These days, as World Cup fever sweeps the US, you’ll find me on the couch, texting back and forth with two of my adult kids as we parallel watch every game of the US team, my daughter in Michigan, my son in Florida, and me in Chicago or Indiana.

We mouth off to each other on unfair referee decisions, the current stringencies of the offsite rule that has always been hard to understand, or the odd new “goalie protection” rule that has disallowed goals that previously would have been perfectly fine. Our takes on various players, their skill or lack thereof, or that day’s lineup bounce back and forth. We also did this whenever Germany played—because we’re a binational family, but alas, the Germans have now been eliminated.

When there’s a goal for the side we’re rooting for, we text each other TOR! If we’re really excited, TOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOR!!!

In this family, the ultimate soccer joy of a goal happens in German because our love for soccer comes from me growing up in Germany, where soccer is the national sport.

Men’s soccer, to be clear. (I have failed, as of yet, to develop any kind of interest in women’s soccer, even though my sister played for many years.) I never played—girls playing soccer was still an oddity when I grew up, but my brother did. Every town has a soccer club, and pretty much every boy played, or at least tried to. Those local soccer clubs grow the talent eventually feeding into Germany’s top league, the Bundesliga. My brother, BTW, never went up the ranks, but he still loves playing soccer with a bunch of dudes.

Bundesliga games happened on Saturday afternoons, the season running from fall through late spring. Every Saturday, we kids would be glued to the radio sitting on our window sill (we didn’t have a TV), following the impassioned sports reporter’s recounting of what was happening on the field, of how “our” team, the FC Bayern München, was doing. Once in a while, Dad would join us and opine on this or that player, who could be relied on and who couldn’t, what the overall strategy might be, etc.

As we got older, my brother and I occasionally even bought tickets to attend one of those FC Bayern München games in Munich’s Olympic Stadium.

We could only afford the cheapest tickets, which meant no seats but rather standing in the “curve” behind one of the goals.

The curve is where all the diehard fans congregate—fans not quite as questionable as British hooligans, but people whose life revolves around their team, who travel from game to game, and from tavern to tavern, sporting team colors and hollering team songs. Some of those songs are quite wicked and funny, particularly those taunting the opposing team, and it was good fun to sing along there in the curve. Nevertheless, the curve was not the place a young woman had any business being, I’d say now. My parents, however, clearly weren’t worried, and I was with my brother. He’s younger than me, but still.

To boot, taking public transportation to those games, as we did, was a somewhat dangerous activity.

It meant riding the subway stuffed with drunken, brawling diehard fans, and not just “our” diehard fans, but those of the opposing team. We were always careful not to be identifiable as Bayern München fans.

One time, as I was passing through Munich’s main train station but fortunately wasn’t going to a game, I witnessed Munich police forming a corridor for Manchester United fans to funnel them from an arriving train straight down to the subway to keep them from veering off, wreaking havoc on the train station, or picking fights with the locals.

Thus I developed this love for soccer, something most of my female friends in Munich couldn’t understand. I often hung out with their men watching the games, especially the tournaments, while my husband, who has no interest in soccer, hung out with them.

Later, in the US, one of my husband’s good friends, a Russian, who’d grown up on soccer like me (mind you, my husband also grew up in Germany, so a love of soccer doesn’t necessarily follow from growing up with it), became my soccer buddy. We’d go to Chicago Fire games together, a much more quotidian, family-friendly affair than games in the massive Olympic Stadium in Munich. And—my daughter and younger son liked coming along.

It then so happened that another good friend of my husband, a Brit, suggested going to the 2014 World Cup in Brazil together.

He wanted to give his son, who’s about the age of my youngest, the experience of attending the arguably greatest international sports event. His dad, he told me, had taken him to the Olympic Games in Munich in 1972, a seminal experience. He wanted to give his son the same kind of experience. Was I interested?

I was! In general, crowded events are not my thing, but he’d hatched a plausible plan, namely trying to get tickets for the group stage games in the Amazon capital of Manaus, which wouldn’t be so expensive or sought after as the games in Rio or Sao Paulo.

To cut a long story short, we went! In June 2014, my daughter, younger son, and I traveled to Manaus, Brazil, along with my husband’s friend and his son, and another friend of his and his son (my older son and my husband had no interest in going). We saw two World Cup Games, one of them fortuitously turned out to be USA vs. Portugal. (We got the tickets via lottery before it was even decided who was going to play.)

This was the wildest trip I’ve ever taken, mainly because flying in and out of Manaus turned out to be a nightmare. But—it was an amazing adventure all around, and we experienced a World Cup in the flesh!

Furthermore, to our great joy, Germany won that World Cup in Brazil—my daughter and I watched the amazing final from a beach café in Tel Aviv a few weeks later. (That was a year of major international travel, to say the least!)

Thus, perhaps it’s not such a big wonder that I was sitting on my couch this past Wednesday night, watching the USA : Bosnia-Herzegovina game, and texting back and forth with my son and daughter, and thinking to myself:

How utterly wonderful that my kids share this interest, which is not a particularly popular one in the US, how wonderful that I’ve been able to pass on this passion.

It has afforded us so many joyous times together.

My daughter had even hatched a plan to attend one of this World Cup’s games, aiming for the June 20 game in Toronto (which turned out to be Germany vs. Ivory Coast), which would have fit into her tight work schedule. It would have been grand to attend, and I dutifully put my hat into all lottery rounds, but alas, we didn’t get lucky. We also were unwilling to pay $800 a seat for a lousy spot in the stadium.

So, we’re watching this World Cup from our couches, from where we’ve got an excellent view, and we’re still talking shop, relishing the experience together.

Leave a comment

For our 38th wedding anniversary this year, my husband and I did a little fun thing in the northwest Indiana countryside, where we like to hang out:

We went for an old-fashioned train ride!

Originally I’d booked a steam engine ride at the Hoosier Valley Railroad Museum. Given that we’d never ridden in steam engine train before, I thought that would be mega cool. Alas, the steam engine had mechanical difficulties that day, and we had to settle for this cute 1952 General Electric 95-ton switcher diesel-electric locomotive pulling us around. Not what we’d wanted, but still fun.

This heavy industrial engine used to be a common sight in the railyards around the steel mills in northwest Indiana. It was designed for maneuvering heavy railway cars over short distances, i.e. “switching around,” hence its name.

Now it’s used to pull tourist trains when the steam engine isn’t working.

After we returned from our ride, we poked around the old North Judson railway station turned museum.

And what did I spot sitting under a table in the former train station waiting area?

A suitcase that looked exactly like the one my mother used to have!

This made sense as we were basically visiting the 1950s in this train museum, and Mom got her set of three white suitcases as a wedding present in 1962—in time for her first overseas trip: My parents’ honeymoon, crossing the Atlantic by boat to visit the in-laws Mom hadn’t met yet in Germany.

I immediately snapped a picture of this suitcase and sent it to my siblings, asking my brother whether he still had Mom’s old suitcase set.

Sure enough, he sent back the above picture of Mom’s old suitcase, taken in a hotel room on a recent trip of his. He still likes to use her stylish luggage on short trips. It just has character, unlike our present-day functional suitcases.

Not only that!

Mom’s erstwhile cosmetics case serves as my brother’s tool box!

I was blown away when, three years ago, as we siblings moved Mom into a group home for seniors with dementia in Germany, my brother arrived, carrying Mom’s chic, white, and square vanity case full of tools.

It’s the perfect size, he explained, and sturdy as hell! Never mind the mirror on the inside of its lid.

He also sent me this picture of our newlywed parents, arriving in Wiesbaden, Germany, on their honeymoon in 1962, when Mom met Dad’s parents for the first time.

Everyone is decked out—I don’t recall ever seeing my grandmother wear a hat like that! Mom, on the other hand, always had style. I’m sure she’s wearing high heels in this photo, sadly not visible, either green or white to match her clothes, because high heels were the only shoes she owned in those days.

And there are Mom and Dad’s suitcases: Mom’s set of white (surely the cosmetics case is stacked behind the other suitcases?) and Dad’s iconic brown suitcase full of travel stickers.

Those suitcases defined the travels of my early childhood.

In December 1965, Mom’s dad took the above picture when my parents arrived at Detroit Airport with Dad’s mom, two-year-old me, and my toddler brother, whom Dad is carrying. We were going to spend Christmas with Mom’s family in the Detroit area before traveling on to Florida, where Dad had an expat assignment for Siemens beginning in January. Both grandmothers are sporting hats in this airport scene, and Mom’s white suitcase and Dad’s brown one are clearly stacked on the luggage cart to the left.

Stumbling upon “Mom’s” suitcase at the Hoosier Valley Railroad Museum made me think of all our luggage.

I mean actual luggage, not baggage! ;-)

It amazes me that my siblings and I still have the luggage our parents traveled with in the 1960s—how sturdy and high quality are those suitcases that they’ve been holding up so well?

We also still have our parents’ steamer trunks that they used to move from the US to Germany in 1964. There were three steamer trunks, and now my brother, my sister, and I each have one. Mine still serves as a side table in my living room! (Story on that coming up!)

I’ve traveled a lot with my own family, but every ten years or so, our lightweight 4-wheel suitcase wonders stop functioning and need to be replaced. The zippers break, the sides tear open, the wheels jam.

I had a chic purple Samsonite set once, one you could easily recognize as yours on an airline luggage carousel. On our 2022 flight to Poland, the zipper of the outside pouch was destroyed. I had to buy a new Samsonite at a mall in Warsaw, just to be able to continue on the trip, but shlepped the broken purple suitcase along to later have it “fixed” at the one repair shop in Chicago that still does this kind of work. Alas, it broke again, and I gave up on preserving my own set of luggage.

My husband and I won’t leave a luggage legacy, even though we’ve traveled a lot, farther and wider than my parents.

But there probably will be the steamer trunk, and in my brother’s case, Mom’s white suitcases and Dad’s brown one. They have survived and they shall survive.

Oh, this reminds me: I do have one of my German grandmother’s cute old suitcases sitting on a top shelf in my closet. Time, perhaps, to air it out and use it as a design element somewhere?

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Yesterday I had the good fortune of doing a Substack Live with Lori Olsen White (@hometownwriter) on the topic of bias in family history, the recording of which I am sharing today.

Do we favor certain family lines over others — and if so, why?

Lori and I talked about how proximity, relatives who tell stories versus others who don’t, our own emotional comfort, and even the availability of historical records determine which ancestors we’ll research, whose stories we love to tell, and whom we don’t spend time on.

We also got into the unexpected rewards of digging into the side we’ve been neglecting — including some amazing, almost redemptive discoveries neither one of us saw coming.

Our conversation ranged from whether we prefer the paternal vs. maternal side to gender bias in the historical record, from the pull of certain time periods to the stories we avoid because they’re too uncomfortable or too thin on documentation. And we heard from listeners in the chat who brought their own experiences into the mix.

So, do you find yourself circling back to the same branch of your family tree?

Do you have a preference for certain time periods? For Lori, it’s the time after the Civil War and the Gilded Age, for me it’s World War II.

Do let me know your take on this, please!

Hopefully, our conversation will prod you to poke at the side of the family you’ve been ignoring. As I reveal in this conversation, unexpected, meaningful discoveries might be waiting!

Leave a comment

When writing a family story, particularly one from family history, it can be tempting to simply quote from the letters, diaries, or memoirs our relatives and ancestors left behind. After all, they can provide compelling eyewitness accounts of events—unfiltered, raw, and thus captivating.

But: Be careful when you use someone else’s voice.

It does add texture and authenticity to quote a letter or someone you interviewed.

Just be aware that if you do, you are handing the microphone to someone else.

Don’t hand it over for too long because then it becomes that person’s story.

The narrator holds together any story, that’s just the way a story works. Whoever takes up the most space in your text becomes the narrator.

You don’t want someone else to be the narrator unless you’re planning to tell the story from that person’s perspective. That is fine, too, but then you have to be conscious of that decision.

In any case, before you use someone else’s voice, you need to have introduced them as a character to your reader.

Who is this person? And why is he or she important to the story?

Two memoirs handle this particularly well. Russell Baker's Growing Up weaves in Depression-era letters from his mother's suitor Olaf, while Rebecca McClanahan's The Tribal Knot draws on family letters going back to the Civil War and her great-aunt's diary to bring rural Indiana life vividly to the page.

I know from my own experience that it can be hard to find the right way to use materials like letters or diaries, or even someone else’s memoirs.

These documents are gems, but it might take several go-arounds until you figure out an approach that works well.

In my initial drafts of Jumping Over Shadows, I simply quoted the most telling passages from my grandfather’s memoirs. He was a good writer, after all, and a good storyteller.

However, many of the people reading those first iterations balked at that. Who is this guy? Why should we care about him? And why is he suddenly talking to us?

The story didn’t flow until I learned to transform his writings into a third-person narrative. This allowed me to provide more context where needed, yet continue to narrate from his perspective.

In general, it is hard to pull off two first-person narrators in one text, because the two “I’s” are challenging for the reader to separate.

So, in the case of Jumping Over Shadows, third person (“my grandfather,” or “he”) clearly signaled to the reader that we were now in his life, versus “I” signaled that we were in my story.

When I stopped quoting my grandfather and started narrating his story myself, something shifted. The two voices — his and mine — stopped competing and started working together. Each part is distinct but neither drowns the other out. That’s what good text management actually feels like from the inside: not a set of rules, but a smooth experience for the reader.

Your reader won’t notice it. They’ll simply be in the story, and that’s where we want them to be. The letters, the diary entries, the borrowed voices: they provide texture, not interruptions. And your own voice — the one that holds everything together — remains exactly where it belongs: at the center.

More tips in my guide:

I’ll be doing a Substack Live next week:

Thursday, June 18, at 11:00 a.m. CDT with the wonderful Lori Olsen White:

Exploring Bias in Family History: Do We Prefer One Side Over Another? (Click here to join us!)

We’ll dig into whether and why we might have a favorite side of the family, and why this matters. Audience takes on this are more than welcome!

See you on the 18th!

(Replay available the day after.)

Leave a comment

For my recent trip to Yellowstone National Park, my plan had been to retrace Dad’s steps.

Our father, so my siblings and I learned by looking through his boxes of slides from his time as a graduate student at Purdue University, had done the ultimate road trip out West in the summer of 1960 with two fellow students. Traveling to the Canadian Rockies first, they then proceeded to Glacier National Park in Montana, and on to Yellowstone.

Alas, there are my plans, and then there is reality.

One reality was that my husband and I were staying in Cody, Wyoming. From there, the “shortest” way to Yellowstone is an hour’s drive along route 14 to the park’s east entrance, passing the Buffalo Bill reservoir’s brilliant blue and on through red canyons worth a national park designation of their own. From the east entrance it is another hour’s drive over the vast alpine panorama of the Sylvan Pass to reach the 8-shaped loop road through the park, see map below.

Yellowstone’s loop road itself is 142 miles long, leading past the majority of sites. Most of the time, on that loop road, you’re trundling along at 35mph or less, often stopping as fellow tourists halt their car (or worse, make a U-turn) on the frightfully narrow road to take pictures of the umpteenth buffalo grazing by the roadside.

Most of the pictures my siblings and I have of Dad’s trip to Yellowstone were taken at Mammoth Hot Springs in the northwest corner of the park.

It dawned on me early on that, on this trip, my husband and I would never make it there, unless we wanted to spend the entire day driving, which we didn’t.

One does have to get out of the car once in a while to look at the odd bubbling mud volcano!

Thus, instead of retracing Dad’s steps, I mainly found myself retracing my own.

This was my third trip to Yellowstone.

I’d been there on a road trip with my sister in 1989, right after Yellowstone burned in 1988, and I’d been there in 2008 with my husband and kids. On those previous trips, I unfortunately had not been aware that my dad had traveled there as well. I have been to Mammoth Hot Springs Terraces twice—what fun would it have been to retrace Dad’s steps then!

Now, I distinctly remembered the mud volcano from a previous trip, but which trip?

It’s located pretty close to Fishing Bridge, our entry point to the sightseeing loop road, so we stopped there on our first foray. This also happened to be right after many roads in Yellowstone had just reopened after their winter sleep, and snow was still piled along the roads.

That day, May 6, the part of the circuit road that goes from Fishing Bridge to Old Faithful was still closed. So were all visitor centers, concession stands, gift shops and gas stations. One felt early to the party! Thankfully, we had packed a picnic and there was enough gas in the tank.

The road to the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, however, was open and close to Fishing Bridge, so we headed there, where ample parking was available, and few other tourists were snapping pictures of the mighty water fall and steep, rough-edged canyon.

All the while I was delighting in finally seeing the Canyon of the Yellowstone, a sight I had discounted on previous visits as “just a waterfall.”

As we were enjoying the stunning scenery, I was convinced I was seeing this for the first time.

Alas, I wasn’t.

Later that day I asked my sister to send me pictures of the album I’d made for her of our 1989 trip. As they landed in my WhatsApp feed, there was—I couldn’t believe it—a picture of my sister’s curly head in the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, clearly a picture taken by me!

I was dumbfounded. I had no memory of having been there before.

Apparently, I now realized, I was mainly remembering the 2008 trip with my family when I indeed had decided not to head to the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone.

On that trip we were operating from the northwest corner of the park, from which the canyon is quite far. Again, I considered the hot springs and geysers were more unique, more interesting.

Nor did I remember driving along the Sylvan Pass, which seemed to be virgin land for me but alas, my album of 1989 showed that my sister and I had traveled along that very route!

My 2008 trip had overridden my memories of the 1989 trip.

Since I now had pictures of my first Yellowstone trip in hand thanks to my sister, I restaged one shot of me at Heart Spring in the Upper Geyser Basin:

In the end, with three forays into Yellowstone this time, my husband and I did manage to get in one homage to a site Dad had been to and both of us hadn’t been to before: the petrified tree.

It’s located close to the Tower-Roosevelt junction, where we made a point to stop on our second day touring Yellowstone, when we had entered the park from its northeast entrance via the Beartooth Mountains (see The View Beyond Yellowstone).

Mind you, if you’ve been to Petrified Forest National Park, which I was fortunate enough to visit two years ago, this one tree stump isn’t all that impressive.

But, Dad had taken a picture of it, and so did we!

Overall, retracing my own steps from previous trips as well as making it to one “Dad” site added another fun aspect and a deeper layer to this journey.

It also proved, again, how valuable records are: photo albums, but also notes, slides stuck in boxes, maps with routes, videos, and nowadays at least a chronological backup of our Smartphone photos in the cloud.

They will preserve what actually happened when and where, much better than our own memories will. To say nothing of trying to piece together a dead relative’s whereabouts—without records, it’s impossible.

Leave a comment

Dear Readers,

My husband and I just returned from a trip to Northwest Wyoming and Yellowstone National Park, and my head is brimming with unsorted impressions, learnings, stories, and lots of pictures.

I’ve got at least two posts percolating, but since they’re not fully brewed, for today I want to share with you the one vista, from this trip of magnificent vistas, that is stuck in my mind. This view took my breath away, and I say that as someone who grew up in the foothills of the Alps and is generally not that impressed with alpine landscapes.

And that was the sweeping panorama of the Absaroka and Beartooth Mountains as seen from the Chief Joseph Highway (Wyoming Route 296).

The road had just reopened after its winter sleep when we drove it on May 12 on our way to the northeast entrance of Yellowstone. I took the above video at the Dead Indian Pass vista point, which is at 8,048 ft elevation. All of these peaks are at least 10,000 ft high.

However, on this drive I wasn’t even most impressed by the view, but by this vast, pristine landscape, that was devoid of human settlement and activity.

The Chief Joseph Highway is a 46-mile hairpin drive. We hardly passed a car and only one cluster of log cabin buildings that looked like a summer camp not yet open. In the valleys there were no farms, on the mountain slopes no ski runs. There was just forest, towering, massive mountains, open grass land. Rarely does one pass the entrance to a ranch, which will be out of sight, or signs warning of “open range - cattle on the road.”

To me, a good deal the R&R value of this part of the country comes from this emptiness—this vast sense of space and being confronted only with nature.

The same is true of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, wherein probably lies one of the reasons I love it so much. It is particularly appealing to me as a city dweller, and, as my kids would say, I am also a bit of a misanthrope.

Mind you, all of this beauty isn’t even in Yellowstone National Park itself, but rather beyond its northeast border.

More to come on traveling the Wild West in upcoming posts…

Enjoy!

Annette

Leave a comment

Dear Readers,

What’s your surefire sign that you love a book?

For me, it is when I find myself reading passages out loud to my husband. Even more so, when I find myself giving it as a gift.

Agatha’s Christie’s archaeological memoir Come, Tell Me How You Live is such a book.

Mind you, I had bought it many years ago. It sat in my TBR shelf until, this December, I watched Evil Under the Sun with my kids, as we like to “watch a Poirot” now and then, namely the BBC’s unsurpassed renderings of the Agatha Christie’s mystery stories featuring David Suchet as the fastidious detective Poirot. For some reason, after watching this episode, my daughter and I started researching Agatha Christie’s life, and that’s when I remembered I had a memoir written by her sitting on my shelf.

I am so glad I finally read it!

Come, Tell Me How You Live is her chatty, tell-it-as-it-is answer to the “How do you live?” question she was often asked in her social circles in London, when people wanted to know how she and her husband, archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan, lived while digging in Northeastern Syria in the 1930s.

Her personal account here is a refreshingly politically incorrect portrait of a place and its people, quite often hilariously funny but also poignantly tragic at times.

It certainly dispenses with any glamour one might attach to such an archaeological undertaking, while also portraying the cast of characters with dignity, giving insight into their often baffling attitudes which, once the context is revealed, often thanks to her husband’s translations of torrents of speech in Arabic.

I’ll share just one such episode with you here, to give you an idea. Appearing towards the end of the book, Agatha’s favorite and quite capable servant among their household staff, a young man by the name of Subri, reports to her husband (addressed as ‘Khwaja’ - which seems to be a mixture of “sir” and “boss”) on his visit to the dentist:

Subri, after spending sleepless nights with toothache, demands leave of absence to go to Aleppo by train and visit the dentist. He returns two days later beaming.

His account of the proceedings is as follows:

‘I go to the dentist. I sit in his chair. I show him the tooth. Yes, he says, it must come out. How much I say? Twenty francs, he says. It is absurd, I say, and leave the house. I come again in the afternoon. How much? Eighteen francs. Again I say absurd. All the time the pain is increasing, but one cannot allow oneself to be robbed. I come the next morning. How much? Still eighteen francs. Again at midday. Eighteen francs. He thinks that the pain will beat me, but I continue to bargain! In the end Khwaja, I win.’

‘He comes down?’

Subri shakes his head.

‘No, he will not come down, but I make a very good bargain. Very well, I say. Eighteen francs. But for that you must take out not one tooth but four!’

Subri laughs with enormous gusto, displaying sundry gaps.

‘But did the other teeth ache?’

‘No, of course not. But they will begin to some day. Now they cannot. They have been taken out, and for the price of one.’

I loved this book and enjoyed my nightly “installments” of it so much that I didn’t want it to end. I could have read on and on. Agatha Christie is, no surprise there, a master storyteller, but to read a real life story by her is extra special.

I gave Come, Tell Me How You Live to my daughter, who has found it equally delightful, telling me that it was, in fact, too delightful because it kept her reading when really she should have been sleeping. It is a particularly fun read for anyone who has spent some time in the Middle East as we have.

Please do share your surefire sign of a good book and a recent favorite!

Leave a comment

Dear Readers,

In my recent post about my Aunt Herta, I promised a sequel:

The first thing that comes to my mind when I think about visiting Tante Herta in her nursing home in Wiesbaden, Germany, is the color white.

A crisp, clear, clean white. The white of bleached and starched cotton shirts. The white of milk glass.

I can see the view down the long hallway on the first floor, with its gleaming white linoleum floor and its high white walls. A handrail runs along both sides of the hallway for wheelchair riders to pull themselves along. Light streams in from a high window at the end of the hallway, painting a luminous rectangle on the floor.

And later in the visit, there are the bleached uniforms of the nurses—indeed made of thick starched cotton, the white speckled Formica tables in the dining room, and the white plastic trays the food was served on. It would not have surprised me if beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows of the dining room there had loomed, as outside the sanatorium in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, “the reeking void, the world enwrapped in grey-white cotton-wool, packed to the window-panes in snow and mist.”

Instead, we looked out on the gray blue waters of an inlet harbor off the Rhine, and a yellow ferry docked among the sailboats to carry passengers across the river.

“There you are!” Herta’s voice sounded from the end of the hallway on my first visit in the summer of 2002. Against the pyramid of light I made out the contour of a figure in a wheelchair. She glided towards me. We met in the middle of the white hallway.

“Nice of you to come,” Herta said as I plopped a kiss on her forehead.

“There’s not much left of me now, is there?” she chuckled, referring to her weight loss and amputated leg.

It warmed me to hear her chuckle even though it lacked the rumble it used to have when she weighed a hundred pounds more.

I was thankful that my sister, who had visited her before me, had warned me not to be too shocked by Herta’s appearance.

She’s almost a skeleton, my sister had said.

Indeed, I could not help but study Herta’s sunken, wrinkled cheeks that I remembered as rosy and so plump they used to squish her eyes. She still wore her small golden Star of David pendant, but now it rested against a bony chest, on the triangle of pale skin showing through her collar. She used to wear a wig because of her extremely thin hair. On occasion, I had seen her without the wig—on hot days, or when we had shared a bedroom on our trip to Vienna all those years ago. Now the bald circle on top of her head and the wisps of short white hair surrounding it were her permanent look.

I could tell she was barely able to see me because her watery blue eyes followed whatever sound I made rather than my movements.

For the past few years, Herta and I had kept in touch via the occasional phone call or letter. I had moved to the States in my mid-twenties, and had seen Herta on my yearly visits to Wiesbaden to see my grandmother. After Oma passed away, after I left student life behind me, and started a job with ten vacation days a year, I traveled to Germany less frequently. When I did come, I visited my mother, siblings and in-laws in the Munich area, four hours away by train from Wiesbaden.

I called Herta for her birthday and for New Year’s, and she sent birthday cards with unfailing punctuality not only for my birthday, but also for my husband’s and my children’s. She remembered my sister, my brother and my mother the same way. As her eyesight continued to fail, her cards became unreadable scribbles.

And then in the fall of 2001, and, most tellingly, for the holidays, no mail arrived from Herta.

Something was wrong. Through persistent phone calls to Herta’s daughter Gitta, my mother and sister finally found out that Herta had fallen in her apartment and had been discovered unconscious hours later. Based on that, so it seemed, Gitta had decided that her mother should not be living by herself anymore and searched for a nursing home while Herta was in the hospital.

Herta never returned to her apartment. While her home was being dismantled, she was stuck in the hospital, her left leg getting worse. It had always troubled her with oozing wounds. She had inherited, as Oma used to say, weak tissue, a propensity towards varicose veins, and latent diabetes. I remembered how during the summer she used to hate to wear stockings, opting for comfort instead, exposing her legs, wide and wobbly, the thick blue veins knotted in tight spirals up the back of her knees, her ankles a bluish red. Nevertheless, she had been “gut zu Fuss”—a good walker. Herta and Oma used to go for long walks every Sunday afternoon.

After Herta’s fall and during the months in the hospital, her left leg refused to heal, the tissue slowly disintegrating. First the doctors snipped off two toes. Her diabetes must have been raging at the time, and they ended up amputating her leg above the knee.

*

“Come on in, Nettylein, come on in,” Herta said, and swiveled her chair around to return to her room, gliding through the flat, threshold-less doorway.

No one calls me Netty anymore, let alone the endearing diminutive of Nettylein.

But in Tante Herta’s voice, the name Netty was like a favorite armchair. I could settle into it and know who I was.

I could be the twelve-year old coming over to Herta’s apartment, the place on the fourth floor of an art deco building in Wiesbaden, the place with the high ceilings and the balcony in the sky. I loved teetering out on that balcony, but I loved looking at it from the living room window even more: how it stuck out, just like that, from the walls, four stories above the ground, and how a few clothes lines were strung out farther from its railing, so one had to bend over to peg table cloths and bed linens to it that would then sway in the open air, into the heights above the neighbor’s balcony below.

I could be the twenty-something in the newly acquired sophistication of patent leather pumps, coming to report on the progress of my studies and ending up discussing the classics of English literature with Tante Herta. “We read Three Men in a Boat. That was my favorite,” Herta would reminisce about her years of schooling. “That was marvelous, just marvelous!” Her puffy chuckle and wide smile would echo the mirth of her adolescence.

Or I could be the thirty-something swinging by on a visit from overseas, married and more relaxed in jeans, reminiscing about the trip Herta and I had taken to Vienna when I was fourteen, when we had stayed at Aunt Poldi’s small apartment, a place without a fridge where we stored the butter for our breakfast rolls on the outside window sill because it was cooler there at night. When she had introduced me to the coffee house culture of Vienna (every day we went to a different café), when we had walked through the manicured gardens of the Schönbrunn palace, when she had navigated that old imperial capital with me hurrying along beside her. When her step had been swift and assured. When she had known which clanging tram to board, and which park corner to get off on to visit the Votivkirche with its gigantic royal blue and ruby rosetta window.

“Yes, it wasn’t the Stephansdom you liked best,” she would reminisce, referencing Vienna’s main cathedral. “It was the Votivkirche, right? That’s the most beautiful, you said.”

Vienna had always been Herta’s favorite city.

After Herta and her daughter had fled Czechoslovakia in 1970, they had ended up in Wiesbaden. Moving to Vienna, Herta's dream city, had not been legally possible. Leaving Liberec had not been her choice but her daughter’s, and leaving her beloved brother Ludwig behind must not have been easy.

In the end, Herta built a pleasant new life for herself in Wiesbaden, where, in her apartment with the teetering balcony, there was always was cake on the table and tea from a Wedgwood china pot whenever I visited. In the summers after his retirement, Ludwig would come for long visits, creating a new sense of family togetherness.

*

Now I sat in Herta’s room in the nursing home, on her teak chair—one of the few pieces of furniture I recognized from her old apartment. The only remnants of her former life were this chair and the matching secretary desk, and above the desk the petit-point tapestry of two sailboats on a rough sea that Herta had needlepointed.

I remembered how she had peered through a magnifying glass to discern one minute navy stitch from another as she had completed the ocean part of the canvas. Needlework had been her hobby. Like Oma, Herta had knitted, but needlepoint had been her passion. Gitta would pick out a white damask tablecloth, and Herta would embroider it for her with interlaced roses and bluebells.

Clear plastic bags stuffed with folded canvases and a rainbow of yarns used to pile up by the secretary desk in her apartment. She challenged herself with tapestries requiring finer and finer stitches. Sometimes Herta came along when Oma took me to the opera. Then, if I spotted a lady with a traditional Austrian-style petit-point handbag in the crowd of elegant attendees, I’d spin dreams of Herta making such a purse.

“You could make something like that, couldn’t you?”—the floral tapestry on black background, the gold tone metal frame, the clasp carved like a lion’s claw, and the snake chain handle. Herta certainly could have!

The petit-point tapestry of the sea voyage remained her masterpiece, and I was happy to see that it had survived the dismantling of her household, keeping her company in the nursing home.

It provided a touch of the personal opposite the bed, the TV stand, and the table by the window, all of which were standard hospital issue.

A computer-like contraption sat on the table. It turned out to be a reading machine, a monitor to slide a book under that then magnifies the text. It also turned out that Herta rarely used it.

“That’s no way to read,” she explained, “sitting at a table, staring at a screen. Plus it tires me.”

I sat on Herta’s teak chair and took in her new surroundings. The door to the built-in closet stood ajar, and I was heartened to glimpse a row of Herta-style dresses: flowery prints on polyester, cut straight through the waist, buttoned down the front, with a modest lapel collar, and a thin fabric-rolled belt.

“See how shabby I have become? I have nothing to offer you,” Herta fretted, looking about her room. “Over there, by the bed, must be a box of cookies. But they’re nothing good, they’re diabetes cookies, and I don’t know how long I’ve had them. They are probably stale.”

“Don’t worry about that,” I said, “a glass of water is all I need right now. And we can go out, can’t we? Isn’t there a place we can go around here?”

“I think there’s a café up the street, up the hill,” she replied, “but I’m not sure. I don’t get out much.”

“But you do get out, don’t you, now and then?”

“Gitta comes every weekend, but you know, she’s so petite, she doesn’t have the strength to push my wheelchair, and I can’t push myself up that hill. So sometimes we walk along the Rhine promenade. We can manage that.”

“So how about we go exploring?” I asked. “I’m strong enough to push you up that hill. We’ll see if we can find that café.”

“Alright, if you think so. But don’t you think it’s too cool?”

“What? It’s summer, and we can take your wool jacket, can’t we?”

“Well, if you think so. Let’s do that.”

And off we went, Herta and I. I pushed her up the cobble stoned sidewalk, up the street with the incline. It was my first time pushing a wheelchair, and Herta was heavier than the double stroller packed with two kids I was used to. I worried about how much the cobble stones made Herta shake in it.

Maybe this excursion wasn’t such a good idea?

“Are you OK?” I asked every five yards.

She was. She held on.

I gripped the handles harder in an effort to stave off some of the rattling. I concentrated on navigating the narrow sidewalk and the curbs. In this section of Wiesbaden, the sidewalks were not flattened at intersections, thus I had to roll the wheelchair over the curb without tilting it too much.

We did pass a café where a few people sipped coffee in the window, but three steps led up to the entrance. Not doable for us.

I pressed on. Herta thought there might be an ice cream parlor farther up. I maneuvered her across an intersection, and after a left-hand turn we found the ice cream place.

Again, steps led up to the tables, but on a hunch I wheeled Herta around the corner and happened upon the courtyard behind the café. No steps there, and we could sit outside, if someone would open the wrought iron gate. I asked a waiter to unlock it, and then there we sat, under a red and white striped umbrella flapping in the breeze. We ordered coffee and two bowls of vanilla and hazelnut ice cream topped with cherries and chocolate sauce.

“Remember how you introduced me to eating Stefanie Torte at Café Heiner?” I asked, thinking of all the coffeehouses we had frequented in Vienna. Heiner had been Herta’s favorite.

“Yes, the Heiner with the wood paneling, the one by the Steffl, right?” she said. Heiner was located off a side street next to the Stephansdom, nicknamed “Steffl” by the Viennese.

Herta stirred her coffee. I noticed a crusted stain on the sleeve of her wool jacket.

“Remember how you got me to climb up the Steffl?” Herta mused, referring to how I had insisted we climb up the cathedral’s south tower. “All 343 steps! And you counted them all! I had to take a few breaks; I never thought I’d make it, but I did. If it hadn’t been for you, I would never have thought of doing that. But you insisted, you just wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

Looking back I thanked my fourteen-year old single-minded self who had ignored the fact that maybe it was not the wisest thing to force a two hundred pound woman up the spiral staircase of a four hundred foot high tower. Thus we had made a memory.

Our ice cream bowls were almost empty when Herta announced she needed to go to the bathroom. However, the ice cream parlor restrooms were upstairs. I pushed her back down the hill as fast as I could, and we made it to her bathroom in time.

Left alone in her room, I watched the white curtains sway in the open window. Her room overlooked a concrete-tiled terrace at the back of the building. A few baby trees were stuck in between the tiles. A driveway swung around the terrace, and I noticed that it disappeared directly under Herta’s room. In a sense her room was suspended, just like her balcony used to be.

I picked up the gossip magazine BUNTE from her TV stand. (“Bunte” means colorful.) Its cover felt grimy from dust and as I looked closer I saw the issue was two years old. Was time standing still here? Was there no other input than the blare of the TV that I heard through the receiver whenever I called her?

It troubled me that Herta was in this home at all, nice and comfortable though it was. From what I could tell, the only thing “wrong” with her was that she had a leg missing. She was mentally alert, and whatever brain fog she might have seemed to come from a lack of stimulation rather than any onset of dementia.

Wouldn’t she have been capable of living on her own in a wheelchair-accessible apartment? Couldn’t she have done her own laundry, shopped for her own groceries, fixed her own food, dealt with the little challenges of managing a household? Instead, they were managed for her.

But then again, I had no say in the matter. I lived an ocean away, and even though I called her Tante (aunt), I was only her cousin’s (my father) daughter. My father was long dead, so was her brother. She was the only surviving relative of the old generation on my father’s side of the family. Gitta was her only child, and so Herta was, first and foremost, Gitta’s responsibility.

I never had much contact with Gitta, who was fifteen years my senior. I had seen her last at Oma’s funeral and had called her before making this trip to Wiesbaden, but no one had answered. Herta told me then that Gitta and her husband were in Austria on summer vacation. I remembered Gitta mainly as the Twiggy-like apparition she had been in her early twenties when she had decided to counteract her mother’s tendency towards plumpness by dieting, and Oma and Herta kept clucking and shaking their heads about the child who “was starving herself.” Now Gitta was in her fifties, with a fulltime job at an insurance company, a house in the suburbs, a husband and a grown son. Who was I to question whether she had made the right decision, whether her mother was indeed incapable of living on her own?

So there I was, stuck on a teak chair from another time, stuck in my helplessness.

All I could do was visit and remember with Herta. And life would pass by outside, captured in gossip magazines that were two years old.

“You sure have an old copy of BUNTE here,” I remarked when Herta returned from the bathroom.

“Oh, I don’t read that,” she replied. “I don’t even know who gave me that. Some people here aren’t very sophisticated, you know. But for the most part people are okay. One can’t choose anyway, can one? People come here, they don’t necessarily have much education.”

She paused, and then went on, “I always wanted to go to university, you know, I would have loved that. But in those days it wasn’t possible, so what could I do? Uncle Klaus even inquired in Vienna, but there was nothing to be done.”

Characteristically, she did not say that in the 1940s, in a Czechoslovakia annexed by Nazi Germany, she was not able to study because, classified as a half-Jew, she was barred from university. She did not say it because she was not bitter about it.

For all the futility that permeated the nursing home, I could not detect a trace of bitterness in her, only good-natured complaisance. For her, the inability to study or the reduction of her life to a nursing home warranted a folding of the hands, a leaning back, a shrug. The whims of fate and family all fell under “What can one do?”

For a few years, my visits with Herta became an annual ritual. Every June I would come to Munich, Germany, where my mother-in-law lived, so that my children could attend school there for a few weeks to further their German. During every visit I made a day trip to Wiesbaden. I left the children with my mother-in-law and took the train, four hours to get there in the morning, four hours back at night. It was the train ride of my youth, the trip to visit Oma: Munich – Wiesbaden, Wiesbaden – Munich.

On my last visit I arrived in the early afternoon to find Herta asleep in her bed. Her face was almost as white as the bed sheets, the whiffs of her gray hair spread against the pillow.

“Netty? Are you here already? I must have nodded off.”

She craned her neck, her blue watery eyes searching for me, even though she could not tell whether it was my silhouette she made out or someone else’s. She needed my voice.

“Yes, I’m here. How are you? Don’t worry, you don’t have to get up,” I answered.

She didn’t get up. I settled by her bedside, updating her on my life, while she kept pressing the bell for the nurse. Finally, a voice sounded through the intercom: Shift change, it will be a while.

“I can help you get up, can’t I?” I offered.

“No, thank you, that’s fine, let’s wait for the nurse.”

Our talk drifted, like it always did, to literature. “You know, the classics always give me solace,” Herta said. “And I have my father to thank for that. One time I was reading some kind of juvenile fiction. I must have been twelve or so, and when he saw that, he said ‘Let me give you something real to read.’ And he walked me over to the book cabinet—the book cabinet with the glass doors—and unlocked it and handed me a Schiller and said: ‘Read this, and when you’re done with it, let me know and I’ll give you another one.’ And so I started with Schiller. And you know, whenever I was having a hard time in my life, I would turn to Schiller or Goethe and I always found something that helped me. That’s why they are the classics.”

I could almost see the stuffy parlor with its mahogany book cases, the father handing the book with the gold-imprinted cover to the girl.

I wondered how she lived without the classics now, since she couldn’t read comfortably anymore, and I never heard her say that anyone read to her.

And then she answered my thoughts: “It’s a good thing I learned some of those poems by heart, you know?”

While we talked, Herta lay flat on her back, so incredibly flat, turning her head sideways towards me, then back again to stare at the ceiling. It is hard to talk to somebody when you’re lying flat on your back. I asked again whether I could help her out of bed, and again she declined.

Finally the nurse came and I stepped back from the bed, wanting to give Herta some privacy. But I still saw.

When the nurse flipped back the bed sheet, I saw that Herta’s other leg was also cut off below the knee.

She lay there like a rag doll. No feet. I stood by, frozen, while the nurse diapered her, helped her into a dress and then lifted her into the wheelchair, the two of them exchanging pleasantries the entire time.

I kept up the pleasantries after the nurse left, not wanting to reveal how saddened I was. But I did ask: “What happened to your other leg? When?”

“Oh, that. It has been like this for a long time.”

“But you still had it when I was here last, a year ago.”

“No, no, it’s been like that for a long time.”

I wasn’t going to argue, of course, but I knew she had still had her right foot last June. She had worn a beige sandal on that foot, and sitting in her wheelchair, she had been scoffing her foot back and forth on the concrete tiles of the terrace outside while we waited for the taxi to take me back to the train station.

Now she was cut off from the ground.

We went for our customary walk, this time on the promenade that runs along the inlet harbor off the Rhine. I pushed her along, and we talked about the beautiful weather, watched a bunch of rowers glide by, and pondered what kind of flavors we would treat ourselves to at the ice cream stand farther along. Every so often I had to stop and place my hands under her arms to pull her up in her chair. With little strength in her arms and no foot to prop against the foot rest, she kept sliding down on the chair’s vinyl seat.

In the early evenings of my visits I always wheeled her to the dining room, where she sat with the other women—there were no men—at white Formica tables, eating parceled-out slices of ham or beef, steamed potato wedges or green peas on the side, and fruit cocktail or canned peaches for dessert. And I sat next to her, feeling terribly dynamic and young and out of place.

She always introduced me as her cousin who comes all the way from America to visit her. Yes, all the way from America.

The other ladies didn’t know what to make of me, the intruder into their white world. I expected them to cluck around me, inspecting the curiosity. But no, milky eyes would scan me briefly, a few heads would nod, but minds there were too dulled to bother. The monotony of life between the room and the dining hall made life flat. Furthermore, some ladies took medication that muddled their minds, and some suffered chronic pain that pounded life even flatter.

Flat, until there was nothing but the back and forth in the white world and a white dish with canned peaches to contemplate.

Time drowns in the measureless monotony of space;

where uniformity rules,

and where motion is no more motion,

time is no longer time.

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

Leave a comment

Happy Mother’s Day to all of you who are moms!

And to those who are not, please do think of your moms! Because everyone has a mom, or someone like a mom. Otherwise we would not be on this planet, which is the point.

I have strong feelings about Mother’s Day, in case that wasn’t yet obvious, so here goes:

“We’re all mothers here in some way or another,” a 50-something woman once said in one of my writing classes as we discussed some aspect of motherhood in a book.

I immediately thought: “No, we’re not,” but I kept my mouth shut, not wanting to hurt her feelings about not having children.

Sure enough, the rest of the women in the class nodded, and the sole man smiled to himself.

Come Mother’s Day, it is customary for hostesses and doormen to smile at any woman above the age of what? eighteen? twenty-five? and say, “Happy Mother’s Day!”

We’re all mothers here, right?

No, we are not, and to pretend otherwise takes away from those of us who are.

Here’s the thing: You’re not a mother if you have two nieces and five dogs and have given birth to a novel. To be a mother, you need not have given birth, but you need to have taken on the responsibility of nurturing another human being for the rest of your life.

Yep, for the rest of your life. The expectations and responsibilities of a mother never end, even when the children are adults. So all of us, who’ve reached that point, have come to realize. Unless we decide to abdicate our motherly responsibilities, which is possible, but rare.

To be a mother, you need to have taken on what a friend of mine calls “the sheer eternity of it.”

The night that never ends when your toddler has an ear infection, and you discover that sleep interrupted every 90 minutes is a greater torture than not getting any sleep at all. Schlepping to the office the following morning is the ultimate “working mother” experience.

Motherhood is studying up on convection to help your 5th grader with her science fair project even if you couldn’t care less. It’s yelling at your 7th grader to glue the cut-outs on his history fair board straight so it won’t be a sloppy presentation. It’s getting up every morning to fix breakfast and pack lunches, and worrying about dinner every night. It’s driving across town to watch basketball games you don’t care about. It’s putting up with your teenager’s wrath and making him do his homework even when he hates you for it. It’s giving up on a trip that you looked forward to because your son has a pinched nerve.

It’s foregoing a wedding invitation to sit with your college student to pound out a paper he only has eight hours to write because he messed up on the topic in what he wrote before. It’s helping your adult daughter road trip 2,238 miles to move her from one job to another in only one week. It’s welcoming your in-law children to the family table, whether or not they have the same values you took such pains to instill in your children.

But, it’s also blowing bubbles on your baby’s soft tummy until she squeals, snuggling with three deliciously smelling bodies after baths to read a bedtime story (and reading it for the umpteenth time!), or bursting with pride when your son wins a science fair medal. It is telling stories of your life and stories of your children’s lives to their rapt attention; it’s singing silly folk songs full throttle at the Seder table.

Motherhood is in the doing: the feeding, the taking care, the teaching. Motherhood is also in how you comport yourself. You are closely watched, emulated or rejected: Not until my three-year-old yelled back, “One moment, please!” did I realize that that’s what I always said to him. Sigh.

What then, one might interject, about women like a friend of mine who, in the 1960s, had to give up her baby, and didn’t find him again until he was in his thirties? Is she a mother? A biological sense yes, of course, but she is painfully aware that she missed out on all the ups and downs, the hugs and the fights, the late nights and the snuggly mornings, and thirty-some Mother’s Days.

And what about women, like another friend of mine, who chose not to have children? Why call her something she did not want to be? Or what about those, who did want to be mothers but for whom, for whatever reason, motherhood did not pan out?

Please, if we’re going to have a day to celebrate mothers, let it be about motherhood and not womanhood. Equating the two is an affront, not only to mothers but also to those who aren’t, whether by choice or not.

Let’s celebrate weathering the “sheer eternity of it.”

Leave a comment

Dear Reader,

Last night I dreamt about my Aunt Herta, and thus I feel like sharing a bit about her from my point-of-view.

Usually, Herta is on my mind around the time of her birthday, March 19, which is a day before my mom’s, and thus easy to remember.

But last night, I assume she was on my mind because my sister had told me that she had finally managed to connect with Herta’s only grandson, who had then sent her info about a book in which his great-grandfather is mentioned, which of course I knew, having already dug into it as I was Filling in the Blanks of my Jewish Family History many years ago for my book Jumping Over Shadows.

And this grandson—my second cousin once removed in proper genealogical terms, then showed up in my Substack feed, liking that post, which my sister had shared with him, and subscribing to my writing here. Welcome, Michael!

How wonderful is that?

All thanks, in the end, to the family tree work my siblings and I have been doing, which I didn’t much enjoy (Why Are Family Trees So Depressing?). Still, it put the extended family on our minds, and my sister got busy tying up loose ends.

Thoughts about my Aunt Herta are always pleasant, and always comfortable, because she was that kind of person: pleasant and comfortable.

Only late in her life, poignancy crept in, at least from my vantage point, which I might share in an upcoming story.

In any case, Herta is a character in Jumping Over Shadows, and she was, after my grandmother, a good source of family stories for me. Once my grandmother (“Oma”) had passed on, Herta was, in fact, my only link to the family’s past in Reichenberg.

Herta had told me the story of the Queen of the Night cactus, as related in the chapter “Fait Accompli I” of Jumping Over Shadows. I will forever hear her clogs booming up this staircase in the apartment building where my grandfather used to live in Reichenberg, even though, of course, I never actually heard that. I just managed to trod up and down this staircase on a visit in 2016.

Such is the power of telling family stories! Herta would be tickled to bits, I am sure, that some of her stories landed in my book and that I ended up becoming a writer.

She was one of the first people to encourage me to become a writer, long before I seriously considered doing so.

“We need another Utta Danella,” she said to me, referring to a German author we both liked to read at the time.

Unlike my grandmother, who loved to read as a teen but later always had something “more important” to do, Herta loved to read and was a regular at the city library in Wiesbaden, where she had designs on systematically reading all the books, one shelf after another.

I don’t think she ever managed that, but she did read ferociously.

Unlike my grandmother, Herta knew English because her mother Resi had foreseen that English would become one of the main languages of the world and thus had her children tutored in English when it wasn’t offered in high school in Czechoslovakia in the 1940s.

Herta spoke fondly of reading Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat with her tutor. I can still hear her pronounce the title in her German-accented English, followed by “Boy, did we laugh when we read that book!” Which is also why I remembered that title when I stumbled across the above picture from my last trip to Venice in 2017: Three men in a boat!

Herta had lived in Reichenberg (called Liberec since the end of World War II) until 1970 when she and her only daughter (from a brief second marriage) fled Communist Czechoslovakia after the failed 1968 Prague Spring Uprising. They left her brother Ludwig behind (at the time Czech authorities never granted travel visas to an entire family to discourage defection), something my grandmother and my father always faulted her for.

Eventually, Herta surfaced in a refugee camp close to the city of Wiesbaden, where my grandmother lived. Under the erstwhile German Law of Return, any German defecting from the former Eastern bloc was granted pretty much automatic citizenship in what was then West Germany. As a trained accountant and speaking fluent German, it didn’t take her long to land a job in the accounting department of one of Germany’s big department store chains.

It also didn’t take long before Herta became the cheerful aunt my siblings and I hadn’t had until then.

Technically, she was our dad’s first cousin, but to us, she was our aunt. Our actual aunts were in far away America, and only manifested in elaborately wrapped Christmas packages. Herta, on the other hand, became part of our lives.

Herta also became a trusted friend and travel companion of our grandmother.

She loved to travel (another thing I have in common with her). As soon as she could afford it, she got my grandmother to go on bus tours with her.

Herta persuaded my grandmother to do a cruise of Norway with her (my grandmother was afraid of getting seasick but had a great time) and an extended bus tour of England and Scotland (my grandmother was definitely more comfortable on the European continent but nevertheless enjoyed the trip).

And, most wonderful for me, Herta took me on a trip to Vienna when I was fourteen to show me her favorite city.

She introduced me to her favorite Café Heiner, right behind the Steffl (Stephansdom–Vienna’s main cathedral) where one simply had to eat Stefanietorte. To this day, I advise anyone who asks me about Vienna to visit that café and have that torte. And I made Herta climb the 343 steps up the tower of the Steffl, a feat we later loved to reminisce about.

Unfortunately, my little photo album from that trip does not yield any photo of Aunt Herta and me together.

I only have these separate snap shots of us; but the above postcard I sent to my grandmother reports, in my authentic 14-year-old voice, what a great time I was having with Aunt Herta showing me around Vienna.

What a gift, for my aunt to take me on a trip!

That’s how one creates memories, and how one lives on, in the hearts and minds of the next generation.

Towards the end of her life, the first time I visited her in the nursing home, in 2002, I began wondering about who she had been in her youth:

After my visit with Herta, I asked my sister to dig out our grandfather’s memoirs, which had been stored in her basement along with other family documents. I wanted to see if they would provide me with my grandfather’s take on his niece, Herta, on her mother, Resi, and on their whole life in Reichenberg.

Jumping Over Shadows, p. 178

Thus I have Herta to thank for sending me on the journey of teasing out the family story that became the second narrative thread in my memoir.

I am pretty sure she would have been thrilled about that.

Leave a comment

On last week’s lecture trip to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, it seemed to me that the students in the History of the Holocaust class I presented to at Northern Michigan University were particularly interested in how I turned my research and my mother-in-law’s experience into a children’s book (Natalie and the Nazi Soldiers).

So, for today’s post, I’ll give you a glimpse into that process.

Once I’d decided to finally make this book happen, my first order of business was to assemble a team, because no book is created by just the writer:

• Editors

• Book Designer

• Illustrator

• Art Director

• Proofreaders

I got input from several editors well versed in illustrated children’s books. One such input almost derailed the project (read about that in The Book That Almost Wasn’t). Another editor helped me make sure that the story was compelling, and that the vocabulary would work for early readers. This was a particular worry of mine because the story, while written in English, rides on some expressions in French and German.

My wonderful book designer Melinda Martin was a referral by the equally wonderful Beth Lottig, who’d helped me bring How to Write Compelling Stories from Family History to life.

Melinda blew my mind with her initial grand suggestion of how to lay out the flow of illustrations in the book:

Turns out, the famed narrative arc, inherent to all good fiction, can also be depicted by the arrangement of the illustrations throughout a children’s book.

At the book’s beginning, the illustrations are on the left-hand side of the “spread.” (Picture books are thought about in spreads, i.e. the double pages readers face when they open and leaf through the book.)

The climax of the story—in my book’s case, the showdown between Natalie and a Nazi officer, has text and images centered, on both pages.

As the book wraps up, illustrations are on the right side of the spread and the text is on the left. That’s the denouement.

Can you see that arc?

Melinda pointed out to me that, for example, this is how Maurice Sendak set up Where the Wild Things Are.

Once you know this, you’ll see it. But who knew?

Creating Natalie as a character on the page was another challenge.

I wanted the main characters in the book, namely Natalie and Hermine, the woman who was hiding with Natalie, to look as close to the real people as possible.

This is, however, a story about a hidden child. And in hiding, one is definitely not taking pictures.

Thus, the earliest picture our family has of my mother-in-law as a child, besides baby and toddler pictures before WWII, is the one below, taken in 1946, two years after she was liberated by US soldiers.

Clearly, in 1946, my mother-in-law, whose name was indeed Natalie but whom everybody called Nana, was still in the French countryside, helping with farm work as she had been while in hiding. Unfortunately, no one in the family that I could contact knows who the other people in this photo are.

We do know, however, that Nana, Hermine, her dad and her siblings, who thankfully all survived, stayed in the French countryside long after liberation. They had nowhere else to go. The business of Nana’s dad and the family’s home in Paris did not exist anymore, and it took him quite some time to reestablish himself and his family in Paris.

In this picture, Nana is two years older than she is in the story of Natalie and the Nazi Soldiers. She’s also remarkably chubbier than she would have been while in hiding, when food was scarce. Nana liked to tell the story of how her two older brothers, who were hiding on another farm nearby, would gorge themselves on whatever unripe fruit they could find, only to suffer the consequences of “shishul”—the Yiddish word for diarrhea. Once the Nazis had surrendered in France in August 1944, country life slowly resumed, and food was available again after two years of never knowing when you’d get your next meal. Having suffered hunger for two years, Nana had learned to stuff herself when she could, and having plenty of food available remained an important need for the rest of her life.

For the story of being a hidden child, I instructed my lovely illustrator, Ste Johnson, to draw Natalie with slimmer features.

Another challenge remained, however: Nana always had dark, super curly black hair. As you can see in the above image, her hair was kept short during those years in the country, where washing happened in the local pond and fleas were a constant issue.

Here are the first illustrations of Natalie as a character, based on the above image:

We found that, unfortunately, depicting Natalie with her real-life short hair made her look like an African-American girl in this black-and-white illustration, particularly to a mainly American audience, and that would not be accurate.

Given that Natalie and the Nazi Soldiers was going to be a serious book about a serious topic, I wanted the illustrations to be black and white line drawings with the occasional touch of color. Patricia Polacco’s The Blessing Cup was my model for that. I found my illustrator, Ste Johnson, looking for that kind of illustration. At the time, his portfolio on hireanillustrator.com featured black and white drawings he’d done for an educational series about life in the American colonies. Here, I thought (rightfully so, it turned out), is someone who can depict other periods in time, in other countries (he himself lives in Sheffield in the UK), in a serious but child-friendly manner.

To fix the hairstyle issue, I did more research on what kind of hairstyles girls tended to wear in France in the 1940s, and we settled on a short bob hairstyle for Natalie. It wasn’t factually what she looked like, but I took this creative license so that she would work as the character of a Jewish girl.

One aspect I truly loved about the process of having the book illustrated was seeing how the story would be interpreted through illustrations.

For example, the above barnyard scene. It is my favorite spread in the book. I love the chickens! However, the chickens are nowhere in the text. They were added by Ste because that’s how he imagined that scene.

This is exactly the kind of collaboration that rounds out the story, that makes it bigger, better, and more alive than my words alone.

I am fortunate that for all my books, the art director, the person who makes sure that the book’s whole look, namely the colors, layout, and fonts work well together, is my brother. He does this for a living, but he also gets me. He’s the only one who can say that something is “me.” To boot, he specializes in typography, and thus he picks the font that will work best for the book. He has had a serious hand in all my book cover designs, and throughout the entire book production, it is wonderful to be able to rely on his taste and expertise.

Lastly, as the book was taking on form, we had to scrutinize the interplay between words and illustrations, which only revealed itself once book designer Melinda had laid out Ste’s illustrations with my text.

Thankfully, my family and a few friends helped with proofreading.

Could words be cut because they were superfluous now that we had pictures? Indeed, some could.

Also, did the images fit the text?

In the above scene, for example, I decided to change the text to match the image as that was easier than changing the illustration, and thankfully, that worked just as well. The original text in the above scene had read, “She yanked Mimi back” (end of first paragraph). However, as drawn, “pushed Mimi back” was the more apt description.

Even after all that reviewing, the last step before going to print is checking the advance reader copies to see how the book actually looks as a book and not just as something you look at on a screen or print out on pieces of paper.

Again, issues revealed themselves. For example, the jeep with the American soldiers, a crucial plot item in one of the last scenes, had landed in the fold of the book and was hardly visible (see image above). Thus my note to move it to the right.

So much for today’s look behind the scenes of creating this picture book. It was an arduous process, which, all in all, took about nine months. Plenty of times I was getting annoyed at how much needed to be fiddled with in a book of 32 pages, but then again, it has lots of moving parts, and I am thankful for the ultimately pristine product.

Let me know what questions you have!

Leave a comment

Just a short missive today, dear readers, as I am on lecture tour in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan this week, talking about my children’s book Natalie and the Nazi Soldiers to the Jewish communities there, as well as college students, high schoolers and school children.

Since I am traveling right now thanks to being a writer, I thought I’d leave you with my thoughts on

Who’s a writer?

The answer is quite simple: Someone who writes!

If you process life by writing, be it journals, long texts to friends, essays on Substack, sweet or sad poems, investigative reports, or wild science fiction novels—you’re a writer.

I’ll say it again:

If you process life by writing, you’re a writer.

In my workshops, some participants still get wide eyed when I say that if you process life by writing, you’re a writer. It seems that often, a grand vision is attached to being a writer, such as having at least one book published or owning a writing studio above the garage like Hemingway in Key West, and you can’t be a writer until you have all that.

But, really, you just gotta be someone who writes.

Because not everybody does that, nor should everyone aspire to. Other people paint, compose music, build tables, or sew quilts—all of which I don’t do.

Not everyone can write, in the sense of crafting a story or an article, or wants to write, but everyone can be creative.

If you’re a writer, you’re not afraid to write. Writing may not come easy, but it is what you do. And you tend to see the world through words.

There’s a bit of a misconception I run into occasionally that being an author and being a writer are the same thing. They are not. To be an author, you do need to have authored something, i.e. put something out into the world for others to read. It doesn’t have to be a book—although most people would associate being an author with someone who has published at least one book, but you do need to be out there with a text.

It used to be that you had to get the approval of the publishing gatekeepers to be published, but these days, you can go it alone, thankfully. So, if you only write on Substack, you can call yourself an author if you want, at least in my opinion.

Ok, so much for today from this author and writer—until next week!

Leave a comment

Dear Readers,

This Sunday I’m embarking on a lecture tour to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to talk to the two Jewish communities in Marquette and Houghton/Hancock, as well as local college and high school students, and school children about my book Natalie and the Nazi Soldiers.

This trip grew out of the impromptu visit my husband and I made to Temple Jacob up in Hancock, Michigan, last September, and me falling in love with the reality of a Jewish community in such a remote place:

Now I am beyond thrilled to be offering a Yom HaShoah program for this community, sharing the story of my mother-in-law’s experience as a hidden child in France during the Holocaust, and what it took to make her memories into an award-winning children’s book.

Natalie and the Nazi Soldiers was published three years ago, in time for the annual Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) commemoration, observed by Jewish communities worldwide.

In retrospect I marvel at the fact that this book almost didn’t make it, and so I thought I’d share here the twisted path of creating this book, which was so very much a heart project of mine.

How long did it take to write? Create? Publish?

This is a standard question authors are asked in interviews and ordinary conversations, but, believe it or not, the origins of a book are not necessarily easy to pinpoint.

However, I do know exactly when I got the idea for this book:

Back in 2008, when my youngest child was reading Patricia Polacco’s magnificent The Butterfly in 3rd grade, a lightbulb went off in my mind: We have a story like that!—the story of a hidden child in France during the Holocaust, and I should do something with that story!

Right from the beginning I knew that this needed to be a children’s book, written from a child’s point-of-view, because the protagonist is my mother-in-law at age eight.

When did I set about writing the book?

Thanks to my photo archive, I do know exactly when I worked on the first draft:

In January 2014, I had a writer’s residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (heaven on earth for a creative person!), and there I developed the basic structure of Natalie and the Nazi Soldiers.

First, I studied Patricia Polacco’s The Butterfly, noting how many page spreads it had, and what happened on each spread.

Illustrated children’s books are thought of in spreads, i.e. the double pages you look at when you open the book.

How did The Butterfly begin? How did the story develop? Where was the climax? How did it wrap up?

That study of mine is the first row of paper notes in the above picture.

Then, as you can see from the second row of notes in the picture above, I worked on how I could shape my mother-in-law’s memories into a cohesive storyline that would work for this kind of book.

I also studied how to write a children’s book.

Sunny Virginia winter afternoons were spent sitting outside, digging into guides like Writing Picture Books by Ann Whitford Paul.

Even though I had plenty of creative writing experience by then (Jumping Over Shadows was already in the works), what did I know about writing children’s books? Exactly nothing! Creative nonfiction was, and still is, my expertise.

Turns out writing a children’s book is quite a challenge.

There’s got to be action, i.e. a scene, on every spread. Otherwise, what is the illustrator going to draw if nothing is happening?

It’s all action driven. Each spread needs to end on a beat that makes you want to turn the page.

And it all has to be done in very few words.

By the end of that two-week residency in 2014, I had a draft manuscript.

That November, I did a “test drive” of the manuscript, reading it to a class of third and fourth graders at my kids’ school on the anniversary of Kristallnacht. This was tremendously helpful as the kids asked about what happened to the piglet at the end of the story, and I thus realized I had a dangling thread that I needed to tie up. Sadly, right after this reading, my friend the school librarian got the shocking news that her niece had been stabbed to death waiting for a bus in Israel (see my article in Tablet Magazine).

The next seven years, on and off, while I wrote, polished, and published my two other books, I got feedback from children’s book editors. I wanted to make sure, for example, that the vocabulary would be appropriate for early readers, ages 7-9. I also wanted to make sure that the storyline worked and was compelling enough.

Unfortunately, one of the editors I worked with derailed the project, mainly in my mind, by suggesting all kinds of alternate storylines.

It should be a middle-grade book, and I should develop the entire backstory, because this story, of course, has a big backstory. Many more characters could be fleshed out, and the whole setup could be operatic.

That was in 2019, and I spent the following few years being unsure of the book and dabbling in writing the backstory.

Such are the pitfalls of showing your work to people who you think know more about the genre than you do. Their challenges to your premise might be helpful, or they might be entirely unhelpful.

In the summer of 2022, I finally decided I was going to stick to my original concept of the book.

I couldn’t make the editor’s idea for a bigger version work. I didn’t have the passion for that, but I also knew that not bringing this book into the world would be something I’d regret on my deathbed. Such considerations are morbid, I know, they are a productive filter for me.

This book was the story of my children’s grandmother, and I had the power to package and preserve it for future generations. I was going to find an illustrator and create this book!

Finding the right illustrator had been another major hang-up, again mainly in my head, in getting this book out into the world.

Whenever I perused illustrator sites, I got bogged down looking through all the cutesy illustrations. This was not going to be a cutesy book! I envisioned mainly black and white line drawings, with a dab of color here and there, to go with the more serious subject matter.

Thanks to Beth Lottig of Inspire Books, who had done the layout for my second book How to Write Compelling Stories from Family History), I found the wonderful picture book designer Melinda Martin, and she suggested I check out hireanillustrator.com. There, finally, I found Ste Johnson, who ended up illustrating Natalie and the Nazi Soldiers.

I am so, so happy with his work, and in an upcoming post I shall share a bit about our process of designing and illustrating this book.

Leave a comment

Following up on my story about my trip to the monasteries of Marsaba and St. George in the Judean Hills, today I want to take you inside such a Greek monastery clinging to a cliff.

(Side note: Should this missive be truncated due to the photos, please click on “View entire message” [either at the top or bottom of the email], and you’ll be able to view it in its entirety.)

Didn’t I mention previously that women aren’t allowed inside?

Indeed they aren’t, but there is one intact monastery that isn’t operating as a monastery anymore but rather as a tourist site that can be visited, even by women:

The Monastery of Temptation above Jericho

Built into a steep cliff face overlooking the Jordan Valley, the earliest monastery there was built by the Byzantines in the 6th century AD at the site of the cave traditionally believed to be where Jesus spent forty days and forty nights fasting and meditating during the temptation of Satan.

Being able to go inside such a Greek monastery is precisely why I wanted to visit! I find these monasteries fascinating—the curious concept of dwelling in the arid, generally inhospitable desert of the Judean Hills, and the architectural feat of building into the side of a cliff.

Just as with Marsaba and St. George, wanting to visit the Monastery of Temptation is one thing, actually being able to go is another, given their location in the West Bank, which can erupt into political unrest at any time.

The Monastery of Temptation hovers above the city of Jericho, located in Area A of the West Bank, and is thus entirely under the control of the Palestinian Authority.

Since the Oslo Accords, the West Bank has been divided into a web of Area A, B, and C territories, a rather inconvenient situation, so we learned from our guides. To enter or exit Area A, you have to go through a border checkpoint, which can close at the slightest whiff of trouble.

Israelis are not supposed to enter Area A, which makes me, as a Jew, uncomfortable, to say the least. Unlike our trip to Marsaba and St. George, where we rode around with an Israeli guide in Areas B and C, for this excursion, which I’d also booked through an Israeli tour operator, we were handed off to a Palestinian tour operator at the border between Israeli and Palestinian territory.

My daughter and I did this tour in March 2022, on a trip to Israel right after it had reopened for visitors after the Coronavirus pandemic—a time when there were blissfully few other tourists. We were only six people on this tour that first took us to Bethlehem, where I’d been before but my daughter hadn’t. Seeing Bethlehem and what the Church of Nativity was all about had been her goal, while mine had been, obviously, seeing the Monastery of Temptation. This was a rather outlandish desire, judging by everyone else’s reaction (including my husband’s, who refused to go on that trip). Thankfully, my daughter was game.

After the visit to Bethlehem, our four travel companions proceeded to the Dead Sea, while the two of us rode on in the backseat of the private car of our designated and rather mellow Arab driver.

Descending the hairpin curves of the steep road to Jericho, a rosary and amulets dangling from his rearview mirror, he informed us that he sends his kids to a “very expensive” Christian school, because the public school is “all about Islam.” We cautiously “aha’ed,” having agreed between ourselves to keep quiet about being Jewish. For this excursion, we’d just be American tourists and go for Catholic if challenged. At least I could mimic that, having grown up in a secular, nominally Catholic, German-American family (see my book Jumping Over Shadows for my conversion story).

When I fished a banana from our backpack and began munching it while we were hurtling towards Jericho, the driver asked: “What are you eating?”

“A banana.”

“That’s not a banana! No, no, no! I show you real bananas! In Jericho, we have the best bananas in the world!”

Typical tourist-guide thing to say, I thought to myself and finished my banana.

Since I have celiac and often can’t eat what’s offered on tours, I always bring my own food. Still, our guides in Bethlehem had been extra obliging once they’d heard that I couldn’t eat the pastries they procured for us at various roadside bakeries. Promptly they stopped at a falafel stand set up in the breezeway of a Bethlehem apartment building. A swarm of young men was instructed to change their fryer oil to fry up a fresh batch for me. Soon, a tray of piping hot falafel was proffered through the open car window. I swiftly offered a copious baksheesh before diving into the crispy falafel. A true delight for the gluten-free among us!

The view towards the Dead Sea from the Jericho cable car

To reach the Mount of Temptation Monastery, you take a cute made-in-Austria cable car up the mountain, swaying above the archeological site of Jericho, where incidentally, signage makes no mention of its Biblical significance:

Here you can see the string of apartment rooms and domed squat towers built into the side of the mountain that form the Mount of Temptation Monastery (just to its left you see three of red cabins of the cable car), as viewed from Jericho.

This monastery has weird opening hours with breaks for lunch (apparently) and early afternoon closures, but we arrived in time for an afternoon visit at the seemingly deserted site.

If you zoom in on the cross above the monastery’s doorway, you’ll see 1899 inscribed, which is when the modern day monastery was built by the Orthodox church.

Notice the raw rockface on the right side of the picture—that’s the side of the mountain into which this is built.

The above is my favorite picture of our trip to the Mount of Temptation Monastery, because it shows how this feat was built: raw rockface on the right, narrow walkway in the middle, doors to monks’ rooms on the left.

My second favorite view is from the crude cave chapel that marks the stone where Jesus supposedly sat during his fast. Again, you can see how the monastery is a build-out from the cave.

Here’s the view from one of the monk’s rooms that we could enter. You can faintly see the Jordan Valley spreading down below.

Inside the chapel at the Mount of Temptation Monastery, the squat domed building you see on the left end of the panorama photo I shared above.

The accoutrements of modern day life await outside the monastery entrance.

These days, tourist restaurants are built into the side of a mountain. It was curiously empty when we were there, although we did encounter a troupe of squealing Palestinian school children, clearly on a field trip, on their way up just as we swung back into the cable car station in Jericho, where our driver was dutifully awaiting us.

And he hadn’t forgotten about the bananas.

As we were leaving bustling Jericho, he stopped at this stand and hollered at the vendor to bring him a bushel of bananas.

Our driver, so it turned out, was disabled and could only move around laboriously on two crutches, possibly the result of childhood polio. At least that’s what it looked like to me. Thus it was his habit to pull up to a stand like this one, roll down his window, and yell at the vendor to bring him whatever he wanted. In Bethlehem he had the cell phone number of his regular vendors, and by the time he appeared in his car, they were ready with his order. Jericho wasn’t his stomping grounds but still, the strategy worked. He procured a bushel of bananas for me.

Roaring out of Jericho and up the hills towards the border checkpoint into Jerusalem, I sat in his backseat, savoring these Jericho bananas and counting myself lucky to have accomplished the last leg in my quest to visit all of the available Greek monasteries in the Judean Hills.

The bananas were delicious, by the way. But out of this world? Not in my estimation.

Leave a comment

My husband and I have been busy groundskeeping on our property in NW Indiana. Come March, when the snow is gone but the trees haven’t budded yet, it’s time to prune the saplings we planted more than five years ago.

Few of them flourished as they kept getting beheaded by hungry deer at the end of winter. Thus, two years ago, we got wiser and stuck the more than 200 survivors into tree tubes. Sure enough, most of them grew happily in these tubes made of plastic milk jugs and have now grown higher than we are. But this also means that every spring we have to remove the tubes, clean out old leaves, trim weeds, and prune superfluous branches. It’s fiddly, leg- and back-breaking work, particularly if, like us, you’re not used to hours of physical labor, two weeks in a row.

To boot, our property is populated by old pin oaks, who, over the winter, throw off millions of branches, to say nothing of entire trees coming down during storms. So, before the time comes to mow the lawns again, somebody (i.e. us) has to pick up all those branches and remove rotten timber lying around. We employ our tractor for the heavy stuff, and our cute little Kubota truck for the myriad of pesky branches, and we set to work, feeling like a cleaning crew, which we basically are.

And that brings me to my deeper story about owning land in the Great Lakes region of the Midwest and owning a tractor, because, you see, it has all happened before in my family.

*

“We have this tractor because of your grandfather,” my husband says as he walks around our brand new 4720 John Deere, a year after we acquired 77 acres in northwestern Indiana.

“How so?” I ask.

“Well, your grandfather had a tractor, and you have good memories of it, so it made sense to you that we’d have one, too.”

Sometimes he knows me better than I do. Or rather, he sees my life’s threads before I do.

My grandparents had a farm in Michigan.

Calling it a farm is a misnomer, because they didn’t grow anything there, nor did they keep animals, but “farm” sounds good. It was merely 26 acres, deep in the countryside. So deep that as a kid I had no idea where it was other than a long drive from my grandparents’ home in the Detroit suburbs. (I later learned that it was in the Lapeer area.)

The family referred to the property as “the A-frame.”

For years the A-frame, built by my grandfather and my two uncles on the hill overlooking the pond, tyrannized the extended family. For weekends on end, my aunts would be single moms while their husbands toiled laying foundation, mounting walls, then roof tiles, often in the summer heat, to say nothing of hanging drywall.

Meanwhile I, the oldest child of my grandparents’ only daughter, grew up in far away Germany. I saw the A-frame only once when I visited for three weeks over Easter in 1971.

Two years later my grandfather died suddenly after a fall playing ice hockey on his pond with the family. He banged his head, blacked out, but came to and walked up to the house before fainting again, never to regain consciousness. (Curiously, my mother died from the same kind of brain hemorrhage after a fall, not playing ice hockey, though, see my post Death Can Be Beautiful). Upon hearing the news, my mother flew to Detroit from Germany, only to arrive too late for her father’s funeral. That her mother didn’t wait with her dad’s funeral until my mom arrived caused a permanent rift with her mother, among other things, but that’s another story.

A few years later, after another husband, or maybe during his tenure, the A-frame burned down under “mysterious” circumstances, and my grandmother reaped the insurance money. A house out in the nowhere was not for a lively widow in her early sixties.

When I was visiting in 1971, however, my grandfather’s dream of living in the country was alive and well.

At that time only the first floor of the A-frame was finished, being, in effect, a walk-out basement. My mom and I were given the master bedroom with adjacent bathroom where the toilet stuck out of an unfinished wall. Such a floating toilet was a wonder to me.

My grandmother must have slept on one of the living room couches as I don’t remember there being another bedroom, at least not one that was habitable. My grandfather had a trailer parked a short walk from the A-frame that was his space. I don’t know how often he retreated there to escape my grandmother’s antics; that was beyond the realm of my eight-year-old awareness.

From the A-frame to the mailbox it was a five-minute drive with my grandfather’s tractor.

That’s how time and space were measured. Every day we rode out on the tractor, my grandfather and I, with me in the seat on the fender, to get the mail and check on the property.

That you could have a property so vast that getting the mail was an undertaking astounded me, coming from a country where land is cut into compact parcels, the borders of which are always in sight. Here, I couldn’t tell where my grandparents’ property ended and someone else’s began. Neighbors were invisible; fences were not a thing, and only the lake beyond the hill beyond the pond was not entirely owned by my grandparents.

These days, in northwestern Indiana, we have a gravel road just like my grandparents’ driveway.

We cut it into the woods to the spot where we eventually built our pole barn (including an apartment), overlooking one of our ponds. We bought that tractor, a John Deere, not a grey Ford like my grandfather’s, to be able to tend to the property: mow our ten acres of open meadow, plow snow off the gravel road, and, more than anything else, it turned out, haul fallen logs from the driveway, trails, and lawns.

When I walk through our barren woods at the end of winter, I can feel my eight-year-old self again, helping my grandfather clear out tree trunks.

I can sense the hard metal of the chain that my grandfather had slung around a tree stump in my hands, my palms getting hot against the chain links. I strain against the weight of the stump behind me, pulling the chain, aiming for the hook at the rear of the tractor that my grandfather is backing up towards me. The engine drones in my ears. The tractor’s giant back wheels, deeply grooved and as tall as I am, crunch up the brambles in front of me. The tractor inches towards me, and I inch towards it, and eventually I make it. I slip a chain link into the hook. My grandfather waves for me to step back, and I jump into more brambles to watch the work continue.

Oh, how strong and useful I feel!

My grandfather instructed me to step back once he signaled me, “Something could come loose and snap back at you.”

Indeed, a branch snapped back at my husband’s shin one March when he climbed from our tractor to move a log that was jamming the front loader. Thankfully it didn’t hit his knee or it would have shattered it, but the resulting bruise and swelling had him hobbling for weeks.

Standing in my grandfather’s woods in 1971, I watch Grandpa shift the tractor out of reverse, and then sit twisted, his right handing clasping the steering wheel as he maneuvers the tractor and turns to see what is happening behind him. The tractor strains against the weight of the stump. Not that the tractor isn’t stronger than me, but the stump got caught in the brambles. They are clingy with their thorns, and their roots are firmly planted in the ground. Spindly as they were, they’re still powerful. The tractor sputters black wads of diesel fumes from its stove pipe exhaust. All the while I am hopping in my thicket, bursting for joy at that power play, cheering for the tractor and my grandfather.

Eventually the stump lurches free of the brambles’ clutch, and I jump out of the woods and onto my seat on the fender, and we roar to where we are assembling a wood pile for burning.

How many times we did this, I don’t remember. Sometimes I managed to hook the chain, sometimes I didn’t. Sometimes those fallen trees were simply too heavy, or the chain was too short, or my grandfather couldn’t get the tractor close enough.

I loved this kind of work; I loved being outside even if the weather was dank, and the woods were muddy.

I didn’t get hungry, and I didn’t get cold. I loved being able to do such hard work. I wanted to be out of the house, away from my grandmother and her religious babble. She was, at that time, into the Rosicrucian Order, and would take every opportunity to slip a religious quote into everyday happenings. Rather tellingly, I remember none of them. Instead I remember that she let me peruse the kitchen cabinet where she kept my grandfather’s favorite cream-filled, chocolate glazed cookies. During those three weeks of my visit, she always restocked them so Grandpa wouldn’t realize I was eating them.

My grandfather was not the cuddly type, and he probably yelled at me a few times, or worse, poked fun, because I wasn’t understanding something with my limited English and my ignorance of outdoor work. Up until then I had only pushed my parents’ lawn mower and clipped the grass around my mother’s flower beds. If he did yell at me, it is not stored in my memory. Instead I remember that quiet rhythm of steady work, the bumpy ride on the tractor’s fender, and the thrill of steering the tractor myself that one time when Grandpa put me on his lap and let me hold the steering wheel on a straight part of the driveway.

He didn’t treat me as a child with limited capabilities. He treated me as a person with an able body.

Perhaps he even expected too much, but I loved rising to the occasion. I might have been smaller and weaker than he, but I could still do things. He expected me to help, and he needed me to help. He couldn’t run the tractor and fit the chain into its rear at the same time. Even as a small person, I could do that. And at the end of the day, it felt good to have worked, even if my palms were blistery.

One evening, Grandpa sat me down and recorded our conversation about removing a tree stump with the tractor (Click here to listen to a snippet of that conversation and revel in my thick German accent! Be sure to put the volume way up.)

These days, our tractor isn’t anything like my grandfather’s. It’s green and yellow, not grey and maroon; it’s got an air-conditioned cab, not a simple butt-fitted seat. There is no seat on the fender, much to my chagrin. I have yet to learn how to operate it with all its accoutrements.

For now, I am perfectly happy to stand on the sidelines, directing my husband when he backs it up to attach the brush hog before he sets off to mow the meadow. Or even better, waving him maneuver the front pinchers to pick up a pile of branches.

But what I’m really itching to do, is to get deeper into the woods, sling a chain around a fallen tree, and hitch it to the tractor to be pulled out. Because that, in my heart and in my bones, is real work.

As is, I have come to learn, pruning 200+ trees and refitting them into their growing tubes. Groundskeeping in the Great Lakes region of the Midwest is a family tradition, after all!

Stories in which the past and the present connect are a great entryway to write compelling stories from family history. More on that in my book:

Leave a comment

Dear Reader,

Israel has been very much on my mind these days as the life of friends and family there is ruled by constant air raid alarms.

So I thought for today I’d take you along one of the greatest tours I have experienced visiting Israel. Incidentally it has also been exactly ten years since I went on that adventure. This tour ranks among those I am grateful to have gone on when a window of time and peace in the region presented itself. Unfortunately I have seen, more than once, that places and countries I wanted to see have become unsafe to travel to.

(Side note: Should this missive be truncated due to the photos, please click on “View entire message” [either at the top or bottom of the email], and you’ll be able to view it in its entirety.)

Always, always, I wanted to see the Greek Orthodox monasteries of Marsaba and St. George, castlelike structures built into the cliffs of the Judean Hills.

On all my trips to Israel until March 2016, it had been either too hot (the desert wadis are not places to visit in the summer), or too dangerous (because of political unrest), or I was simply too busy with other things (seeing family and friends, learning Hebrew, and visiting other sights) to actually attempt to see them.

But on that trip, I finally did it.

I did something I always said (mainly to myself), that I wanted to do.

My research turned up a Jeep tour that would fetch us (my son and daughter were doing gap years in Israel at the time) from our Jerusalem hotel and take us out into the West Bank to see the monasteries. I texted my daughter whether we should do it on that one day when it looked like it could work out, she texted back, “Let’s do it!”

Mind you, traveling out there is not without its hazards, see sign above. You absolutely need a guide who knows his way around. In addition, the monasteries are remote, isolated, as the monks want to live as undisturbed as possible.

Once we leave Jerusalem and are off-roading, we stop by an 800-year-old cistern (which can supply the Bedouin family that lives close by with water for up to three years), pet a new-born lamb, and spot Israel’s national bird, the hoopoe, sitting on the rocks of a Bedouin grave.

Not until we reach the edge of the Kidron Valley does the magical castle of the Marsaba Monastery, clinging to the cliff on the valley’s opposite side, appear in our car window.

Founded in the 5th century CE, the Marsaba Monastery has been in continuous use since then. About twenty monks live there these days. Inadvertently, I caught one of them in the above photo, descending the stairs under the copper dome.

It is a wonderous castle, isn’t it? Fortified by the crusaders in the 11th and 12th centuries, it boasts the architecture of their sturdy fortress walls and towers.

Women are not allowed inside the monasteries, so, being a party of two men and two women, we were only able to view Marsaba from the opposite cliff.

The cliff is also a nice spot for a break of cookies and mint tea, prepared by our guide in the back of his Jeep.

On we travel across the Judean Hills and encounter traffic jams West Bank-style.

My first glimpse of the St. George Monastery, built into the gorge of Wadi Qelt, a canyon in the hills rising from the plain of Jericho to the heights of Jerusalem.

St. George is not as remote as Marsaba, thus souvenir sellers await us.

There’s also a viewing platform, convenient for us tourists and the souvenir sellers, but how is this for the monks? They’re not making money from entrance fees, and they want to live in seclusion, yet they have a balcony in front of their house, with people gawking at them? Hmm, of course I’m one of those gawkers…

Likewise, more adventuring tourists also dot the cliff edge opposite Marsaba, but at least there’s no structure for them!

Thankfully, I console myself, the harsh climate probably keeps tourists away most of the time.

Crosses mark the monastery’s claim to its territory on the surrounding hills.

Founded in 480 CE, St. George was destroyed by the Persians in 614 CE, and not really restored until the late 19th century. You can see that its architecture is quite different from that of Marsaba.

In the upper right corner of the above picture you can see an abandoned (or unfinished) cliff dwelling, which is basically an extension added onto a cave in the rock. That’s how these monasteries were constructed: Clinging to the side of a steep cliff, their rooms are essentially built-out “balconies” from caves.

Notice the two flags hissed at St. George: The red and white flag of St. George’s Cross and the blue and white Greek flag, both identifying the premises as the Greek Orthodox Monastery St. George of Choziba.

“Chozeba” is mentioned in the Bible (I Chronicles, 4:22) as a place in Judah. It may mean something like “deceitful” or “disappointing”—possibly referring to a seasonal stream that dries up (= a wadi) in the hotter months, thus “deceiving” desert travelers, who might be expecting water.

Speaking of water: Before we leave, we visit the ruin of an aqueduct built by King Herod (73-4 BCE) in Wadi Qelt.

As we leave the wonders of the wadis behind us and drive back to Jerusalem, I sit in the back of the Jeep and smile to myself. I am tired, sweaty, and dusty, but I also feel like I’m flying, floating on the inside.

Why does it feel so great to have seen the monasteries?

Sure, they are magnificent sites, and I am happy that I finally managed to see them.

But more than that, I realize, by having made this trip, I have kept a promise to myself.

There is special power in that.

Keeping a promise to yourself boosts your confidence in yourself (your self confidence!) because you actually did what you told yourself you would do.

When you fulfill such a promise, you grow a little on the inside. You gain a little pride in yourself. You float.

Leave a comment

Dear Readers,

Life is big; family history is big, and thus we tend to think of any writing based on family history as a big project—a book project. However, writing a book is a daunting task. Therefore, quite often, capturing stories from family history is never attempted, even though we all have stories to tell.

There is, however, another way:

Start small.

Focus on learning how to write one short family story.

A memoir does not have to be a book.

Regarding shorter pieces, I am often asked:

What’s the difference between a personal essay and a memoir?

While a personal essay might bring in some memories, it is a story of the present, in which you relate an insight, a realization, an epiphany. A memoir, on the other hand, is a story of the past, even if it is the recent past. It can be short, but it relies on memory and aims to find the meaning of that memory. That’s the difference.

You are more likely to find success by going small, by distilling one particular event into a short memoir.

Start with whatever story you find most interesting.

Having taught memoir writing for more than ten years, I know that crafting a story from real life is best learned by focusing on one event.

Thankfully, one well-crafted scene can capture more of the mosaic of life than 25 pages of exposition.

Furthermore, by going small, you avoid the structural challenges of a larger work.

Completing this one story will not only give you the satisfaction of actually “having done something with” a family story, it will also teach you a lot about how to tell and write this kind of story.

If you’re so inclined, try to get it published. The chances of having a short piece published are much higher. There are so many online publications and Substacks out there these days, you might just be able to find one that is interested in your topic. Or better yet, start your own Substack and publish your stories there, easily shared with your family, friends and others who might be interested.

A completed story also gives you something to work with.

It sets you on your path. Write another one, then another. Soon you might find that they congregate around a certain topic, and you could create a story collection, or a memoir of linked essays. And pretty soon, you’ll have written a bunch of stories, bringing your family history to life!

I have found, for example, that the project of writing about my father’s sudden death that I began almost a year ago with my siblings has, in the meantime, yielded a collection of “Dad stories.” And it has slowly dawned on me that I might actually have produced the draft of my next book, without setting out to do so.

But, again, you don’t have to write a book. Collecting a few anecdotes about a person (like I did with my Little Klaus post) suffices, because, as I like to reiterate:

Something is better than nothing.

And you know what? After I published that post, my brother ran with it and created a booklet about our uncle, who died so young, featuring the stories I had written and a collection of beautiful black and white photos we have of our uncle.

One small story can lead to so many more things!

Leave a comment

This post is a slightly altered excerpt from my guide How to Write Compelling Stories from Family History:

Dear Reader,

I really appreciated receiving all the different comments to last week’s post, Why Are Family Trees so Depressing? It was evident to me, even before I published that post, that my take on the family tree was not the norm, but the variation in the experiences readers shared has been fascinating.

One reader remarked on something I had also noticed in assembling my family tree: “The information is always more detailed on the men’s side than the women’s.”

We had a short exchange about why that might be, and I’d love to get your take on that if you have one! Some of it, I contend, might simply be that the genealogy platform looks for input on people’s profession more than it does personal traits or homemaking skills. And in general, men in the past certainly had more of a notable life, particularly outside the family, than the women.

But then it occurred to me, regardless of the family tree, that, in fact, what often actually gets passed on and talked about by the following generations are the kind of things women did, particularly if they were primarily homemakers. The home someone creates is more important to the family than a grandfather’s career, isn’t it?

Could it be then, I wonder, that women created and passed on more of the actual legacy?

How much do the men's grander careers actually matter? If it's Grandma's quilt that the next generation cherishes and passes on? Who has the last laugh then?

And so, for today, I am happy to share one such legacy, namely the story of one of my German grandmother’s signature dishes that my kids love just as much as my siblings and I.

Because of her recipes, my grandmother is an entity for my kids who never met her. She was also an educated woman, an elementary school teacher, and the family’s sole breadwinner after WWII until my grandfather was able to find work.

Oma had a large influence on my siblings and me, but for the next generation? She lives on because of her dishes!

“Could you make Buchteln again?” my 25-year-old son asked last year.

I frowned and smiled. On the one hand, I was glad he was asking for one of my grandmother’s signature dishes, a childhood favorite that my children also loved: buttery yeast dough rolled into small balls, arranged and baked in a casserole dish until golden brown, served warm with chocolate sauce.

Buchteln is a Mehlspeise, literally meaning “flour dish” in German. It’s a sweet main meal, typical for the cuisine of Bohemia, my grandmother’s homeland, a region now in the northern and western Czech Republic, but formerly part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Mehlspeisen still feature on restaurant menus in Austria; Kaiserschmarrn (a torn pancake dusted with powdered sugar) is one of them.

Having a sweet dish for a main meal was a custom my American mother never quite understood but my siblings and I loved. Consequently, I often served Buchteln when my kids were growing up, and they became a special treat whenever my adult kids visited.

Buchteln are a quintessential yeast dough dish.

Just the smell, let alone the taste of the raw and then the baked dough, makes me happy! Sometimes, I would make Buchteln as a pick-me-up, just so I could knead the squishy dough, nibble it raw, and, once the Buchteln were baking, relish the unique smell.

This was the cozy smell of my grandmother’s kitchen in her social housing apartment in Wiesbaden, Germany, where she ended up after all “Germans”, whether they had been Nazis or not (my grandparents fell into the latter category), had been deported from Czechoslovakia after World War II.

There is no going back to my grandmother’s kitchen, nor could she return to Bohemia—but Buchteln could be made anywhere, even in my Chicago kitchen.

On the other hand, in 2021, I was diagnosed with celiac disease. This put an end to all things yeast dough (or so I thought), because, I was sad to learn, yeast dough is difficult to pull off without gluten. Gluten creates its characteristic gluey, bubbly elasticity.

I found my favorite baking recipes worked with Measure-for-Measure Gluten-Free Flour. Just not yeast dough. I did bake challah for our Shabbat dinner, resorting to a special baking mix.

But genuine yeast dough? Such as for Buchteln? That was unchartered, gluten-free territory!

Until my son’s question. He had developed a gluten sensitivity, so we both have to eat gluten-free. Like me, he was missing the taste of home, the taste of childhood foods like Buchteln.

I had to at least attempt a gluten-free version of my grandmother’s Buchteln. Turns out, gluten-free bread flour and adjusting my grandmother’s recipe accordingly (mainly more liquid) did the trick. Thus, we have Buchteln again!

Amazingly, the gluten-free version is pretty much just as heavenly.

It is the taste and scent of childhood, of home, of Bohemia in exile—be it in Germany or Chicago, be it gluten-free or not.

Buchteln

[Gluten-free instructions are in brackets] Download a printable pdf version here.

500g flour (4 cups) [same amount of gluten-free bread flour—I use King Arthur]

1/8 teaspoon salt

80g sugar (3/4 cup)

100g butter (1 stick minus one tbsp.) (Ideally, take the butter out of the fridge a few hours before you plan to make this so it gets soft.)

1 egg (let the egg sit outside for a while so it gets to room temperature)

250ml whole milk (1 cup) [GF: 325ml/1.5 cups]

1 packet of dry yeast

Grated rind of one lemon (not absolutely necessary, but makes for a nicer taste)

Warm up the milk so it’s warm to the touch, not hot! Pour dry yeast into a little bowl, add one teaspoon of sugar and one teaspoon of flour, then pour in the lukewarm milk and stir a little. This is your “pre-dough”. Let it sit in a warm, non-drafty place for 20 minutes so the yeast can rise.

I usually warm the oven to 110F and put it in there, but sometimes I wrap a kitchen towel around the bowl (to protect from draft) and place it on our kitchen steam radiator (this works even better, but we also live in a 100-year-old building).

In the meantime, mix the flour, salt and sugar in the large bowl. Get the butter ready: either melt it in a pot (I use the same pot I warmed the milk in) and then let that sit for a while so the butter isn’t hot and won’t fry the egg when you put it all together. Or, if the butter is soft, cut it into little pieces and plop those in with the flour and sugar.

Once the pre-dough is ready (it should be frothy on top), pour it into the flour and sugar mixture. Add the other ingredients: butter, egg, and lemon rind. Then mix the whole thing for a good while. I use the dough-kneading hooks on my hand mixer (I am one of those odd people who bakes a lot but doesn’t own a KitchenAid stand mixer). You can also use a big spoon. Eventually the dough will form a ball.

The dough should not be sticky. You should be able to knead it comfortably without it sticking to your hands. If it sticks, add a bit more flour. Knead the ball for a minute or so, then put it back in the bowl and put the bowl back in the warm oven and let it sit there for at least 30 minutes. Up to an hour is fine, too. The dough needs to increase in size. Don’t let it rise for more than an hour, however, or it will be too puffy. When the dough is done rising, knead it again for a minute; that will decrease its size but that’s OK. You should have a nice, slightly fluffy ball to work with.

[Gluten-free version: After you put all the ingredients in the bowl, use dough hooks (or the paddle of a KitchenAid) on medium speed to mix the dough for 5 minutes. Gluten-free dough does not respond to kneading and thus does not require it. Just mix it for 5 minutes, making sure it’s not too sticky (add regular GF flour if it is), and put it back in a warm place to rise (proof) for at least 30 minutes. After that, proceed to forming balls and arranging them in your buttered casserole dish.]

Preheat oven to 350°F or 180°C.

Pick chunks off the dough, about the size of a soupspoon, and roll it in your hands to form a ball, about the size of a golf ball. Arrange the balls in circles in the casserole dish you’ve buttered with that one tablespoon left from the stick of butter. Save whatever utensil you used for buttering and swish its buttery remnants across the top of the yeast balls neatly arranged in your dish before you put the whole thing in the oven.

Bake the Buchteln in the oven for about 45 minutes or until the top is golden brown. [Gluten-free dough bakes faster, so start checking after 35 minutes to see if a toothpick comes out clean.] You don’t want the Buchteln to become too dark!

After taking the Buchteln out of the oven, let them briefly cool, then plop them out of the casserole dish onto a serving plate.

Serve with homemade chocolate sauce (see below). You can also use Hershey’s or another store-bought chocolate sauce—for my taste, they are too sweet.

For serving, put the plate with the warm Buchteln on the table. People can break off a few Buchteln for themselves, tear them a bit on their plate, then pour chocolate sauce over them, or dip them into the sauce.

Beware: Buchteln can induce the most pleasant carb coma, courtesy of my grandmother, so a subsequent nap might be necessary.

Leftover Buchteln keep well wrapped in plastic and are a delicious treat over the next few days.

Homemade Chocolate Sauce

1 liter milk (4 cups)
3 tbsp. starch (potato or corn starch)
4 tbsp. unsweetened cocoa powder
1/4 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips (this is my addition—there are no chocolate chips in Germany—but they intensify the chocolate taste)

Whisk starch and cocoa together in a medium-sized pot. Put on medium heat. Pour in the milk while stirring continuously with a whisk. Continue stirring until you feel it thickening. This takes a few minutes. (If you don’t stir it all the time, you risk the milk burning or the starch clumping; both will ruin the sauce.)

As soon as you feel the mixture thickening, take it off the heat, and toss in the chocolate chips. Continue to stir until the chocolate chips have melted. Taste to see if it’s chocolatey and sweet enough for you. Add more chocolate chips if needed.

Make the chocolate sauce just prior to serving, as it will continue to thicken.

Serves 4 people. Halve recipe for fewer.

This story about my grandmother’s Buchteln was originally published on the wonderful Substack Fieldfare.

More of my grandmother’s dishes:

Leave a comment

Dear Reader,

Have you ever put together a family tree? I mean the real shebang on an online site? And how was the experience for you?

As part of the Dad Project I’m doing with my siblings, we’re finally assembling our family tree on MyHeritage.

It’s been a curious experience.

My sister chose the platform, and thankfully, she owns the project. However, I have a lot of the genealogy info, particularly on our mother’s side thanks to our aunt, the family genealogist, and so I did have to build out a good part of our family tree.

I’ve been meaning to do this ever since I visited my aunt and uncle in 2014, when I spent two days with my aunt, digging through her bins stuffed with family documents and jotting down page after page of who’s related to whom, including notes on some of our ancestors’ lives and personalities. The above picture is an excerpt of my notes on my maternal grandmother’s side of the family, featuring my great-great-grandmother Elizabeth Carver. My grandmother remembered her own grandmother as “mean.” That, sadly, is the one info I have on what kind of person this great-great-grandmother of mine was.

In any case, with the impetus of the Dad Project, I finally sat down in January to enter all my notes into our sprouting tree on MyHeritage.

Rather quickly, I found building the family tree depressing.

A dark, uncomfortable cloud descended upon me as I entered ancestor upon ancestor, clicking boxes to add siblings, children, parents, grandparents, typing in names, birthdays and death dates, sometimes marriage dates, sometimes the place of birth or death, all the while squinting to ensure I got all those details right.

When I assembled part of my husband’s family tree a few years ago (rather rudimentarily as a PowerPoint graphic), I had already found this rather depressing work. Granted, in that family’s case, the many branches dead-ending in the Holocaust are beyond depressing.

I felt that I was reducing each life to a name, to some facts and figures, to a junction in an ever spreading web of names.

If someone didn’t have children, he or she becomes irrelevant in this structure. There’s so much more to a life than merely the fact of procreating! So much more to each person? As I typed in name after name, linking them to parents, children, and siblings, I wondered who these people were? Anything, please, beyond a name?

In any case, building a family tree confronts you with the finality of life.

Which, of course, can be a downer. By day three of this endeavor I was feeling particularly depressed about it and so I asked some of my friends on Substack, who are better versed in genealogy than I am, whether this was a common thing or whether I was just weird feeling bogged down by the family tree?

Turns out, none of them particularly loves this work. All that input is tedious, everyone agreed. Still, creating anything can be tedious at times.

Denyse Allen presciently pointed out that I was expecting stories to be housed in a system that is simply not built for it. Which is why, she rightly argued, we’ve got to be telling our family stories elsewhere, perhaps including parts of that arduous family tree with the narrative to clarify who’s who.

Working on the family tree, you’re putting yourself in the midst of the flow of life, as my sister smartly put it.

Each person you add is a junction, where the river of that family branches out, flows on, or doesn’t. As you’re working on those junction points, you’re also exposed to that family’s vibe. This might sound esoteric but I realized that when, after the three days it took me to set up my mother’s side of the family tree, I set about creating my dad’s.

Amazingly, putting together my dad’s side of family tree was less hard and not depressing at all.

Rather, I was uplifted reading my beloved grandmother’s explanations of her family in her oh so familiar handwriting. It carried the love her letters always had. Going through my grandmother’s notes, I enjoyed encountering the names of relatives I remember her talking about. She tended to a vast web of extended family, and I now was learning how she’d actually been related to them:

• Her spinster first cousin Gretl, who ended up in East Germany after WWII and to whom my grandmother, living in West Germany, always sent care packages stuffed with luxury goods like coffee and pantyhose;

• a far flung cousin with the fun name of “Frikka;”

• a second cousin of my father’s, Lotte, whom he supposedly had a crush on in his early twenties and whom he later was mightily annoyed by whenever Oma mentioned her antics;

• “Tante Rosi,” whom I knew quite well as the “aunt” whom Oma liked to visit in Salzburg (a two-hour train ride from where I grew up south of Munich in Germany) and whom I even visited on my own, to whom she was related via her great-grandfather.

Here, if only in my mind, were small stories attached to ancestors, lived history rather than merely the notation that someone was mean. Why had someone been mean? Perhaps the weight of assembling my mother’s side of the family came from the void of not knowing? Aside from the fact that her side is just much larger?

So, even though I was generally unenthused by this family tree project, I plowed on because it is important work.

Tedious, for sure, and in my case also depressing, but still important. Invariably, as one dives into family history or socializes with extended family as I recently did at my aunt’s 90th birthday party, the question of how one is related comes up. And then family trees are drawn on napkins, or arguments erupt over whether someone is a second cousin or a second cousin once removed. How much better to have it all sorted! Better yet, ideally I’d love to be able to whip out a print-out of the behemoth the family tree has become, something one can see on a page. Tips welcome, if you have them!

Beyond that, it remains of the utmost importance to capture and pass on the lives and stories of our ancestors. The family tree is just a small part of that telling.

Knowing what kind of people our ancestors were is grounding and, so often, explains why we are the way we are, simply because we are related, and they formed, in part, who we are.

Case in point: the parallels between my little uncle and my younger son, as I shared in

Leave a comment

I’ve been going through my grandfather’s papers, manuscripts, and letters searching for something he wrote about his son Klaus, the boy who died from diphtheria in 1943 in Reichenberg (now Liberec) in what is now the Czech Republic.

My siblings and I recently decided, as part of our father’s family history project, to complete one ancestor’s profile on the family tree as best we could to see what kind of publication we might be able to create on myheritage.com. We settled on our uncle Klaus, as that would be an easily contained project, given his sadly short life.

He had been in second grade, seven years old. Within a week of contracting diphtheria (perhaps at school?), he died on September 19, 1943.

Vaccination against diphtheria wasn’t wide spread yet, nor were the necessary antibiotics readily available during WWII when medications for the civilian population were scarce. Our grandmother, 34 at the time, also got this diphtheria, but, being an adult, her immune system managed to fight it off after a three-week battle of being extremely ill. She lost her child, and diphtheria left her with a weakened heart muscle. The doctors told my grandfather that she could live with that for quite some time, but eventually she would die from it, which she did, thankfully not until age 83.

My grandfather was a writer and left stacks of papers, but alas, I cannot find anything about his little son. At least not so far, as all the family papers aren’t in the best of order yet.

Until I find something, then, I might as well write down what I know about this little boy, who would have been my uncle, based on the reminiscences my grandmother liked to share about him. Something is better than nothing, so my own advice goes to anyone wanting to capture family stories. I might as well heed my own advice!

Little Klaus, as I call him in my mind to differentiate him from my own brother, who has the exact same name, was a spirited boy. By all accounts, he had a fetching, charming personality, in contrast to my dad (his older brother) with his quieter and more studious demeanor.

Little Klaus constantly had stories percolating in his head.

He lived in his own world of fantasy and fiction, freely sharing whatever stories he was spinning with anyone who was willing to listen.

Once, he kept his first (or second) grade classmates captivated with a tale during one show and tell, only to be astounded the next day when one of his classmates admiringly retold part of the story.

“That’s a great story!” Little Klaus marveled.

“But that’s the story you told us yesterday!” his classmate exclaimed.

According to his teacher, who gleefully related that anecdote to my grandmother, Little Klaus did not remember the story he had told the previous day.

He spun his stories, released them into the world, and promptly forgot about them.

Had he lived longer, he hopefully would have gotten comfortable writing and penning some of his tales.

He was known for his absentmindedness, a trait that stood out in his family of focused and practical people.

My grandmother liked to recount how, on multiple occasions, she would happen to look out the dining room window to see Little Klaus walking about her kitchen garden, babbling to himself, arms folded behind his back, trampling through the salad bed.

“Get out of the salad bed!” she’d yell at him from the window.

“Oh!” He hadn’t noticed.

When he realized where he was standing, he would gingerly tiptoe over the remaining salad heads onto the terrace-stoned walkway to continue his rounds.

Whenever my younger son paces about the house, clearly concocting a story in his mind while occasionally talking to himself, I think of Little Klaus, my uncle. That trait of his lives on in my son, who comes up with dystopian tales I could never even imagine. I am glad that I have this reference point to make sense of that pacing, that spinning of stories, that absentmindedness. Thankfully, my son is not trampling my non-existent salad beds but, in a way, it would be cool if he did.

Now and then, my dad, three years older than Little Klaus, employed his brother to help with some of his engineering projects.

For example, Little Klaus was supposed to man the lower station of the cable car my dad had strung from the garden up to the dormer window on the second floor of their childhood home. Alas, waiting around for his brother to mount whatever he was mounting in the dormer quickly bored Little Klaus. He wandered off among the fruit trees, spinning his tales, while my dad hollered at him from on high to please crank the cable car’s handle so it could ascend.

Dad went on to get a PhD in Electrical Engineering at Purdue University, marrying my mom, having his own family and building a life of his own. His brother’s life, tragically, was cut short.

What then, remains of this little boy’s life?

• A few tapes of home movies, taken by my grandfather and recently digitized by my brother, such as this one of the family’s 1938 summer vacation at the seaside resort of Dierhagen, Germany, on the Baltic Sea, when Little Klaus was a rambunctious two-year-old, and my dad an equally energetic boy of five:

• A stack of well preserved black and white pictures, recently digitized by me,

• A triptych of anecdotes, thanks to our grandmother’s storytelling, that let Little Klaus’ personality shine through.

All of which is way more than I have and know of most other people in our family tree.

People whose names I’ve entered as junction points, but about whom I know nothing more than their name, and if I’m lucky, the years (and maybe the places) of their birth and death. People who grew up, got married, had a profession and a family, and a much longer life than my little uncle.

Thus, his personality shines on, all these years later, thanks to my grandparents’ storytelling, picture taking, and movie making.

Leave a comment