No forebodings accompanied me on the Hapag Lloyd boat that carried us, a group of Jewish youngsters and a German Jewish social worker, from Bremerhaven to New York. In fact we were rather full of practical jokes and bad manners in general, the natural compensation of long unnatural restraint, years when we were told on a daily basis that we, as Jews, needed to be better than good and at any rate inconspicuous, as was invisible ink. My own ill-timed sortie into rebelliousness—one that still makes me cringe—is my sudden assumption of a blasé attitude as we steamed into New York Harbor. As all the other passengers rushed toward the railing to be greeted by the Statue of Liberty, I casually strolled toward her in a spirit of nil admirari.
Before disembarking we said goodbye to an American gentleman who had befriended us en route. His expansive manner and his munificence—he treated our entire group to an exotic drink called Coca-Cola—convinced us that he was one of those fabled American millionaires. Toward the end of our voyage he told us that he was a vacationing mailman who had hoarded his savings for a European trip. We didn’t believe a word of it; our “millionaire” wanted to stay incognito, we conjectured. My appreciation of the porousness of America’s social hierarchy—perhaps calcifying as I write this—did not crystallize until much later.
The two days in New York contributed little to my Americanization. I was met at the pier and shoved through Immigration by a representative of a Jewish committee and by a cousin of my mother’s from Essen. My Green Card was in apple-pie order and would, fifty years later, help illustrate an exile exhibit of the Deutsche Bibliothek in Frankfurt. No such notoriety accompanied my first day in New York. Aunt Klärchen took me in tow, speaking a hard-to-follow amalgam of German and English. “Wir fahren jetzt mit der Subway. Duck dich mal unter die Turnstile, dann brauchst du keinen Nickel zu bezahlen!” Keeping with her instructions I committed my first American misdemeanor by entering the platform without paying. My recollections of New York are a jumble of skyscrapers (“Look out, die Wolkenkratzer,” Tante Klärchen would exclaim), subways, and a curious type of gastronomy (“Automatenrestaurant,” said Klärchen), where you inserted money to obtain the item of your choice. The meals were indifferent. I learned early on in America that technology often outstrips substance. Tante Klärchen said “Mahlzeit, my boy,” as our ways parted at the exit of Horn and Hardart.
The committee in New York decided that my English would allow me to solo on my train ride to Saint Louis, the residence of Uncle Benno and Aunt Ethel. As we sped from the East to the Midwest my awe at the largeness of America’s geography—and of its vocabulary—increased in tandem. As to the latter, a curious omission of Mr. Tittel and “The Boxer” surfaced. After I had completed my main course in the dining car, the steward, the first black person I had ever spoken to, asked me monosyllabically: “Pie?” I thought that was his way of saying “pay,” so I pulled out my committee-donated meal coupon. He then repeated his terse question two more times, his decibel level rising. The supervisor, called to the table, solomonically told the steward, after being equally thwarted by my apparent obtuseness: “Bring him some apple pie!” From that moment onward that word stuck to me like the gelatinous goo that held the pastry together. The experience came in handy. As a writer of textbooks I have always insisted on illustrations, even where pictures can’t tie memory to the taste buds.
Yet another side of America, undreamt of by Mr. Tittel, unfolded before me in Chicago, where the aforementioned sophisticated committee-woman provided a city tour in her car during a three-hour layover. She concluded the tour with a stroll through the Maxwell Street Flea Market. Both sellers and buyers, at least at that time, were largely Jewish; some of them even wore yarmulkas. As I watched them in their unselfconscious transactions and relaxed by-plays, years of inhibitions, the need to crawl into myself, slowly if yet incompletely, peeled off. I began to realize that in my new country I need not resemble invisible ink or that, conversely, I now had to rebel against my enforced inconspicuousness. Others, like those coreligionists milling around Maxwell Street Market, had already done that for me.
A bevy of relatives, familiar from diverse family albums, welcomed me at Union Station in Saint Louis. Uncle Benno, working a night shift, was not among them. I met him at midnight, an undersized, squat person, floored but not counted out by the Depression. What sustained him were flights into popularized mysticism; even that first night he tried to make me a convert to Rosicrucianism. He lived a hard life and didn’t apologize for the cramped flat, so different from his parents,’ my grandparents,’ spacious Westphalian house. Nor did he dwell on the fact that I had to share my bed with another refugee boy, boarded there, at some profit to my aunt and uncle, by the ubiquitous Jewish committee. Nonetheless my dreams of adventurous America didn’t collapse those first days. Rather they now played themselves out on a reduced scale. Infinity, today’s current chaos theory tells us, can be encountered in small spaces, if the measurements aren’t applied to the cosmos but to atomic particles.
My exploration of America via cross-country trains, begun on my trip to Saint Louis but not repeated until five years later courtesy of the US Army, shrank to treks across Saint Louis and environs. I had discovered America’s subsidiary, cost-free mode of transportation called hitchhiking. I discovered South Saint Louis with its “Dutch” (i.e., German) neighborhood, bordered by Italian Hill. I went swimming in Crevecoeur Lake, which I almost failed to identify to the kind lady who picked me up because I pronounced it the French way rather than in her Midwestern drawl as “Creavecar” Lake. I often thumbed my way to the downtown section of Saint Louis with its sheltering library (and the nearby White Castle, ten cents for an egg sandwich and a glass of chocolate milk), and to Forest Park with its art museum and Jefferson Memorial where a replica of Lindbergh’s Spirit of Saint Louis was housed.
Together with my new family I would walk on Jewish holidays to a small prayer house a few blocks away. Few of us in our neighborhood could afford the substantial membership dues for the ornate temples of Rabbi Isserman or Rabbi Gordon, both of them riveting orators. Our makeshift synagogue was bare. It was presided over by Mr. Ansky, a volunteer cantor. But despite the soon-familiar faces the holiday celebrations weren’t the same for me. I missed my hometown synagogue, even more the familiar ritual, the different pronunciation of the Hebrew vowels, and the annually intoned liturgical music. What I had imagined to be the easiest transition, from one Jewish service to another, turned out to be the most formidable obstacle course, in fact one never entirely mastered. Catholic exiles have told me that they found a spiritual anchor, wherever they went, in the “blessed sameness” of the then prevailing Latin ritual. I never sang the Hebrew melodies common in America with the same overtones of happy childhood memories that I had gathered in the oriental-style synagogue of Hildesheim. But that was a minor religious adjustment problem, which faded into utter insignificance after the traumatizing news of November 9, 1938. A newsboy, hawking the St. Louis Star-Times, to which we subscribed, was shouting, “Synagogues burning in Germany! Read all about it!” Sometimes I hear his voice, the shouts raised to screams, at the most unexpected times and places: at services, before becoming fully awake, and certainly when I am in Hildesheim. And then I relive each time the feeling of loss and my maledictions against the perpetrators.
Occasionally I would walk with my aunt—her treat—to the Plymouth Movie House. Tuesday night was Ladies’ Night at the Plymouth. That meant reduced admissions, coupons ultimately redeemable for “free dishes,” and a steady diet of B-movies. Their saccharine quality didn’t matter to me: the features with such faded matinée idols as Rudy Vallee, constituted lessons in English and very basic Americana. What I had missed by not growing up in America I picked up at the Plymouth or in other curious ways. From a film about a love triangle with an utterly predictable happy end I learned the folk tune “Who’s Coming around the Mulberry Bush,” sung by one of the swains about his rival. I became as distortedly knowledgeable about America’s West as an native-born, red-blooded American kid by walking to a sweltering outdoor cinema at the Wellston Shopping Center, where Gene Autry proclaimed, repeatedly and in song, that he was “a happy, roving cowboy.” I learned English nursery rhymes, with which my American contemporaries had all grown up, by reading the Mother Goose murder mystery by best-selling detective-story writer S. S. Van Dine. In the evenings we adolescents gathered in someone’s front yard, no less satisfying a gathering place than today’s night clubs, drank weak lemonade, mildly and innocently flirted, and sang traditional American songs, such as “On Top of Old Smokey.’”
During those heat-baked Saint Louis summer nights we confided to one another our own versions of the American dream. How ambitious we all were! Out of our neighborhood, confined to three to four blocks of Saint Louis’s predominantly Jewish West Side, emerged one of the city’s most successful businessmen, a leading conductor and musicologist, a prominent physician, and Missouri’s future lieutenant-governor, Kenneth Rothman. The dreams of my American contemporaries sustained and occasionally restored mine. That happened, for example, when my aunt and uncle, who were also my legal guardians, proposed taking me out of high school and enrolling me in a trade school. They had read somewhere that the path to later employment started with the learning of a trade. I fought the notion and won.
I knew instinctively that Soldan High School, where I had been enrolled within five days of my arrival in Saint Louis, was ideal for me. Simply put, it was America at its best. James Hotchener later wrote King of the Hill, a novel about the school set during the Depression. In 1993 the novel, with the name of the institution and its administrators slightly changed, was made into an inspiring film. It tells about a boy’s struggle, sometimes tragic, often wryly funny, to succeed despite a fragile family structure and against mounting debts. It is not quite my story; my life fortunately lacked that kind of drama and traumata. I was never completely broke. A distant, more affluent relative gave me an allowance of fifty cents every two weeks, when he didn’t forget, and my aunt and uncle were never threatened with eviction. But the film did re-evoke Soldan for me as it then was. Students from fairly affluent families rubbed shoulders with kids in threadbare clothes. And the teachers and principals, Mr. Stellwagen and Mr. Barr, were magnificent. They had set their sights on rivalling the best college prep schools, and on balance they succeeded. As an educator of some fifty-five odd years myself, I am sure that, in chronicling those two years, I have not yielded to the temptation of idealizing those golden school days.
At Soldan I soaked up American history, political structures, culture, and literature. Ask me today about Andrew Jackson’s Populism or the initial nonpopulist elections to the US Senate or the poems of Longfellow and I will still be able to regurgitate the teaching of Mrs. Mott, “Doc” Bender, and Mrs. Nagle.
The rules were as strict, or almost so, as those I knew from Hildesheim. No smoking within two blocks of the school building, no curse words (even mild ones) in class, no walking down the up staircase, and absolutely no unexcused absences. But these rules were tempered, nay, sweetened, by personal attention and care. Sure, we also had a few villains hidden in our idyllic environment. Mr. Patrick, an English teacher, disliked foreigners, and the girl students avoided one of the math teachers, who doubled as the football coach, and considered women unqualified for his discipline.
But in general the halls of Soldan echoed kindness. My first day at school betokened it. Mr. Stellwagen received me personally, told me that he had assigned me to the advisory (homeroom) of Mrs. Muller, the German teacher, handed me my program and asked me whether I was interested in going for any extracurriculars. My quizzical look elicited further explanations and a menu of activities. “Swimming and the school newspaper,” I responded. “Of course,” he said, “I’ll introduce you to the faculty advisors.” And he didn’t discourage me at all, despite the fact that my English, even to this day but then more pronouncedly, was tinged by an accent. “Our publications, the yearbook and the newspaper, are called Scrip and Scrippage,” he said. “Do you know where those names come from?” A puzzled silence on my part. “Well,” he explained, like a teacher would, “they come from Shakespeare’s As You Like It: “Let us make an honorable retreat, though not with bag and baggage, yet with scrip and scrippage.” And then he took me to Mrs. Rasmussen, the advisor of Scrippage.
My first class was Mrs. Carmody’s geometry class. “Ah, our new student from Germany! Well, we’re having a test today. Why don’t you show me what you can do? Just take a seat over there.” I read the test and stumbled over a few terms. I walked up to her desk and asked: “What is an isosceles triangle?” She went to the board and drew one. “Ah,” I said to myself, “Ein gleichschenkliges Dreieck.” I got a “G” (for “good”) on that test and still consider that a major triumph of my academic career.
Beyond shepherding me through my program, some of the teachers took a personal interest in me. Rose Kaufman, a Latin teacher, well connected in the Jewish community, got me my first job outside the occasional lunchroom work at school. I became a dishwasher at the Branscom Hotel, and a busboy at the Chase, and at the Jefferson Hotel. At the tail end of the Depression even those jobs were at a premium and Rose Kaufman interceded for me at the highest level with Mr. Kaplan, the owner of the Chase.
But my stint at the Jefferson became memorable for another reason as well. One of the owners had also found a job for his father, who did not want to be idle. His son had brought him to America from Bulgaria and he now eked out a wage and learned English at his old age. Well, he did not advance much. We, as fellow busboys, talked to him because he seemed to have some influence on his son. He reacted invariably in one of two ways to our conversations with him. He would say “Izza good,” when he approved “Izza no good,” when he wanted to condemn. The other busboys and I tried to catch him in a situation where neither comment would be applicable. We never did, but I never forgot this eccentric old man and his two responses can still be frequently heard within the walls of our house.
With these fledgling positions I was well launched on a “career” as room service waiter, then dining-room waiter with full union standing. My catapulting into that august standing came about through one of the most remarkable, if unheralded, exiles in Saint Louis, Johnny Ittelson.
Ittelson had come to Saint Louis after a brief mandatory waiting period in Cuba, had made successful careers, first as a liquor salesman—salesman of the year for the firewater producers of McKesson and Robbins, then as maître d’ at the Jefferson Hotel in Saint Louis, and in a further though unsuccessful venture, as the owner of his own European-styled establishment, the Continental, located at the entrance of the much-visited Forest Park.
His founding of the restaurant also brought about major progress in my career. I advanced from the lowly position of a busboy to the status of a waiter. (Actually my ironic remark is really ill-placed, because even such common jobs were at a premium during the tail end of the Depression.) Johnny had met me while he was a maître d’ at the Jefferson and I a busboy. When he founded his restaurant he felt a sense of loyalty to the fellow exile and recruited me as a waiter at the Continental.
It is only in retrospect that I can fully appreciate the favors that Rose Kaufman and Johnny Ittelson did for me. Of course, my high school education at Soldan was invaluable, but of need, limited. By becoming for a while a member of America’s working class, I gained perspectives, closed even to many Americans who were born in this country.
This added experience was three-fold. I became a coworker of men and women who provided the muscles for America’s well-being by their skills. There was Calvin, the dishwasher from Indiana, who threatened “to beat the sh-- out of me,” and in fact, landed a punch because he felt that I had talked down to him when I just used my usual vocabulary. I soon learned to talk his jargon. Then there was the fellow waiter who only addressed me by the name he bestowed upon me, which was Abie, a reference to me being Jewish. Finally there was the only waitress in our group, the highly efficient Opal, with whom I partnered as a waiter and who promised to introduce me to certain adventures for which I was as yet unprepared.
The second new perspective supplemented what was lacking in my middle-class setting in Hildesheim. The Jewish community there was composed, for the most part, of established and well-provided professionals in industry and trade, the law, medicine, the arts, and music. There weren’t any entrepreneurs who in many cases had to survive by their wits. But in Saint Louis I became a close acquaintance of an intrepid, rare individual who exemplified such a person. That was Johnny. He ultimately succeeded in America because he could think beyond standard conventions and because he would often fail, but would never stay down. Somewhat by chance he assembled around him a group of immigrants with whom even most experts on Exile Studies became acquainted. If I hadn’t worked for Johnny, gotten to know him, his strengths and weaknesses—and learned to appreciate, perhaps to imitate his never-die spirit, I wouldn’t have had that opportunity.
For a short while he also opened up to me one of the few centers, certainly in the Midwest, where nearly all the refugees from all walks of life in city would gather and could be observed by a curious youngster. All that came about because Johnny the Incredible had opened, yes opened, a restaurant. One observation of mine mirrors that group of exiles while not at their best. From the start Johnny had installed three pinball machines in a back room of the restaurant. Soon the players became tired of pitching their skills just against the machine itself. They started betting against one another for what would seem today ridiculously small change. The competition became as fierce as if the players had been in Monte Carlo or Las Vegas. In fact Johnny had to intervene a few times when the rivalry almost became physical. On one of those occasions, when one of the participants made a lame excuse for walking out with the loot he had taken from his opponents or when someone had given the machine a forbidden push in order to correct the routing of the pinball. Because of Johnny’s manifold managerial talents and their influence on me, I became much more pragmatic. Hence, I will draw a full portrait of him and of our brief “association.”
Johnny was at his best on the opening night of his restaurant. His planning had been meticulous. He had the financial backing from his cousin Henry and the décor of his restaurant left nothing to be desired. Tables and chairs called to mind the style of the Bauhaus. Beautiful light-brown napkins, folded in the form of crowns, matched the color of the table cloths. There was a music box that played tunes from operettas and burst forth, every hour on the hour, with the song “The Continental,” borrowed from a Fred Astaire film. And Johnny’s spirit hovered—yes, hovered over the entire décor. He himself took charge of seating people and operating the cash register.
Johnny’s planning paid off. I spotted members of the high society of Saint Louis, among the arrivals hitherto known to me only from the society columns of our local newspapers. Even August Busch showed up with a large party. He was the famed proprietor of the gigantic brewery Anheuser-Busch. Johnny courted that party to a fare-thee-well, kissed the hands of the ladies—to their surprise and consternation—and put on a show reminiscent of Paris at its most glamorous period.
I returned from work dead tired. The tables in my station had been filled three to four times. The evening marked my less-than-smooth entry into my status as a waiter. But Mr. Busch rewarded my earnest efforts with a munificent tip.
Alas the triumph of opening night didn’t extend to the weeks ahead. The good citizens of Saint Louis had at first thronged to the new restaurant out of pure curiosity. Once that was satisfied, the aroma of the zesty spaghetti sauce, spreading from the citywide renowned Italian restaurant, Garavelli, located just across the street, made their mouth water much more than the hard-to-pronounce (and equally hard to digest Cordon Bleu) of our gourmet restaurant.
Instead of the leading citizens of Saint Louis, the refugee circle moved in, but only for afternoon coffee and cake. There was a barber, more affluent than the rest of the refugees, who had had an exclusive clientele in Berlin and who became my favorite customer. He gave me one of the distinctive, if un-American, haircuts that I continued to sport in a period of my life when I still needed frequent trips to the barber. To indicate my rather sparse earnings the barber gave me a fifty cent tip when he and his wife dined at the Continental, which I returned to him as a gratuity for practicing his original haircuts on me.
Despite a few such steady guests the income of the restaurant and with it the money from tips steadily declined. Johnny became moody. For example, he resented that I was not only a waiter on his staff, but also a student at Saint Louis University because he realized that I wanted to become a member of The Establishment. “You’re studying Spanish?” He was reverting back to his time in Cuba, when he added, “I, myself could teach you that.”
His first concrete measure to stave off the threatening decline of the restaurant was reducing staff. He started with us waiters. Admittedly we weren’t prime specimens of our profession. When the positions for Johnny’s experiment had been announced by the union, the demand for such employment was scarcely spectacular. Hence, among the hired waiters were some eccentric employees and a slightly senile retiree, who shuffled his way slowly through the dining hall. Then there was me, the fledging waiter and also a colleague, frequently less than sober and who in our dressing room sometimes told me, while in tears, what the demon alcohol had done to him in the past. I pitied him, but he found little understanding among guests whose orders he had hopelessly messed up for the second time. The union, used to the troubles they had had with him, finally endorsed his dismissal.
In order to be able to spread his charm even more palpably among our customers, Johnny had recourse for help from his parents. He turned the cash register over to his stepfather, a former Berliner architect and businessman, finally turned refugee. He stuck by the old German proverb: “He who doesn’t watch his pennies will soon not have any dollars.” And for that reason he watched every item on the bill with infinite care while waiting guests, in growing frustration, hit the counter with their knuckles. Johnny’s mother, however, an aristocratic looking lady, had a piping voice and promptly had been given the nickname of “Chirpy” by her friends and old acquaintances, became a further addition to our motley staff as a sort of supervisor. Her measured steps took her from the kitchen to the dining room and back and she gave out with well-meaning advice for cutting expenses. Our leading chef, a highly qualified master cook from the Philippines, turned red-faced as soon as he caught sight of her. In exquisite language she advised him that one simply shouldn’t throw away the wrapping paper for the butter. “It’s excellent for greasing pots and pans.”
One day the cook’s patience was at an end. He tossed his apron on the floor, disappeared like a lightning bolt, and was discovered again after he had been hired by the competition across the street. His position was filled by the second in command, but that worthy was hardly capable of filling his former chef’s shoes. This gradual breakdown of our infrastructure didn’t escape the wide-open eyes of Johnny’s wife, a chic but calculating woman from Berlin. She took action and confronted Johnny a few weeks later with an application for a divorce and soon after disappeared from our vision. Johnny, alternately depressed, enraged, and defiant, sought short-term substitutes with well-to-do customers who admired him as boundlessly as before. What was most on his mind was rescuing his restaurant. He wrote letters to the editor of the most important newspapers and used me as his ghost writer and editor.
Then one morning the telephone rang at my aunt and uncle’s residence. He asked me to come to the restaurant early because he had a colossal idea. Immediately after my first class I tore myself away from the Golden Age of Spanish Literature and ended up in the tough reality of an enterprise approaching bankruptcy. But Johnny’s face was all smiles. “You will be the first one to hear of my rescue mission,” he said. “We will imitate European customs and hold a costume party right in our own restaurant.” Let me report that his costume ball attracted only the customary impoverished European refugees. My tips were below moderate. I had only one consolation, a young woman who had borrowed a rather daring waitress costume from her place of employment, had come with the expectation of meeting a well-heeled American male at the costume party. We consoled each other and continued with that long after the last guest had departed. The restaurant lasted only about eight months.
I had to look elsewhere in order to practice my new-found skills. I ended up at the Rose Bowl, a bar and restaurant sought out by football fans. The combination of schoolwork and waiter’s chores worked for me until high school graduation.
I soon lost sight of Johnny. Yet, I was destined to see him once again. World War II separated the two encounters. By 1957 I had become a professor at a good university and the German-Jewish American newspaper Aufbau had published a feature about me, giving out the name of my university and my department. Two weeks later I received an airmail letter. Wasn’t I his former waiter at the Continental and didn’t I frequently make trips to the Federal Republic of Germany, to which he had returned after retirement? Surely I could visit him sometime at his German home in Wiesbaden. In fact, in that very city I was to meet with a German writer for research purposes on my next trip scheduled shortly after hearing from Johnny. At first glance there was little left of the man of the world. He was walking on crutches, had aged badly, and was accompanied by an elderly live-in partner, who, as he whispered to me, was inclined for reasons of her own, to do him kind services but hadn’t turned romantic with him. But then I looked at him more closely. His light blue suit fit him as if it had been poured on, his shirt was immaculately white, his old cufflinks were glistening as in the days of old, and lo and behold, his car was a nearly new BMW. He had once more landed on his feet. He had become a special events director for the city government of an American city in the Midwest. Perhaps our luckless costume ball had served as a testing ground. So I asked myself whether this enterprising spirit, this man whom you couldn’t keep down, this visionary of a miniature world: wasn’t he also at a loss for his home country? If the Berlin of the twenties had lived on without a dictatorship this Johnny Ittelson or Hans Ittelson would have livened up the most humdrum surrounding with his ever-present optimism and his irrepressible spirit.
I have jumped across the abyss of those eventful and sometimes horrible years between 1939 and 1957. In 1939 I was just on the verge of graduating from a wonderful high school. I have dealt above at some length with the intellectual rigor and prescribed discipline at Soldan, because I continue to believe that public education is the bulwark of a functioning democracy. My late wife Judith, a high school teacher of forty-odd years’ experience, liked to quote Thomas Jefferson: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and will never be.” Today we stand in danger of selling public education to forces with profits rather than education as their goals and of confining the training of informed, broadly knowledgeable future citizens to those few who can afford the most prestigious private high schools. Is it really too late to return to the ethos and values of Soldan High School and other schools like it that enfolded me as a fresh-off-the-boat immigrant in those years of 1937–1939? After all, those years were beset by crises no less severe than those that purportedly necessitate the current dismantling of public education. I might add that I wrote the above paragraph in 1998.
The time for graduation and the prom was approaching. I turned again to my benefactor, Mrs. Kaufman. She came to my rescue again. She found an anonymous donor who donated a navy-blue jacket and white flannel trousers, an almost requisite outfit for the graduation ceremony and for the prom as well.
I consider one incident surrounding that graduation and prom as a barometer of my progressing Americanization. I couldn’t go to the prom, because I had to bus dishes that night at the Chase Hotel. But the prom was also held at the Chase and during lag time in the dining room I had the temerity to stroll over to the adjoining ballroom, busboy uniform and all, and to greet my decked-out, jitterbugging classmates. But with that stroll, which I knew would draw everyone’s attention, I had walked the long distance from the invisible-ink person to a healthily uninhibited American youngster.
If I had been able to attend, I would have escorted—as it was then called—a classmate with the improbable name of Idamae Schwartzberg. We had become friends soon after my arrival at Soldan, though we actually met at the YMHA/YWHA (Young Men’s/Women’s Hebrew Association), where I was working out to secure the not highly touted number three spot as breast stroker on the Soldan Swimming Team. Idamae contributed to my Americanization, beyond the usual “European boy meets American girl” stuff, in a most visible, audible, and certainly permanent way. She had little patience with my German name, Günther, which she termed a tongue-twister. She decided to retain the first two letters, and to add a “y.” I became “Guy.” The name stuck in high school and I retained it when I became a US citizen during basic training at Camp Berkley, Texas. People say it kind of fits me, especially in combination with my monosyllabic surname, which incidentally means “star” in English. Neither Idamae nor I had any money to speak of, so we would pack a picnic basket, stow our books for homework and get to the Saint Louis Forest Park outdoor opera at 3:30 p.m., right after classes, for one of the back row free seats that the city provided in conformance with the founding statutes. The time till curtain at 8:00 p.m. passed with homework, food, and tomfoolery. And then we were in the grip of performances of such musicals as Gershwin’s Of Thee I Sing or Jerome Kern’s Showboat. We lingered till the last curtain call and the dimming of the spots. I have rarely felt more intensely part of the American scene than at those times, when the two of us, humming the just-heard melodies, were walking home through a summery Forest Park—arm in arm, with a bit of necking thrown in, like virtually all the couples around us. My fondness for the American musical started then. And today, when I, as the vice president of the Kurt Weill Foundation, thrill to Weill’s enrichment of the genre, I suspect that memories of those Forest Park summer nights, redolent of its flower beds and replete with simmering warmth and the joyousness of my first American love, are floating up to harmonize with the Weillian strains of, say, “Speak low, when you speak love.”
During our incessant conversations Idamae and I not only advanced our romance, but reinforced each other’s interests. Idamae provided me with my first glances into the unknown world of Hollywood. Her artist elder brother worked for Disney Studios as an inker for the cartoon movies. His letters home were promptly communicated to me. On the other hand, I told Idamae of the occasions I attended performances at the Fox Theater in Saint Louis. I was invited by friends from the YMHA to accompany them to this huge movie house. There is no way I could have afforded the ticket prices. It was only through the kind generosity and inclusion of my new friends that it was made possible. They reached out to the new immigrant in a way that would help him become an American boy more quickly. It was the era of Big Bands, famous choral groups such as the “Ink Spots,” and solo appearances of performers. One moment of such a stage appearance has never left my memory. The comedian, Stan Laurel, appeared without his trusty partner, Oliver Hardy. I must admit that my friends and I felt we had been entertained by the person we thought represented unsurpassable stardom. At one point he had walked through the audience despite his sizable bulk and made spontaneous wisecracks about the people he passed. People roared with laughter.
My other afternoon outings, the quintessence of American leisure time activities, didn’t interest Idamae. An energetic, attractive brunette with decided individualistic opinions—she was interested in theater, appeared in several high school productions, and wasn’t enamored with baseball at all. But another neighborhood friend, Kurt Salomon, like me a recent arrival from Germany, had jointly with me foresworn our intense, even fanatical, attachment to German soccer in favor of baseball. We shared the incredibly useful intelligence that high school students could get so-called Knothole Passes, which entitled the bearer to free admission to the left field bleachers of Sportsman Park, home of both the Saint Louis Browns and the Cardinals. There I became acquainted with the intricacies of the squeeze play, batting averages, and a more robust American language than the parlance absorbed in my English classes. I remember one diminutive student from another high school whose booming voice belied his small stature. He greeted each opposing left fielder, when he took up his position, with the choice sobriquet of “moldy rectum,” this being a somewhat attenuated version of the actual quote. I also came to admire the powerful hitting of Joe “Ducky-Wucky” Medwick, of Johnny “The Big Cat” Mize, the fielding artistry of Terry Moore, and the spectacular pitching of the Browns’ Buck “Bobo” Newsom. In fact once, while hitchhiking to Sportsman Park from Soldan, I was picked up by the Browns’ all-star pitcher himself. He detected my accent, asked me quite a few personal questions and I gloried for years in my close, if only very brief, proximity to diamond greatness.
But another hitchhike acquaintance ended in an impasse that fills me even today with guilt and outrage. All this while I had vainly tried to find Jewish people in Saint Louis wealthy enough to provide credible affidavits for my family left behind in Germany. One afternoon, on my way to work at the Jefferson Hotel downtown, a man picked me up in a car that implied affluence. I steered our conversation first to myself, then to the plight of my family. “What’s involved in getting them over here?” he asked. “Someone with some means has to guarantee that they won’t become a public charge,” I told him, or words to that effect. “Well,” he answered, “I could do that.” I nearly hugged him even while he was speeding down Delmar Boulevard. But then he continued: “I’m not sure the government will accept my pledge.” He offered no further explanation. “Are you willing to try it?” I asked. “Sure, absolutely, after all, life’s a gamble!”
All the next week I hustled for an appointment with the lawyer whom the Jewish Committee had designated to do pro bono work for us refugees. The three of us met on a Friday afternoon in the fall of 1938. Mr. R., the lawyer, turned out to be a stickler for the niceties of the law and all but oblivious to the less-than-nice plight of Germany’s Jews. He started fussing with papers and forms, asked my new acquaintance the usual routine questions, but came to an abrupt halt when my family’s potential benefactor stated his occupation. “Gambler?” A pause. Then: “We needn’t bother. The signer of an affidavit must be a stable citizen with an assured income.” The terse verdict was uttered with supercilious superiority. I remonstrated, in less sophisticated terms, of course, that we could perhaps substitute a euphemism. A withering look: “Circumvent the law?” My newfound friend walked out of the lawyer’s office, out of my life, and with him the last concrete chance of rescuing my family. I have never forgotten nor forgiven that afternoon in lawyer R.’s office. I am convinced that Malcolm C. Burke, even had he detected a subterfuge, would have validated my family’s immigration papers. Until this day, beginning with that afternoon, I have retained a loathing for pettifogging, pigmy-sized, letter-of-the law officials, and a secret if selective admiration for America’s free and generous spirits who, like that gambler or Azdak, the poor folk’s judge in Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle, “broke the laws like bread to feed the people.”
In 1939, during my senior year in high school, I became the feature editor of Scrippage and earned the nickname of “Scoop.” Said appellation attached to me because I had obtained some interviews rarely found in high school newspapers. Within months I had interviewed the band leader Benny Goodman, which also contributed to my Americanization. He and his band were appearing at the Fox Theater in midtown Saint Louis. After watching the rousing performance—I had grown to be a jazz aficionado—I eluded a watchman to get backstage. I immediately ran into Jerry Jerome, a member of the band and, with a bird in hand, developed my strategy. Had I asked Jerry directly and unadornedly to lead me to the leader of the band, he might well have shown me the door. So I said, “I would like to interview you and later Mr. Goodman for my high school newspaper.” “Sure, kid, go ahead!” And then he took me to the reigning idol of the jazz scene. “Bright kid here, wants to interview you,” Jerry said. Benny Goodman spent half an hour with me. Even today I remember the lead sentence of my front page feature: “Here he is, the King of Swing, whose clarinet and band delight jitterbugs across the land.” Of the interview itself I remember one item of repartee. I told Mr. Goodman that I had become a jazz aficionado upon coming to America from Germany, where jazz had been outlawed by Hitler. He responded, “Well that is just one additional folly of that madman!” For about a month I was a high school celebrity and my fellow students nearly forgot that I was a strange transplant in their midst.
Their brief admiration increased even more with my second interview with a prominent personality. I had devoured two news stories in the St. Louis Star-Times, the newspaper favored by my aunt and uncle. Two of my German cultural heroes were appearing in my new hometown, if under different auspices. The Nobel Prize–winning author Thomas Mann, whose novel The Buddenbrooks I had read at my home in Hildesheim and long past my bedtime, was scheduled to speak at the Saint Louis YMHA/YWHA located within two blocks of Soldan. Richard Tauber, the celebrated Viennese tenor—whose records of opera and operetta arias had frequently resonated through our apartment—had also found asylum in the United States and was appearing at Kiel Auditorium downtown.
Of course my allowance of fifty cents was laughably inadequate if measured against the price of admission to either event. Inspiration struck feature editor Stern. I went to Mrs. Rasmussen, the advisor of our school paper who wrote a well-crafted letter, requesting a free admission to the Thomas Mann lecture for the feature editor of Scrippage, Soldan’s incomparable school newspaper.
I arrived at the Y in good time. But already a record crowd was beleaguering the stairway leading to the auditorium. I immediately noticed that all arrivals were closely checked by a Cerberus in the form of a ticket-taker. Several prospective attendees were unceremoniously shunted to the nearest exit. My chances appeared no better.
I decided on a stratagem. I handed him my trumped-up credentials and while he was reading, I vanished into a group of validated arrivals and triumphantly took a seat in the auditorium. Thomas Mann, reading from a manuscript, but ever so hampered by a curious pronunciation of the English language, held forth on “The Coming Victory of Democracy,” a topic fully covered by the dailies. My moment of journalistic distinction came after the lecture and the question-and-answer period. He was assisted in the epilogue by his daughter, Erika, who translated the questions into German and her father’s answers into English.
As the crowd filtered out, Thomas Mann was led to a horseshoe-like semicircle of seats, near the exit of the auditorium. For whatever reason, Erika was temporarily not at his side. An eager group of reporters led by an obtrusive correspondent of Time magazine, started the grilling. The Time representative couched his beginning question in the willful style of his magazine, to the bafflement of the famed author, who despairingly and vainly looked for his interpreter. When another journalist was similarly ignored by the eminent guest, I saw my opportunity. I threw in a question in German. As if he had been tossed a lifeline, he clung to several of my questions. My “colleagues” were fuming. In protest, I assumed, they capped their fountain pens. Then I spotted Erika Mann, hiding a wicked smile behind her hands, undoubtedly amused by the spectacle of these supercilious reporters scooped by a precocious high school student. Having composed herself, she joined Daddy and my fun was over.
In its issue of March 24, 1939, the school newspaper carried my report on the main event and my interview, together with a column by the “associate editor-in-chief,” announcing to the world that “a Scrippage reporter scooped a Time magazine interviewer” and so forth.
For years I tried to retrieve that column and my report. My high school never responded and I thought it unlikely that the volumes of Scrippage could have survived anywhere else. But a colleague of mine, Professor Paula Hanssen at Webster University, Saint Louis, was more persistent and more skilled. Soldan’s news organ had been neatly shelved, all volumes of it, at the Missouri Historical Library.
I reread my report with a note of triumph, still reverberating into my advanced age. My first question to Thomas Mann concerned the past and was linked to something he had said during his lecture. “Mr. Mann, how is the socialization of which you spoke to come about, since you are aware that such attempts had failed in Weimar Germany?” His answer, given in German, was a prediction that the lower classes and particularly the “Negro” population, still resenting the hardships of the Great Depression, would become politically active and achieve those goals. A second question that I raised about education received an equally optimistic, if hitherto unfulfilled prediction. He felt that America was on the cusp of having universal college education. If I look at today’s tuition, Thomas Mann’s vision has moved backward rather than forward. It was an auspicious (and all but final) beginning of my journalistic career.
I graduated from Soldan in June, 1939. My efforts to gain a scholarship for college succeeded, but ultimately led to naught. Westminster College in Fulton, Mississippi was ready to cover my tuition but could contribute nothing for my room and board and in fact told me that getting a job there, for example as a busboy, would be next to impossible. I had to find a different route to make the transition from high school to college.
So I did what my students of today are doing quite regularly. I decided to work for one year to have the funds for college. I carefully hoarded my busboy tips and salary. Finally when I was financially ready—well, more or less—I had a stroke of good luck.
I applied for a busboy job at a hotel within half-a-block of one of the universities located in Saint Louis. I went for an interview with hope and trepidation. The interviewer for the position was Lukas Lanza, the head waiter of the Piccadilly Room of the Melbourne Hotel. I sold myself as a busboy of nearly superhuman capacities. I also interspersed an appeal to his apparent good nature. I mentioned that I was ready to continue my education at a university and that Saint Louis University would undoubtedly accept me because of my good high school grades and what I needed now was a job to pay my tuition. His kindness showed: “OK Gunther, we’ll try you out.” My luck held. I proved to be proficient at my job as a busboy and Saint Louis University sent out a letter of acceptance in short order. With the help of a counselor I selected my program and found that the faculty was both outstanding and absolutely undeviating in their rigor. My prize example is our encounter with our logic teacher on a wintry day. Father Steven J. Reeve, who took delight in signing himself S. J. Reeve, S. J., had an uncanny ability to provoke his students into thinking. As a debate coach he would take on the affirmative team and deftly obliterate it, then turn around in mid-debate and dispose of the negative team with equal ease.
On a chilly February day we were scheduled to take our final exam. The central heating system had given up the ghost and we were sitting in our overcoats, hats and gloves awaiting the arrival of Father Reeve. He came into the classroom clutching thirty or so blue books. Immediately one of the students, Nancy Bakewell, a prominent campus leader, rose from her seat. “Father Reeve there is no heat in this building. You will have to postpone the final.” He looked at her with an iciness that matched the room’s temperature. “Miss Bakewell, you didn’t come to Saint Louis University to get out of the inclement weather, did you now?” It is the first and only time that I, together with my fellow students, wrote the answers to an exam with my gloves securely in place. I might add that there’s no way that Father Reeve could have prevailed in today’s atmosphere even at a rigorously run university.
There was my history professor, Father Bannon who taught European history from an American perspective. For example neither in Germany nor in my high school classes had I learned about the history of Ireland and the emigration of Irish citizens to America during the so-called Irish Potato Famine of 1845–1852. His graphic description and empathy kept us spellbound. But his empathy didn’t stop with his (presumable) forefathers or with his present-day fellow Catholics. Before I left the university at the end of the semester for the US Army, I went to him to say good-bye. He kept me at his desk until the room had emptied, took me aside and gave me his priestly blessings well-knowing that I was Jewish. I heard that several months later he joined the Army as a chaplain. His kindness overwhelmed me.
And there was Father McNamee, the head librarian. He had set up a large desk at the entrance of the main reading room. One day Professor Sullivan, our English teacher, had given us a fairly complex assignment. I had the temerity to walk right up to Father McNamee’s desk and to ask him where I might find relevant material on the subject. He got up and urged me to follow him. Belying his seventy years plus, he climbed at top speed up a spiral staircase, then turned to a shelf and said: “You will probably find several books on the subject right here.” I did, of course, and I found something else, a university administrator whose first priority was students.
As those intensely lived years progressed I learned to see America as it was, its wonders and its warts. But one additional person had simultaneously entered my life who showed me my adoptive land not only as it was, but as it should be. Aunt Rae (short for Rebecca) Benson was no relative at all; she was the sister of Ethel, my aunt by marriage. While both sisters had been born in or near Saint Louis, Rae had broken the mold of Ethel’s homebody existence and humdrum lifestyle. Ethel had married an assimilated but still observant Jew, Rae an Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Ethel took no trips except into the close vicinity of the West Side and hence had little to report beyond neighborhood gossip; Rae, the wife of a railroad linesman supervisor, had gotten annual railroad courtesy tickets and showed pictures of fabled San Francisco, its stately hotels and Fisherman’s Wharf with Joe DiMaggio’s restaurant, a landmark of particular interest to me, since the Yankees always stayed at “my” Chase Hotel. Aunt Ethel played auction bridge; Aunt Rae went to lectures.
She took me along. When I first came to their house to play with her son Frankie, a few years younger than I, she sensed my unformulated hunger for a closer and deeper look at America’s culture. She had joined the Ethical Culture Society. At least once a month I joined her at her invitation for a lecture by prominent speakers at the society’s auditorium. It was there I heard Martha Gellhorn’s impassioned plea for America’s involvement in the face of Hitler’s quest for global conquest. A magnetic personality, striking both by her eloquent, fiery delivery, and her commanding beauty, she told of her experiences during the Spanish Civil War with her fellow correspondent and brief marital partner Ernest Hemingway, and of the brutalities she witnessed during the German entrance into Prague. Aunt Rae and I walked up to her after the lecture and I asked her a few questions. Some fifty years later, during an interview I conducted with her for my article on Hemingway and the exiles during the Spanish Civil War, I reminded her of our first encounter. She indeed remembered her lecture in her hometown of Saint Louis; but of course not the precocious youngster and his insistent questions.
Aunt Rae made me see the darker sides of American life and she offered correctives for them. She recommended that I read some of the muckrakers. I read Upton Sinclair’s The Brass Check, an exposé of America’s press and particularly its beholdenness to its advertisers. I was shocked at first by the boldness with which she discussed the book’s title; Sinclair had taken it from the entry tokens bought upon entering a house of prostitution. So Aunt Rae also freed me, en passant, of a lingering prudishness. But she also pointed out how reportage can be twisted according to the wishes of large advertisers, an observation that even today has lost little of its relevance.
After Joe Louis’s blitz victory over Max Schmeling in their second encounter she ridiculed the myths of racial superiority and ethnic stereotypes. She pointed out America’s discriminatory practices; in later years she took an active part in the integration of Saint Louis’s public swimming pools, effected only after some brutal beatings of some pioneering black youngsters. She looked at some of my high school textbooks and found them wanting. In David L. Murray’s textbook she found his reference to the slaves as “samboes” incredibly offensive. She gave me an added perspective on my country of asylum. I began to see it more clearly without loving it less.
While Aunt Rae became my mentor, Aunt Ethel was my guide to the work-a-day life of America’s lower middle class. At dinner she would remind me of the difference between European and American table manners and, in general, prevent me from violating American do’s and don’ts. Her benevolence wasn’t perfunctory at all. She maintained a home for all of her family and sought to make our lives as comfortable and fulfilled as possible. Even with a five-year age difference, their son, Melvin, who lived with us for a while, and I often engaged in what can be termed “sibling rivalry.” It was rooted in part by his resentment that he, who had never finished high school, had to listen to my reports of my classroom achievements. By the same token, I felt that Ethel’s motherly allegiance was lying with her son. Of course, what Melvin had that I could only dream about was having his parents in his life. My focus continued to be having my family join me in my new world. There was really no competition in that. He won hands down! Uncle Benno and I, when we spoke together, frequently and in German, talked about his parental home. He asked me for every tidbit of memory of my days in Vlotho. Although I was most appreciative of his and Ethel’s generosity, they were no loco parentis, except for the emotional closeness of being biologically related. They also sheltered me when I became despondent about being cut off from all the persons loved in my homeland. They substituted their love and I shall never forget that. In addition they shared their vision of the American dream with me and under their tutelage and despite the occasional demurrers of Aunt Rae, I became a budding American patriot.
Yes, I was on the road to Americanization, a walk no one can ever complete, because America is not only different, as Carl Zuckmayer put it, but also because it is so many things; it is protean and unpredictable. As for me, Günther, I never became a completely American guy; I am, we all are a conglomerate of our experiences. But I am grateful to all those who pointed me in that direction toward America, from Mr. Tittel to the Silberbergs to Aunt Rae, and who gently chivvied me along. As those years of rapid acculturation drew to a close, “I Heard America Singing,” as Walt Whitman, the poet of its democratic spirit, had exulted. It is my hope that the song will not grow faint, in the years to come.