Letters From the Lost (10 page)

Ludwig and my father got along beautifully, but the friction between my mother and my aunt was constant. Old rivalries from their childhood surfaced repeatedly, and usually Ludwig poured soothing oil on troubled waters.

I often wonder at the source of Ludwig’s inner calm. He was not a very learned man, yet he had a wisdom that I find all the more admirable as I struggle to find my own perspective. There were frequent rumours that Anny had flagrant affairs. Did she? Or were the rumours just envy on the part of straitlaced outsiders who secretly admired her uninhibited social interactions? New acquaintances, both women and men, instantly felt they were her best friend. Anny knew how to reach out.

Ludwig, in turn, knew how to hold his tongue. After his death, Anny complained that it was the one piece of his advice that she had failed to master. Ludwig also knew how to recognize and foster the good in others. Just as he had encouraged me to sit unafraid on the back of a huge horse, so
he helped others in later years. Long before “Native rights” became prevalent in Canadian consciousness, Ludwig began hiring men from a nearby reserve. Frequently, there were accidents and problems, but Ludwig never lost sight of what was right. He continued to support the men, and their families, who often became his friends.

At Ludwig’s funeral, there were all sorts of people. Absent were a handful of people that Ludwig had been unable to forgive, those who had turned their back when Jews had clamoured for entry to Canada. Some had been fellow Jewish immigrants more concerned with getting ahead in the new world than with reaching out to those stranded in Europe.

Anny had always been a woman of action, the one who grabbed life by the scruff of the neck and shook it until change happened. Just as she had taken the lead in learning English and in selling eggs, she had stepped forward in other ways. Ironically, the more Anny did, the more my mother’s resentment of her grew. Petty complaints, all voiced behind closed doors. Although her food tasted great to me and largely came from the same cookbook that my mother used, I grew up hearing that Anny was a terrible cook. Today, I still make her red current cake. The tart berries are covered with a sugared meringue, the two extremes evocative of Anny’s own sweet-topped turbulence.

Even though I knew my aunt as a lively, outgoing woman who talked to everyone and had many friends, my mother claimed that nobody liked Anny. My admiration of my aunt was another of those dark secrets I hid from my mother.

Sadly, the lifelong rivalry between the two sisters grew worse as they aged. After Ludwig died, Anny retreated into a shell from which she emerged only briefly. She threw up walls and rarely deviated from the rigid daily routine that became her life. It was her way of creating a semblance of control.

There was always a reason why Anny could not make the short trip to Hamilton. Monday was laundry, Tuesday was ironing, Wednesday was hairdresser, Thursday was banking, Friday was shopping, and weekends were unsuitable. Although my mother routinely smuggled her little white
lap dog into stores, restaurants, and local buses, my mother claimed that because of the dog, she could not board the bus to Brantford.

Three days before she died, I visited Anny for the last time. She was lucid but ready to rejoin her beloved Ludwig in the next life. She had no desire to see her sister again. After Anny’s death, the letters that Max and Resl had sent to both sisters before the war were nowhere to be found.

J
UST A SINGLE SET OF LETTERS
, dated April 2,1939 and sent to us in Antwerp, had restored each aunt and uncle to me. I seemed to hear them speak and watch them act. In 1996, with those letters in my lap, the family I had not known began to take shape.

I trembled with my father’s sister Martha as she contemplated an uncertain future for herself and her children. I agonized with her husband Emil Fränkel as he hesitated, not knowing which way to turn to escape the Nazi net. Stretching across the miles and through the years, their longing to be with us reached deep into my heart.

I shared my Aunt Else’s hopes as she smiled in the face of adversity. Her efforts seemed to parallel my own struggle to smooth life’s bumpy road with food and cheerful conversation. I felt comfortable with her husband Emil Urbach, and saw the parallel between his directness and the abruptness of which I often stand accused. Even Emil’s unsolicited advice to my parents seemed to echo my misguided efforts to be helpful. All too often, without being asked, I propose solutions to the problems of others.

However, it was in my Uncle Arnold that I most clearly recognized myself: fundamentally optimistic but rooted in reality and alert to human possibility. It was with great eagerness, therefore, that I opened the next letter in his handwriting. The letter is dated June 25,1939. Much had transpired since that first letter from all six of my aunts and uncles in Prague to my parents in an Antwerp hotel. As of April 16,1939, my parents had become Canadian farmers. How eagerly my father would have seized the letter, seeking some reassurance that the sky was not falling upon his family.

Arnold’s letter does not disappoint. Its tone is newsy and chipper. There are many comings and goings. My grandmother Fanny had been to Prague, to visit the family and to check on the progress of her youngest grandchild, the “uncommonly cute” Dorly. Arnold paints life as warm, familial, and comfortingly normal.

As always, there were many visitors at Else’s and the conversation was lively. Of course, we talked about everything under the sun, but the main topic of conversation was you. Repeatedly, we discussed your new living conditions and there were great debates ranging from coping with your lack of drinking water to what you should plant in the fields. Well, these days we who are “left-behin-ders” must become more multi-faceted than ever and learn to understand much that is new.

Still, if this was a normal family visit, why did my grandfather Josef not accompany Fanny? Did she go alone to start the search for accommodation? In March of 1939, Hitler had declared Bohemia to be a “protectorate” of Germany, and by August, Jews living in the provinces of the protectorate had been ordered to resettle in Prague within the year. Fanny and Josef would soon be forced to move.

Arnold avoids troubling my parents with matters they could not change. However, he points out that Emil Fränkel has resisted all pressure to sell his house and his business premises in Linz, despite the new laws in Austria that bar Jews from owning property. In desperation, the man who assumed
interim control of Emil’s business affairs had come all the way to Prague to persuade Emil to sign over the property to him.

In 1996, safely under my own roof, I began to rethink what my parents meant when they said,
“When we fled, we
lost
everything.”
Because I have been both fortunate and frugal, I own my home and do not wake up wondering if someone will take it away from me. Yet in Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, that is precisely what happened. The government simply changed the law. Jews could no longer own property. Whatever they owned was simply taken by the state, and the state signed over to Aryan citizens any property that it did not keep. That is how we “lost” our home and the store in Strobnitz, how my mother’s parents “lost” their home and their store in Germany, and how the Fränkels “lost” everything in Austria.

Some Jews hastily sold their property for very little, but Emil Fränkel refused to give up. If the man who took over the business came from Linz to Prague to pressure Emil, is it not because that very same man expects to be the new owner?

Arnold describes his own work situation in a surprisingly open manner.

I need some rest and relaxation, and am actually overdue for holiday time, but I shall have to be patient until early August. Because several of our employees have now been given permanent vacation time, the weeks ahead promise to be sour and work-intensive. Of course, we have no holiday plans, since it’s impossible to plan very far into the future. Still, I’d at least like to go to Taus for a week to get my teeth fixed.

The German that Arnold uses is somewhat unusual, compelling me to read between the lines. I conclude that the “permanent vacation” granted to certain employees is a euphemism for Jews who have been fired in accordance with new regulations excluding them from medicine, the law, and other professions. I note too that conditions are so unstable that even a month ahead is considered “long-range” planning. Given the uncertain future, Arnold urges my parents to write more often.

I had counted on a letter this week from you, my dear Canadians, but on the other hand, we do understand that you are preoccupied with concerns beyond keeping up a correspondence, and that your hand is perhaps too tired at day’s end to pick up pen and paper.

Arnold adds one more paragraph to reassure my parents that the bonds of family transcend distance.

Our thoughts are always with you and I visualize your situation with all its difficulties and shortages as if I really knew it. Vera is often caught up in her thoughts by your description of the natural surroundings. Every little creek that we come to, she wonders if it looks like yours. On the other hand, I often wonder if the weather there is as miserable as what we have been having here. Does it make you frantic and is there anyone who will help you if it suddenly starts to rain when the ripened hay is in the field?

Arnold’s letter is followed by a few paragraphs from his wife Vera who has mailed us a book on naturopathic healing. She apologizes for having been unsuccessful in finding the up-to-date health lexicon that my parents had requested.

I wonder why Vera does not have access to recent books and publications. She does not spell out the answer, but her letter suggests that life is changing for her and for all European Jews. Everyone is under stress.

I always read your letters with great pleasure and await them impatiently, but please do not be angry with me if I just attach good wishes or even nothing to Arnold’s letters. We know each other well enough that surely you will not take it as indifference if I am sometimes simply not able to write. The inner unease and a certain restlessness that now characterize each day cause such an emptiness in my brain that I am sometimes incapable of putting two sentences together. It is a well-known fact that great stress usually attacks the human organ that is by nature inclined to be the
weakest. In some, that organ is the stomach, in some the intestines, and in my case, the brain.

Vera’s struggle leads her to speak twice in a row of the need for God’s help. Calamity and uncertainty are cruel reminders of our own limitations.

Perhaps God will not abandon His own. I hope that this will be true for you, my dear Canadians. We are very aware of all the hardships that you will have to endure. We know how all the harsh, demanding labour will sap your limited strength. God will really have to help.

————

UNLIKE HIS SISTER-IN-LAW
Vera, Emil Urbach trusts his own powers of rational thought. Having spent hours poring over books, his typed letters are treasure-troves of information and well-intentioned advice.

We always read your letters with great interest, but unfortunately we have not so far been able to imagine clearly your present life and circumstances. Even the dominant climatic conditions there will be markedly different from ours.

It is hard to give you advice from a distance, because many things aren’t clear to us. Given the proximity of a larger city (Hamilton), you have a good market for agricultural products, and you are in the best part of Canada. Soil there consists of sand mixed with clay; the terrain is level and can easily be worked. Unfortunately, you don’t have coal, but you do have water power there. In the summer you won’t be too hot but in the winter it will be rather cold. The temperature in Toronto, for example, ranges from -20 in January to +33 or higher in July. The Great Lakes don’t freeze, but winter lasts 5 months.

It is perhaps also advisable to proceed from small to large, getting a smaller farm next and managing it well and then undertaking
something larger with the money earned and saved. For sure, a small landowner can’t do much; farming on a small scale isn’t worthwhile anywhere, and certainly not in Canada. Even before the present crisis, farming was already unprofitable here in Czechoslovakia. A small landowner was only able to survive by taking advantage of by-products like pig manure or by raising bees alongside profitable plants (poppies, mustard, sunflowers for oil, crops that attract bees while also providing fodder for animals.)

Since you have a very real shortage of money, the best solution would be to build (under very strict conditions) a collective with people who have a stronger base of capital. You would get paid for your labour and in this way, you could obtain some capital. Of course this means slaving away. A large farm also involves greater mangement demands, whereas your part in a collective would be easier to manage.

Even on the topic of location, Emil has advice to offer. He points out that land on the prairies is cheap in part because the weather is brutal, and that tracts of land on the Gaspé Peninsula could lead to sudden riches if they were to contain mineral deposits. The outraged voice of my father still echoes in my head. “
Wie stellt er sich denn das vor?
How does he expect us to follow these preposterous suggestions?”

Emil’s well-meant words might have encouraged a more self-confident man. My father’s goal was modest: survival in this alien environment for which he was so woefully unprepared. Emil must have known this to be true, for the books that he sent are reminders of how little my father knew about farming.

In the same mail, I’m sending you three books:

1. Introduction to Vegetable Gardening by Friederich Huck

2. The Practical Vegetable Gardener by Fr. Saftenberg

3. The Garden Book for Beginners by Johann Boettner. Wishing you good results, we remain with best regards Yours