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Overview
As fate would have it, his adoptive father, a German-Jewish refugee raised by a loveless and embittered stepmother after his own mother died in childbirth, has inflicted on his stepson a fate uncannily—and terrifyingly—similar to his own: Having first adopted Michael, in part, to help his dying wife, he then imposes on him the same sort of penurious and loveless stepmother whom he himself had had to survive. With these revelations, the "mysteries" that seem to have permeated Michael's childhood are laid bare, triggering a quest for belonging that will infiltrate the author's entire adult life.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781943665273 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | West Virginia University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 210 |
| File size: | 883 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
All My Mothers and Fathers
A Memoir
By Michael Blumenthal
West Virginia University Press
Copyright © 2016 West Virginia University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-943665-27-3
CHAPTER 1
BEGINNINGS
It is a gift if one is born happy. Those who are born unhappy are incurable.
— Henry Miller
IT HARDLY SEEMS LIKELY that I was born happy. For there are other mothers and fathers in this story as well.
My biological mother, Nelly Atlas, a rabbi's daughter from a small German town near Leipzig, met my father, Berthold Gern, on a moshav in Palestine by the name of Moledet near Afula, just west of the Sea of Galilee, several years after Berthold left Germany in 1934. Their first child, Daniel, died of infantile typhus when he was ten days old. All the evidence points to the fact that my mother Nelly — having then given birth to my brother and sister — wasn't all that wild about bringing a fourth child into the world, particularly under the circumstances into which I was born on March 8, 1949.
My parents had come to the States for what was to be a two-week visit in the fall of 1947, just before the outbreak of the War of Independence, to celebrate my grandmother Johanna Gern's seventieth birthday at the home of my father's sister and brother-in-law, Betty and Julius Blumenthal, with whom my grandmother lived in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan.
The Blumenthals, like most German Jews who managed to get out in time, had left Nazi Germany at virtually the last feasible moment, for a simple reason: to avoid Hitler's gas chambers and crematoria. After several years as a busboy at New York's Hotel Governor Clinton, Julius had managed to work his way back into the only profession he had known since entering the doors of Meyer und Vogel at age fourteen — the fur business. Within just a few years — thanks to an unending supply of charm and flattery ("Gnädige Frau," he greeted every woman who entered his showroom, "in this coat, you will schtop the traffic.") — he had been able to build a fairly successful business as a retail jobber on West 29th Street, allowing him, his wife, and his blind mother-in-law to move into their sunny, five-room, sixty-eight-dollar-a-month apartment along Fort Washington Avenue, at 801 West 181st Street.
So it was with a great deal of anticipation (and a certain amount of envy) that my biological parents set out from Tel Aviv with their four-year-old daughter, Judy, and two-year-old son, Amos, one afternoon in October 1947 for what they thought would be a brief reunion with their comparatively worldly and successful New York relatives.
But, as fate would have it, just after Berthold and Nelly Gern's arrival in New York and the celebration of my grandmother's seventieth birthday at Café Geiger on East Eighty-sixth Street, the Israeli war against the British intensified. And Julius Blumenthal, whose life's motto was, "Es ist nicht nötig dass man lebt, aber mir dass man seine Pflicht tut" (It isn't necessary to live, but to do your duty), decided he simply couldn't allow his wife's family to return to such an insecure, dangerous existence.
After turning the obituary pages of the German-Jewish weekly Aufbau one morning just after the Gerns' arrival, he noticed in the FOR SALE column an offering of a five-acre ten-coop chicken farm in the small, heavily Jewish community of Vineland, New Jersey, just three hours from New York. Leaving the house early the next morning for what he said was an appointment with a customer, he drove 120 miles south on the New Jersey Turnpike, plunked twelve thousand dollars in cash on the table of South Jersey Realty, and returned that night to proclaim his brother- and sister-in-law the proud new owners of a three-bedroom brick-and-shingle house, five acres of land, and a purchase-and-sale agreement for 7,500 two-week-old baby chicks, to be delivered a week from that Monday to their new home at 1066 East Sherman Avenue, Vineland, New Jersey.
"I don't know how we will ever make it up to you," Berthold Gern, on the verge of tears, told his brother-in-law.
"Ja," his wife, Nelly, concurred, "it is so generous. I don't know what we could ever give you in return."
"You would, I know, do the same for us," Julius Blumenthal assured his relatives. "After all, Es ist nicht nötig dass man lebt, aber nur dass man seine Pflicht tut."
And so, with a quick flick of Julius Blumenthal's eager pen and an overnight trip to Montreal to apply for residence visas to the United States, my parents Nelly and Berthold, along with their children, Amos and Judy, packed themselves into Julius Blumenthal's burgundy-colored 1946 Chevy and headed south on the New Jersey Turnpike. There, approximately a year later, amid several thousand other farm-fresh eggs incubating their way toward life or some family's breakfast table, I made my first, tentative motions toward the light and air of this world.
* * *
My adoptive father, Julius Ernst Blumenthal, had met my mother, Betty Gern, in the small German town of Georgensgmünd, just outside Nuremberg, in January 1936, when he stopped at the widow Johanna Gern's house at 16 Friedrichsgmündstrasse to pick up the key to the Jewish cemetery where his stepmother's son lay buried.
My father must, of course, have been depressed by Claire's departure, frightened by the ominous march of Julius Streicher and his SS troops through the streets, increasingly terrified about his own life and future. And his stepmother, the loveless, ever-withholding Janette Lissauer, must still have been deeply wounded as well by the death of her only son from her first marriage.
So that, on that morning when, ever dutifully, my father went to get the cemetery key, he must have been pondering his own death as well. He must — his true love gone, his real mother dead, the Nazis already hard on his heels — have felt a terrible emptiness ... a fear, a longing for comfort.
I picture my mother — a shy, pretty young woman of nearly thirty — that day my father first came by the old stone house to lay some flowers on his stepbrother's grave. I imagine her standing in a back room, peeking out from behind a curtain, then entering the foyer, eyes lowered toward the floor, where her eager mother had summoned her to meet the dashing young Jewish furrier from Frankfurt.
There were, no doubt, not many men for a young, fatherless woman like my mother (whose only brother, Berthold, had already fled Germany for Palestine) in a small town like Georgensgmünd; not many opportunities for romance or escape. So that — seeing the handsome, dapper, charm-oozing figure of Julius Blumenthal at her door — a deep glimmer of hope must have passed through her. And, finding this innocently available girl and her widowed, ambitious mother — both of them eager to welcome a man like himself into their home and hearts — my father must have suddenly felt fate smile down on him. For here, finally, he could have both a loving mother and a shy, devoted wife.
And so, arriving to claim the cemetery key — the key to death — on his miserable stepmother's behalf, my father must have felt instead that he had found the key to a new life. And what did it matter that he felt little of the passion he had felt for Claire Haas for this not exceptionally pretty Jewish girl who hesitantly reached her hand toward him, hardly daring to look up? It wasn't, after all, passion he was after any longer, but safety — not really a wife he had been looking for all these years of kissing women's hands, but a mother ... a mother at whose living breasts he had never fed, into whose living eyes he had never had a chance to gaze.
So, on February 2, 1938 — hardly a year after the love of his life had departed for South America — in a small ceremony in the Black Forest town of Freiburg, presided over by Rabbi Fritz Sheuermann, Julius Blumenthal married Betty Gern, thereby acquiring both a wife and a new mother with whom to soothe his wounded, grieving heart.
I will never know, I suppose, at what point during — or after — my mother's pregnancy it was decided that I was to be adopted by my aunt and uncle. Perhaps as they drove south that very afternoon on the New Jersey Turnpike, thinking gratefully of their childless relatives' generosity and of the burden of having two young mouths to feed on the income to be generated by a small family chicken farm — the idea first hatched itself as a possibility in my parents' minds. Or maybe it was only a year later, when Betty Blumenthal looked down one morning to find a small brownish lump on her left breast, and a radical mastectomy was performed on the forty-year-old woman, leaving her in a state of weakness and depression for which the most effective cure, according to her doctors, would be to "give her something new to live for."
What a convenient solution it must have been! On the one hand, a childless woman who had, in some sense, "nothing to live for"; on the other, her newly arrived immigrant brother and sister-in-law with two young children and a chicken farm they were uncertain would provide them with even a subsistence living. Whatever the reason, on March 15, 1949, just seven days after I uttered my first tentative cries, I was handed from the potentially nurturing breasts of Nelly Gern into the arms of Betty Blumenthal, and took my place among the dying of the world.
"The day vee picked you up in Vineland," my parents would say throughout my early years, "vee vas so happy." And so, throughout the first years of my burgeoning consciousness, the answer to that ever present childhood mystery — "Where did I come from?" — seemed to be that babies were "picked up" somewhere, like a special delivery package, or a disease.
But meanwhile, here were these two families for whom mortality had entered from opposite directions — the one husband poor, relatively unskilled, the shards of a far-off war's bullet still implanted in his left arm, soon to be the father of a third child; the other charming, middle class, childless, faced with a dying wife and a blind, aging mother-in law. And the perfect solution must have presented itself: They would exchange death for life, barrenness for hope, the farm of thousands of unfertilized eggs for a single, fertilized egg.
And with that trade — carried out as cleanly as that of my boyhood hero, Duke Snider, from the Dodgers to the Mets — I, too, exchanged "uniforms"; and Berthold and Nelly Gern, my natural parents, became my aunt and uncle, and Julius and Betty Blumenthal, an impotent Jewish furrier and his wife, became my father and mother.
CHAPTER 2GOLDEN DAYS
I hold a candle to your face:
In the light, the lines of you
are a latticework of loss —
three mothers, two wives,
an uncertain son
who thrashes about
in the brine of your eyes,
calling you father, uncle ...
mother.
If all men want mothers,
what might we,
having none, want?
We could break
from that design —
take back the stolen rib
and the fig leaf, take back
the diaphanous heart,
take back the fluttering eyelids.
Father,
hermaphrodite,
mermaid and minotaur,
read this
in any language:
Lese dieses
in jeder Sprache.
Be water, Father,
be blood.
— from "Father," from Days We Would Rather Know (1984)
So it was that I went from being an infant hatched alongside the chicken coops of 1066 East Sherman Avenue in Vineland, New Jersey, to a room beside transmogrified pelts of mink, Alaska seal, Persian lamb, and chinchilla, in apartment 53 at 801 West 181st Street in Manhattan, a boy raised in a play whose characters, from the outset, were cast in confused and conflicting parts. It was, in fact, a play only one of whose central characters — my nearly blind grandmother Johanna (mother of both my biological father and my adoptive mother), with whom I shared a bedroom for the first twelve years of my life — played an unambiguous and unchanging role.
It was a play whose first ten years, I was only to discover later, were permeated by the unspoken secret of its origins, a play whose original script, I, its central character, was never allowed to read. And so — like any other child of any other "normal" family — I went about playing my assigned role as the dutiful only child of Julius and Betty Blumenthal, unaware that the woman at whose missing breast I had been placed was already only a single breast away from the grave, or that the father who, by all appearances, had "fathered" me was incapable of fathering anyone. Unaware that my household's only actual link to what was my blood lay in the person of the seventy-five-year-old woman, her white hair gathered in a bun, who reached out weekly from behind the Sabbath candles to bless me in the encroaching dark.
I am three years old, and my father takes me downtown to make a recording of Mario Lanza's "Golden Days" as a birthday present for my mother. It's a time when a dollar bill can still buy things: a pound of rice pudding at Horn & Hardart's, a whole pepperoni pizza, a silk tie, a two-minute recording of anything you can grind out, recorded in the quiet anonymity of a green-curtained booth somewhere near the garment district, where my father peddles furs.
Among my father's great loves are Mario Lanza and his The Student Prince, a love he maintains with the same fierce, undivided loyalty with which followers of Callas and Caruso, Tucker and Peerce, Domingo and Pavarotti, will later love their heroes. Along with the dulcet tones of Eddie Fisher singing "Oh, Mein Papa," it's the voice of Mario Lanza belting out, "I Walk with God," and, of course, "Golden Days," that fills our five-room apartment in Washington Heights.
I should, I suppose, be amazed to discover that, beyond the two words of the title, my father doesn't know a single syllable of "Golden Days," a song he must have heard, played, and sung several thousand times during the years of my childhood. Even now the scratched and warped 45, with the words "MICKY and Dady, GOLDEN DAYS, 5.1.52" scrawled on the label in red ink, reveals — along with the birdlike, contorted chirpings of a three-year-old boy — my father's commendably cantorial voice chanting the two words: "Golden days ... da DA da da da da da DA ... Golden days ... da da da da da da da DA ... Golden days ... da DA da DA da da da DA ... Golden days ..."
It doesn't occur to me that there is any meaning to this lapse on my father's part — to not knowing the words to the song he loves most. I don't, for that matter, yet know that listening means much of anything, that listening says something about both the listener and the speaker. I don't yet know that listening — like gifts you buy someone, like the way you honor their choices in life, their griefs, their happinesses — reflects a kind of attention.
I don't yet know how difficult — how nearly impossible — it is for anyone to really listen if no one has ever listened to them.
* * *
My mother and grandmother are kind, loving women, and I — lucky boy — am the apple of their collective eyes, my grandmother's pair of which, alas, has gone almost totally blind. She — the one person in all these tradings and exchanges whose biological relationship to me actually matches her role, and who is also my roommate — loves me, perhaps out of sheer proximity, most of all her three grandchildren, and showers me with whatever love and attention her ever-diminishing sight allows, which includes tickling my feet so much when she changes my socks that I burst into fits of delirious laughter.
For both my mother and grandmother, my academic achievements — which lead, to my prematurely advanced reading level, to my skipping second grade — are a source of great pride, and my grandmother, whose mind functions like a forerunner of the modern computer, is more than eager to help me with my math homework, with me calling out numbers and various functions ("times," "divided by," "minus") to her in German, and she coming up with the answer before I can blink an eye.
On one occasion, when, my third-grade teacher has the audacity to give me merely an S (satisfactory) rather than the ultimate SO (satisfactory/outstanding), my mother races, head down, up Fort Washington Avenue, bent on rectifying what must clearly be a mistake, and returns with a line of uninterrupted SOs that puts me right up there with the brilliant, encyclopedia-reading accountant's son who will be my nemesis throughout my elementary, junior high school, and high school years — and, later, my Harvard colleague — Warren Goldfarb.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from All My Mothers and Fathers by Michael Blumenthal. Copyright © 2016 West Virginia University Press. Excerpted by permission of West Virginia University Press.
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