MY MOTHER’S AWARENESS OF DANGERS AND HER ABILITY TO ACT ON IT

[David's not been feeling well today, plus his daughter Fran & her fellow Tom are visiting from Ontario this week, so he didn't write a new blog entry.  Instead he approved my posting for him this story he typed up for me to send to Andrea Russell as part of our Germany/England trip last fall.  It's a pretty amazing tale!  LT] 

This is what I recall from childhood: Mother told of her (WWI) war-time activities in getting goods for Father’s store when they were either hard to obtain or trade was later forbidden by the occupiers. During the war she had managed not only to keep the business going, but actually to make it more successful. But when, after father’s death in 1968, she confided that on his return from the war, instead of rewarding her for her help, he made her his cashier, she was deeply offended. She correctly expected to be an equal partner in the business that she had managed so well that it not only survived but prospered.

This much I know from hearsay, but other events I know because I was a witness or reliably informed. During the late nineteen twenties- around 1928-29- when the Nazi movement became increasingly powerful, its antisemitic program was daily fostered by marching men bellowing “things will improve when Jewish blood flows from the knife.” In those scary days Mother actually dared to attend a Nazi meeting to hear Goebbels rant political obscenities. But rather than repressing the frightening voice and the mindless responses of the participants, she acted with courage. Next day she went to our bookstore and bought a copy of Hitler’s MEIN KAMPF.

Mother had three jobs- serving as cashier in the store, running the household, and looking after the children, so that she had little opportunity to read. She did so late at night, in bed, and now with the just acquired copy of “Mein Kampf.” That night Father woke up and seeing mother’s light on, went over to see what she was reading. As told by Mother, he ripped the book out of her hand and rushed down to throw it into the furnace. Adding insult to injury, he threatened her with “don’t let me see you do that again; or I may have do to you what your father tried to do to your mother –(have her declared insane)”. She then and there decided to take her own and her children’s fate into her own hands.

That is how she, bilingual in German and French, immediately began to learn Italian. For my younger brothers and me she planned similarly: English in my case, French for Ernest, Dutch for Michael. Father, never very involved in domestic issues, accepted a hands-off role so that he, when Mother in 1933 went to England to search for a boarding school for me, demurred only when she decided to actually send me abroad. Luckily he did not succeed: at sixteen I left Mönchngladbach’s Gymnasium for England to enroll in Maiden Erleigh, a private school in Reading. There some small dramas occurred involving another boy, the son of a member of the Nazi consulate in London. So I ran away and with the help of an aunt found a humane and educationally sound haven at St. Christopher School in the town of Letchworth, in Hertfordshire.

In Germany Father apparently dragged his feet: without a second language, emigrating spelled danger to him.  Mother told me that she gave him an ultimatum: he would go with her and the boys or she would have to leave him behind.  Dependent on her, Father went.

Looking back, I realize how fortunate we were that Mother could recognize the dangers ahead, and so strong-willed as to bring us all to safety abroad.

UNCLE WALTER

            On the morning of my arrival in New York harbour I saw a skyline of skyscrapers that seemed to camouflage the place I would shortly call home. At the dock I was met by my mother’s brother Walter, once the black sheep of the family. Walter, viewed by my maternal grandfather as utterly profligate and therefore not fit to work in the family’s machinery sales business, he had been sent away to Canada in his teens.

My first memory of meeting Uncle Walter at the dockside is noticing a dollar bill stuck into his hatband. When I disembarked and we went through customs together, he put his hat in front of the customs officer looking through my suitcase and, before I could wink, the bill had been removed from the hatband. Walter Simson was, at 17 or 18, his family’s pioneer immigrant to the Americas having done much, to his conservative father’s displeasure, that was exotic and out of order for an upper middle class Jewish family.

When my parents first met him on their first visit to America, they discovered that he was involved with a much younger woman, the sister of an Austrian-Jewish friend of my mother’s. It appears that they disapproved of the relationship and, with their judgmental manner, proposed that they immediately get married. That is how my old Uncle Walter was looked after by the young and beautiful Aunt Rosie – and he was lucky to have her seeing that, shortly after their marriage, he was hit by a car while crossing Broadway. The story is that “nearly every bone in his body was broken” and that Rosie looked after him for several years while he was in a wheelchair and helped him gain enough strength so that, for the rest of his life, he was able to walk on crutches.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

In 1938 I was on my way from London to New York and, on board ship, shared a cabin with a Jewish man from Chicago. When he heard that I was planning to change my name from Kirchheimer to Kirk, he warned me against it. I remember that he said, “Call yourself Kirch or something else if you want, but not Kirk – that’s misleading”

He was of course right: for many years while giving my name over the telephone, I’d often be taken for a Scot. For instance, giving my name as Kirk when in Los Angeles telephoning for an apartment for my parents, I was told to come and see it. When people there recognized that this Kirk was probably not a Scot but a Jew, a number of them said, “Sorry, our place has just been rented.”

 ……….. Yes, Los Angeles had lots of antisemitic people at that time! 

MY FIRST JOB IN MY NEW COUNTRY

  
           When I arrived in New York City in 1938, I was met by my Uncle Kurt Simson and, for the first few weeks, had bed and board at his apartment with him, his wife, and their baby daughter, Esther. My parents had expected me to find a job, but neither they nor I were fully aware of the extent of the depression, so getting a job for a just twenty year old without any work experience was a problem.

One day I found an advert in the paper for a “work opportunity” which turned out to be Electrolux vacuums. When I went to the address given in the paper, I saw that it was to be a sales job. The sales price of the vacuum was something like $150, of which $70 was to be paid to the salesman. The task was to ring bells of houses and apartments with a quick spiel “How would you like a demonstration cleaning one or two rooms with this wonderful Electrolux machine?”  So I carried the heavy unit all day on the subway and on buses trying to persuade some woman in her apartment to let me demonstrate the machine’s virtues. I remember doing so at several homes and mostly was told, “When we have the money we will buy one on deferred payment.” The fact was that, in monthly installments, the whole unit would have cost $130 of which the salesman would ultimately receive almost half. But since I viewed installment payments as being against the interest of buyers, I would advise people that they would do better to wait until they had the money. With my old-world ethics and because hardly anyone had the money to buy the unit outright, I made no sales, but cleaned many homes for free.

So that’s the story of my first “job” in America.

HORSES AND CARTS

            We all have images without words – those unfinished utterances we wish much later to have been able to share with others. You probably also know the experience of waking up with a sense of discovery – but what? Perhaps we saw the solution to a puzzle that has long irked us, or perhaps we have even sensed a new understanding of ourselves. Of course, the idea of images without words goes against everything we believe we know about language. The naïve view that we start with an idea that is formed into concepts and words is upside-down: We start with words and sounds that ultimately become the building blocks of our language and therefore of our thoughts. The idealistic formulation of language following, or built upon, thought runs against our present understanding, for we believe against all “common sense” that language is built upon abstract thought. So now we must make sense of the contradiction between “thought” and “expression”.

When the parent says to the errant child, “think before you act”, he or she may be putting the cart before the horse. If thinking arises out of actions – or if it is actions that lead to meanings, why not say, “think while you act and then put your actions into words”.