August
Met with Shirley Kaufman, who is visiting from Israel. She showed me a poem she wrote recently. I found it very moving. Images of the holocaust mingled, ending with a river of salt. It begins with a story a man told her. A survivor. His first sexual experience. At Bergen Belsen. A stolen moment with himself, touching himself, all the time looking over his shoulder.
Charlotte’s mother Franziska was beautiful, charming and “popular.” Her younger sister, the first Charlotte, felt diminished in her presence. I know something of jealousy among sisters. My mother loved my sister more than she did me. She told me once it was simply a matter of closeness. They had spent more years together before the family diaspora. From the ages of six to eight and then from nine to eleven, I was with my grandparents. I did not add the years up then, nor did I ask if seven years were not enough to form a bond between mother and daughter. I simply shrugged off her explanation as a reality I had long ago accepted.
August
Shirley is worried about the possibility of war. Might Israel be pushed by the United States into using nuclear weapons against Iraq?
When my mother and father divorced, I was sent to my grandmother’s house, and my sister was sent to live with my great-aunt, my grandmother’s sister, who lived six hundred miles away. Years later she held these miles against me. And something else, I suspect, came between us. My grandmother, who was the matriarch of the family, chose me as her favorite. Then I was blond and my sister dark in a culture that worships blondness and fears darkness. And in the years that I was married, she was a lesbian, marginal, marked with shame, only half visible.
August
When we first met, Shirley was living in California, and in another marriage, with three children. But she fell in love with another man, a teacher, critic and an Israeli. She left her marriage and her life here to move to Israel. I remember how much I admired the courage it must have required to make that change.
The feeling of not being acceptable or loved cuts deeply into the psyche, often leaving an unhealable wound. And what is played out in families is also played out in the schoolyard. Certain children are favored among their peers. Others excluded. Himmler never forgot the years when he was rejected in this way.
August
Now, twenty years later, we are drinking tea in the house of Shirley’s daughter, who is a mother now, and my friend too. “It is not what you would think it is, the Middle East,” Shirley says. The hostilities are predictable, but everywhere there are pockets of contradiction. She tells me about her friendship with a Lebanese poet. Because no mail passes directly between Jerusalem and Beirut they correspond through her daughters’ addresses in the United States. He is a German scholar too, and has translated Trakl and the Bible into Arabic.
Of course patterns of exclusion continue past school years. There is no saying where they begin or end. In the family, or in society at large. Jews. Homosexuals. A darker color of skin, hair. A different accent. Clothes or shoes that are not fine enough. All these prejudices accumulate in an intricate lattice of meaning and injury.
September
Language as both bond and division. Lenke telling me that in Sweden she and Nelly Sachs studied Kabbala together in German. Lenke had learned German in Auschwitz.
Charlotte’s mother was not the same after her sister jumped to her death. But the effect on her was not immediately visible. Except that she insisted to her parents that she be allowed to become a nurse and tend to soldiers wounded in the war. Finally, after much pleading, they relented but only on the condition that she stay away from the front.
September
There are so many stories I heard in the course of the writing that I would like to include in the book. But one cannot tell everything. The urgency of testimony, of bearing witness. A crowd pressing, like passengers, pushing to board a train already filled to capacity.
It was in a hospital in Berlin that Charlotte’s mother met her future husband, Charlotte’s father. He was a doctor. In one painting Charlotte depicts the two of them hovering over the body of a man who has a severe wound. It looks as if either his genitals or his intestines have been injured.
September
Even in the retelling of one story, so many details have had to be left out. And others are given a new prominence. That is, I give them a prominence. And then the book itself, moving with its own life, makes certain choices which I must obey.
Just after Charlotte’s parents are married, her father is called away to the front. Franziska’s parents want her to stay on with them. But she refuses. She goes to live in the apartment they are to share as a married couple. In the story as Charlotte tells it, one feels a sense of liberation and excitement as her mother leaves the suffocating environment of her childhood.
September
What always seems miraculous is when aesthetic necessities yield an insight which otherwise I would have missed. I repeat a word in a paragraph for instance and when I find what I think is a similar word, a simple replacement, a whole new meaning is revealed.
But a painting follows which shows Franziska sitting alone, in a vacant apartment. One thinks then of this vital young woman who just days before, working long hours in the wards of a hospital, was situated at the heart of public life, sitting now by herself with nothing much to do.
September
Of course, one must be willing to break the aesthetic and find a new form. A form which appears to be merely graceful or beautiful can be a kind of censoring mold, a habitual pattern which stifles knowledge of thought and feeling.
But Charlotte’s father returns soon from the war, and the house takes on life. Charlotte is born. There are family dinners. Celebrations. Holidays. Despite the fact that the family is Jewish, there are Christmas trees. Presents. And at the heart of it, in Charlotte’s telling, an intimate relationship between Charlotte and her mother.
September
It is perhaps five years ago now—I was already writing this book—when I began to see that my own despair had become a habit, an old pattern I had inherited from my childhood.
In the portraits Charlotte draws of her mother throughout this work, one senses a woman with great vitality and an independent spirit. But there is no place for her to live out these traits. And as she begins to long for death, these qualities fire her self-destruction.
September
To continue in that old form would inevitably lead to a cul de sac. A foregone conclusion.
Before Franziska attempts suicide, she tells her daughter stories at night, creating a vivid fantasy of an afterlife, a heaven with glorious angels. One day she will go there, she tells her daughter, and she will be happy. If you ever go there will you send me a letter telling me what it is like? Charlotte asks. Yes, Franziska promises.
September
In my most despairing moments I found myself believing that I was somehow cursed to repeat over and over the painful episodes of my childhood for the rest of my life.
In this part of Charlotte’s story I am reminded of the power of German idealism, the hypnotic notion of a state of perfection that transcends any possible earthly existence.
September
In truth I did repeat those episodes many times.
The world has lost its meaning for Franziska and bit by bit she withdraws from life. Those around her are unable to diagnose her trouble. And she herself does not say what is the matter. She makes one suicide attempt and is rescued. But when she is left alone for a few moments, she jumps out a window to her death.
September
But who is to say which came first, the belief or the events?
Why did Franziska end her life? Charlotte has no simple answer. Instead, cast in a certain irony, she depicts the explanations she was given by others, and she presents her own memories, the experience of a child who has lost her mother. No one tells her that her mother committed suicide. Wishing to protect her, consoling adults tell her that her mother has died of influenza. She dep
icts herself as not fully touched by the tragedy, waiting daily for her mother’s letter from heaven.
September
The stories we tell ourselves, particularly the silent or barely audible ones, are very powerful. They become invisible enclosures. Rooms with no air. One must open the window to see further, the door to possibility.
Charlotte is met with two silences. Her mother’s silence and the silence of her family. A gloom descends. One can feel the child’s utter loneliness in the way she has painted herself. Clearly she knows something which has never been spoken. And she is isolated in this knowledge, even from herself.
September
I read this in a review of a book on the Civil War in the New York Times. Walt Whitman writes, “The real war will never get in the books.”
In one frame she pictures herself as a child running terrified through the upstairs hallway to the bathroom. She is frightened by the sense of something lurking there that has a mysterious connection with her mother. A red-limbed skeleton looms over her.
September
My daughter is just now reading Whitman for a class in college.
I am reminded of the long hallway in my grandmother’s house. The walls were covered with an orange-pink paper, embossed as if it were silk, and the lamp was red glass. The hallway seemed endlessly long. I would run to the end of it whenever I was hurt and weep. In my memory this hallway is like an elongated uterine cave, a safe place, yet pulsing with unmanageable sorrow.
September
Among the poems he wrote on the war, “The Wound Dresser,” so simple, straightforward:
From the stump of the arm, the amputated hand,
I undo the clotted lint, remove the slough, wash off the matter and blood.…
What I remember is an overwhelming loneliness, yet I was not lonely for lack of company. There were my friends in the neighborhood and my grandparents. And the visits of my father. I was rarely alone. But I was in mourning. I was very young, but I had witnessed the disintegration of my family, and I had no language for that grief. No one would speak of it with me.
September
He catches it so well, that awful moment of suspended knowledge, when one cannot bear to know.
Recently I dreamed I was in my grandmother’s house. I had inherited it, and I was changing the architecture.
September
His eyes are closed, his face is pale, he dares not look on the bloody stump,
And has not yet looked on it.
A few years after her mother’s death Charlotte’s father falls in love with another woman. A famous opera singer, daughter of a rabbi. Charlotte is quickly infatuated with her father’s new wife, called Paulinka in her story, who is beautiful, charming and accomplished. She has found a mother again, and at the same time a woman whose very nature opens up worlds for her. Those wider worlds that exist outside the private world of the home.
September
A few years ago one could easily have written, “the real Walt Whitman will never get in the books.” That he was gay, a nurse during the Civil War, tender, almost motherly with wounded men, this was a buried story.
Had this opening existed for Charlotte’s mother, would she have continued living? I know that my own mother felt confined in the smallness of domestic life. For a time she took courses in interior decorating. But she was discouraged by my father and her own parents in this. When I ask myself why she became an alcoholic, this is always among the answers.
September
My daughter learns in class that Whitman was homosexual. Buried stories coming to light. There is some hope in this.
Over time, as many women do, my mother became inseparable from her confinement. She was defined by all she could not do, and then never did and then feared doing. She lost the capacity to imagine any other life, until finally the life she had began to be her choice, as she remained inside her house, unemployed and unengaged in public life, private and shy in her manner. At last, it seemed as if this choice were she. Herself then interior, indecipherable, uncommunicative, forever turned away, a person inaccessible behind her private doors.
October
Last night I watched the celebration of the reunification of Germany. The ceremonies began at midnight in Berlin, in time for the evening news here. Fireworks in the sky over the Brandenburg Gate.
If there is a complaint from someone in this condition it is rarely articulated except paradoxically as if it were an extension of the condition itself. Madness. An addiction to pills. Hours of watching television. Drinking. Suicide. But of course, one says, this could have been predicted. This was in her. This is who she was.
October
The crowds in front of the old Reichstag sang the national anthem. The former words, “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,” now forbidden, replaced by new words, translated as, “Unity and justice and freedom for the German Fatherland.”
In the ensuing part of her story Charlotte pictures herself as she attempts to escape the predictable female role. Perhaps I could learn to draw, that might be just the thing. The words accompany a painting of herself as a girl, bent over a desk, intently moving her brush.
October
The unification of Germany is only the latest in a whole series of events which were once thought to be impossible. Yet they are still singing “Fatherland.”
But just as Charlotte discovers this new possibility within herself, events in the public world are taking an ominous shape. In one of the paintings that tell her story a red flag bearing a swastika is raised over a mass of uniformed soldiers, arranged in identical, neat lines. And in the corner of the frame a copy of Der Stürmer reads, The Jew has betrayed and deceived you.
October
Some things change and some do not. In Prague a playwright who has written Kafkaesque plays making fun of government bureaucracy has become head of state. Yet judging from letters he wrote in prison, his attitudes toward women are traditional.
Charlotte’s father, a prominent surgeon, is expelled from the university where he teaches, despite the fact that his knowledge of new surgical methods could save many lives. Now he will only be allowed to work at the Jewish hospital. And her stepmother, a famous performer who has escaped Hitler’s campaign to return women to the kitchen, does not escape anti-Semitism. She is assaulted by young storm troopers who shout from the audience, Out—get out—out—get out.
October
It is difficult to say how things will turn out. But one thing is certain. The old opposition between East and West, the polarity through which the world was once explained, has broken down.
Charlotte pleads to go to art school, but her stepmother, wishing something practical for her, enrolls her in a school of fashion design. What is she thinking? She is an artist herself. But the times have changed. Women cannot rely on men to support them. And there is a depression.
October
No one knows quite what to expect.
I remember my father’s attempt to convince me that I should go to secretarial school instead of college. It was assumed that I would need a way to earn a living. And how else could a woman earn a living except as a secretary? But to me even the thought of secretarial school made me bitter. I was determined not to submit to this plan.
October
Last spring Veronica, just returned from Berlin, told me that all over the city, and particularly along the Kurfürstendamm, you could hear the sound of stone being chipped away.
Was there anything more behind Paulinka’s choice for Charlotte? Could it be that she felt competitive with her young stepdaughter? Or was it some richer mix of emotions, including that odd dissociation that so many successful women have toward young women trying to escape the common female fate?
October
For several months now I have saved a photograph of the half-fallen wall because it reminds me of a day I spent there two years ago, when the wall seemed like it would be a permanent landmark.
Charlotte persists in t
he direction of what she wants. She fails in the school of design and the school of fine arts has turned down her application. But she takes drawing lessons. Her teacher will not let her rest until she succeeds in completing a realistic rendering of a cactus, which includes every stalk. And so finally she passes the entrance requirements of the school she wants to attend.
October
I stood on the steps of the Gropius Museum with Hella as we looked into the windows of offices just across the wall. We were on our way to the old Gestapo headquarters, which had just recently been excavated.
It was in this period of her life, while she was longing and preparing to be an artist, that she met Alfred Wolfsohn. He was a music teacher with radical and new ideas about the process of creation. Because he was Jewish, during the Third Reich it was difficult for him to find work. He was introduced to Charlotte’s stepmother by an old friend of hers who was attempting to help Jewish artists in such circumstances. Paulinka, moved by his stories of suffering in the First World War, and perhaps also because she was drawn to him, hired him to give her lessons.
October
The wall seemed so strange, a barrier rising up suddenly in the midst of a neighborhood, the buildings on the other side so close we could see in the windows.
Wolfsohn’s new theories about art were inspired by his experiences as a stretcher-bearer in the war. He came out of the war shell-shocked, and he had lost much of his memory. What he could not forget, however, were the voices of the men who lay wounded and dying on the battlefield. In particular one voice returned to haunt him, a voice he heard for two days crying out for help. He could not crawl to him. He had had to ignore this plea, to save his own life.
October
Hella, the friend of a friend, part of a group working for peace, was shepherding me through the city. In the old Gestapo building, now a kind of museum, we watched films of a man being beaten. And she wept. I realized then her pain was double; she suffered both as a witness to this brutality, and as a German.
Survival when others have perished brings its own suffering. The question inevitably poses itself, Why was I chosen to live? In the wake of this question, it is a comfort to discover something unique one might give to the world.
A Chorus of Stones Page 28