Ahead of Time: My Early Years as a Foreign Correspondent

Part One

BROOKLYN

1

1935

I paced the room. Had I been followed? Was the phone tapped? Was there a microphone hidden somewhere—in the ceiling perhaps, or behind the heavy German drapes?

It was nearly twilight. Outside the hotel window, the latticed steeples of the Cologne Cathedral—the Kölner Dom—stretched upward toward the summer sky.

Somewhere I had read that music drowned out a microphone, scrambled the voices. I switched on the radio. Beethoven’s Violin Concerto filled the room.

I was mad to do what I was doing. Was any traveler safe from their surveillance? Surely they knew that I was a Jew.

From London I had written Johann, I shall be arriving in Cologne on Tuesday. If you want to see me, come to the [Kölner Dom] Hotel at 5:30 in the afternoon.

That would give him the choice. If it were not safe for him to see me, he wouldn’t come. If he had become a Nazi, then surely he wouldn’t come. Still, I had to know.

Four years before, as Hitler was marching to power, we had met at the University of Cologne. Our friendship grew out of reading Goethe and Rilke together, walking hand in hand through the great German forests, impassioned discussions of German philosophers and musicians. In that one year, on an exchange fellowship from America, I had come as close as I could to German life, to the Germany of Goethe’s Faust and The Sorrows of Werther.

Marry me, Johann had implored. We, who come from two religions, two cultures, two different civilizations, we will bring strength to each other. We will bring strong, fresh blood to both our races.

Races! The word had not yet become the hated word the Nazis would make it. Sitting in the hotel room with its heavy German furniture, I could still picture him on the platform of the railroad station, seeing me off to America—the narrow, poetic face, the shining black hair, and the dark eyes that seemed to have glints and shadows of the Black Forest.

He spoke with urgency. It’s true, the Nazis are getting more powerful every day, but there are also social democrats and communists and Prussian Junkers. And they’re fighting each other. We’re not like them, you and I. We can have a beautiful life, and together we can change what’s happening here.

I knew he believed his own words, believed that two young students could make a difference in this German world. I wanted to believe it too.

I can’t make any decision until I go home, I said. I must put distance between us. Give me time.

I had gone home to Brooklyn.

A few months later my grandfather, Zayda Moishe-Avigdor Gruber, who looked like Moses in my storybooks, died in his sleep. His death shook me. On Saturdays and holidays, when I was four and five, he had taken me by the hand to his little synagogue in Williamsburg and let me sit beside him. (Little girls could sit in the men’s section.) Solemnly, I drank in the prayers and the chanting, for I was sitting next to my own Moses.

I climbed the stairs of the tenement in which he had lived for forty years, since the day he had landed at Ellis Island from Odessa, where he and my grandmother had run a kosher inn. When I stopped at the stairwell on the second floor, his voice seemed to come to me: You cannot marry this young man, no matter how fine, how noble you think he is. He is a Christian. This is your home. Here you belong. In America, among us. This is your fate.

I entered the spotless apartment. My grandfather lay like a dead monarch on the high white bed. I whispered to him, weeping, Zayda, I heard you.

That afternoon I wrote to Johann. It’s like a fever that has broken. I know now it can never be.

He persisted. You are wrong. We belong together. Give yourself more time. You will see that I am right.

In January 1933 Hitler came to power.

He will not last, people said. The man is ridiculous. In a few months he will be exposed and finished.

I was not so sanguine. Though I had fallen in love with Germany, I knew its dark side too. In that student year of 1932, despite the anguished warnings of the Jewish family I lived with, I had gone to a Hitler rally at the Messehalle, the huge Exhibition Hall on the Rhine. I had clutched my American passport in my purse, my heart beating so loud I was afraid the storm troopers would hear it and grab me.

Huge swastika banners waved in the packed hall; the stage was festooned with flags; brown uniforms with red swastika armbands were everywhere; anti-Semitic songs kept the crowd charged with shock waves of hatred.

Suddenly the audience screamed. Hitler was marching toward the podium, followed by stern-faced storm troopers. He waited on the stage until there was silence. Then he spoke, his voice hoarse, hysterical. He ranted against the Weimar Republic, against capitalists and communists, against America, against Jews. His audience shrieked with approval, their hysteria matching his. "Juda verecke [May the Jew croak]," he shouted. Juda verecke. The crowd took up the cry. Juda verecke. Juda verecke.

I left the Messehalle unattached but sick at heart. Germany had two faces. Das Land der Dichter und Denker, the land of poets and thinkers, was also the land of Lumpenproletariat and screaming racists.

Now, three years later, I walked restlessly to the tall window in the hotel room, drew aside the dark drapes and looked down at the city with its cluster of narrow medieval streets and its vertical electric signs, like Chinese banners, blinking the names of beer parlors and movies, and beyond the streets, the Rhine river on whose banks Johann and I had walked countless days and nights.

Would he be in brown uniform? Would he come?

Late afternoon shadows fell over the Cathedral. Down below I saw a group of storm troopers marching and singing. On the sidewalk, passersby waved at them.

Screams came from a nearby building. I saw two storm troopers pull an old man out of a house. His cries filled the air. But on the street there was silence.

2

October 1, 1911

I was born in a shtetl—a shtetl called Williamsburg—in Brooklyn.

At five and a half, I learned about birthing. Mama, short and stout, with thick, curly, prematurely gray hair, shrewd gray eyes, a determined chin, and wide hips, had given birth to four children in less than eight years. I was the youngest. Then, at twenty-nine, she discovered she was pregnant again. She was mortified. She was too old to have more children. What would the neighbors on Moore Street think? She told no one, not even my grandmother, Baba Rockower. Mama hid her shame beneath a huge blue woolen cape.

On a warm afternoon in May, she corralled her four children. You, she said to my oldest brother, who was twelve and street- smart, you take Harry and Betty and go to the movies. Here’s a nickel for each of you. (For a nickel, two could see a movie.) Then she turned to me. You’re too small to go with them. You go in the bedroom and take a nap.

And Dave, she ordered my father, it’s time. Run down to the corner drugstore and call Dr. Hyman. Don’t call from our store. I don’t want the customers to hear.

I tiptoed out of bed and watched from the bedroom door as Mama went to the kitchen, flung an oilcloth across the round table, hoisted her heavy body on a kitchen chair, and climbed onto the table. In minutes, I heard her drawing in sharp breaths that seemed to give her pain. Soon she cried out. There were other sounds I had never heard before. Then I saw her bend forward and lift a baby swathed in blood from between her legs.

At that moment Papa and the doctor ran up the stairs. While Dr. Hyman bent over the baby, Mama scolded them, Where were you until now?

Papa was contrite. Three people were ahead of me at the telephone.

You couldn’t tell them it was an emergency!

Then they would have heard me, and you didn’t want anybody to hear.

I fled back to bed and pulled the quilt over my eyes.

Mama was young and strong and had delivered her baby herself, yet custom demanded that she spend the next ten days in bed as a kimpeturin, a woman who had just given birth. Baba Rockower came every day to prepare her food and bring her the baby, wrapped in fresh white swaddling clothes. On the eighth day, my little brother, Irving, named Israel in Hebrew, was circumcised. It was his covenant with God.

Jewishness was my home, and God, sitting up in the sky, was my friend. Whenever I did anything wrong, I ran to the window and whispered, Excuse me, God, excuse me, God, excuse me, God. He always excused me.

On Moore Street, I thought the whole world was Jewish. The butcher, the grocer, the dressmaker, the corsetiere who made my mother’s corsets—everyone was Jewish.

Every day I sat on the street curb, watching and listening. Shabbily dressed hawkers shouted in Yiddish accents: Old clothes, buy old clothes. Fix your knives. Sharpen your tools.

"Gai schoyn [Move along]." Men sat high up on their wagons, flogging their tired dray horses. I was too small to roller-skate, but my sister, Betty, two years older, dared to clutch the back of a wagon and screamed with delight as she was pulled up the bustling street.

Moore Street smelled of pickles in big barrels, of roasted chestnuts and sweet potatoes, of jelly apples and knishes and haisse arbes [chick-peas]. Each morning a man who looked like the giant in Jack the Giant-killer, with sweat dampening his shirt, carried a huge mound of ice in iron claws from his ice wagon up the stairs to our flat over the liquor store that Papa owned. Then, looking down at me on the curb, he gave me a small chunk of ice to suck. Take it, child, the giant said in Yiddish, and with his giant hands he patted me gently on the head.

On Saturday, the seventh day, Moore Street rested. The horses and carts did not clomp down the streets; the vendors stayed home; the iceman did not come. Only a few stores were open.

Early Saturday morning, Zayda Gruber came to the house to take me with him to shul. Of all his fourteen grandchildren, Mama told me later, you were his favorite, almost from the day you were born. I would put you out in the carriage to get fresh air, and he would come into the store, mad like anything. He would wave his finger at me like this. Mama shook her finger angrily. "He would yell at me, ‘Nemm ihr arein [Take her inside]. She slept out there long enough. You don’t take enough care of her.’ "

For Mama and Papa, Saturday was no day of rest. They locked the liquor store only on the High Holidays—Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur—and on the first day of Passover, when the whole family marched proudly to the synagogue. Papa, wrapped in his huge white prayer shawl, sat downstairs with the boys, while Mama, Betty, and I sat upstairs with the women. I sat solemnly, angry if the women chattered. I wished I were down in the big hall with Zayda, praying and swaying and singing in Hebrew, not one word of which I understood.

At lunchtime Mama served a big Shabbos meal of gefilte fish, chicken soup, boiled chicken, and applesauce. Then Betty and I walked the six blocks to visit Mama’s parents, Baba and Zayda Rockower. They lived over their beer parlor in a corner house that stretched around Bushwick Avenue and Varet Street. Baba, taller than Mama, carried herself erect, always tightly corseted and elegant even in her housedress. Zayda, an engineer in Russia, portly, with a black sweeping mustache, had organized the David Rockower B’nai B’rith Lodge, which met in the meeting hall in their home. Seated on a throne, he presided over boisterous political meetings and pinochle games.

Betty and I were barely inside the kitchen when Baba Rockower made us sit at her round table and eat our favorite rogalech, little rolled cakes filled with raisins and nuts. Then, satisfied that we really couldn’t put another morsel in our mouths, she said, Now we go to the lunge. The lunge was a brown leather lounge in the parlor, where she took her daily nap She handed me her steel hairbrush, stretched out on the couch, and while I stroked and brushed her long chestnut hair, she told us stories of her childhood in Russia.

She had come to America in her twenties and, needing to work, had never found time to go to night school to learn English properly. Her favorite advice to Betty and me was You be good girls. You no talkit mit de boys. You kiss a boy, you get a baby.

After this weekly admonition, she read us articles from her Yiddish newspaper. Here I learned about Jewish tzuris—Jewish trouble—as distraught men and women wrote seeking advice from Dr. Klurman, whose name meant the wise man. Dear Doctor Klurman, one man wrote, I left a wife and six children in Galicia. When I came to America, I was lonely, so I married another woman and now I have three more children. Please Dr. Klurman, what should I do about my wife and children in Galicia? The questions intrigued me more than the answers.

Before dusk, Betty and I walked home, carrying bags of rogalech. I felt snug and safe and loved in this small, all-encompassing Jewish world.

My Jewish world began enlarging when I entered P.S. 141, a girls’ public school. Most of the teachers were young, second- generation Irish women. Teaching was their step up the American ladder, as being a priest or a cop or a politician was the route many of their brothers took. Black women were still on the bottom rung of the ladder. My first-grade teacher was an exception—a strikingly beautiful young black woman who taught our class of Jewish, Irish, Polish, and a few black girls to read and memorize poetry and to cherish books.

On a late spring afternoon I caught sight of her entering our flat over the store. Once again I hid behind the bedroom door as she climbed the stairs.

Mama answered the knock. Yes? she asked hesitantly.

I could hardly breathe.

I am Ruth’s teacher, she said.

Her teacher! Mama’s voice trembled. Did she do something wrong?

No, no. I just wanted to tell you to take good care of her. She loves books so much I’m sure that some day she’s going to be a writer.

So she knows, I thought.

A girl’s life in Brooklyn was different from a boy’s. At three o’clock every day, my brothers went to Hebrew school to prepare for their Bar Mitzvahs. In a bare room with hard benches, their teacher, in a shabby black coat and a shabby black beard, taught them to read the Hebrew words but never taught them what the words meant. With a long stick, he whacked them over the knuckles if they misread a single letter. Mama was constantly bribing him with a bottle of wine from the store. This is because you’re such a good teacher, she lied bravely, and please don’t hit my boys.

Betty and I were jealous that only the boys went to Hebrew school. Girls don’t need to go, Papa said. Girls don’t get Bar Mitzvah. Bat Mitzvahs for girls would come later. We insisted, and Mama backed us. So we attended Sunday school for awhile, but the teaching was superficial, the teachers inadequate, and we learned little except the Hebrew alphabet and songs we could sing at the Passover Seder.

Papa was our King Solomon, the wise patriarch to whom not only we but all our relatives and friends came for advice. Papa was six feet tall, handsome, with kind, gray-green eyes, a red mustache, and a gentle voice that he never seemed to raise. I loved him for his wisdom and his kindness, and I knew, even as a little girl coming in from the cold, when he bent down and took both my freezing hands in his and blew warm breath on them, that he loved me too.

Every month Papa sent money orders to the relatives in the shtetls in Poland and to others in communist Odessa. And every spring he would round us up: Children, give me all the clothes you’re not wearing any more. It’s time to send a bundle to Europe. Even if I protested, But I like this coat, Pop, he would say, Send it. They need it more than you.

Mama and Papa respected each other’s wisdom, yet it was hard to imagine two more unlikely people in love.

I didn’t want to marry Pop, Mama told me later. I didn’t even like him at first. I wanted my cousin Yidel Rockower. But my mother said, ‘Marry Dave, he’s a fine man. He’ll be good to you.’ My friends made fun of me. ‘You gonna marry a greenhorn?’ He was six years older than me. Once he took me to Coney Island; we went on the boat in ‘The Old Mill.’ It was dark inside, and he wanted to hold me and kiss me. I pushed him away. Then he wanted to give me a gold ring. My father said, ‘You can’t take it unless you’re serious and you want to marry him.’ My mother liked him more than I did.

Did you fight your mother? I asked. Did you want to run away?

Mama looked at me. "No, I listened to my mother, not like children today. Before the wedding ceremony—it was in the Capitol Hall on Manhattan Avenue and it was two o’clock in the morning because we invited so many guests—my mother was leading me to the Chuppah [the bridal canopy] and she whispered, Tret im oiff de fiess, denn du vest sein dee balabusta [Step on his feet, then you’ll be the boss].’ "

But Mom, wasn’t it awful to go to bed with a man you didn’t like?

I was seventeen when I got married. I didn’t know from anything. I didn’t know what you do the first night. After the ceremony, my mother and my mother-in-law took me to the apartment Papa rented on Humboldt Street, and they said, ‘Do whatever Dave tells you to do.’ The first night we didn’t do anything. They came and looked at the sheet and there was no blood. Then I began to fall in love with him.

Where Papa was quiet, Mama yelled. Where Papa mediated, she controlled. She forbade my brothers to read Horatio Alger books, the paperback stories of poor urchins who became millionaires. She had never read them but had somehow decided they were dirty. The boys hid them under their bed covers and read them anyway.

Nearly everything Mama knew, she had taught herself. She had come to America as a five-year-old in 1893, twelve years after Czar Alexander of Russia was assassinated and the Cossacks began burning and looting and raping women in the shtetls. She was not allowed to finish elementary school, for her parents needed her to scrub the floors and wash the underwear of the immigrant boarders they took in to make ends meet.

But Mama was smart and sharp, and she taught us to hate idleness the way nature hates a vacuum. At dawn every day she chopped hundreds of pieces of herring and small, round slices of rye bread for the free lunch in the store. Afternoons she sewed dresses for Betty and me; mine were always too big, so they would fit next year. She taught me to sew fine lace around my panties and to crochet cotton lace on doilies for the armchairs. She cooked our meals in Jewish style with schmaltz, [chicken fat], and on Fridays the whole house smelled deliciously of the golden-braided challah she baked and the almond zwieback she hid under the bed. She wanted to make sure we wouldn’t find the cake before Shabbos. We always found it.

Summers she loaded huge baskets of food and shepherded all five of us and six or eight of the neighbors’ children to Coney Island on the open-air trolley car.

Are these all your children? The conductor stared at us unbelievingly. Children paid half fare.

No longer ashamed of having a baby at the advanced age of twenty-nine, she said proudly, Of course they’re all my children, paid the fare, and promptly fell asleep until the trolley pulled into the station at Coney Island, with its wonderful smell of saltwater taffy and taffy kisses.

We were all sizes and shapes of children as we marched like a Fourth of July parade, carrying food and bathing suits, toward the beach and boardwalk. Mama paid our way into Taunton’s Bathhouse, a shambles of wooden locker rooms lined up on a shaky wooden walkway over the sand.

On the beach Mama spread a blanket with the food and fruit while we raced into the water, swimming and splashing each other, coming out to play catch, then back into the ocean while Mama, in her black bathing suit, with its full skirt billowing around her generous hips and thighs, breaststroked through the waves. After feeding us, she stretched out on the sand and fell asleep. The beach at Coney Island and the trolley-car ride were the only times I saw her sleeping.

Late in the afternoon she gathered us together to go back to Taunton’s. While the boys disappeared in the men’s section, where, across a transom, we could hear them talking and laughing, Mama, followed by the gaggle of little girls she was chaperoning, opened the heavy doors of the steam room. She helped us pull off our wet bathing suits, rubbed our naked bodies with mineral oil, and, cupping her hands, slapped our backs with a drumbeat rhythm, insisting, It’s good for you. Breathe in the steam, that’s good for you too.

The steam was so dense I could hardly see my own hand. But soon through the mist I could see little girls like me with no breasts, sitting on stone benches against the wall, and women like Mama with bosoms dangling like oversize pears or protruding like round honeydew melons, and loose stomachs drooping from childbearing.

I think I loved Mama most in that steam room, the caring, laughing, energetic Mama, slapping our backs and telling us it was good for us.

She always knew what was good for us. She had no use for doctors; she called one only if she thought we were near death. Once when she finally did call a doctor, she read the prescription, which, of course, she never filled. The only word she understood was glycerine. After that, she made us swallow a tablespoon of glycerine for anything from a sore throat to a bellyache.

On special occasions, especially on birthdays, Mama took us to Coney Island’s Luna Park. On the carousel, we smaller children sat bravely, holding tight to the prancing horses, while our big brothers and sisters reached up from their steeds, trying to catch the brass ring.

Then on to the steeplechase, where, buckled tight, we held our breath as the car climbed the rickety tracks toward the sky, turned sharply, and with all of us screaming in terror, shot down to the ground again, our screams catching in our throats, until at last, still shaking, we were unbuckled.

I wasn’t a bit scared, we told each other and reluctantly left Coney Island. Mama slept all the way home on the open trolley. Back at the store, Papa had his arms open to embrace us.

In 1917 we woke up to find the big brothers of our friends suddenly in khaki uniform. Soon there were gold stars in some of the windows. The war ended with fireworks and bands playing and parades and girls hugging soldiers they didn’t even know. The big brothers of our friends came home, some without arms or legs, and some in wheelchairs. In school we were told triumphantly, We have won the war, the war to end all wars, the war for democracy.

Prohibition came in 1920. Papa, who would do nothing unpatriotic in this country he loved, closed the liquor store and turned to real estate to support the family. There was a depression in 1921; it was not a good time for real estate, but we lived frugally, and there was money to tide us over.

Gussie, I heard Papa tell Mama, it’s time to move to a bigger place. The children are getting big. They need more room. We should move into a house of our own.

What’s wrong with where we are? Mama protested. She hated changing anything that worked.

A new house will cost us too much, she complained. Besides, I don’t want to move. From here, I can walk to my mother’s house every day.

Papa insisted, We’ll find something not too expensive and not too far away.

I won’t know anybody there, she argued, but in the end, unhappy, she organized the move a mile away to the house on Harmon Street and Bushwick Avenue.

It was a turn-of-the-century, castlelike gray stone house with a front stoop, a black swinging gate, and a wrought-iron entrance door leading to the big kitchen-dining room where we did most of our living. In the back of the house there was a garden, a large yard, and a garage that had been a stable, with a steep ladder leading to a huge loft for the horse’s hay. An architect had built the house for his own family with a small separate house for his office at the side. In this office, each of us had a desk, and here I began collecting books.

From our Jewish shtetl we had moved unknowingly into a German world. The baker on the corner of Evergreen Avenue was German; the grocer on Himrod Street was German; the beer parlors on Broadway a block away were owned by Germans; even the man who ran the candy store and sold ice-cream cones and my favorite food in the whole world, charlotte russe—even he was German.

In spring and summer and fall, the neighborhood boys played softball in the gutter with my brothers, and in the winter we built fat snowmen together. We knew their families had come from Germany; they knew we were Jews. We were friends, unaware of what was beginning to happen in Germany.

3

Goethe says that children rebel against their parents and return to their grandparents. My rebellion began in Bushwick High School against Mama and Papa, against orthodoxy, and against Brooklyn.

I had been skipped so often in elementary school (mostly because the classes were overcrowded), that I was not yet thirteen when I entered the sophomore grade in high school and came under the influence of Willis N. Huggins, a black history teacher who taught us the tragedy of black discrimination and inspired us to fight it.

Willis Huggins introduced African history into Bushwick High forty years before the civil rights movement.

I want you to know, he told our class, a mist forming in his brown eyes, I want you to know the tragedy of Negro men and women and children. (The word Negro was used then: black and African-American came later.)

Imagine yourselves in an African village, he said. "You’re happy young people living in straw huts with your parents and your brothers