My father, meanwhile, had taken to drink. This was not the measured tots enjoyed by my grandfather and his friends but great gulps of whisky, sometimes straight from the bottle, that transformed his kisses into bierkeller blasts. So I squirmed to escape and he accused my mother of turning me against him. He was quietly dismissed from the store but he could not be so easily removed from our lives. Aunt Annette (don’t worry, I’ll catch up with myself soon), in a rare criticism of my grandfather, charged him with doing too little to promote a reconciliation. But, in an equally rare criticism of Aunt Annette, I charge her with being too harsh. It was surely enough that he tolerated my father’s presence: that he sat down with him at the end of each working day (that is for my grandfather) and swallowed his disgust; that he didn’t put a padlock on the cellar door but left my father to struggle with his conscience, which was never the most daunting opponent. My father and mother started to lead separate lives, meeting only at mealtimes, when the length of the table militated against intimacy even as my grandfather’s presence precluded confrontation. My father drank more and more until one night, when the drink had, in that serviceable English phrase, got the better of him, he forced himself on my mother. Nine months later Luise was born, and my father’s impact on our family was complete. He had stamped his image on her innermost being, poisoning her cells and befuddling her brain. She was steeped in father’s whisky long before her first taste of mother’s milk.
The day after Luise was conceived, my father left us. He leant over my bed, and for once I did not recoil since his breath was as fresh as my mother’s. He whispered, even though it was morning, that we might not see each other for some time but I must always remember that he loved me. Then he clasped me as hard as if he were squeezing out the last drop of toothpaste, laid me back on the pillows, and disappeared. He was right, at least in one thing, since, in the eight years before we quit Germany, I never set eyes on him again – although I was to do so soon afterwards, as you will discover. I made as determined an effort to forget him as I did Johannes von Hirte, my former blood brother, whom I had seen waving a banner in the Hitler Youth. Sometimes my guard slipped, such as when I was driving through Berlin with Aunt Annette and we passed a line of vagrants, themselves soon to be expunged from the Third Reich. ‘There’s Daddy!’ I screamed, taken in by a fleeting resemblance and refusing to be silenced until Aunt Annette ordered the chauffeur to stop and let me out. My mistake acknowledged – and my embarrassment assuaged by the gift of a handful of marks – she informed me that my father was living comfortably in Breslau on an allowance provided by my grandfather. She did not, however, offer any explanation as to why my parents were flouting every precept in my schoolbooks. She simply declared that my father needed time to work through his problems. But, as time wore on with no sign of his return, I grew increasingly certain that the chief problem was me.
Dear Aunt Annette…. I promised to flesh out my reference to her and I do so with more pleasure than almost anything else in this account. She had been my grandmother’s best friend although, with the strict demarcations of my schoolboy mind, I was surprised to find that she was nearer in age to my mother. She told me that, when my grandmother lay dying, she had made her a solemn vow to take care of her husband and daughter – yes, and her grandchildren too, she added quickly to quieten my clamour. She had acted not as a house-keeper but as a house-preserver – assuming that such a title exists. She had a sitting room, which she imbued with her own warmth and to which she would retreat at times of tension with my mother. She found such tension particularly painful since, as I pointed out to my mother, her entire existence was dedicated to smoothing everyone’s path. ‘Starting with her own,’ my mother replied, with disturbing disloyalty to the adult cause. I hated to see them quarrel, but Grandfather assured me that it was inevitable when two women shared a house. Which was odd because, when I was fretting about him and my father, Aunt Annette had used the very same phrase of men. It filled me with apprehension. If two women or two men could not live together in harmony, what did that bode for the Christians and the Jews?
While Mother was so thin that Grandfather was always tempting her with titbits, Aunt Annette was so plump that he shook his head whenever she reached for a cake. Mother once banished me from the dinner-table for suggesting that they should have an operation so that some of Aunt Annette’s fat could be transferred to her. Yet, when I crept upstairs to apologise, Aunt Annette was so far from taking offence that we shared a tray of truffles. The one meal at which she could eat as much as she liked was breakfast, which she had in bed – a privilege that was never extended to me, even on my birthday. I had only to conceal a biscuit beneath the covers for my mother to detect a telltale crumb. To her, lying in bed was a form of malingering – a charge that carried added weight when I discovered its usage during the War. She herself rose early, hurrying to her studio and spending as much time as possible at her easel before she was beset by distractions – for which read ‘me’. She accused me of lacking respect for her art and yet, try as I might, I was unable to repress my innate reverence for realism. My efforts to praise her paintings always fell flat. Once, when Grandfather described Aunt Annette as looking ‘as pretty as a picture’, I asked if he meant one of Mother’s. The words were no sooner off my lips than I regretted them. But, instead of issuing the expected reprimand, my mother tore into my grandfather, itself an extraordinary occurrence. ‘Congratulations, Father,’ she said, ‘you’ve bred yet another Frankel with no feeling for art.’
By then, of course, my mother had come to hate me. It was quite understandable. In addition to my own failings, I offered her a daily reminder of my father’s. Our physical resemblance, regularly remarked upon by scores of malevolent well-wishers (‘He’ll grow into such a handsome man, the spitting image of his father’), was a pointer to the moral. It was small wonder that I longed to remain a boy.
Aunt Annette did her best to reassure me, insisting that, far from hating me, my mother loved me so much that she would sometimes grow impatient with my imperfections.
‘But she’s not impatient with Luise,’ I replied, ‘and she has far more imperfections.’
‘It’s not the same and you’re intelligent enough to know that,’ Aunt Annette said, as ever cushioning the rebuke. ‘Which is another reason not to take everything your mother says to heart. She’s constantly worried about what will happen to Luise.’
‘In which case,’ I said, ‘she should treat me better since, when she and you and Grandfather are dead, I’m the one who’ll have to take care of her.’
‘I don’t suppose she’s looking that far ahead,’ Aunt Annette said.
With hindsight, I think it was that casual remark that gave me my first intimation of Luise’s mortality. I saw then what everyone else had seen since the day she was born: in the eyelids that constantly fluttered and the eyes that failed to focus; in the arms and legs that gripped her in a permanent tug of war; in the massy forehead and lumpen chin; in the slurred speech that didn’t emerge at all until she was five years old and then only in burst-pipe spurts of inarticulacy; in the wild, self-destructive furies that would flare up for no apparent reason. I saw the fear, not of what would happen to Luise when she grew old, but of whether she would grow old at all. And yet, in spite – or perhaps because – of that, my mother insisted on preserving the illusion that Luise was simply slow and that, in true fairytale fashion, she would grow up and amaze us all. I don’t know if she felt that, by articulating the wish, she would make it happen, as she did with everything else in her life, or rather that, by stressing my sister’s normality, she could justify ignoring her. Either way, the pretence became harder and harder to maintain.
Luise was born with Foetal Alcohol Syndrome. Although we didn’t have a name for it then, we had the diagnosis of a visionary doctor: one, moreover, who was willing to look beyond an abstemious mother to a drunken father. I can’t remember how I came to learn of my father’s guilt. No one put it to me directly, n
ot even my grandfather, who used to twist his mouth whenever he spoke of him as though he were trying to dislodge a piece of gristle from his teeth. I expect that even he realised that it might not be wise to inform a growing boy of a parental rape. In your case, Marcus and Edward, I am trusting to the passage of time, not to mention the ubiquity of sexual imagery, to mute the effect. In my case, the facts of even loving procreation had never been explained. As a Jew, I had been banned from biology lessons. I was far too overawed to ask my grandfather and I lived in horror of any such discussion with my mother, whose grasp of anatomy – at least to judge from her paintings – was even hazier than my own. I scavenged for information in the school playground and in the pages of Der Stürmer, an anti-Semitic scandal-sheet full of predatory Jews preying on Aryan maidens, which, paradoxically, became my primary source of both sexual knowledge and erotic stimulus. The dual burden of shame made me determined never to marry but, rather, to devote myself to Luise the way that Aunt Annette had to Grandfather. Yet, when I told her of my resolve, Aunt Annette merely tousled my hair and suggested that I wait until I was older: one of the few occasions on which her placid wisdom afforded me no relief.
Even before my friends’ defection, I spent as much time as possible with Luise. I brushed aside my grandfather’s warnings that she would hold me back, since I knew that I could make her smile more broadly than anyone else. My only rival for her affections was Sophie, her governess and my honorary sister. Sophie had come to us at the age of twenty-three in flight from some unexplained heartbreak. I was aware that this was another sorrow that it would be dangerous to probe and yet it made no sense, for how could any man break the heart of someone as loving and warm as Sophie? Her arrival had been the only good to come out of Luise’s condition. Until then I had had an English nanny, Miss Snape, who had instilled in me such a rosy view of her homeland that, when I finally arrived in London, I was half-expecting to be welcomed by both Christopher Robin and the King and Queen. Luise’s problems had overwhelmed her and my mother had engaged Sophie, a Bavarian beauty, whose blonde hair and blue eyes were an even greater reproach to Nazi propaganda than my own. At first she wore a traditional white blouse that laced up the front, and I would sit at her side and toy with the laces, but she soon became a buttoned-up Berliner. Besides, I grew too old and lost my place of privilege. How I longed to turn back the clock… but I wanted it both ways: a ten year old’s licence with a fifteen year old’s hands. If adolescence were the threshold between childhood and maturity, then I was stuck in a permanently revolving door.
Sophie entered my life in the same year that Adolf Hitler entered my consciousness. He and his National Socialist party gained power – legally it has to be said, which should be remembered if you wonder why we stayed put for so long. A government that had been voted in could just as easily be voted out, or so people thought. This government, however, behaved like no other. A matter of days after taking office, it waged war on a group of its own citizens, declaring a boycott of all Jewish businesses. The tactic backfired, at least in our case. Far from shunning the store, Berliners made a point of braving the Brownshirts at the entrances. The day’s sales actually rose, which filled my grandfather with a misplaced confidence in the goodwill of ordinary Germans. His belief that their show of support had wounded the government was confirmed by the lack of any action to follow the boycott. Anti-Semitic threats peppered the speeches of the Führer and his Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, but, for the most part, they remained veiled. My grandfather’s conviction that the government must acknowledge our indispensability was boosted when, three weeks after the boycott, the army placed a large order for new uniforms. Meanwhile, he welcomed high-ranking SS officers to the store as warmly as his father had done members of the Imperial family.
If I had a pound for every time that I’ve been asked over the years why we didn’t leave Germany in 1933, I’d be a rich man … although I should know better than to use an idiom which contains what many of my questioners (I might almost say my accusers since their tone makes us as much to blame as our enemies) already regard as the reason: that we were more concerned with our comfort than our lives. In other words, nothing so validates Jesus’ warnings on the danger of riches than the fate of the German Jews. But, while it’s true that my grandfather was devoted to his business, he viewed it less as a source of wealth than as a sacred trust. He was justifiably proud that, in little over a century, a peddler’s cart had grown into the most prestigious store in Berlin. Even so – and although I was too young for him to take into his confidence – I know that he contemplated leaving. Many of his friends had bought tickets and their brandy-and-cigar conversations assumed a new urgency, yet, just as he had drawn comfort from the Nazis’ electoral mandate, so he did from his friends’ departure. Their freedom to travel meant, paradoxically, that he saw no need to rush. Besides, as an acknowledged leader of the community, he felt a twofold obligation, first, not to abandon his less privileged coreligionists and, second, to prove to their Christian persecutors that the boy David was not the only Jew ready to stand his ground. The final cause of our apparent complacency was that, even when the government had begun to legislate against us, the process was not clear-cut. The restrictions came in dribs and drabs and, initially at least, were accompanied by a host of exemptions. It was even possible if you tried hard enough – and, believe me, people did – to see the Nuremberg laws in a positive light. After all, they gave the Jews a measure of recognition: to be second-class citizens was preferable to being no citizens at all. As my grandfather said: ‘They’ve done their worst. What more are they going to do? Murder us?’
I’ve taken pains to defend my grandfather against any charges that you or your contemporaries might bring, because there is no court more unjust than that of hindsight. At the time, however, I was less tolerant of his inaction. When the Nazis came to power, I was eight and took little notice of the world outside my windows; four years later, I was carrying its entire weight on my shoulders. The country’s political turmoil was echoed inside our home. I defined the difference between my grandfather and myself as that between Job and Joshua. He believed that history was destiny. Having suffered – and survived – persecutions in the past, the Jews would do so again. I, on the other hand, demanded that we fight back. Please don’t misunderstand me, I was not so naïve as to suggest a running battle with the SS, who had taken to marching through Berlin as though it were their private parade ground. I held, rather, that we should secure the land that was ours by right: Palestine. At first, without my grandfather’s knowledge, and then, in express defiance of his will, I began to attend meetings of the Young Pioneers. I came home flushed with Zionist fervour, soliciting contributions from my grandfather, who refused as brusquely as if I’d asked for a non-birthday present. Unlike my mother, who dismissed the Pioneers as harmless idealists, he viewed them as dangerous fanatics. ‘Are you too young to see?’ he asked, offending every ounce of my twelve-year-old dignity, ‘that the moment they provide us with a home elsewhere, they’ll be justified in throwing us out of our homes here?’ And, though the move from a bleak and banner-ridden Berlin to the holy city of Jerusalem struck me as highly desirable, it was my grandfather’s greatest nightmare. No matter what the Nazis did to him, he remained a dedicated patriot. He maintained that to categorise people by their religion was medieval. ‘We’re living in the twentieth century and should define ourselves by nationhood. Never forget, Karl, whatever they may tell you, that you’re a Jewish German, not a German Jew.’
This simple distinction eluded the majority of our fellow countrymen. Their confusion was most apparent where it was least appropriate: at school. The government imposed a series of restraints on Jewish pupils. From the start, only a handful of us were permitted to attend any state institution. I, as my grandfather never ceased to point out, was ‘one of the lucky ones’, but then he had said the same of a man who had returned from the Front without legs. Friends, who had enjoyed my family’s hospit
ality – no, that is to think like them … friends, who had enjoyed my company, now shunned me. They made an elaborate show of not speaking to me, channelling their guilt into a game. They chalked caricatures of my face on the blackboard, the crudity of their drawings making up for the modesty of my nose. They held me down and punched me until I agreed to read out anti-Semitic passages from Mein Kampf. Then, when I demanded satisfaction, they refused to fight on the grounds that, as a Jew, I had no honour to lose.
The teachers were equally craven, condemning acts of violence while rewarding the perpetrators, shielding them from pollution by shunting me into a corner like a dunce. I gained my revenge by excelling in every subject. But, the better my work, the lower my grades, since even the cleverest Jew was by definition inferior to the stupidest German. By 1937, even my token presence at the school was regarded as a threat and I was sent instead to an all-Jewish establishment where, to my horror, I felt even more alien. Most of my new classmates were immigrants from Eastern Europe, the very people whom my grandfather and his friends blamed for provoking Hitler. Not only did they look different from me (it isn’t just your father whom you have to thank for your blonde hair and blue eyes) but, whether from diet or inadequate sanitation, they also smelt different. This time I would have been grateful for a desk apart, but the class was so overcrowded that we were virtually in one another’s laps. To these boys, my name was a symbol of luxury, and they lashed out at that which they couldn’t hope to attain. Night after night I returned home covered in bruises which, on the rare occasions that she took note, my mother attributed to street brawls. I suffered her rebukes in silence. At the time I felt humiliated that, although I was almost a man – a fact impressed upon me by the number of my classmates who were preparing to be bar mitzvah – I had failed to protect myself. Looking back, I wonder if I were not also trying to spare her the humiliation of her failure to protect me.
A Sea Change Page 2