BY HARRIET HEYDEMANN
I sit at the curb, gazing up at five stories of concrete, steel and glass. The modern, flat-front building begs for ornamentation. Something to make it distinctive: a cornerstone with a date, a marker of its past, a plaque to declare its importance. The building has nothing to say for itself. The only thing unique about it is its address—Hansa Allee 5.
Frankfurt’s sky is colorless this morning. Hazy light dulls the industrial beige paint, casting an ashen patina over the exterior. I think about ringing doorbells. Maybe someone still lives here who remembers the Simons. Maybe I’ll find an illuminating detail, a sound or smell wafting out of a window, a remnant of who she was. Maybe if I sit here long enough, if I listen hard, her past will come forward and talk to me. But that doesn’t happen. Hansa Allee 5 was my mother’s address, but it’s not her house.
When my mother lived here, her home resembled a stately old lady with mansard roof and Gothic Revival decoration. She lived here from 1920, the year of her birth, until 1938, the year she escaped.
The new Hansa Allee 5 was probably constructed around 1950, after the Marshall Plan took effect, and the U.S. sent Germany over a billion dollars to rebuild war-devastated areas.
The neighboring houses weren’t bombed. They memorialize a more enlightened period in German history. A cornice displays the Gothic numerals: “1908.” My sister, the art expert, identifies the buildings as Renaissance Revivals.
I imagine my mother descending a grand curved staircase with marble balustrading. I think she had her own bedroom. That is until Jews were evacuated from outlying towns, and my grandparents’ house was divided to accommodate a few of the three thousand Jews confined to the cities. Did my grandparents shelter poor relations? Did they rent rooms to cover expenses? Or was it mandated by the Third Reich?
My visit to Frankfurt is by invitation from a volunteer organization dedicated to the remembrance of the Jews who once lived and prospered here. A few dozen people have been invited each year for the past thirty-five years. First, the survivors. My mother went in 1993. Though, my mother never called herself a survivor. She reserved that designation for those who survived the camps. She said she didn’t suffer as much as they did, as if suffering could be weighed in kilos.
I am with a group of “children of former Frankfurt citizens.” There are about thirty of us. When someone says “hoppe, hoppe reiter,” we nod and remember bouncing on our parents’ knees. We sing “Guten abend, gute nacht,” the only German words my mother shared with her children, which she sang in the key of melancholy, her voice drifting off at the end. I don’t speak German, but I can imitate the gurgling “r” sound I heard as a child. Both of my parents were German Jews, as were most of their friends.
One by one, we introduce ourselves. I wonder if the others grew up with vagaries, silences, and dark rye bread. Did they wish their mothers filled their lunch boxes with Hershey’s kisses and peanut butter and jelly on Wonder Bread? And maybe a note? My friend Betty got notes, like Valentines and Cracker Jack prizes, my mother would have thought silly.
I wonder if the others wished their parents had laughed at their knock-knock jokes and rocked around the clock? Were their parents unable to help with their college applications, only to say they must go, “because education is the one thing they can’t take away from you”? A few paragraphs in my high school history book tell me who “they” are. But if “they” are history, why do I still feel afraid?
As part of my invitation, I’m asked to speak to students about my mother.
“That will be a short talk,” I say. My mother left nothing but a handful of photographs without names or dates and a few letters addressed to her, but nothing from her, and nothing before 1938.
I had begged my mother for details of her home as a door into her childhood. We sat drinking tea at her kitchen table, a few years before she died. The windows in the breakfast area looked out to her backyard. A gardener mowed the weed-filled lawn, but there hadn’t been flowers since my father died almost thirty years ago. Over the years, my mother’s thick wavy hair had thinned. Underneath the pale reddish, blondish color was whiteness I’d never seen. My mother hunched over the table, her shoulders rounded from the burdens of age and weight. When I was a child, she would reprimand me for my poor posture. “Sit up straight” was a phrase I heard often. Her dictates were often followed by “as long as you’re under my roof” and “don’t talk back.” My two grandmothers had instructed her not to spoil me. I spent much of my childhood playing outside or at friends’ houses where their all-American moms didn’t seem to mind elbows on the table or eating with fingers. My friends and I would watch TV, and I would pretend Donna Reed was my mother.
“Did you have a parlor? Did the windows have lace curtains?” I asked her.
“Yes, of course.” She paused for a minute before nodding, her face saying, “Those are ridiculous questions.” My mother prided herself on her photographic memory. Anything misplaced, a sweater, a magazine, a hair clip, she knew exactly where it had been left. She memorized whole passages of books and quoted verbatim things people said. Why did her memory stop at 1938, as if the time before didn’t exist? Her history was the one thing she didn’t want to reclaim.
I started with simple questions to ease into her past. “Where was your room? In the front or the back? Where was your nanny’s room?”
My mother said she had a nanny, and a maid, and a woman who came once a week to wash and iron the sheets. My mother always had her sheets ironed, even the permanent press. “Our nanny, Lina, and our maid were forced to leave.” Her eyes looked teary when she said this, but I reminded myself she had glaucoma.
In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws forbade Jews from employing German females under the age of forty-five.
“Lina eventually married a German officer,” she added. Her face bore an expression of hurt, or maybe she was simply tired. She had once spoken of Lina like an older sister. I wondered if my mother felt betrayed. If I asked her would she tell me?
“Was Lina the one who snuck you backstage for performances when Jews weren’t allowed in the opera house?”
My mother paused, shaking her head. Was she revisiting the child who hid in the dark offstage, learning arias by heart? When I was six or seven, she took me to see Hansel and Gretel, my first opera. I sat perched on the edge of the cushioned seat with my mouth agape, dazzled by the singing, the costumes, the lights. I could feel the fear of those children, lost in the woods. When real angels floated down, I held my breath, hypnotized by their wondrous wings. I shifted my torso and swung my head back and forth from the stage to my mother, wanting to share the thrill of it with her. But all I saw was her profile. What was she thinking when she fixed her gaze away from me?
My mother mouthed the words to the arias, singing to herself. I think she liked to sing, but when her children grew too old for lullabies, her lilting soprano only surfaced for Passover seders.
“No, not Lina,” my mother said. “A German woman who liked my parents and hated the Nazis. Her lover was an opera singer.”
My ears pricked up with the mention of love, opera, and a German who hated Nazis. “So, what happened to her?”
My mother sipped her tea and didn’t answer, either because she didn’t know, or didn’t want to know, or didn’t know how to tell me. As a child, I knew not to ask. Now, I get the facts from books and other people’s accounts. My mother’s sister, Rosy, described my mother as “geschlossen,” like the after hours signs on storefronts. I wanted to peek inside, but I wasn’t sure what I was looking for.
My mother turned to the window. “I need that fence fixed,” she said, pointing with her chin.
***
Through our tour guide, I learn that in 1933, Ludwig Landmann, a Jew, and the mayor who had served the city for nine years was removed from office, tossed out like a bucket of sewage. Thirty-thousand Jews lived in Frankfurt then, about five percent of the population. Soon after, my grandfather, a portly middle-aged man who wore three-piece suits and tucked a pocket watch in his vest, lost his job. In 1935, Jews lost their German citizenship and their right to vote. When my grandfather walked by his Christian neighbors standing in line to cast their ballots, he wept. Two brown shirts spat on him and pushed him down in the street, while green-uniformed Orpo looked the other way. The police and the courts no longer protected Jews. My mother never mentioned the incident, but I felt her silence like a knot in my throat.
The only story my mother told me was a love story. It starts with her boyfriend, Erich. As laws restricted every phase of their lives, two teenagers found each other in Philanthropin, a private Jewish high school they were allowed to attend. I wanted details. Where did they kiss? Under a staircase? In an empty classroom? As they strolled home from school?
“Well, Harriet,” my mother began. “Before Erich leaves, I think late 1937, he went to my mother, your grandmother, and asked if we had any relatives in America.”
I picture my grandmother, who I called Omi, reclining on an upholstered divan in their parlor. She doesn’t dangle her legs from a chair which is bad for circulation, and she never goes out in the sun. My Omi is a lady of leisure who manages her household, rules over her two daughters, entertains guests, plays the piano, and keeps a strictly kosher home.
“Your grandmother tells Erich that maybe we have second or third cousins in Baltimore, and she thinks their name is Davidoff.” My mother nodded and gazed out at her yard, holding her teacup in both hands.
“So, then what happened?” I prodded her.
“As soon as Erich arrives in America, he goes to the New York City library and looks up Davidoff in the Baltimore phone book.”
I tried to imagine a teenager, who knows little English, navigating the main library on Fifth Avenue, an imposing fortress of seven stories, covering an entire city block. Maybe he’s motivated by the horror stories coming from Eastern Europe, stories that surfaced in the U.S. but were hidden or dismissed as unbelievable lies. Germans who read Heine and listen to Beethoven wouldn’t do such things.
“Erich goes to the phone booth, empties his pocket of coins, and calls every Davidoff in Baltimore. How many could there be? Six? Ten? One by one, Erich asks, ‘Do you have relatives in Frankfurt by the name of Simon?’ No one heard of us. Then, he thinks maybe they Anglicized their name, because Davidoff sounds Jewish. He goes back and looks up the numbers for anyone named David. Were there twenty? He hopes they hadn’t left Baltimore. It was the Depression. People were struggling. They moved to find work. Finally, someone answers, ‘yes.’ But they’re poor and can hardly take care of themselves. So Erich asks them if they know anyone who will sponsor me. And they come up with a distant cousin with money and connections. And the distant cousin agrees. That’s the story.” She slapped her hand on the table. “That’s how I got out, because of Erich.”
“That’s it?” I raised my eyebrows. “You can’t stop there. Go back a bit. What did you and Erich do before he left?”
“Well,” she stopped and closed her eyes for a few seconds. “We liked to dance. Sometimes, we went to an apfelwein garden.”
“Wait a minute. An apfelwein garden?” I interrupted my mother. “How did you get in? Jews weren’t allowed in public places. Weren’t there signs, ‘Juden nicht erwünscht?’ Weren’t you supposed to wear yellow stars?”
“Ach, there were ways,” my mother smiled. Her face soft, as if she might be staring into Erich’s eyes.
“What do you mean ‘there were ways’?” I leaned forward hoping she would look at me. I wanted her to go back in time, to tell me about this person who defied rules, took risks, fell in love. Was that possible? My mind rattled with loose jigsaw pieces that didn’t fit my picture of my mother.
“You wouldn’t understand,” her only explanation.
Looking through a box, hidden in the garage, I found a black and white photograph of my mother, a pretty young teenager, a girl really, with defined cheekbones, high forehead, and a sweet smile, the face of a Hummel figurine. Her eyes turned slightly upward catching the light. There’s part of a swastika in the right hand corner. My chest tightens looking at her. The girl is too happy, too innocent to know not to smile. She’s wearing a pin or button of a Scottish terrier that’s too juvenile. Did her mother dress her like a child to protect her from the world? How could they ignore the swastika creeping into the frame? She’s trapped in a fantasy childhood, and I’m afraid for her. I want to grab that girl, yell out, and tell her, what? Grow up? Get out of this picture? This story doesn’t have a happy ending?
The crown of her head shimmered. I pointed to the picture. “You’re almost as blonde as you were when you were a young child.” This was a question I hoped she would answer.
“From the sun,” she said.
My mother reached across her kitchen table and tucked an errant strand of my hair behind an ear. When I was a child, she kept my hair cropped short. My unruly curls tangled into knots and were too much for her to manage. Kneeling over the rim of the tub, she’d reach for a bottle of peroxide standing next to the Breck. As she shampooed my hair, she’d mix in a little. Just a capful or two. She wanted me to be blonde, like she was as a child. Blonde was brighter, prettier, more desirable. Blonde wasn’t Jewish.
“No one likes the Jews,” she told me. “Not FDR, Joseph Kennedy, Charles Lindbergh, and the entire Ford Motor Company.” My parents only drove Chevrolets. “No one wanted us.” By the time I am old enough to go to kindergarten, I know that “no one” is everyone who isn’t Jewish.
“Put some highlights in your hair. You’re getting too dark,” she said when I was thirty. I followed her advice. Appearances mattered, to her, to the world, a rule I absorbed without question. She convinced my sister to dye her hair blonde, too.
***
I take a streetcar and find my way to the Sachsenhausen section of Frankfurt and enter an apfelwein garden. Could this be my mother’s and Erich’s apfelwein garden? I can imagine him looking into her eyes as he held her hands across the battered wooden table. Is this where they promised to love each other forever?
I order one glass of apfelwein and then another. I don’t like the tart liquid, but I want to feel like I’m here with my mother and her boyfriend. They would be drinking. They toast to their future in America with the cider Frankfurters love.
I look over my shoulder. My mother would be looking over her shoulder hoping no one notices her. She wears a fitted sweater with tiny pearl buttons from her grandparents’ department store in Lithuania. The two teenagers hold hands as they lean over the table.
An accordionist plays romantic German folk songs in the background. A few couples are dancing. Erich guides my mother to a dark corner of the patio under an arbor weighted with vines. He puts his hand at her waist and pulls her close. “Come with me, if not now, soon.” They sway to the music and for a while after the music is over.
Ruth eyes an older couple watching them from across the patio. Her father has told her to trust no one. She turns to the side, trying to disappear. Her fingers tremble. Erich squeezes her hand.
“You don’t need to worry.” His deep voice comforts her. “You’re so pretty, Ruthie, with your hazel eyes and blonde hair.” He lowers his voice. “No one can tell we’re Jews. They stare at us, because we’re young and handsome. He smiles and turns his face left and right, showing off his square jaw, opening wide his blue eyes. “Just look at me.”
Ruth leans into him, her forehead grazing his shoulder. He believes, because his mother has told him that he can do anything he puts his mind to, he can protect her, and one day, he will save her. The two teenagers turn their backs to the dance floor, creating their own cocoon, as if they are invisible.
That scene is my invention, like more than half of this story. I wonder how much my mother invented. I’ve heard her story a few times. Erich was always the hero. She’s hardly present.
***
“Erich wrote me right away,” my mother said. “‘You must come. If you don’t come now, I will never see you again.’ Can you imagine? I wasn’t even eighteen.”
“Were you frightened?” I’m frightened for her. “Did you realize you were in danger?” I wondered how much she knew of the world outside of her geography book.
“I was frightened to leave my family.” She says this quietly, almost to herself.
I could picture her, reading Erich’s letters, trying not to tear the thin tissue. She wraps herself in a duvet and muffles her sobs in down pillows. She imagines running off the ship and into Erich’s arms. He will be there on the dock waiting with a spring bouquet, just like in the movies. She will feel light and airy, as if she could take flight.
She squints at the paper, trying to find his heart in the spaces between his words. Erich’s handwriting looks hurried, not the even script they were taught in school. She senses desperation and fear, begging her to come. Did he miss her, or were his pleadings a sign of homesickness?
What is there, but a foreign place? All she knows is here. How can she leave everything and everyone she knows? She’s never been without her family. Her entire life has been dictated by her parents, her close-knit relatives, centuries of traditions, and 613 commandments. Her mother even picked her clothes. How can she leave her aging parents? Her head aches thinking of what might happen to them. Only a few days ago, men in brown shirts came for their neighbor, Herr Kessler. She had heard boots stomping. Doors slamming. Frau Kessler crying. Questions unanswered. Herr Kessler taken away and never returned. No one is certain of anything anymore.
She wants to hide under her duvet with Erich’s letters. “I love you, Ruthie. Write me. I wait for you. Kisses, Erich.”
Erich must have warned her of dangers and atrocities, or maybe those lines were redacted by the German Minister of Propaganda or the American consulate. When I asked my mother for his letters, she shook her head. My mother erased the painful parts of her story, but I could see her anguish in the deep creases under her eyes.
There are no atrocities in my mother’s story. Ever. After all, this is a love story. My mother never mentioned the horrors of her childhood. She forbade me to see The Pawnbroker, and “Holocaust” wasn’t part of our vocabulary.
When a woman from Poland moved to our neighborhood, my mother brought me along with her welcome gift, a box of butter cookies from Silber’s Bakery. She instructed me to “be nice to the daughter. Make friends. She’s your age.”
I was eyeing the box of cookies when the Polish woman opened the door. We were attacked by the odor of cooked cabbage. My mother knew the smell made me nauseous. She looked down at me with a commanding glance that said, “Don’t say anything, or you will be punished.”
The girl’s hair was oily, and her forehead was too narrow. At age eight, I already had my criteria for coolness. I leaned into my mother.
Their living room didn’t have any furniture, and their kitchen was smaller than ours, or maybe the table was too big. My mother scooted sideways to sit down. The Polish woman rolled up her sleeve and lay her arm across the table, like she wanted my mother to give her an infusion. Her tears splashed onto the blue numbers. My mother reached across the table, her plump arm soft and unmarred. She held the Polish woman’s hand. A sadness flooded the house, and I was afraid I would be swallowed up by the thick sludge of it. I bit my lip, trying to behave.
“This is what they did to us,” the Polish woman said to my mother. For a second, the woman glanced at me, as if she just noticed my presence. Then, she switched to a language that sounded like German but wasn’t German. My mother nodded and whispered, “Ja, ja.”
When we walked home, my mother shook her head. “Six million,” she said and let out a quiet moan. Her face drooped down to the pavement, but I didn’t know why. I had nightmares about the Polish woman that night and many nights after, but my mother didn’t come to hold me in the dark. I told my mother there were ghosts in that house.
“Go back to sleep,” my mother said. “There’s no such thing.” But I didn’t believe her. When she was alone at night, she heard her father’s voice as clear as it was in 1938. She told me as much.
***
My mother sat at her father’s feet, or maybe in his lap, her arms around his neck. “I don’t want to go. I don’t want to leave you.” She hid her head in his shoulder and wept like she never had before or ever would again.
My grandfather pulled his handkerchief from his vest pocket and wiped his daughter’s tears. He stroked her cheek and kissed her forehead. “Ruthie, you must go – now, while you have the chance. God willing, we’ll follow soon. You, my good daughter, will save us.”
“I’d never been alone before, or taken care of myself or anyone else.” She stopped and closed her eyes for a few shallow breaths. “One day I am a child, and the next day, I have to save my family. I arrived in Baltimore on October 12, 1938, one month before Kristallnacht, when the synagogues were set ablaze, and brown shirts rounded up Jewish men to work in concentration camps. Rosy told me later that our father went to bed, took out his teeth and pretended he was dying.” She stopped and swallowed. Sometimes my mother had trouble swallowing.
“The next day, Rosy ran to the telegraph office. It wasn’t easy. She was pretty, but she had a distinctive nose. And she wasn’t blonde. She saw Frankfurt’s synagogues smoldering, Jewish shops looted, windows smashed, Torah scrolls thrown in the streets. That day I get a wire. ‘Get three affidavits. Beginning of the end,’ For years, my sister tormented me —‘You weren’t there. All you cared about was your boyfriend.’”
My mother never told me about her sister’s taunts while her sister was alive. She had buried Rosy’s words for seventy years. Do they belong to me now?
***
A round-faced man, wearing a kippah, sits in a small office in Frankfurt’s old Jewish cemetery. He searches a computerized database with hundreds of names and hands me a map. “Turn right at the entrance and count eight rows. Jacob Simon is in area H or Q, the eleventh stone from the left.” What looks simple on the map is a labyrinth on the ground. After several circular attempts, I walk down a dusty uneven path and find my grandfather. His two daughters had purchased a gravestone in the sixties. Plain and unadorned, it’s as noncommittal as the house at Hansa Allee 5. I place a stone near the base. I do this for my mother. Part of her is here with him.
I look down row after row of graves. Who did my mother know here? Where are the other Simons? My grandfather had five siblings, and parents, and cousins, and grandparents. Did my mother learn their fates? She never spoke of her relatives who died, as if they never lived. But she never forgot them. They confronted her on her return visit to Frankfurt, just as she stands beside me now. My vision blurs, and my limbs feel heavy, as if my pockets are full of stones. “Say the prayer,” my mother tells me. “Say the name, Simon.”
I recite the Mourners’ Kaddish for all of them. I don’t mourn alone. Their ghosts are my minyan. How many could there be?
Our tour guide tells us the numbers, but no names. How can he? About 20,000 Jews escaped Frankfurt before trains transported the remaining 9,500 to death camps. When the city was cleansed of Jews, did German officers occupy Hansa Allee 5?
My mother must have known people on those trains. Her family had lived in Frankfurt too long for her not to know someone —her schoolmates, her teachers, the members of her synagogue, the neighborhood shopkeepers she passed on her way to school. She would wonder who was on those trains. Why them and not her?
A friend from our group takes me to Romerberg Platz, the heart of the medieval Altstadt (old town). The area was destroyed during World War II. Since its reconstruction, it’s become a popular tourist destination. We stroll around the plaza admiring the half-timbered buildings, cobblestone streets, and the old town hall, all rebuilt to look like they once were, like a scene from the Pied Piper of Hamelin, like it was when my mother was a child. My mother might have sat with her parents, sipped cocoa and ate sacher torte at a café here. Until they couldn’t.
My friend draws my attention to a plaque lying flat amidst the cobblestones on the far side of the plaza. “This is where they burned the books,” she says. My throat tightens. I ask my friend to translate the inscription.
“This was just a prelude, where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.- H. Heine, 1820.”
I shudder looking at the date – 1933. My mother lived here then. She was thirteen, old enough to remember the event and all that followed.
Students, not much older than she, threw whole libraries onto the pyre, the writings of Jewish scholars, and poets, and philosophers: Heine, Goethe, Schiller. They cheered as if at a festival. My mother must have been frightened. She could hear people in the streets yelling, “Sieg Heil.” She curled up in her bed, drew her legs to her chest, and hid her face in her hands, but she couldn’t shut out the chanting. She cried in silence. She didn’t want to upset her parents.
The wind carried the sparks and ash and hatred a mile north to Hansa Allee where they fell on my mother’s doorstep. My grandparents closed their drapes and stayed indoors that night. But what about the next day and the day after that? How could they protect their children from young men running through the streets painting “Kauft nicht bei Juden” on every store owned by Jews, from constant surveillance by the Orpo and brown shirts? All the while, their non-Jewish neighbors, people they thought were friends, looked on in silence.
The bronze flames on the plaque move. The wind was blowing then as it is now. Rain clouds darken the sky, and I pull up my hood. Smoke fills the air, and I strain to breathe. A few young people laugh as they walk past and puff on their cigarettes. They carry briefcases and shopping bags. Busy Germans on their way to wherever. What do they see? What did they see then? Why did they smile?
They pass, and I hear a voice resonating from the stones. “Meine Tochter.” Did she ever call me that? “Don’t get too close.”
I feel “chilled to the bone,” a phrase my mother often used. She’s right here wearing her camel hair coat. Her hands, always cold, are deep in her pockets. Her face expressionless, she watches me, and then she’s gone. My eyes pool with tears, but like my mother, I don’t cry in public. I can’t stop trembling. My friend grabs my arm before my knees hit the cobblestones.
I thought if I went to Frankfurt, and found my mother’s house on Hansa Allee, and drank the apfelwein in Sachsenhausen, and strolled along the streets of Altstadt, I would find a carefree young woman who looked like my mother. She would toss back her head, and laugh, and tell me I am the light of her life, the best thing that ever happened, and she would sing “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.” My picture dissolves quickly. I never knew my mother to be carefree, and she never sang American songs.
My mother wanted to spare her children from the ghosts who reminded her that she survived, and they did not. They latched onto her shoulders and never let go. I saw them in the sorrow of her face, and I heard them in our basement where my mother sat at the bottom of the stairs, her head bent in her lap, and cried alone in the dark. I will always be afraid of basements.
My mother believed it was her job to shield her children from the evils of the world. It’s an impossible task, and there’s no way to do it right. She didn’t want to burden her children with all the cruelties people inflict on one another. But even as a child, I sensed her fears, fears that seeped out of her pores and invaded my cells. And no matter how hard she tried to safeguard me, I learned that the world is a frightening place. Terrible things happen every day. Books burned. Homes bombed. People packed, like cattle, into trains, with no return. Whole towns destroyed. My mother’s past reduced to a few photographs, and letters, and paragraphs in history books.
***
On the last day of my trip, I take a cab to a high school near the center of Frankfurt. I look at the smiling, blonde, blue-eyed teenagers, as they wait for me to begin. I am not the first to speak to them. They have been told horror stories of the Holocaust by survivors and survivors’ children. One student tells me, “We’ve heard a lot of sad stories.”
The child in me wants to attack. “Where were your grandparents, when my grandparents were forced to leave Frankfurt? Did your grandparents move into Hansa Allee 5?” But I am a parent now, and they are children, as young and innocent as my mother was. So I stand as straight as I can and tell them a story of two Jewish teenagers, a story with stolen kisses, and dancing, and a handsome hero who rescues his girlfriend from men in brown shirts, and a burning building, or maybe a sinking ship of a homeland.
With only half a story from my mother, I took her story and wrote my own, a story with dimension, and ornamentation, and demonstrative love between parent and child. A Renaissance Revival story. This is the tale I tell my daughter as we sit around my kitchen table. I don’t include the numbers, or the part about Romerberg Platz, or what happened to Erich, or Jacob Simon, or the ghosts.
I keep the love story.
Harriet Heydemann is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University. Her work has appeared in The Big Roundtable, Brain,Child, Hippocampus, Driftwood Press, Intima, She’s Got This! Essays on Standing Strong and Moving On, and A Cup of Comfort for Parents of Children with Special Needs.