Hidden Inheritance: Family Secrets, Memory, and Faith - Brossura

Neumark, Heidi B.

Brossura

ISBN 10: 1630881244 ISBN 13: 9781630881245

Casa editrice: Abingdon Pr, 2015

Riassunto

Heidi Neumark’s life changed forever when her daughter’s late-night online searching exposed a generation of family secrets. From a few computer keystrokes, Neumark discovered her hidden Jewish heritage—and uncovered hundreds of questions: Did her grandfather really die in a concentration camp? Howdid she never know her grandmother was a death-camp survivor? Why hadthe family history and faith been rejected and hidden?Heidi’s search for the truth quickly became more than a personaljourney; it also became spiritual. It caused profound ponderings on herthirty-year vocation as a Lutheran pastor. It was a shocking revelationthat her Jewish roots and successive family loss and trauma now suddenlyand inherently connected her to the multi-ethnic, marginalizedcommunity she had been ministering to for three decades.Hidden Inheritance takes the reader on a journey thatseamlessly weaves personal narrative, social history, and biblicalreflection to challenge readers to explore their own identity, vocation,and theology. Neumark boldly calls readers to explore the harsh placesof the past, uncover the possible buried secrets, ask new questions,forge new understanding, and discover new hope for transformation thatis only possible when what has been hidden is finally brought to light.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Heidi B. Neumark is an author, speaker, and Lutheran pastor in New York City. She is the author of the highly-acclaimed book, Breathing Space: A Spiritual Journey in the South Bronx, which won the 2004 Wilbur Award given by the Religion Communicators Council. She has chapters and sermons in numerous other books and writes regularly for The Christian Century and other journals. Pastor Neumark also serves as the executive director of a shelter for homeless LGBTQ youth. She holds an honorary doctorate of divinity from Muhlenberg College.

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Hidden Inheritance

Family Secrets, Memory, and Faith

By Heidi B. Neumark

Abingdon Press

Copyright © 2015 Heidi B. Neumark
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-63088-124-5

Contents

"Preface: Googling Moses", 
"ONE: Crossing Over", 
My German Trousseau, 
A Boy That Wept, 
"TWO: Wittmund", 
Edzard's Big Hobby, 
Re-membering, 
A Meeting Place for the Sages, 
Judenfrei, 
"THREE: Lübeck", 
The Iron Works, 
The Font and the Pit, 
Knit Together, 
Totentanz, 
The Bells of St. Mary's, 
"FOUR: New York", 
"FIVE: Berlin", 
Hitler Youth, 
A Green Shade, 
An Alien in Meshech, 
The Ark, 
Dark Rooms, 
Glory, Laud and Honor, 
"SIX: Theresienstadt", 
The Fowler's Snare, 
Moses at the River, 
"SEVEN: Post-War", 
Reconstruction, 
After Years of Forgetting, 
A Good Star, 
Stumbling Stones, 
"Afterword: Passover in the Promised Land", 
"Acknowledgments", 
"Endnotes", 
"Photographs", 

CHAPTER 1

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 plastic wrapping. As the final piece was peeled off, the eel was revealed, gloriously plump and glistening! — and emanating a sickening odor. The eel was rancid. I was thankful that my mother did not say what she must have been thinking — Bloomingdales is not the best venue for eel shopping.

Although culinary nostalgia was ever-present, the church had an even more prominent place in our lives. It was my father who insisted on joining the Lutheran church. It was my father's confirmation certificate, from 1918, that hung proudly on my parents' bedroom wall, a vestige from the days when church certificates were works of art. In this one, Peter grasps Jesus' billowing robes, pulling himself up from the waves where Jesus stands calmly and speaks, "Do not fear, it is I." The old certificate is marred by a brown water stain that now seems ominous.

On their honeymoon in 1953, my father brought my mother to the magnificent brick gothic church where he was baptized and confirmed, St. Mary's Church in Lübeck, still bearing the scars of an allied bombing raid in 1942. My mother recalled standing in the church and looking up past the columns and arches right into the sky. The roof had not yet been repaired at that time. Several years before I considered seminary, my father gave me a book of sermons by the German pastor and theologian Helmut Thielicke. He raved about Thielicke's ability to connect with university students and professors, farmers and shopkeepers alike. He joined the throngs who gathered to hear him preach and admired the pastor's brave repudiation of Nazi propaganda. It was a high homiletical bar from my father who died two years before I was ordained as a Lutheran pastor, but not before handing over the spiritual inheritance that has shaped my life.

My father imbued parental maxims like "Don't follow the crowd!" and "Stand up for what you believe!" with a fierce urgency. His mantra to "be yourself" come what may makes me wonder if his own identity issues were so deeply buried that they had ceased to exist for him. On the other hand, the very thing he wanted to keep from me was not always far from the surface. When I was in high school, a friend of mine became very involved with the Roman Catholic charismatic renewal, and I began to attend prayer meetings with him. My parents were curious and a bit concerned, wondering if it was a cult, and so they attended a meeting to see for themselves. My father became so upset that he could barely speak, which made no sense to me, even when my mother later explained that it reminded him of a Hitler rally. Something about the group vibe and regulated responses triggered a visceral reaction. At the time, I knew he hated Hitler, but what decent person didn't?

Anyone who knew my father well would say that he could be stubborn to a fault. On some such occasions my mother would refer to him as a "Prussian general." But there was another side to his stubborn streak — he was unshakably faithful to his word, his commitments, and his beliefs. The fact that he could maintain a wall of silence for so many years, even with those he loved and trusted most, is not surprising in one way. If he believed that something was for the best, he would stick with it no matter what. On the other hand, I am not at all sure that it was commitment that led to his silence for all those years. What it was is something that would take time to explore.

* * *

Sometimes I wondered what my paternal grandparents did during the Third Reich. In 1933, when Hitler assumed power, my grandfather was sixty-seven and my grandmother was sixty-one. Were my grandparents Nazi collaborators? Were they good people who did nothing? Neither alternative was pleasant to dwell on. I certainly could not imagine my loving grandmother as a Nazi sympathizer, but then, a nation of sweet grandmothers who said and did nothing as their neighbors and their neighbors' children and grandchildren were massacred helped smooth the onward grind of evil.

I assumed that if my grandparents had been among the meager numbers of "Righteous Gentiles" — the German citizens who risked their lives to protest a hateful regime — my father would surely have spoken of it with pride. I took his silence on the subject to mean that there was not much to say. If my grandparents were not active in collaboration or resistance, that left one alternative: that they were caught up in the sweep of horror, riding it out as best they could, sending their own children away to safety and ... and what? What did they do while the annihilation of millions went on around them? Did they not realize what was happening? It was unbearable to think about.

That there might be another possible position for my grandparents during the Shoah — that they might have been Jewish victims of Nazi horror — never, not for a fleeting second, entered my mind. But it was exactly there in that inconceivable, unimaginable place that my real grandparents were to be found. In the internet frenzy brought on by my daughter's discovery, I located the manifest for the ship that brought my father here. The S.S. Europa docked in New York harbor on June 2, 1938. On board was Dr. Hans Neumark, age 35, engineer, nationality: German, race: Hebrew. The last was surely typed in against his will, taken from his German identity document. He did share a memory of that voyage with me, a photo of the day he set forth. Friends had come to the dock to see him off, and they are all smiling and waving up toward the big ship where my father, already on board, snaps their picture. There is nothing to see except that it is a lovely, sunny day for adventure. My father could never have imagined the day years later when I would sit here with the ship's manifest before me, his secret exposed by Ancestry.com. The trunks of family silver and linens, his photographs and artwork, his German culture and the faith he practiced were all passed down, but not this: my father was Jewish. He was descended from a Jewish family that can be traced back to the seventeenth century, and perhaps further.

I realize that I have clues and resources to trace my father's journey that others do not. I think of eight-year-old Miguelito hiding his tears under a table during our church homework help program. When I took him aside, he told me that he was missing his mother. Miguelito came here from Mexico with his parents and older sister. One day, he arrived home from school and his mother was no longer there. He knows she's back in Mexico, but he doesn't know why and no one will talk about the situation. Miguelito is a child but his longing is ageless. Recently, a woman told me about the father her mother has always refused to speak about, "It makes me feel like half of me is missing even at seventy." I take this journey mindful of so many more.

A Boy That Wept

There is a Hasidic tale from Menahem Mendel of Vorki describing the moment from the book of Exodus when Pharaoh's daughter is shown the baby found inside a rush basket, floating in the Nile River:

"And she opened it, and saw ... a boy that wept." "What we should expect to be told," said he, "is that she heard the child Moses weeping. But the child was weeping inside himself. That is why later on we find the words: `and (she) said: This is one of the Hebrews' children.' It was the Jewish kind of weeping."

My father was Lutheran, but he lived with the Jewish kind of weeping. He adjusted to his new life on these shores, and when he got news of his parents' deportation, the sacking of their home, and eventually his father's death in Theresienstadt and his mother's liberation, he took all that he felt to some private place and locked it in. Soon after Ana's discovery, I spoke with my parents' closest friends, and they were all stunned. My mother's sister, her only sibling, with whom she shared most everything, had the same reaction.

I could not ask my mother, who had died two years earlier, but I am certain that she did not know. Even if she had promised to carry my father's secret to the grave, I'm sure she would have eventually told me. There is also another reason I believe that she didn't know. My mother was very engaged in genealogical research and, when my father was alive, she told me multiple times of her frustration with his unwillingness to help with his side of the family. She was disappointed and annoyed with his lack of interest in the past. She said that she was going to focus on her ancestors, and when she finished with that, she would try again to get his assistance. She died before completing the research into her own roots and would never have made the comments she did had she known the truth about my father.

It's difficult for me to understand how one could be in a thirty- year, intimate relationship and never speak of something of such a profound impact. I can imagine that when my father first arrived, he may have been anxious about anti-Semitism here. One of his friends told me that it was not uncommon, even through the 1950s, to find job opportunities in the paper listed as "Chr only." By the time my father met and married my mother, he had already been here for more than ten years and was well into building a new life and a new identity for himself. He may have feared my mother's reaction. He may have internalized a sense of shame. He may have viewed his history as a burden that he did not want to impose on his young wife and, later, on me, his daughter. He may have dealt with trauma by burying it beyond speech. In the end, my father's silence may have gone beyond his conscious control. I spoke with a therapist whose own father is a Shoah survivor and whose grandmother was killed at Auschwitz. He mentioned that my father may also have felt guilt for leaving his elderly parents, even though he could have done nothing to save them.

Outwardly my father was highly successful, like his own father. Upon his arrival here in the summer of 1938, he quickly found work thanks to a family friend in the chemical industry, Gustav Luttringhaus. Uncle Gus was born here to parents who emigrated in the late nineteenth century, but he returned to Germany, where he and my father were chemistry students together in Munich in the 1920s. Some of my father's trauma likely began during this time when German universities were known for increasing anti-Jewish rhetoric and agitation among students and professors.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Hidden Inheritance by Heidi B. Neumark. Copyright © 2015 Heidi B. Neumark. Excerpted by permission of Abingdon Press.
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Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Abingdon Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1630881244
• ISBN 13: 9781630881245
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Lingua: Inglese
• Numero di pagine: 219
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile