Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind
Read Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind Online
Authors: Sarah Wildman
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Cultural Heritage, #Personal Memoirs, #History, #Jewish
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Copyright © 2014 by Sarah Wildman
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Portions of this book appeared in different form in
Slate
and
Tablet.
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint images on the following pages:
Letters
here
and
here
: Letter from Dr. Laurence Farmer to Karl Wildmann, dated May 24, 1938, and letter from Jewish Family Welfare Society, dated March 6, 1939. Used by permission of the Immigration History Research Center Archives, University of Minnesota.
Letter
here
: Index card, Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland, Hanna Taube Scheftel, 1.2.4.1/12671976/ITS Digital Archives, Bad Arolsen. Reprinted by permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wildman, Sarah.
Paper love : searching for the girl my grandfather left behind / Sarah Wildman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-101-61616-1
1. Wildman, Karl. 2. Scheftel, Valerie, born 1911. 3. Jews—Austria—Biography. 4. Jews, Austrian—Massachusetts—Biography. 5. Jewish refugees—Massachusetts—Biography. 6. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Austria. I. Title.
DS135.A93W55 2014 2014018422
940.53'18092—dc23
[B]
Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.
Version_1
For Orli and Hana,
the two little Jews who grew
and
For Valy and Hans
CONTENTS
Introduction
I
N
THE
B
EGINNING
I
n my father’s eulogy for my grandfather, he quoted Field Marshal Ferdinand Foch: “Hard pressed on my right; center is yielding; impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent, I shall attack.”
We called my grandfather
saba
, the modern, muscular Hebrew appellation, rather than the Old World Yiddish,
zeyde
—or German,
Opa
—let alone the (far too) American
grandpa
. Born Chaim, he went by Karl. My grandfather, in my memory and in the hagiography of my family, was a bon vivant, a multilingual, well-traveled émigré doctor who lived with the joie de vivre of a man who had never been oppressed by hardship. Or maybe that’s not right: with the joie de vivre of a man who had known
only
hardship, and then emerged from it, phoenixlike, into a problemless promised land. He was dashing, a character out of (Jewish) film noir, with the perfect suit, a jaunty hat, a top note of expensive European aftershave, a bottom whiff of Odol, the German minty mouthwash he imported in bulk for himself each time he returned to the Continent. His appeal was not simply aesthetic—his hair, as his friends teased him, was unruly, wildly curly,
clipped close to his head by middle age, always pure white in my memory, long and unkempt as a younger man, so much like my own that my sister and I would joke about our “
saba
hair” when ours would frizz up, above the hairline, beyond our ponytails. His nose was a bit too big, his lips fleshy, and yet he carried himself in the way of men who know they are appealing, who understand women—and men—and how to win over either sex. And swoon they did. His inherent attraction was some combination of pheromones, charisma, charm, actual beauty, mystery.
As much as my grandfather loved America, for what it stood for, for its freedoms, for what it had done for him, he never seemed “of” this country; certainly he stood apart from, or perhaps outside, the town in northwest Massachusetts where he settled and opened a medical practice. His English, though grammatically perfect, had the light, lyrical accent of European sophisticates; he would, biannually, free himself from our idioms entirely for six weeks at a time and find his way back to Europe. The family, at first, remained behind. After a few trips completely alone, by 1952 my grandmother (aware, perhaps, of his attractions) refused to allow him to travel without her. And so they went together, their children left with a babysitter, an Italian-born seamstress musically named Rina DiOrio, whom I remember for her marvelous baskets filled with strips of silks and cottons and tweeds and synthetics, the soft kaleidoscope gleanings of her work that I would tie together into costumes, well into my childhood.
Six weeks they left their kids! Postcards were written to my father and aunt, advising them on where to find their Halloween costumes, to remember to do their homework, to remind them to be in touch by forwarding mail to their next stop, which was, invariably, Munich or Milan or Madrid. It is something I can’t quite imagine, but somehow it was just who he was; and, for the most part, it wasn’t questioned, he was living a life grander, and more cosmopolitan, than his neighbors in their big but rural Massachusetts town—it was a quest to see the world, to
live
aggressively, that propelled him.
