Years ago, my phone rang, at 2 AM, It was a friend, a well-known American poet, quite drunk. I woke up, I tried to focus on her words,
a little slurred. She had been paging through her address book, name by name, and found that she knew, suddenly and with certainty, that “if there was another Anschluss’ -- who, among these names -- would take her in and hide her and who would refuse her and shut the door in her face.
It was “intoxicating” she cried, to go down the list of names. As a Jew, she knew “Anschluss”. In 1938, Hitler decreed that he would “join together” Germany with its German-speaking neighbor, Austria, a merger called “anschluss”, a mutual embrace that left out some apparently unembraceable fellow citizens: Jews. Jews would be allowed to merge only as they were loaded en masse onto boxcars, after arrests, then transported to death camps. It was too late to escape now, to safely cross borders: the only hope was to hide or be hidden.
I knew “Anschluss” from reading history. (There were readers, once upon a time!) I could hear her sigh. “I knew for certain” she said “when I got to your name, that you would open the door for me. You wouldn’t turn me away.”
Then she hung up. I kept the receiver to my ear, listening to the dial tone.
I couldn’t fall back to sleep, even as the sky began to grow light.
When I was eleven years old, in the late 1950’s, my parents joined with other neighbors on the block to cast their votes determining whether or not to allow a Jewish family to buy the house next door to us on Pascal Street in St. Paul, Minnesota.
This vote (which I didn’t hear about till years later) ended up, thankfully, positive – and the Jewish family moved in next door. The father was a kosher butcher and a Talmudic scholar, his wife was a homemaker and a marvelous cook. They had two children, a boy and a girl, younger than I was.
I was asked to babysit their children and not long after that was invited to sit at their dinner table. The food was delicious (despite my mother’s grim observations about garlic and unsalted butter.) But most unforgettable for me, was the conversation.
There was little to no conversation at my family’s dinner table. My four brothers and my father ate quickly and my mother who was often depressed and overwhelmed by pregnancies, had little to say. (My little sister came along a year or so later.)
My father, though he was a brilliant man, wanted family meals uninterrupted by “controversial talk” – or debatable “ideas”. (He also announced, though he changed his views dramatically later in life – that women were inferior to men. )
If he defied his own “non-controversial” rule, ranting on about “women drivers’ or women “competing” with men - I felt duty-bound to speak up and prove him wrong, though he was formidable: angry and insulting.
The Gold family table, in stark contrast, was lively, challenging and filled with humor. Politics and education were freely debated. I was asked what I thought – though when asked, I froze, realizing that I had no idea what I thought.
I had been informed that an original story of mine had been accepted for publication in American Girl magazine – I was only eleven, but I confided that I wanted to be a writer. I was persuaded to read the story aloud at the Gold’s table -- to cheers.
I found myself laughing at jokes whose punchlines required a thinking pause.
How thrilling it was to hear and have opinions expressed. Mr. Gold told me about the different sects of Judiasm, Orthodox, Reformed, etc. He told me about Sephardic Jews who were “blonde” like me. Slowly I came to understand that men did not have to be a threat to women.
My bedroom window on the first floor of our house was on the same level as the Gold’s kitchen window, where I noticed the candles lit each Friday night at sundown.
I was a night owl, reading books by flashlight, when lights were out and everyone else asleep. One night and for most nights thereafter, I saw Mr. Gold, framed in the window, poring over thick books in dim yellow light. I believed he was reading the Talmud, filled with the rabbinical wisdom of ancient centuries -- or the five books of the Torah, as he’d described them to me. Once I waved at him and he looked up and waved back: comrade readers in the night.
Of course, I longed to become a Jew, but I knew my Catholic parents would fiercely object. My father had “turned” from Norwegian Lutheranism “for” my devout Catholic mother. Despite my family’s changing faiths, they would never support any desire of mine to convert.
So I kept it all to myself. I read Leon Uris’ “Exodus”, learning, “potboiler” style, about the Holocaust, the founding of Israel and the partition of British-occupied Palestine. I read about David Ben Gurion.
I learned the Hebrew word: “Shoah”.
I learned to be outspoken at the Gold’s dinner table. I learned to ask myself what I thought. I grew to have a little bit of confidence, which was also bolstered by brilliant insightful nuns, my teachers in the all-girl “convent” high school I attended. I was named Editor-in-chief of my school paper – I knew for certain I would be a writer and writers needed to believe in their words.
I then made a terrible mistake.
Though I had excellent grades and a nun told me casually I could go anywhere to college, I ended up at a Jesuit learnery in Nebraska , where I almost lost myself.
All that I had tried to become and my fragile faith in myself - even my delight in words, nearly died.
When I was editor of the literary magazine there, a poem I published that made fun of the male obsession with women’s breasts, was deemed obscene and all copies of the magazine were confiscated. I complained about this ridiculous censorship and was called into the president’s office, an individual with the I.Q. of a hassock – for one of the dumbest most discouraging exchanges I’ve ever endured. Misogyny was rampant, its dark roots entwined with racism, anti-semiticism – and this twisted Catholicism. I was raped at Creighton (which, by the way, was also the alma mater of the cult-driven Ginni Thomas) and then discovered I was pregnant, after fleeing to California.
There’s significant “outspoken” distance from the abortion I obtained in California a couple years before the law changed and Roe v. Wade was passed. It was a legal abortion during the time when abortion was still illegal - because I spoke my mind to a racist psychiatrist, (who was indifferent to the fact I’d been raped) Here I am now, 76, just retired from an institution of higher learning. What happened?
More history of “outspoken”!
But to return to the Gold’s dinner table. I was mortified when I heard that they had to be “approved” by the vote of their future neighbors.
But now I wonder why they wanted to move into a goy neighborhood in the first place? How grateful I am that they did – they changed my life! They would never have altered their beliefs, but did they hope to “assimilate” in some way?
Recently I saw “Leopoldstadt”, the new Stoppard play on Broadway.
I have been a longtime devoted fan of Stoppard and I have seen nearly all his plays. I also know him a little, through my late husband, who appeared in a few of his plays – beginning with “Travesties” on Broadway, when David was quite young, but, by all report, a brilliant Henry Carr.
But “Leopoldstadt” is not typical Stoppard fare – it has been called the most “autobiographical” of his plays – when he has not allowed his shadow to fall on his writing ever before. What caused this sea change?
When he was 56 years old, Stoppard discovered that he was Jewish - and that he had an entire family of relatives who had perished in the Holocaust, about whom he had known nothing. His mother had fled the Nazi march on the tiny Czech town where she had been left with her two small sons after she was widowed. She traveled to India with her children, where she met and married a British officer named Stoppard.
He took them to England where he adopted Tom and his brother and they grew up English. Tom’s mother never told him about their relatives who died at Auschwitz until he found out, through a newfound cousin who shared the news with him, late in his life.
“Leopoldstadt” is set in Vienna – not in the town outside of Prague where Tomas Straussler (Stoppard) was born – but the story closely follows his own.
The two Jewish families whose lives are set before us in the play’s first scene are prosperous, cultured, highly-educated and they believe they have been assimilated into Viennese society. They have even become Catholics – in name only.
Stoppard moves the families through time – 1899 to 1900 to 1924 to 1938 to, finally, 1955, when only three family members remain alive, one of them a stand-in for Stoppard.
It is 1938 when the Anschluss arrives, when the families who believed they were accepted and assimilated, are forced to face the horrific reality - and are taken away to their deaths.
Vienna had seemed to them the heart, the pinnacle of multi-cultural acceptance, of flourishing diversity. The Jewish families believed that they had escaped the past, escaped the old Jewish ghetto of Leopoldstadt, even as the inescapable shadow of the ghetto and pograms crept toward them. 1938, in the shattering of Kristallnacht, the broken glass of Jewish-owned shop windows -- the Anschluss finally became real.
Anschluss: the end of any dream of a democratic ideal - marshalled by its opposition: brutish Christian nationalism.
I sat in the audience of “Leopoldstad” thinking in terror – “It’s coming to the U.S.” Then thinking - “it is already here.” Synagogues are now on high alert as anti-semitic violence intensifies.
Kanye West ‘s ugly threat to Jews inspires neo-Nazis to unfurl a banner of support from a freeway overpass as they raise their Sieg Heil salutes -- here in Los Angeles.
How did this happen? How did we come to this time of unhinged denials, lies and violence? How did we arrive here?
Ghosts from a dark past we never imagined would rise from Hell again, loom over us. Glass breaks, there is gun violence in the streets, at the ballot boxes, in synagogues and schools.
The phone is ringing at 2 AM. An old friend is calling to tell me that that when It comes, she knows I will hide her when she knocks on my door. I listen to the dial tone. I will open the door, I know I will.
I listen to the dial tone. Dawn is coming – but with what promise of a new day?
Anschluss
Wow, this is a knock-out, a punch to the gut. From your memory of the Jewish family whose hospitality saved your spirit, your soul, your sense of yourself as an intellectual and a writer, to your response to seeing Leopoldstatd. So powerful, Carol, thank you.
Carol, this piece is extraordinary for its personal revelations melding with the remembrance of that wonderful Gold family; with Stoppard and today's horrific realities. I thank the Golds that you became a writer, in spite of all.