas breakfast along with scrambled eggs and smoked eel, a tradition from northern Germany near the Baltic Sea. Eel was not on most New Jersey Christmas menus, and my mother went on an annual quest to find it. I remember the year I was thirteen, and the search had proven unsuccessful. My mother and I were doing some last minute Christmas shopping at Bloomingdale's in a nearby mall when I spied smoked eel in a refrigerator case where food delicacies were being sold. I couldn't believe my good fortune — eel at Bloomingdales! Without her knowledge, I bought it and hid it in the back of the refrigerator.

A few days later, on Christmas Eve, I presented the package with tremendous pride; my father would be able to enjoy smoked eel on Christmas morning, just like he did in Lübeck when he was my age. I waited excitedly as my very pleased father took his present to our kitchen and opened the many layers of...