Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind (6 page)

Tonya reminds me of my grandparents: she regularly attends the opera, still schleps uptown to the Jewish Museum, where she was once a docent; still dresses for her guests. In turn, I feel I have to dress for
her. Her table is always set with several layers of cutlery, a plate for each course; we have to eat a slice of melon, an appetizer, a salad; she would like me to drink a V8, unless we go to Knickerbocker Bar & Grill, around the corner, where she’ll push me to eat a steak even though I haven’t had meat since I was fifteen. They know her there.

Every time we meet, she wants to tell me that though they were a couple only briefly, Karl really loved her, she really loved him—she wants desperately to be acknowledged as important in his life. Even though the romance ended over sixty years ago. Even though, she rues constantly on one of my visits, all he talked about when he arrived was Valy. Valy, so intelligent, Valy so sexually free; Valy Valy Valy. “If he loved her so much, why didn’t he take her with him?” she wonders to me, and then she recoils, worried, horrified she has overstepped. She says, looking skyward, she can’t say more, she will upset the dead. She points upward—she doesn’t want anyone to be angry with her—“
Turn that off!”
she says again and again into my tape recorder—even though all those who could be legitimately bothered by her consuming love left this world many years ago.

Tonya has all of my grandfather’s letters to her, and he, in turn, tucked her replies alongside those of Valy, dozens upon dozens of notes in tiny handwriting, on pages of purple, blue, and white, scattered throughout with photos of Tonya, looking glamorous. These letters are thick with the recriminations of a relationship that never quite worked out. They bickered (and flirted) endlessly, by mail. She suspects he—and his mother—did not find her intellectual enough for him, since she was not able to afford university. She is likely correct.

Tonya tells me that she and her friends tried, for some time, to rescue Jews themselves by writing letters of financial support—affidavits—that showed they held more money than they actually did. The group concocted a scheme to move the same four hundred dollars or so among bank accounts, several times, to show financial viability to immigration authorities. As she explained it: once a refugee had arrived, the money was placed in a different account, under a different
name. It was an essential piece to the emigration package; each affidavit provided “proof” that a Jew hoping to come to these shores from Vienna or Poland or Germany would not be a “burden” on the U.S. economy, that if he would not be immediately self-sufficient, he would, at least at first, be supported by an American who had enough money to keep him off the dole. This money—this four hundred dollars, or however much it actually was—might mean the difference to someone stuck in Vienna or Poland. I wonder, when she tells me this, if my grandfather was impressed by the effort, if he explained to her how essential it was, this work. I wonder if he was impressed by the amount of money itself—it was enormous for them—about sixty-five hundred in today’s dollars.

After all, he arrived penniless—to a country that was not nearly so much welcoming as it was simply safe. Here was Myth Number Two, a corollary to the myth of escape
: He was a success, always
.
He was self-made, landed on his feet in this country and was able to work, immediately. He was so fortunate to have his degree already! All he needed was an internship. . . .
This, of course, was in part my own construction, my own fantasy, it wasn’t told to me, exactly; it was simply implied, by everyone. It, too, is upended by “Correspondence, Patients A–G.” Along with the envelopes from friends, there are cashed checks stapled together—they are loan repayment checks, countersigned by the uncle who provided my grandfather’s own affidavit to America—and each green check is itself stapled to a series of tiny yellow notes, painstaking acknowledgment that he paid back, in installments, every penny. The man I knew had been an overnight success. A sheaf of letters detailing the origins of the checks shows how very close he was to losing it all.

Upon closer inspection I realize the loans were not bank loans, but instead came from something called the National Committee for Resettlement of Foreign Physicians, an organization established, I discover, in what appears to be their founding memo, for the “clarification of current misconceptions” regarding foreign physicians.
Misconceptions? But that memo, posted online by the University of North Texas, stands lonely and unexplained. Further digging leads me to an article in the
Journal of the American Medical Association
, published in late November 1941 by the founders of the committee that propped up my grandfather. “
The
National Committee for Resettlement of Foreign Physicians was organized more than two years ago to deal with one of the problems that have arisen out of the present European upheaval,” they write. “The task has not been made any easier by the opposition which has arisen in certain quarters. Where once a medical degree from any noted European university was considered proof of outstanding scholarship, now there is a deplorable tendency to swing in the other direction. In incomprehensible isolation, legislators and others build bars around their own small domains, arbitrarily cutting off those valuable immigrants whose professional ability could contribute to the health of the whole nation. It is not the European physician who has changed; it is, at least partially, the American attitude.” The committee began a correspondence with my grandfather not long after he arrived in America. He preserved their every letter.

The committee I have stumbled upon was created by a handful of sympathetic (and, interestingly, mostly non-Jewish) physicians in 1939 to combat xenophobic lobbying efforts on the part of the American Medical Association, explains Laurel Leff, a professor at Northeastern University in Massachusetts and best known for her book damning
The New York Times
for burying contemporary reporting of Holocaust-era crimes. She has spent, she tells me, the last few years writing about “the response of American intellectual elites to the pleas coming from Germany and other places in Europe.” American doctors, who once venerated their counterparts from the University of Vienna, were nervous about jobs being taken away from U.S. citizens. The AMA appears to have lobbied state governments to block Jewish refugee physicians, like my grandfather, from receiving their medical licenses and finding positions here. State after state, Leff writes in an unpublished article she shared with me, barred graduates of foreign medical
schools from taking their medical boards. By 1938, twenty-four states required citizenship in order to take the medical licensing boards—a disaster for those born overseas, who would now be forced to wait the five years to take citizenship tests, five years without an income, without the ability to practice. Twenty-two additional states would require the same by 1943—leaving only two states left to welcome physicians fleeing persecution. Even Massachusetts—safe when my grandfather arrived—would eventually institute rules to make life more difficult for refugee physicians.

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.