Crossing the Borders of Time (56 page)

All the letters were in German, with Norbert’s typed on army paper. At the top, by hand, a mistrustful afterthought, on one of them he penned a warning to his sisters not to pry: “
NUR FÜR PAPA UND MAMA!
” And he closed another writing, “
With a thousand greetings and kisses, your loving-and-hoping-you-have-the-same-feeling son and brother (though this is not my sisters’ business), Norbert
”

Remarkably, while debating the situation, none of Norbert’s letters or his parents’ answers ever mentioned the name of his bride-to-be or told anything about her—Dorothea Ostheim, who would turn out to be a petite and pretty blonde of twenty-seven. A feisty, sensible, and unpretentious person, she had been a member of the Bund (the girls’ equivalent of Hitler Youth) and had worked in the war years as a secretary for the
Wehrmacht
. Only later would it be learned that her parents had been divorced, her father was dead, a sister had committed suicide, and her only surviving brother was an unrelenting anti-Semite. Alice wrote her son to plead against the marriage:

Dear Norbert,

Your letter makes me realize that you were sent away from home too early and for too long, forced out of your milieu and obliged to live with people with a different outlook on the world, a different life and feeling. Only once back here would you probably see that while you may have had an understanding girlfriend there, she is not the right wife that you need. It is always the same with you, as you always think you love someone whom you don’t want to leave, and then each time you forget her and end up happy that it’s over.…

You are not, as you say, a child anymore. You alone are responsible for what you do and don’t do. If
you
think that all conditions are present for a happy and worry-free future, we cannot stop you. We here in America certainly feel differently than you over there; none of all the refugees here will forget Dachau and Auschwitz or the outrage of how we were regarded and treated. It is too much, dear Norbert, to expect people to have sympathy for our accepting a German Aryan girl into the family.…

With much love, your Mama

Sigmar advised in writing that he had seldom heard of a “
successful intermarriage that ended up happy
,” and avowed that Norbert’s choice of bride came as “
a great shock to me and the biggest disappointment of my life
.” But he nonetheless went on to capitulate resignedly:

 … You are now of an age when a man has a right to choose his own course and far be it for me to want to influence you in your decisions. If after thorough reflection you are still of the opinion that your planned union is absolutely necessary for your life happiness, we want to put absolutely no obstructions in your way, and I hope that the relationship between us and you and our family will in no regard be changed by this marriage.

That Sigmar censored his feelings is clear from the sentences he struck out in composing his final version:

But you cannot force us in any way to accept a Christian German woman as a member of the family. And I personally do not know if I can ever overcome the resentment I have against such a union.

Still, before marrying, he urged his son, “
Come home and take the necessary time and distance to think this over once again, thoroughly and uninfluenced by us or by anyone on the other side of the great waters
.” He closed, “
Fervently, your Papa
.”

That December, Norbert and Dorothea quietly married in Germany. Sigmar and Alice sent a wedding gift of $2,000, an enormous amount of money for them, the equivalent of more than eight times that much today. Pledging to make Norbert happy, Dorothea wrote to thank the parents for their generosity and understanding:

I can well imagine what it cost you to give your permission, and especially because I know the reasons for your reluctance, I am doubly grateful to you.… Many thanks for your dear letters, which confirm to me that you have accepted me as a daughter. I am very happy about that—I can’t describe it in words. It is so wonderful to know that I am welcome with you and I am convinced that this will make it much easier for me to adapt to life in the United States. I pray every day that it will not be much longer before I can get to know my new parents.…

Many loving greetings and all good wishes, your Thea

It would take a year before Norbert could win approval from immigration authorities in Washington for his German bride to follow him to New York. He spent months engaged in lobbying and paperwork to surmount restrictions and cope with stringent postwar immigration laws. By the time Norbert’s wife arrived, Janine felt so disturbed about the impact of this marriage on her parents—who struggled within their refugee community of friends and family to reflect the proper mix of acceptance and disapproval—that she refused to allow herself to compare Sigmar’s acquiescent attitude toward her brother with his autocratic intervention in her own romantic life. Instead of harboring resentment against Sigmar or even Norbert—in view of the vitriolic letter he had sent from Lyon warning her that in marrying Roland she would lose her only brother—Janine embraced her new sister-in-law with kindness and friendship. Indeed, it was Janine who became her guide in creating an American persona, which included the seemingly obligatory name change as Dorothea reentered life as Doris.

For Sigmar, however, the coup de grâce in this affair came when Herbert invited Norbert to come see him to discuss his future. That his son might build a fine career with his prosperous nephew had been Sigmar’s eager hope ever since he landed in America. There was, moreover, historical justice to it. Sigmar had launched his nephew in the steel business that had made his fortune, and now Herbert could reciprocate for Norbert. But on the morning in 1951 that Norbert arrived in Herbert’s Manhattan office with a fresh haircut, shined shoes, a new suit, and buoyant expectations, his older cousin kept him waiting for more than an hour and then dealt with him summarily.

“I believe your father generally reads
The New York Times
?” Herbert inquired after asking about his parents’ health.

“
Ja
,
jeden Tag, jede Seite
,” Norbert replied brightly, every day, every page.

“Good. As I understand you want a job, I suggest you check the want ads in the Sunday edition,” Herbert said. “Under the circumstances of your marriage, that’s the best that I can offer you.”

To their credit, Sigmar and Alice never allowed their German daughter-in-law to know their frustration and dismay over Norbert’s marriage. For her part, Doris formally converted to Judaism and wore a gold Star of David on a chain around her neck, even when she went to work for a German top executive in the American corporate offices of Mercedes-Benz. When her only child became a bar mitzvah, a beaming Sigmar stood at his blond-haired grandson’s elbow to recite the Torah blessings.

As long as he lived, Norbert demonstrated devotion to his parents by visiting them every Friday night, always by himself. It was a ritual for which his parents invariably prepared by setting out fresh bottles of Seagram’s Seven and ginger ale beside a pack of cigarettes, and only after he went home would they shake their heads in worry over his indulgence in habits so detrimental to his health. Among them, my uncle would include an ever-hungry taste for women. Yet his marriage to Doris would endure, in spite of his succumbing to sexual adventures that rarely remained a secret and always contained a titillating hint of danger by way of jealous husbands threatening violent reprisal. Working in the linen supply business in New Jersey, as he and Harry would later go on to do, Norbert would more than once nervously confide to Janine that given the range of potential retaliation he might face, the most extreme vengeance—“a rub out”—would actually be preferable to him than lesser alternatives he could imagine.

In view of my grandparents’ belief in the value of a common background to guarantee a happy marriage, it is interesting that among their three children, Trudi was the only one to wed a Jew from Freiburg, and hers the only union to end in divorce, albeit a friendly one in middle age. All the same, arranged through intermediaries with little thought of romantic love, Sigmar and Alice’s marriage was unquestionably the best of all, lasting through adversity and more than fifty faithful years.

“Thank you,” Sigmar would say to Alice on his deathbed at the age of ninety-two, exactly thirty years from the day in 1942 that they had sailed from Europe. “You have been my darling
Hausgeist
,” he told her, the spirit of his home. “In spite of everything we went through, we’ve had a wonderful life together. No man could have a better wife.”

Alice and Sigmar in the New York apartment where they arrived in 1943 and spent their lives, Sigmar to the age of ninety-two and Alice to ninety-five
(photo credit 19.1)

TWENTY
FROM THE DYCKMAN HOUSE TO OUR NEW HOUSE

T
HE ORANGE-AND-BEIGE BRICK BUILDING
where I lived surrounded by my mother’s family until the age of almost nine remains virtually unchanged at 680 West 204th Street, one quiet residential block west of upper Broadway in Manhattan. Here, beyond art deco double doors with a wrought-iron sunburst fanning over etched glass panels, there were Gunzburgers in four apartments during most of the 1950s. Our own place was on the second floor and prized in my opinion for having Sigmar and Alice just across the stucco hallway. Three flights directly overhead, my Aunt Trudi’s daughter, Lynne, was my dearest friend and constant playmate. And my brother, Gary, born when I was four, was just a month apart in age from Uncle Norbert’s son, Stanley, whose family lived in an apartment two floors above our own. My mother and her sister even rigged a primitive communication system between their two apartments with a coffee can they operated on a pulley system from their kitchen windows. Every part of life was shared, and the closeness of our circle made this the period that we would treasure as a golden age.

Just outside the secure cocoon of family, soft-spoken German Jewish refugees recreated to the best of their ability a European world at the quiet northern tip of the planet’s most exciting island. And to me it always seemed as if their insular community had adopted as its center the Dutch colonial farmhouse that still presides, kitty-corner to our old building, overlooking Broadway. What a curious delight—the Dyckman House, an obscure city-owned Manhattan landmark and a solid anachronism on a hillock above the modern street, surrounded by retaining walls of rough-hewn fieldstone. It spoke to me of other times as wistfully as the refugees who sat conversing on the painted benches that lined its walls. Three centuries after the arrival in the New World of the neighborhood’s first intrepid German immigrants, it seemed as if the Dyckmans’ ghosts had summoned refugees of Nazi Germany, inviting them to treat that green and pleasant corner like the cobbled marketplace in
Deutschland
each one had left behind.