Finding My Jewish Story

I EXPERIENCED EUROPE for the first time on a family trip in the summer of 1960. My seventeen-year-old romantic heart fell in love with Venice with its pastel buildings, sparkling water, twisting alleyways, and spires gleaming in the sun. Even the presence of my mother with her rules and judgements and my little sister with her tears could not ruin my first trip to Europe. I had no idea that in Germany I would discover a secret that would change who I was.

In the land of my father’s birth, I found no romance in the heavy food, the square houses, and the stout people. We were in Bavaria, visiting family I didn’t know, and on the day of my revelation, we went to a cemetery.

The tires of the black Mercedes crunched across gravel as we passed under an iron gateway. Aunt Ida parked the car and got out. Not my aunt, she was my father’s aunt, his mother’s younger sister. Ida’s straight back and black suit commanded respect as she strode across the grass among the gravestones. Her granddaughter, Renata, my newly discovered second cousin, followed her with a bouquet of flowers in her arms. Even though Renata was only fifteen, something about her reminded me of my grandmother, my father’s mother, back in California.

The scent of pine and mountain air drew me out of the car. My young sister looked up through wisps of straight blonde hair and twisted in her seat. Mother held tightly to her wrist. “We’re going to wait here,” she said, her voice icy. She had made it clear that she disliked cemeteries. Dad rambled off by himself, oblivious to everyone’s discomfort. He stood where the grass met the trees and stared into the shadowy forest. Happy to be away from my mother and squirming little sister, I tagged after Aunt Ida and Renata.

In Italy, I had seen plenty of crypts, but I’d only been to a cemetery once, seven years before when I was barely ten. My mother, who hated funerals as much as cemeteries, had never-the-less taken me to her father’s internment. I vaguely remembered the green, tree-studded, memorial park and the deep hole into which his gray coffin was lowered.

This German cemetery seemed oddly neglected. There were no even rows of white headstones, no brass plaques nestled into a neatly clipped lawn. The grass was overgrown and lumpy in places and brown in others. Most of the blackened and chipped gravestones tipped drunkenly or were half buried as if they were hiding. Some stones were inscribed with a queer kind of writing, lines and curves even stranger than the old-fashioned German letters I had seen in the books my father kept on his bookshelf.

Aunt Ida and Renata stopped near a solitary stone monument, the only new one I could see. Aunt Ida bent down and picked up a round smooth stone. She rubbed its surface with her thumb, then laid it on top of the headstone. Renata quietly laid the flowers at the base and turned away.

I lingered. I could not read the German words carved into the stone. Below the epitaph, the name of Aunt Ida’s late husband, David Erlanger, and his dates of birth and death, January 1880 to October 1956, were all that made sense to me. Above the name a star with six-points was outlined in gold — a Jewish Star of David. I turned around and searched the graveyard. None of the other graves had flowers and there were no crosses anywhere.

As we walked back to the car, I fell in beside Aunt Ida. “Were you born Jewish?” I asked. “Was my grandmother born Jewish too?”

Aunt Ida stopped. She looked at me, her eyes both tired and sad. “Born Jewish?” she said. “Yes, and still Jewish. Once Jewish, always Jewish. Especially in Germany where all it took to be Jewish was two grandparents who had once prayed in a synagogue.”

Ida’s response puzzled me, but I didn’t know her well enough to ask all the questions that swirled in my head. The year before, I had seen the movie The Diary of Anne Frank. The weird, undulating sound of Gestapo police sirens, a symbol for fear in the movie soundtrack, stuck in my mind like a burr under a sock. When I had heard the same siren sound again a few days before, a spontaneous chill of terror crept up my spine. I wondered why Germany still use that awful noise.

The afternoon in the cemetery was the beginning of years trying to make sense of my father’s family history. The Holocaust was not yet a common concept in the minds of high school students. Little more than twenty years had passed since Hitler had first poisoned Germany, then all of Europe. School children knew about Hitler and the Nazis, but history teachers in public schools were still silent about the worst part of the story. It was all waiting for me to learn.

Born during World War II, I was raised in a small coastal town in southern California. Unlike my friend’s parents, mine never attended church, though I was dropped off at Sunday school as a young child, I think so my working mother could have time to herself for an hour. I knew nothing of my father’s early life other than he spent his childhood in Germany and, at the age of nineteen, he immigrated to the United States. When asked why he left his home, he always said, “I did not agree with Hitler’s policies.” All I really knew about Hitler was that he hated Jews, he had been a dictator, and he started a war. In elementary school, I had been taunted by finger pointing children who yelled, “Nazi! Nazi! Your father is a Kraut!”

Back in California, one of the first things I did was visit my grandmother who lived next door in a cottage owned by my father. I loved her more than anyone else in my family, and after hugs, I shared my enthusiasm for riding a gondola in Venice and eating a Michelien starred dinner of Truite au Bleu in France.

“Mother refused to go inside the restaurant because Karen started complaining of a tummy ache. They stayed in the car, and I had Daddy all to myself. . . It was heaven! And in Paris, I went to the Eifel Tower all by myself because Mother was too tired and Daddy wouldn’t leave her that night.” Finally, I told Grandmother about the afternoon excursion to the cemetery with her sister. “Why did you never tell me you were Jewish?” I asked.

I was surprised when she turned away and fidgeted with her coffee cup.

“I promised your father I’d keep it a secret,” she said. “He’ll be angry if he thinks I told you. When I arrived here when you were a baby, he made me promise to never speak of it.” She seemed genuinely frightened at the thought of my father’s reaction which didn’t make sense as he was slow to anger and quick to get over it. “Your mother won’t allow any talk of being Jewish,” she whispered. “Her father was from Texas — a Southerner with strong prejudices.”

Early Days; the writer and her grandmother.

Ah, now it started to make sense. “But why? Why would Daddy do go along with that?”

Grandmother shook her head. “Your mother will not countenance any talk of why we really left Germany.”  She paused. “And maybe your father was afraid for us after what happened.”

“But were you truly Jewish?  When you were a child?  What did that mean?  What was your family like? What makes a person Jewish?  Isn’t it just a religion?”  I had a million questions. Though the Pledge of Allegiance I’d learned in grammar school said something about “one nation under God,” I understood God to be a part of all religions, not just Christianity.

Hesitantly, my grandmother began to tell me about her childhood in Germany. Her answers were short and seldom revealed much, but one thing she said made an indelible impression.

“I can never trust anyone with a German accent, not since Hitler,” she told me. “Not until I know the person is Jewish . . . do I feel safe.” 

My grandmother and I had always been close. I had even lived with her for six months when I was in middle school and my parents went on a long trip around the world.  Now we had an added bond — a shared secret. The secrecy turned the mystery of my father’s Jewish connection into an obsession. My interest would slowly expand to antisemitism, the war, and Hitler’s Jewish policies, but for now I simply wanted to understand Judaism and what it meant.

I made friends with the only girl in school I knew to be Jewish. She wore a Star of David on a silver chain. “You’re not really Jewish,” she told me, “Your mother has to be Jewish for you to be a Jew.” Later she gave me a necklace like hers. “I guess you’re half Jewish anyway,” she said. I wore the star on its chain under my blouse to conceal it from my parents, but I showed it to Grandmother.

The next year, I moved away from home to live at college. Finally, I could explore Judaism openly. I made another Jewish friend. I joined Hillel, the Jewish Youth group, and became the club secretary. I was surprised when the president of the group said he was an atheist. Obviously, there must be more to being Jewish than religion. So what was it? A culture? A race? A set of beliefs?  A common history? “All of those,” my new friend told me. I wrote a long letter to my grandmother telling her of my discoveries and my activities with Hillel. I had no idea the letter would cause so much pain.

My grandmother, who depended on my parents for almost everything, did not have her own mailbox. I thought my mother respected the privacy of the US mail, but I should have known better―she did not respect the privacy of her mother-in-law. Later, my grandmother wrote to me about the evening my letter arrived.

She explained that my mother handed the letter to her at dinner. “You have a letter from Katie,” my mother said. “Will you read it to us.” My grandmother wrote that she tried to deflect the suggestion. She said she was tired and would look at it later. It was the first letter from me addressed to her alone. She knew me well and feared I might be carelessly speak of our secret. Grandmother wrote that Mother had insisted she read the letter out loud. My father said nothing to help her. He knew better than to contradict his wife.

I imagine Grandmother began to read slowly in her soft, German accented voice. Perhaps she hoped to skip over anything problematic.  But I had written only about Jewish things ― my new friend, joining Hillel, and all I was learning there. There was nothing else to read. My grandmother was trapped by my words.  

Two letters told me what happened. First one from my mother and a few days later the letter from Grandmother. I’m sure my mother wrote her scathing letter to me that same night. My memory of what she wrote goes something like this: “You are not Jewish. Your father is not Jewish! Your obsession with this Jewish idea is ridiculous. Stop at once!  You are forbidden to write any more of these letters to your grandmother. The subject is closed.”  I could feel her anger hot on the page.  

Of course, this did not stop me. I stayed in Hillel and made more Jewish friends.  Starting with This Is My God, by Herman Wouk and Exodus by Leon Uris, I read everything I could about being Jewish, about Judaism, Jewish history, and antisemitism in Germany.  

I did not write any more troublesome letters to my grandmother. But when I visited her cottage, we continued to talk about her past and what I was learning.  Sipping from her tiny glass of schnapps, Grandmother shared a little more each time we were together. Gradually, by continuing to ask questions, I unraveled the truth of her upbringing, her unhappy arranged marriage, my father’s childhood in Germany, the sudden death of my grandfather, and how my father, his two siblings, and my grandmother managed to leave, one at a time, from that hate-torn country. I did not lie about my continuing interest in all things Jewish to my mother; I simply I neglected to tell her. As we had never been close and I never again lived at home, that was easy enough.

I found it difficult to comprehend why my father insisted on silence as a condition for his mother to live with our family. As I learned more, I gradually understood. He had been raised without religion by his strongly atheist father who controlled the household. He grew up knowing nothing about Jewish traditions or religious practices and thought of himself as German. Then the new Nazi regime labeled him Jewish, an identity he felt no connection to. No wonder, he became hypersensitive to the potential dangers inherent in having Jewish blood. Years later, he told me, “If it could happen in Germany, it can happen anywhere.”

Yet even today, I find I am disappointed in him and saddened by how his decision isolated my grandmother and almost robbed me of the rich stories from their past.