 

                         20060110.00

     It must have been about five or six weeks in September
and October 1939, that my parents, my sister and I lived in
the two room apartment on 61st street near Columbus Circle.
The events of those days loom in my memory like very distant
peaks out of the haze of time.  I remember the apartment as
being on the south (downtown) side of the street, and on the
first floor only a few feet above the ground.  I think I
remember Sally Flanders having brought me back from Canaan
and from Chappaqua, standing in the living room and saying a
few words to my parents.  But that also may be an expansion
and implementation (illustration) of known historical facts.
It has been nine months since my father had disappeared, to
return a few weeks later, then to vanish again across the
Atlantic.  The family that now reconstituted itself was very
different from the family that had been dissolved by
circumstances nine months prevoiously.  The force, if not the
violence of events, the effect on my parents of the trials
that they had undergone, no less than my own aging coalesced
in the circumstance that our life in Germany receded from my
awareness, without any conscious anticipation that it would
ever be recovered.  I think that it was the perplexity of
that situation, reflected especially my mother's inability to
look forward, in her longing for the German past, and in her
propensity to try to recreate it, which engendered in me as
well a commitment to deutsche Kultur as a standard of
comparison.


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Copyright 2006, Ernst Jochen Meyer
