Chapter 19

November 17, 1923

I found Max at his desk. Blue cigar smoke fogged the room. He glanced up when he heard me knock.

“Well, well. Look what the wind blew in. I was beginning to think I wouldn’t see you again.”

I leaned against the frame for support. After making my journey from Munich, I was tired, hungry, and in no mood for anything but straight talk. “I had nowhere else to go.”

“You look like shit.”

“If you went through what I just did, you wouldn’t look pretty either.”

Max motioned me to sit as he pointed to the latest issue of the Jewish weekly paper, Jüdisch-liberale Zeitung. The headlines were stark and searing: Hitler and Ludendorff Putsch Fails. “They likened it to the Kapp fiasco . . . only worse.”

I turned wide-eyed at the headlines.

“Were you part of this craziness?” My glazed-over expression was all the answer he needed. “They arrested a bunch of your gang. How did you manage to escape?”

“You name it. Boat. Wagon. Car. Train.” I stretched my sore limbs as I recounted my journey. “I stole away soon after everything collapsed. I ran to the station thinking I would hop on any train leaving Munich. By the time I got there, the police blocked every entrance.”

More smoke billowed to the ceiling. “That was over a week ago.”

A week? It was a lifetime ago. “The moment I saw them I turned around and headed for the Isar. But I could only take the river so far. I made it to Freising thinking I would catch the train from there, but that was guarded, too.”

“You probably could have walked past without them suspecting a thing.”

“I was afraid to take the chance. My height and all. I managed to get across the Austrian border. From there, I made my way to Prague. That took five days. I considered heading to Warsaw to be safe. But I figured if I could make it to Dresden, I would continue to Berlin.”

“Now what? You can’t stay here. If you’re caught, they’ll close me down.”

“You just said they probably are not looking for me.”

Max poked his chubby finger through a smoke ring. “That’s a chance I’m not willing to take.”

I stood to leave but fell back into the chair as a pain wrenched through my gut.

Max leaned over the desk. “Were you wounded?”

I shook my head.

“Sick?

I grabbed my midsection. “Haven’t eaten in days. Once I finished a bag of apples, I used what little money I had on transportation or an occasional flophouse. Then my money ran out. I stole a loaf of bread and some fruit. That was a couple of days ago.”

Max yanked the cord dangling off the wall behind him and then grabbed a funnel-shaped mouthpiece. He barked an order to someone in the kitchen to bring bread, wurst, and a stein to his office.

“Why are you always so nice to me?”

“I’ve wondered the same thing myself. Big as you are, I get a sense of vulnerability about you. I don’t know where that comes from, but I respond to it. I believe you are a good person.”

“Even though you now know I’m connected to Hitler?”

“I’m sorry to hear that. That man is a total fraud. A ridiculous caricature with that toothbrush-looking thing under his nose. And his crazy racial theories!”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Say thank you. Now I have to figure out what to do with you. Do you have any relatives you could stay with for a while?”

I wish I knew.

“They’re all gone.”

Max scratched his head. “Going back to Kitty’s is too big a risk. The police stop there all the time to collect. It would only be a matter of time before one of them asks too many questions or catches a glimpse of you. If the police are looking for you, there are not many your size.” He looked up with a glint in his eye. “There’s always Marta’s place.”

“That door is closed. It has to be somewhere else.”

He snapped his fingers. “Marta did tell me that when you went to some event together, she was stunned by how well you played the piano. Kitty also said you were pretty good.”

“What about it?”

“I have a cousin who is the financial officer of the SS Ballin. It’s scheduled to cross the Atlantic in a few days. I might be able to get you a job on the ship.”

“I know you think I am some big, strong guy, but I am not going into some ship’s hold to stoke coal until I drop.”

He gave a big belly laugh. “I hope your brain works better after you eat something. Didn’t I just ask you about the piano? I’m talking about a job on a fancy ocean liner playing for the rich people in first class. Can you do that?”

*

I hid in an apartment Max maintained for out-of-town performers while Max cajoled his cousin into giving me a job. When he gave me the “all clear” and some funds, I took a first-class train ride to Hamburg thinking it safer than a lower-class ticket.

I met Max’s cousin, Manfred Gewürtz, in the headquarters of the Hamburg-American Lines. He looked nothing like his cousin. Thin and balding, with wire-framed glasses, he was a model of his trade: an accountant. He explained that his company had been building ships for more than seventy-five years. They boasted of having three sister ships built just before the Great War started, each bigger than the Titanic: the Imperator, the Vaterland, and the Bismarck.

“We had the largest fleet of commercial ships in the world,” Manfred said, and then turned sullen, “before the British and Americans confiscated them for war reparations. That’s a part of the price we paid for losing the war that few know about.”

I was more interested in studying Manfred’s eyes as he copied the pertinent information off my Ausweis—my ID card. My heart beat faster as he turned over the fake reissepass—passport—Max provided, that now required prints from two fingers.

Manfred handed back the documents. “All seems in order. The office will make you a special identity card so you can leave and return to the ship whenever we stop in port. We’ll be leaving from Cuxhaven tomorrow morning.”

“I thought all ships left from Hamburg.”

“Smaller boats still do. But once we started building ocean liners, we needed a deeper channel. So twenty-five years ago we built a terminal in Cuxhaven plus a private railway to get there from here. Have you been to America before?”

I shook my head. “What’s it like?”

He raised his brows. “Like every country, there is good and bad. The Americans are not very sophisticated. They still have growing pains.” I didn’t understand what he meant, but had no need to question him about it. “The ship leaves tomorrow,” Manfred continued. “The next morning it stops at Boulogne-sur-Mer. From there, it goes to Southampton, England. The voyage to New York begins on the third day.”

I thanked him for the opportunity and stood to leave.

“There’s one more thing,” he added. I thought he was going to ask me why I wanted to be on a ship or why I wanted to leave Germany. I began to prepare answers. “I never asked if you could play the piano.”

*

The following morning, I boarded the SS Albert Ballin, one of four sister ships—the SS Deutschland, SS Hamburg, and SS New York—that plied the waters between Hamburg and New York. The first class accommodations were lavish. Staterooms were wide and well lit. The lounge had a baby grand piano. Hoping for a Bechstein, I settled for a serviceable Steinway, and a small room I didn’t have to share.

I spent many months crisscrossing the Atlantic from Cuxhaven to New York and back again, tinkling the black-and-whites for well-heeled Europeans and Americans. As an “eligible” bachelor, I became a focus of attention by single women passengers, and some married as well. I played in the bar lounge each evening, so my days were free. I discovered that the British and Americans on board were only too happy to teach me English.

I particularly enjoyed New York. My days in port were free, as were some of my nights when I didn’t have to entertain those who remained behind. When I could, I ventured uptown to 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue to a “whites only” hip spot—some called it a speakeasy—known as the Cotton Club. A gangster named Owney “The Killer” Madden ran it. The club served his Madden’s No. 1 beer that he brewed on West 26th Street in defiance of the Prohibition laws.

The Cotton Club created a modern-day plantation environment: white patrons and a colored staff. The music deliberately exuded a jungle-like atmosphere. Dancers and performers were the exception to the “white only” rule. Great musicians appeared that year including Fletcher Henderson, Count Basie, and Ethel Waters. I enjoyed the lavish revues featuring tall, light-skinned women performing in magnificent costumes.

New York was a city of contradictions. Indeed, so was the whole United States. That point was made clear the day I took a ferry to Bedloe’s Island. I was resolved to visit the Statue of Liberty, transfixed by its size and grandeur each time we passed it on the way into New York Harbor. I invariably stood by the railing as we approached, mesmerized by its beauty and enhanced size as we drew near, and then with regret as it grew smaller with our departure.

The day I visited, I stood at the base of the statue, cranking my head toward her face and torch. Before I climbed the narrow steps to the top and the spectacular views, I read the poem by Emma Lazarus, welded into a bronze plaque at the base.

THE NEW COLOSSUS

“KEEP, ANCIENT LANDS, YOUR STORIED POMP!” CRIES SHE
WITH SILENT LIPS. “GIVE ME YOUR TIRED, YOUR POOR,
YOUR HUDDLED MASSES YEARNING TO BREATHE FREE,
THE WRETCHED REFUSE OF YOUR TEEMING SHORE.
SEND THESE, THE HOMELESS, TEMPEST-TOST TO ME,
I LIFT MY LAMP BESIDE THE GOLDEN DOOR!”

At first the words thrilled me, but I soon discovered that this Jewish poet’s words were of hope—not reality. Everywhere I turned, from the Cotton Club to schools to country clubs, the Negro and even the Jews of New York City and across the country, were already confronted by the NSDAP program proposed for Germany.

In America white people had subtle and not-so-subtle ways of keeping their Untermenschen—“impure sub-humans”—in place. Newspapers ran ads for employment under the heading “white.” Housing was subtly, and in some places not so subtly, separated into white and black communities. The “nice” communities kept themselves pure by restrictive covenants in deeds that prohibited sales to Negroes and Jews. In practice and often by law, the Negroes, frequently called “niggers” or “coons,” and the Jews, often termed “kikes” or “sheenies,” lived and worked largely among themselves. While I came to learn that New York City was more lenient about racial purity than most other places in America, certain parts of the city still had lines that Negroes and Jews never crossed. As for some other places in America, racial lines were not drawn with invisible ink . . . they were proclaimed in indelibly written legal laws.