Branching: Thoughts of an Ever-Curious Author

I have a guardian angel. I think he is male, though you could not tell by looking at him. He has golden wings and wears a plain white gown. He does not concern himself with politics or other important things, but every so often he rescues me in the most amazing way.

During World War II, the Nazis occupied Belgium. Two years later they decided to send Jews, including me, then a seventeen-year-old teen, to concentration camps. My family decided to hide instead. I was forced to leave my beloved high school and work as a mother’s helper.

When the Germans finally left Brussels two years later, I was much too old to return to high school. I took advantage of a special law that allowed war victims to enroll in institutions of higher education even if they had not graduated from high school. The deal was that they had to pass a high school equivalency exam after their first year in college. I passed my first year at the Institut Meurice Chimie with flying colors, even though I hardly knew any math. In fact, the only thing I remembered of high-school math was Pythagorean’s theorem governing right-angle triangles. During my equivalency exam the professor invited me to pull a math question out of a bag. It asked me to prove the famous Pythagorean theorem. I passed the exam, which entitled me to continue my education at grade level.

*

In 1959, long before cell phones, I drove with my five-year-old daughter Judy, her friend Elissa, and my three-year-old son David to Manhattan’s Fort Tryon Park. We were in the middle lane of the old West Side Highway, surrounded by fast-moving traffic. Suddenly my vintage Ford stopped. What was I to do? If I stayed in the car, chances were that I would be hit, but how could I leave with my brood of three! Suddenly a car pulled up in front of us. Four men spilled out. They were auto mechanics on a lunchtime spin and soon we were on our way.

*

My fridge broke down two days before we were to leave for a lengthy trip. In exchange for luxurious accommodations in Brooklyn Heights, our friend Michael was to dog-sit for Sasha, our little Dachshund. I rushed to a store to buy a new fridge, armed with the measurements of the space to accommodate it. “You are lucky; I have a bargain for you,” the salesman said. “It is bigger than your old model, but it will fit.”

The next day the fridge was delivered. After its doors were unhinged, it fit into the apartment house’s small elevator. It managed to pass through the entrance of the apartment, but got stuck in front of the kitchen passage. After watching the deliverymen unsuccessfully maneuver the fridge for one hour, I panicked. I ran through the apartment building in search of help. I heard workmen banging away in Apartment 3A. I pleaded. The two guys followed me upstairs. After evaluating the situation they removed the frame of the wooden doorway of the entrance to the kitchen. One of my two new friends was an expert mover. He directed the deliverymen on how to maneuver the fridge into place. Angles and inches mattered, but it fit. The doors were reattached and the shelves put in. The doorframe was hammered back into place. A bucket of white painted materialized from nowhere, and another twenty minutes later everything looked pristine.

I figured that the emergency rescue would cost me hundreds of dollars, but the workmen told me that there was no charge. I guess they were perhaps being paid by my co-op or that the bill would come later. It never did, and my dog-sitter enjoyed a carefree vacation.

That was twenty years ago. I beseech my guardian angel that my refrigerator will outlast me.

*

Decades ago I wrote: Conception/Contraception: A New Look, which McGraw-Hill published in 1975. It explains humanity’s long quest to unravel the marvels of reproduction.

One stumbling block to the understanding of the exquisitely timed, hormone-controlled process was that nobody could find the mammalian egg. During the seventeenth century, England’s William Harvey, the discoverer of blood circulation, joined the search by examining the uterus of England’s royal deer. A picture of his experiments hung in Columbia University’s old medical library, where I did much of the research for this book. Harvey failed to find the minuscule egg, even though it is the biggest cell in the body. It was only in 1827 that Karl Ernst von Baer, a, Eastern-European scientist experimenting with dogs, finally discovered the mammalian egg. It took another 150 years, and the discovery of hormones, to nail down the details of conception, gestation, and birth. Inevitably the understanding led to the discovery of effective methods of birth control, a technique people had been searching for since antiquity.

The writing of the book was done, and now I had the pleasure of finding illustrations. One night I woke up with a start. I had vividly dreamt of a faded picture of William Harvey examining the uterus of a doe in the company of England’s King Charles I. The picture hung in the medical library of Columbia University; I had completely forgotten about it. The next morning I phoned Columbia and asked the librarian about it. He said that he never noticed it, but agreed to check. He returned to the phone excited. Yes, to his surprise and mine, the picture was there. I included it in the book.

*

Recently a number of unfortunate events beset my life. I wondered whether my guardian angel had quit. Last December, on an extremely cold day, I took a taxi to the Frick Library in Manhattan. I am still writing books! I left my mismatched gloves in the taxi. On my return trip I was nursing my cold hands as I was sitting on the crosstown bus. I looked up. A departing passenger had dropped a perfect pair of black suede gloves!

Thank you, Guardian Angel. I need you for as long as I live.

David at his bar mitzvah in 1969.

To the memory of David Loebl (1956-1993) on his 63rd birthday and the 50th anniversary of his bar mitzvah.

I was eight years old when my mother and I attended the bar mitzvah of my cousin Ernst
Wertheimer (later Worth). During this Jewish coming-of-age ceremony, thirteen-year-old
boys and girls are called to the Torah. They read a portion of the text, interpret it and
present a speech. In addition to reading, celebrants also make and complete a pledge to perform a significant good deed for the community. A joyous party is usually twinned with the religious service.

The event took place took place in Frankfurt, Germany, in January 1933. It was within days of Hitler’s rise to power, a move in which his goal was to effectively extinguish the life of Germany’s two-thousand-year-old Jewish community.

I forget the religious portion of my cousin’s bar mitzvah, but I remember the party, a
dinner for about 50 held in my Aunt Erna’s gargantuan apartment. I wore a smocked
yellow silk dress and felt as if it were my societal debut. And in fact, I actually had a starring role: I recited a long poem, composed by my mother and dedicated to her favorite nephew.

Erna had seated the oldest next to the youngest, so I occupied a place of honor next to my
great-grandmother Mathilde Mayer. I danced with my cousin Ernst, and declared to anyone willing to listen that we had become engaged and were to marry when we grew up. I don’t think that I ever again was as high in my life as I was then. Then, in the midst of my euphoria, somebody decided it was time for me to go to bed! I refused, insisting that I would only do so if Ernst and his sister Edith would also retire. Surprisingly they humored me. I am still ashamed of having been such a brat and wonder at the idiocy of sending me to bed.

*

Most of my family escaped Germany during the following years and settled in England
and America. I met another Ernest and did marry him. We had a daughter and a son. One day when he was about eleven, David informed me that I “had better get ready for his bar mitzvah.” The request was a pleasant surprise.

Ernest Loebl and I enrolled David in the appropriate classes at the Hebrew Tabernacle in
Washington Heights. Like me, Rabbi Robert Lehman and Cantor Ehrenberg, who studied with David, were transplanted German Jews, familiar with our background. As was usually the case with his studying, David had to be urged to work on his Torah and Haftorah portions, but when March 15, 1969—our wedding anniversary—came around, he was beaming and ready. Some of the same people who had been at my cousin Ernst’s bar mitzvah attended David’s. Among them: my mother, my sister, my great-aunt Selma, my mom’s cousin Martin and his wife Anne (the latter had been a new couple in 1933).

We held David’s party at home. Unlike my aunt Erna, I included my son’s friends—a
noisy bunch of 20 or so. When I looked at my potential guest list it numbered close to a
hundred. Even our grand old apartment on Riverside Drive, with its 16-by-22 foot living
room, would not hold them! Fortunately I managed to borrow a neighbor’s large apartment for David’s friends. I took off a week from work, cooked and organized. David’s food requests included his favorite: stuffed cabbage. I told him that I could not make stuffed cabbage for a hundred people. But then of course, I changed my mind. I made oodles of cabbage rolls, froze them, and stored them in the borrowed apartment. Suddenly, as all the guests were seated, stuffing themselves with salmon and roast beef, I remembered that I had forgotten to serve the stuffed cabbage! When I fetched them a couple of weeks later they had defrosted during an electric blackout and were spoiled!
David’s bar mitzvah was the biggest and most glamorous party I ever threw. I cherish its memory.

*

Frankfurt’s glittering Jewish world has long vanished, but somehow our smallish family
has survived. On a cold Saturday in February we gathered to celebrate Noah Cooper, my
second cousin twice removed, who was old enough to be called to the Torah at the Brooklyn Heights Synagogue. By now I was the matriarch of the Mayer clan. The world
had changed in so many ways. A woman, Molly Kane, was the officiating Rabbi. Services, too, were more relaxed, but the ancient words and melodies shrunk the decades.

Like my David, Noah enjoyed the entire ceremony. His readings of the Torah and Haftorah portions were flawless and his speech very sophisticated. In addition to friends
and regular congregants of the temple, the audience included about a dozen of Mathilde’s and her husband Isaac Mayer’s descendants. To me, Noah seemed so much younger than my cousin Ernst or my son had been. Today we forget that way back when the Jewish traditions were established, a thirteen-year old was about to go to work.

Noah’s party was child-centered. He and his parents had spent months choosing the music for dancing, the videos and the delicious foods. I had a good time visiting with
family and friends, happy to still be around celebrating another generation. Just within
the last month, Tori, Noah’s aunt, gave birth to another one of Mathilde’s great-great-
great-grand daughters. May the world itself come to its senses, so that its children can
continue to thrive.

For the past half-century, my husband of 67 years and I have spent our summers on Echo Lake in Somesville, Maine. This year we wondered whether we would make it. My spouse is not well, and I too have medical issues. Could we stand the 500-mile trip from Brooklyn to Mount Desert Island? Would carrying drinking water from the town water supply to our cottage be too much for us? Our granddaughter Naomi would drive us to Maine, but we worried whether we could drive our 20-year-old Malibu once we got there. The prospect of recharging our internal batteries in Maine, however, won out, and we left in mid-July.

One wintry day in February 1968, my husband and I bought our Maine “camp.” The former rental cottage was kind of decrepit, but it had great bones. It sits on a rise above Echo Lake, fronted by granite rocks, moss and blueberry bushes. It has a magnificent view. Ernest Richardson, its owner and builder, had equipped it with a majestic granite fireplace. Its name, Judy—also that of our teenage daughter—was a good omen.

I immediately felt at home in the small towns that surrounded me, though my new neighbors were totally foreign to my western European, Second World War background. Perhaps our bond was our shared love for the beauty of nature, the quiet lakes, the ruggedness of the mountains, and the wildness of the rocky coast. Perhaps it was that they, like me, believed that money and success are dwarfed by contentment with life. Or perhaps my Maine neighbors did think that I was odd after all, and I simply did not notice it.

We usually arrived in Maine at the beginning of June—just in time for the black flies, the bloom of the lady slippers, lilacs and lupines, the lobster picnic of the Footloose Friends hiking group, the library’s strawberry festival, and the first play of the Acadia Repertory Theater. Soon after we arrived, we would settle into on our regular hiking and swimming routines.

Not this year. We missed the blooms and the festivities. We started out by visiting many doctors and the Somesville Rehabilitation Center. In this age of regimented, indifferent medicine, both were excellent and pleasant. My physical activity had declined, and I spent a lot of time at home on Echo Lake. I also neglected my computer; this is the only blog I wrote during my very pleasurable summer.

Once more I fell in love with my “camp,” now a comfortable dwelling that, in spite of doubling in size, has retained its old charm. It perfectly suits my needs and personality. Over the years, we added a deck and two rooms, and remodeled the kitchen and baths. We pierced the walls and roofs with picture windows and skylights. From every window we have wonderful views. When I raise my eyes above my computer, I encounter the gyrating leaves of an oak tree that grew from an acorn I threw there more than thirty years ago. From the floor, where I do yoga and other exercises, I see sun-lit maple leaves intermixed with evergreens. Out front I view Echo Lake, whose mood changes from placidly calm to angry and white-capped.

Summerhouses are dumping grounds for items one does not quite know what to do with in one’s primary residence. In our home, one of these is a family flag that my mother sewed in 1932. It marks an important piece of our history: the flag identified a sandcastle we occupied that year on the shores of the Baltic Sea. Our flag featured my favorite toys; the neighboring sandcastles flew swastikas.

For some still unfathomable reason, our Echo Lake cottage harbors monogrammed towels that at one point belonged to ancestors born in Europe more than a hundred years ago. Several fancy linen face towels are marked IMM: Isaac and Mathilde Mayer, my great-great-grandparents who married in Frankfurt, Germany around 1865. My favorite dishtowel is red and white. Its exact function, Tellertuch (cloth for dinner plates), is woven into its border. Its initials read HSS: Heinrich and Selma Schwarzhaupt, my great-aunt and uncle. My mother’s towels are marked GB: Gretel Bamberger. Maybe they were used separately from those marked GBH, for both my mother and my father Hugo. My grandmother-in-law’s reads AW (Anna Weiner). I ask myself: how did these household goods end up at Echo Lake—surviving the Holocaust as well as emigration to Belgium, England, Israel and finally America?

There are many other mementos: an olive wood bowl my mother brought back from Italy in 1935, the skeleton of a saguaro cactus I found during a business trip to Arizona, a nude sculpture my deceased son made in college, water bottles my grandchildren took to day camp at the College of the Atlantic, copies of the books I wrote and published, as well as manuscripts of books that did not get published… a whole lifetime.

In September, it is time for me to pack up the cottage. I am deeply grateful to it. I arrived in America in 1946. The present refugee crisis reawakens me to the reality that I used to be one myself: trudging the roads of Belgium in 1940, hiding from the Germans during the Holocaust, stateless until the U.S. offered me citizenship. For a variety of reasons—incredible luck, an inborn positive personality—my childhood experiences did not cripple me. I have had a full, shall I dare to say “normal,” life. My fifty summers in Maine helped me feel at home.