Crossing the Borders of Time: A True Story of War, Exile, and Love Reclaimed

by Leslie Maitland

  In 1940, Len was studying engineering at New York University when he disappointed his family by marrying—too young, at just twenty-one—a non-Jewish woman four years his senior. It was an impetuous elopement largely spurred by his zeal to escape his parents’ bleakly cluttered apartment. There, patterns and pins, thick bolts of fabric, all the detritus of the dressmaking business overwhelmed the musty confines of rooms where the whirring of Bernard’s old sewing machine stopped only when clients came in for fittings. For an extended period, Mona with husband and son lived there as well, making for an airless, irritable environment that Leonard detested almost as much as he loathed his parents’ stifling immigrant culture.

  The new couple moved to a studio apartment near NYU in Greenwich Village, but before long his bride’s manic spending habits plunged Len into debt. Required to sacrifice college during the day in order to work full-time as a draftsman to pay for her lifestyle, he gave up his coveted place in the college choir and shifted to night school at the university’s Bronx campus. After classes, to cover their bills, he worked a second job as an assistant to a department store window dresser until the man’s sexual advances forced him to quit.

  He had a scientific, analytical mind and insisted upon objective reasoning and factual research in regard to every issue in life. “Don’t make assumptions,” was the major lesson he took from his studies and later on drummed into his children, providing my basic training for journalism. When he graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering in 1943, with war raging and color blindness preventing him from fulfilling his dream of becoming an Air Force pilot, both logic and the lure of the sea led him to the Merchant Marine, which had issued an urgent national call for skilled engineers. He joined the effort that helped win the war through the greatest sealift the world had seen, ferrying fuel, ammunition, planes, tanks, trucks, jeeps, and other crucial supplies over mine-infested foreign oceans to American and Allied troops in the fighting.

  Though news of their losses was a well-guarded secret during the war, the Merchant Marine suffered a higher casualty rate than any branch of the military, with thousands of volunteer mariners killed or injured on hastily constructed Liberty and Victory ships, under lethal attack from land, sea, and air. By act of Congress in 1936, merchant seamen were considered military personnel in times of war, yet they were deprived of the GI benefits awarded all other veterans to attend college, buy homes, and start businesses. A pledge to remedy this injustice died unfulfilled with President Roosevelt. Sporadic efforts at redress still falter in Congress more than six decades later, even though most war-era mariners are now gone. Indeed, many former mariners would die of service-related lung diseases, haunted by memories of Victory ships where the asbestos used to insulate pipes floated like snow in the engine rooms.

  For secrecy’s sake during the war, mariners were not permitted to know their destinations in advance, and even discharge certificates listed each voyage only as “foreign.” But Leonard later described perilous missions to the Philippines, Guam, Hawaii, France, England, Italy, Africa, as well as the Soviet Union, with American ships slipping past Axis defenses. From his Soviet visits, he brought back a small wooden cigarette box inlaid with silver, a book on Stalingrad written in Russian, a memory of loudspeakers spewing Marxist dogma over the streets, and a lifelong horror of what he decried as the soul-crushing evils of communism. From walking the decks on cold, rolling northern seas, he adopted a sailor’s stability-seeking, wide-legged stance and loose-kneed, rubbery gait. From war-whipped oceans, serving a chief engineer whom he hated, he came home a lieutenant with a misanthrope’s credo: “Never educate a sucker, and when your boss is a bastard, don’t undertake to do any more than you are specifically instructed to do.” But he gave his doctrine lip service only and always demanded the most from himself, as well as from everyone around him. His shipboard nickname, “L-square,” or L2 for Leonard Laurence, also fell by the wayside, later replaced in the minds of his family by “Leonard the Lion” for the way he restlessly paced in a cage of domestic convenience, exuding dynamic, ferocious potential.

  As to his first youthful marriage, what commitment existed quickly died a victim of war. Between sailings in November 1944, Len discovered that during his absence his wife was openly living in Queens with a lover. Rejecting entreaties to take her back, he divorced her in 1945 on grounds of adultery, shipped out again, and resolved that he would never remarry. With his discharge, just two months before meeting Janine in 1946, he landed a job as a manufacturer’s representative for a sales engineering firm and went on the road. He took on New England and the cold reaches of New York State, a lonesome young man carrying heavy sample cases to sprawling factories in nondescript towns. He almost enjoyed the challenge of sales, the validation that came when he could charm and persuade, educate or downright bully hesitant customers into placing orders with him. But he found little pleasure in his travels, only long, empty miles leading to puny commissions, solitary dinners, and an endless string of barren hotel rooms.

  He described his complaints about work in the many letters he wrote to Janine, though in the earliest months of their long-distance courtship he mainly endeavored to make her jealous. Their meetings were full of the banter that marked their early correspondence. He found Janine a challenge. He thought her “exotic.” Over sodas in what he mockingly called “the Orange Room at Nedick’s,” they teased each other and planted suspicions that may have sparked passion, but also left both of them feeling exposed and at risk.

  On yellowed stationery imprinted with drawings of old, imposing upstate hotels—the Onondaga in Syracuse, the Van Curler in Schenectady, the Cadillac in Rochester, the Arlington in Binghamton—it is easy to recognize the insecurity behind the youthful salesman’s sexual swagger. “I trust that this correspondence finds you in good health,” he wrote her, “and bubbling with poisonous enthusiasm for me.”

  January 7, 1947—These towns are really not very much fun, forcing one to create his own diversion. Naturally your correspondent is not lacking in fortitude in these directions. If you find me lacking in detail anywhere, you can assume that I have been a dirty bastard, as usual.…

  January 23, 1947—If this traveling of mine doesn’t stop pretty soon, I will be in much trouble as I will probably have a femme fatale in every city I go to and that is not good because it makes for a very restless state of mind.…

  January 27, 1947—I had a miserable time Friday night, but I had a wonderful time on Saturday. During the afternoon, I took my rifle and another chap and we went off and did some target shooting until it was almost dark and then quite by accident some girl got me a blind date and a very nice time was had by all, even me.…

  Janine tried to get even, writing back letters—sometimes in French, just to annoy him—in which she made up theater dates, parties, and dancing with other dashing escorts in such specificity that he believed her. When she showed up for a date one evening wearing a thin gold anklet, his pride was outraged. Such an intimate token could only have come from some other suitor! How dare she wear it when she was with him! He grabbed her leg, took hold of the chain pasted under her stocking, and managed to rip it straight through the nylon, snapping the anklet’s tiny links. She kept the pieces but never had it repaired and never admitted it was a gift from Trudi. “Well, that certainly shows some interest,” she mused, unsure whether she ought to feel pleased or upset.

  As weeks and months passed and she grew closer to Leonard, Janine tried to block out thoughts of Roland and to put him behind her. In the time since Norbert’s meeting with him in Lyon after the war, Janine never received the one thing she yearned for: a plea from Roland to come back to him. Had he really forgotten their sacred vow to marry each other? Had he been changed by the war, or had he just fallen for somebody else? Day after day, she prayed to receive a letter from him. And when God failed to answer, she resorted to magic or bargains with fate. If I walk home from the subway by way of Cooper Street instead of Broadway today, I know I�
��ll find a letter from him. If I make myself do the laundry first, before even looking at the mail, there’ll be a letter for me today on the table. If I don’t let myself think about him even once all day long, I’m certain to find an envelope from him. Day by day, once the war ended and regular mail delivery from Europe resumed, Janine’s grief and loneliness grew as no letter arrived and her hopes for Roland dripped slowly away.

  Painful questions consumed her, and she confided her heartbreak to her cousin Herbert. Over a string of Saturday lunches near his apartment on Madison Avenue, she confessed her longing to go back to France and become Roland’s wife, or at least to see him again and determine the truth of whether their love for each other endured. Her friend Malou, now married and working as a dentist in Marseille, had written Janine with just that advice:

  I am of the opinion that you have certainly both evolved and a period of reacquaintance will be required. But it is imperative that you go see Roland again before you do anything else. You might ruin your life with useless regret if you should abstain from seeing him now.

  Reluctantly, Herbert offered to lend her money for a steamship ticket across the Atlantic, but Janine worried how she would repay him. He had loaned her $10 in pocket money for her first week of work, and when she politely offered repayment from her first modest salary check, despite his wealth he had not turned it down, if only to teach her the value of money. How would she manage a much larger debt after getting to France? Beyond that, Herbert’s willingness to grant her a loan was more than matched by his pessimism when it came to assessing the hazards of going:

  How could she know for sure that Roland would want her? Had she fully considered what her leaving New York would do to her parents? Certainly they depended on her, as they struggled to build a new life in a world so unfamiliar to them. On the other hand, how would Roland support her in France while he had yet to finish his legal studies or prepare for any fruitful career? If things didn’t work out, where would she find the means to return to the States? Was she prepared to spend the rest of her life in a bad situation, in view of the fact that the Gunzburgers had never been people who indulged in divorce? How would she cope if she regretted her choice but had no way out?

  All this had been in the back of her mind during the years before meeting Len, as she casually dated the occasional man, not away at war, who was presented to her in a life of routine, largely confined to the dull social wasteland at the northernmost reaches of Manhattan. This was not at all what she had envisioned when she and Trudi persuaded their parents to abandon plans to settle in upstate Buffalo near Aunt Toni and Uncle Heinrich, whom they had visited directly upon arriving from Cuba. (Celebrating Janine’s first American birthday, Sigmar’s brother presented her with The Brothers Karamazov in German.)

  No, it was the razzle-dazzle, vibrant life of midtown Manhattan that Janine and Trudi had dreamed of exploring while waiting for war’s end: skyscraper canyons, Broadway theaters, swanky shops, and enticing people. The life that they had expected to find would glitter like mica in city sidewalks, twinkling in the glow of streetlamps or in flashing lights of carnival neon, proving the myth of streets paved with gold. Instead, Sigmar and Alice had followed the German Jewish refugee influx to Washington Heights, the so-called Fourth Reich, and to Inwood just to the north. The far end of Broadway at 204th Street, eight miles north of Times Square, where Sigmar was lucky to rent a small two-bedroom, one-bath apartment—not without paying a $500 bribe to the superintendent to get it—disappointed his daughters by being quiet and dark, with none of the glamour of the fabled city they had so long imagined.

  Beyond that and much worse for Janine, despite her high grades on New York college entrance exams and the opinion of her Havana headmistress that she would qualify for any American university she chose, she had been obliged to abandon the sort of medical career that had been her goal since childhood. Even as Sigmar jokingly called her die Medizinerin, the medical student, he proved unwilling to underwrite the long and costly studies required for her to become a doctor. Rather, he believed that his daughters’ best prospects depended on finding affluent husbands. And while he failed to consider that Janine’s chances of marrying well might have been boosted by going to college and medical school—if only because she would meet more young men with promising futures—Janine never dared to press him about it.

  Pursuing her interest as best she could, Janine thus resigned herself to becoming a physician’s aide and attended a medical trade school. It was a place, coincidentally, where one of Alfred Dreyfus’s granddaughters turned up as a classmate, her father Pierre earning a living by lecturing to American audiences about the Dreyfus affair. For Janine, a scholarship helped pay tuition, and she worked after class as a secretary in the school office. But the daily drudgery of school, bologna sandwiches at a lunch counter, work, and evenings with her parents left her eager for change, especially after Trudi became seriously involved with a man, Heinz Rawitscher, whom both sisters remembered from Freiburg.

  Two years older than Norbert, Heinz had first met the girls in the 1930s as members of the Bund Deutschjüdischer Jugend, one of the social groups organized for young German Jews excluded from joining their Aryan classmates in mesmerized ranks of Hitler Youth. The sisters recalled Heinz as a very good-looking fellow—a dapper dresser with regular features and a friendly, placid demeanor. His family had owned a department store, the Kaufhaus Modern, at the center of town. But during the Reich, the family store was Aryanized, Heinz’s father died, and in 1944 the Nazis murdered his mother and sister.

  Heinz had saved himself by leaving Freiburg for nearby Basel at age sixteen to learn the trade of an auto mechanic in Switzerland, hoping a skill would speed an American visa. Three years later he bravely moved to New York on his own, adopting a new name, Harry Rawlings, for his new country. One of the few eligible men not caught up in the war, having been spared the draft for medical reasons, Harry visited the Gunzburger girls shortly after they came to the city. A few days later he sent a postcard saying that he had enjoyed seeing the sisters again and eagerly hoped to continue their friendship. That Saturday at eight p.m., he wrote, he would be waiting under the clock at the Biltmore Hotel.

  “Here’s hoping that one of you will show up!” Harry invited indiscriminately. In response, Trudi opted to meet him—just as well for Janine, who found his inclusive approach to them both unappealing. For her, romantic interest required a challenge. It was not in her nature to value a man too easily won, and this, by the time she met Len, made him all the more intriguing to her. As with Roland, her desire was piqued in direct proportion to her efforts to win him. If Len was soured on marriage—he never intended to marry again, he frankly warned—well, she would work to make him want to propose! The fact that he was uncommonly handsome and irresistible to other women only added zest to the chase. He was forceful, witty, and insatiably curious, and he gave the impression he could conquer the world. He was a man to rely on, a take-charge guy who would always protect her.

  After all she had learned in Europe of evil and madness, she found appealing his soaring trust in human achievement and the boyishly optimistic idealism that he seemed to claim as an American birthright. Moreover, for Janine, the fact that Len was American born carried its own significant value. The person she always met in the mirror still felt—as Hannah Arendt similarly grumbled to her former lover Martin Heidegger in Germany, years after she had fled to the United States—like a “girl from a foreign land.” By the time Janine considered marrying Len, she was determined to shed her foreign accent, along with the hated refugee label. If she couldn’t return to France and Roland, she wanted to be American, to be married to an American and cultivate American friends. She wanted finally to begin her life, to claim her role as a citizen and belong where she lived. She was suddenly sick to death of waiting for an impossible dream. And if Leonard’s modest ostjüdischer background displeased her parents, as she knew it would, part of her relished the prospect of retaliating
for their rejecting Roland strictly because he wasn’t a Jew.

  As she balanced her fantasy life with Roland against the idea of marrying Len, Janine made the selfish mistake of telling her new suitor about his past rival, a confession with permanent impact on the course of their marriage. Even now, she cannot explain her motive beyond that she thought making him jealous would only help to stoke his desire. But after hearing enough about the first man in her life and about the pain she had suffered when forced to leave him behind, Leonard wanted to see his rival’s picture. Then he decreed a “tearing-up party” aimed at expunging Roland from her heart. It was an event so traumatic, so engraved in her mind, that Janine never forgot the tan skirt and green turtleneck sweater that she wore on the night of the ritual destruction, five months after they started dating.

  They were sitting on the couch in her parents’ living room when Sigmar emerged from the kitchen with a knife and an apple. “I always eat an apple right before going to bed,” he observed, signaling Janine that the hour had come for her guest to depart. But after Sigmar retired to the bedroom, Len insisted she bring out the box in which she’d saved Roland’s pictures, as well as the letters he’d sent her in Cuba. Inspecting them all, Len then demanded that she destroy them. Perhaps he was right, she reflected. Perhaps now, almost five years since leaving Roland, it was time to wrest free of the past and move on. This would hurt, but it also might help.

  “Are you in bed yet, Hannele?” Sigmar called out from the bedroom. But she ignored him, her eyes fixed upon Leonard as he began to ravage the box on the coffee table. One by one, he had her tear up all reminders of the man she had loved since her first teenage years. What she did with regret at first slowly caught hold, providing at last the relief of catharsis. Fueled by years of unexplored rage and pent-up desire, she ripped through the face she adored and silently cursed him for every day she had rushed for the mail without ever finding the letter she needed. Assez, genug, time enough, she thought fiercely. Rip. Bastante. In every language she’d learned on her travels. Enough, enough. Rip. Too late now. She tore straight through his face and stared at her hands as if they belonged to somebody else. Here, the dark eyes. She remembered his habit of blinking them both tightly shut, as if looking for some interior peace, and how that had felt like rejection to her. Now her own eyes were welling with frustrated tears. Rip. She tore that piece in half one more time and studied the ragged fragment in her left hand, just a flattened shred of his magic smile.