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We're in America Now. Fred Amram
Читать онлайн.Название We're in America Now
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780986448041
Автор произведения Fred Amram
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
Parents gone. Uncles and aunts gone. Cousin Aaltje gone. I am an only child. All I have left is the photograph of a child who did not survive the Holocaust.
This book is dedicated to my cousin Aaltje and all the children butchered in genocides.
When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened.
Mark Twain’s Autobiography
PAPA LIKED TO TELL how he met Mutti. In 1930, he and a friend each brought a girlfriend on a Sunday afternoon date to Café Kröpke in Hannover, Germany. Sometime before sunset, Papa and his friend traded dates. Papa claimed he took home the prettier girl—the woman who became my mother. One day when he wasn’t nearby, I asked Mutti how she met Papa. She told the same story—and allowed that Papa took home the prettier girl.
The story of how my parents met illustrates how I learned about many of the events in this book. For example, I write about my bris, my circumcision ceremony. Only eight days old at the time, clearly I don’t really remember the details. However, if Mutti and Papa separately told the same story and it was corroborated by my Uncle Max and my Aunt Beda, surely it must be true—or so I believe. And so, many events were told and retold around the dinner table until I can’t be sure what I remember and what I was told and only think I remember.
Do I tell the truth? Only as much as I am able. My favorite poet, Dylan Thomas, wrote in 1954, “I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.” Memory, Thomas and I agree, is unreliable.
Elderly Fred Amram
In Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, American author Mary McCarthy writes, “I remember we heard a nightingale together, on the boulevard near the Sacred Heart convent. But there are no nightingales in North America.” The “memory” becomes part of McCarthy’s memoir and we believe it even if the “memory” might have come from reading London-dwelling T.S. Eliot’s poem about the convent of the Sacred Heart. And so my perceptions are my perceptions. In a memoir one should not take liberties with the truth. This is my world as I believe it to be true—today.
I tell the truth as I remember events filtered through my feelings as a youngster and, again, filtered through the memory of a nostalgic old timer. Twice-baked potatoes. I have changed a few names to protect the innocent—or because my memory hit a blank.
And forgive me if I interrupt myself or become sidetracked. Isn’t that the way we tell a story? Ultimately the truth lies in the interruptions. Ask any psychiatrist.
As much as we like to generalize, each Holocaust survivor describes a unique experience. Each Auschwitz survivor tells a different story as does each survivor who spent the war in hiding or who, like me, was lucky enough to leave before the worst of times. This book tells my story and focuses, in part, on the events that led up to the worst of the genocide, led up to Auschwitz and the other death camps.
Every genocide creates displaced persons—refugees. All of us, no matter from which genocide we escaped, bring memories that shape our assimilation.
In this collection of stories—and it is a collection—I share my experiences and feelings as a child survivor. It is my truth of being an outsider, a Jew in Nazi Germany, and then a foreign Jew growing up in America, still an outsider—a stranger in a strange land.
My life in Germany is written in the past tense. As I step off the boat I enter the present tense. What’s past is past and…
Throughout all generations, every male shall be circumcised when he is eight days old… This shall be my covenant in your flesh, an eternal covenant.
Genesis 17:1-14
HITLER BECAME CHANCELLOR OF GERMANY on January 30, 1933. I was born September 19 of that year. I was born in a Catholic infants shelter. My birth certificate has the signature of a nun. Not just any run-of-the-mill nun. The illegible signature shows a clear title underneath: Mother Superior.
Why would a Jewish baby have his birth certificate certified by a nun? Because the Nazis, led by Adolf Hitler, had already closed Jewish hospitals and had prohibited Jews from using public hospitals. Juden Verboten. Jews Forbidden.
A few Catholic orders were prepared to stand up to Hitler. My Mother Superior allowed Mutti to use her facilities and encouraged her nurses to serve Jews. Surely they had taken a risk on my behalf.
Eight days later, as prescribed by Jewish law, I was circumcised. Two butchers attended my circumcision.
My family had scheduled the entire day as a celebration of this special event. Ashkenazi Jews call it a bris. Sephardic Jews call it a brit or more formally a brit milah, a ritual circumcision. Either way it’s a big deal and a party was planned in our fourth-floor apartment.
Nowadays circumcisions are commonplace and they’re usually performed in hospitals shortly after birth. However, for many Jews a special ceremony is involved and certainly, when I was a tad in Hannover, Germany, a bris involved relatives, dinner, drinking—a major celebration. After all, one is celebrating the birth of a male child.
Mutti with baby
My parents told and retold the story of my circumcision a hundred times. The relatives arrived for the party. Uncle Max came from Hamburg. Aunt Beda, whose hugs I adored during my adolescence because of her substantial bosom, came from Berlin with her husband, Uncle Ernst. My widowed grandmothers, of course. My mother’s sister Karola and her husband Kurt, who never had children of their own and doted on me, drove all the way from Kassel. Friends from the synagogue were there. And then entered our local kosher butcher, Herr Mandelbaum.
Theological regulations “circumscribe” the ritual for circumcisions. A professional is hired. In Hebrew he’s called a mohel, in Yiddish a moyl. Although the butcher Mandelbaum was not a rabbi, he had the special training of a moyl. He knew the ritual, the prayers, the cutting technique and he had a sharp knife.
Moyl Mandelbaum, a small, heavily bearded man in his mid-forties, began by blessing the wine. Almost all Jewish ceremonies begin by sanctifying wine. It’s a marvel that we’re sober most of the time. Papa placed a few drops on my lips, presumably as an anesthetic. I was expected to join in blessing the wine. I gurgled my best imitation of a Hebrew prayer. When the moyl became serious I let out a bellow.
I’ve been asked by friends to provide more details about the event. Unfortunately, three factors interfere with my memory. First, expert as old Mandelbaum was, the pain was excruciating. Second, in some Jungian flashback, I was reliving Everyman’s fear of losing his manhood. And third, I was drunk.
I’ve been told that Mandelbaum washed his hands in a special bowl and said the blessing for washing the hands. Jews have a blessing for everything. After more prayers and blessings, he cut.
Papa paid Herr Mandelbaum who then returned to his kosher butcher shop.
Next the dinner. Mutti was ushering the guests to a fine buffet when we heard music. A marching band. Uncle Max, the family tease, announced that there was to be a parade in honor of my manhood. Several guests believed Uncle Max could pull off such a trick. Imagine, celebrating a