Karl’s luck held, though—he arrived in time to take his boards, to apply for jobs—in New York, Ohio, and Massachusetts—even as those doors were closing to others. A rolled-up poster I found in his box of “personal” effects applauds him for passing the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine on July 11, 1940. I see my grandfather, endlessly ahead of the rolling boulder of xenophobia, obliterating everyone and everything from his past, and his present. Nazi Germany barred physicians from working beginning in 1933; by September 1938, the month my grandfather boarded his ship in Hamburg, Jewish doctors were allowed to treat only fellow Jews, in Jewish facilities. Then, soon after he received the right to practice, his own American safe harbor became less safe for Jewish émigré physicians.
It was the National Committee for Resettlement of Foreign Physicians that rescued him—and hundreds of his colleagues—from certain impoverishment, from destitution, and from the—I imagine, in his eyes—even worse fate of a life lived without intellect, in a job he was not passionate about, away from the profession he had earned. Created in February 1939, the group was instantly inundated with requests from doctors seeking assistance.
Leff tells me it’s unlikely, but if I want to see how my grandfather, specifically, was aided upon arrival in America, there is a chance the Immigration History Research Center and Archives at the University of Minnesota might have him on file. The committee worked as social workers as much as advocates, she explains, and some of the physicians assisted by them have case files documenting both their poverty and their success—or failure—upon receiving assistance. Physicians were screened for competency in their specialties, in medicine in general, for their perceived ability to integrate and work in America. Those files were collected and eventually found their way to Minnesota. In fact, the Immigration History Research Center has collected myriad materials on the immigrant experience, archivist Daniel Necas tells me when I contact him, including a project on love letters between immigrants and those they left behind. He is as interested in my letters between Valy and my grandfather as he is in my grandfather’s experience on these shores. But both Necas and Leff warn me that the files are incomplete, so not to expect too much, or anything at all.
Unlikely or not, nearly as soon as he has told me not to hope, Necas writes again to tell me there are some fifty pages in a file about my grandfather. And then, miraculously, in the following days, I receive dozens of scanned pages, mimeographed documentation of the social services that casually determined the course of my family’s life. My grandfather, his files show, reached out for help on these shores even before leaving Austria. Three weeks after the Anschluss—
Dr. med Karl Wildmann
Vienna 2nd District
27, Rueppgasse
Vienna, April 4, 1938
Dear Doctor!
By way of a recommendation I got your address and am taking the liberty to ask you, in your capacity as a colleague, to answer the following questions. . . . In 1937 I acquired the degree of a Medical Doctor in Austria. Please let me know the following:
1. Which documents do I need in order to be able to work as a physician in the United States?
2. Which US states require the Official Recognition of Foreign Examinations and what are the underlying conditions?
Let me add that I already do have an affidavit and that I therefore would be most grateful if you could attend to my request as quickly as possible.
Many thanks in advance; obviously, I would also like to compensate you for your troubles.
Looking forward to your esteemed reply, I remain,
with collegial greetings,
Yours faithfully
Dr. K. Wildmann
He arrived in September 1938 and continued to apply for help, even as he took his medical exams and his English language proficiency tests. He had to. He had nothing to live on.
“Dr. Wildman came to this country with his mother, sister and brother-in-law on September 10, 1938,” begins one letter from the Jewish Family Welfare Society writing to something called the “Physicians Committee, National Coordinating Committee” regarding my grandfather. It is dated March 6, 1939.
His mother is being assisted by a brother in whose home she is staying, and the sister and her husband have made their own arrangements. Dr. Wildman had been living with a cousin but was obliged to move because of this relative’s financial pressure, and he therefore took a room in the home of some friends. . . . We have been giving him financial assistance since February 20th. His room rent is $5 a week, and an equal amount weekly is allowed for his living expenses. He speaks English quite fluently. He has passed his language examination and has also taken his State medical board. He has not yet heard about the results. He is looking around for interneship [sic] and has been writing to various hospitals and institutions in this city and in out-of-town sections. He has his degree from the University of Vienna, and has very high recommendations from various professors and physicians in Vienna. I trust it will be possible for you to see Dr. Wildman within a short time so he can avail himself of the services of your committee.
The committee then contacts my grandfather and he writes back. In the files I have, the committee preserved his own handwritten notes, as well as a typed—in English!—curriculum vitae; in it, he gently notes he arrived on September 16, not September 10. But otherwise, the documents confirm his degrees, his training, his accolades, his bona fides. The committee, internally, then arranges for him to be screened by physicians of their choosing.
Paging ahead, I can see him through the eyes of these Americans: Here is twenty-seven-year-old Karl, duly assessed—he is, writes one, unprepossessing, he has a nice disposition; he is not too tall, he is well built, he has exceptional language skills (this was a boon, as the committee could reject physicians for lacking sufficient English). He tells the committee he has trained as an ear, nose, and throat doctor (he had studied for a time in this specialty, in Vienna, at the Rothschild Hospital, the hospital run by the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien, the Jewish community), but the supervising doctor decides that’s not what he’ll be after all—he’ll be a family physician, a generalist. “He has sufficient training under excellent auspices to make him worthwhile. He is not, however, a trained otolaryngologist,” he writes. And just like that, a sweep of a pen, or rather, a clatter of typewriter keys, and his professional fate twists: though they tell him he can retrain as an ear, nose, and throat specialist in some years, after he is established, I know he remained a generalist for the rest of his life.
A year will pass before professional life begins for him in earnest. In the meantime, his mother, social workers note, has sold all her jewelry—netting a mere sixty dollars—to support herself. Having exhausted that last resource, she can no longer contribute to her own upkeep. She is on the verge of destitution. Karl will spend that year as an intern in general medicine at St. Luke’s Hospital in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. It is that internship that keeps him in Pittsfield, I see from the notes of the committee. He has established himself among the Jews of the town, one document notes. The committee believes he has enough of a reputation at the hospital to start a successful practice there.
In the summer and fall of 1940, the committee internally determines it will enable Karl to establish a practice—without them he would have been completely lost. He could not foot the cost of a single necessary item. They agree to loan him $357, which included money for big-ticket items like office furniture ($75), medical equipment ($80), and a car ($100), as well as smaller ones—food ($35), office rent ($40), and a month in an apartment ($12). The loan is cosigned by my great-grandmother’s brother Sam, the same man who issued the affidavits for my grandfather, his mother, his sister, brother-in-law, and young nephew that enabled them to travel from Vienna. Sam was not wealthy, but he had come to this country decades earlier—the irony, my father tells me, was that Sam had been the “unsuccessful” one, in Europe, he had come to America beca
use Europe didn’t work for him; he was a “failure” in the old country. And here he became their savior, twice over.
The $357 would help Karl open an office, find a home, bring his mother to live with him under his own roof. There was not a penny of excess in that amount. There was nary a dollar to send to anyone overseas, nor an extra ten beyond what he needed to organize his office, and travel back and forth to see family in New York City. And word from Europe is dire, I’ll soon discover. Valy needs hundreds to pay for visas. Money that he has absolutely no access to in those early months, in those early years.
In his initial intake, the social workers indicate my grandfather would welcome a rural practice, but I know from Leff’s article, and that JAMA piece I discovered, that that is exactly what the physicians’ resettlement fund wanted them to say—they were almost exclusively placing these doctors in areas that were lacking medical care so as not to raise the ire of doctors in established urban locations. The loan of $357 came through, and my grandfather’s Pittsfield office opened in October 1940, two years and one month after he arrived in America. In a handwritten note, included in his files, my grandfather shyly writes, “Here I am sitting in my office which you so generously helped establish. More than a week has passed since I started practicing. The local newspaper published a very nice article about me, so everybody knows that a new doctor is in town. . . . So far I had 5 patients and earned $16. Now I am waiting for those patients to get better and to tell their friends about their ‘amazing’ cure.” He includes the newspaper clipping, and there he is, his face boyish, a hint of a smile.
It was not a smooth start. In the next letter to the committee members—apparently he must write about his expenditures and income each month—my grandfather writes that he has not taken in as much as he’d hoped—in his second month he pulled in eighteen dollars, less than the cost of running an office, let alone rent, let alone supporting his mother.
“Dear Dr. Wildman,” they write. “We have your report for the last month and in view of your connections in town are rather surprised it has been so poor. I think you will recall that the arrangement we had made was for supplementation for a three-month period. I wonder whether you might not consider other possible plans in view of the limitations that we have for further loans.” And there again he has his luck—they give him just one month to get it right! One month to turn around his finances, his success. He writes back with great anxiety.
December 16, 1940
I myself am gravely disappointed about the slow development of my practice. Yet I was told it took people who were born and brought up here in town several months to get started. They know practically everybody in town and had many friends who had confidence in them but they simply had to wait until those friends got sick and after the first few good cases their practice developed rapidly. . . . It is only too understandable that your loans have limitations. Immediately upon receipt of your letter I got in touch with a CCC Camp near Pittsfield trying to get a part-time job there. I hope fervently to get it. That would pay all my expenses. Would you have any other suggestions? May I count on your courtesy in the case of failure?
The camp he refers to was part of the New Deal work relief program known as the Civilian Conservation Corps—it employed young, unmarried men who worked the land on behalf of their families (for the money they earned) and their country (creating forests and parkland). He seems not to have gotten this job; it was never mentioned again.
The committee reluctantly issues another eighty-four-dollar loan—the notes in his file are dry and ominous: they can support each physician only for a short amount of time. His time is running out.
And then, somehow, he pulls it out—the money trickles in, the patients start to arrive. The following month he makes seventy-four dollars. It is enough to ensure they will allow him to continue—because he can contribute to his own upkeep, they will give him one more month of support: forty-four dollars more. The notes indicated they would have stopped supporting him if an additional month did not work out—and they would have sought to have him resettled elsewhere, and not in private practice. But with his turn of fortune, they will not cut him off, yet. His mother can come live with him; he can, it appears, support her now. He can, more importantly, be a success here.
Because these were loans in the truest sense, they came due immediately, literally the moment the first patients became regulars and his stationery was printed. Piece by piece Karl begins to repay, forty-four dollars here, a hundred dollars there. He pays and pays and pays, and the committee duly writes to remind him if he is late; to remind him that there are others like him who need the money; that this money is not his. His payments continue all the way into the fall of 1942, at which point they write: “We wish to take this occasion to wish you the very best of luck for your service in the armed forces.” He has volunteered for the U.S. Army. In all that time, though, I’m now well aware, there was no extra money to purchase freedom for anyone else trying to come over.
As I try to piece together what life was like in those early months, that first year, I call Joseph Feldschuh, my grandfather’s nephew who left Vienna with him; he was only three at the time of his passage. He has no personal memory of Valy, at least not from Austria. The name, however, is familiar. He can’t give me exactly what I’m looking for; he was too young for crisp memories. It is all broad strokes. “My grandmother, Sarah Wildman,” he booms on speakerphone, “had a brother in this country named Sam Feldschuh and he came to this country in sometime like 1900 or 1905 . . . so he left early to get out of being drafted by the Russian army, which was anti-Semitic but was happy to grab soldiers . . . so he got here and he married a woman named Fanny Hollenberg and they had four children.”
He proceeds, biblically, to list them all then, and their progeny. I dutifully write it down. “When they finally got the affidavits [from Sam] they were one short.” This, I think, must be the story of the incomplete papers in Hamburg. “And my father was the one who interceded somehow with the Nazis. My father was a real charmer, I don’t know if you remember him. And he managed to get one more. So there was a visa for my parents and myself. Your grandfather, and your great-grandmother, for five people. You know that movie Sophie’s Choice? With Meryl Streep? So you know about those kinds of choices.” I’m actually not at all sure what he means here, though I read the book and saw the movie years ago. Does he mean Valy? Does he mean the others who don’t get to go with them? Who were the others? Whom did they leave behind?
Maybe he means all of it. I’m struck, too, that on his side of the family it was his father, not my grandfather, who got them out. Another family’s myth? A truth that upends my own version of the story? There is no way to confirm; all those in question are gone.
“I remember that my mother was in communication after the war with a couple of people who had escaped. I’ve heard there were some letters [before the war] from people needing help, but”—he grows sharper in tone here—“your grandfather was in no position to help anybody. We were very, very lucky that we were accepted into America . . .”
No position to help anybody. This is clear, from the loans I find, from the stomach-tightening fear embedded in Karl’s own correspondence with his American saviors.
Some of those rumored European letters I find. They arrived heavy with desperation, at the same time my grandfather was negotiating with the National Committee for Resettlement of Foreign Physicians. At the exact moment the committee is debating his future, my grandfather is receiving requests from half of his former university schoolmates for visa money, for affidavits. At the exact moment it is questionable how he will support himself and his family, his former lover Valy—and her friends, I’ll come to realize, and her mother—is reaching out to him and begging him for visas that cost upward of a hundred and a hundred fifty dollars apiece.
He is scrounging for loans that start at twenty-five dollars. He cannot pay for his own mother’s upkee
p. Perhaps, I wonder as I read, the “love” my grandmother spoke of was really guilt: a sense of the horror at how different things might have been, had he not been desperate for another ten dollars here, fifty dollars there, that lingered with him, for a lifetime. By the late 1940s he was successful—later letters show that in the early 1950s, he helped survivor cousins who escaped to Palestine purchase a truck for two thousand dollars, a tremendous amount of money in those years. Was all that largesse in response, consciously or not, to the complete tragedy of his own impoverished years? He was supposed to have been the master of all things—languages, cultures, medicine—and here he was, like so many other émigrés before him, stymied, tripped up, at least temporarily, by a system that was not remotely hospitable, let alone easy to navigate.
Indeed, how could it not have had an effect on him? He was inundated—just like the committee—with requests for money, for affidavits, for passage to the New World. “News from Europe,” he writes to Tonya. “Conditions are terrible.”
“We were unable to stay in Budapest and had to come back here,” writes one friend, from Vienna, in mid-December 1938. “We hope, however, to be able to leave from here within 2–3 weeks.” The writer wants my grandfather to explain how they can get from Cuba to the United States:
Because whatever one hears here is so confusing that it is very difficult to get a clear picture. Some people insist that one may wait for the quota in Cuba. . . . Moreover it is still unclear to us how long the Polish and the Romanian quota must wait. I am convinced that your creativity and your instincts have researched the shortest and best options possible. . . . We are allowed to stay [in Vienna] only until January 10 and hope to have obtained by then the visas in order to find, as already mentioned, a suitable or tolerable stopover until we are able to board a ship. The ships that are bound for Cuba are sold out 2–3 months in advance, but we hope to find a stopover place with the help of the visas. . . . I do hope, however, that the petition of Dr. Eisenstein will be met with a positive resolution and that you together with our noble and much esteemed friend Mr. Klamer will find ways to help us. While I do not want to cry on your shoulder, I am quite sure that you do understand us!!
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