Dear Marion,

It becomes obvious as I write one letter after the other,
that your telephone call and your letter have become occasion
for me to compose what I have long had in mind: a recitation
of the history of my family, a recitation which is addressed
to you as Onkel Fritz's daughter only elliptically and which you
should therefore read, if you read it at all, with scepticism and
irony, which you should under no circumstances take personally.

My father left Bremerhaven on December 7, 1938 on the steamship
"Hansa", and must have arrived in New York eight days later
on December 15. From that day until March 31, of the following
year he lived with Onkel Fritz and Tante Margot in their 
apartment at 1781 Riverside Drive. In my files in Belmont,
there are probably letters from him to my mother in Germany;
letters which I shall now try to find, and on which, if
successful, I shall report to you. I don't expect any such
account in the letters, but after my parents were reunited, 
my father confessed to my mother that Margot had talked to
him about divorcing her. 

We had arrived on a Friday. That night and Saturday night,
I slept on Onkel Georg's examining table in his Broadway
apartment/office. I assume that Heinz, Marga and Margrit
slept in your parents' apartment, but I don't really know.
Subsequently, I suspect within a day or two, my parents
rented an apartment on 161st Street, but the impossible
logistics of accommodating me at Onkel Georg's while my
parents and Margrit slept 39 blocks away would have precluded
such a move at least until the following Monday, after I
had been deported to Chappaqua, and Margrit to White Plains.
I don't know what transpired between your parents and mine
during that period of transition, but it wasn't pleasant.
The months and years that ensued were very difficult for
my father in his and for my mother in her own way. The
difficulties for me gradually abated after I had been
reunited with my parents at the end of the summer. I think
my sister had an easier time of it. I myself have no memory
of seeing Onkel Fritz and Tante Margot again until years
later. Probably we stopped for a short visit in the summer
of 1945, when we lived for a few weeks in rented rooms in
New Rochelle, while my father was commuting into the City
to take a postgraduate course in radiology, preliminary to
the installation of an X-ray machine in his office in
Konnarock.

As the summer of 1939 ended, my fathers' apostasis was not
very far advanced. He himself had no commitment to any formal
religion. His children had been baptized in Germany to camouflage
their semi-Judaism. In those months my father had no need of any
religious formalities. What he needed was an environment in which
he could practice his profession.  As a thought experiment, I try
to imagine how our lives would have devolved if in the summer
of 1939, a Jewish executive with the tolerance and generosity
of our grandfather, had offered both my parents positions of
responsibility, let us say in a Jewish hospital, or a Jewish
nursing home, or a Jewish retirement community. I suspect my
father's "conversion" would have been arrested, it might even
have been reversed. He would never have become an orthodox or
observant Jew, - but neither was his father, but he would
certainly not have been baptized. You will agree with me that
such a fantasy is very unrealistic. Tante Margot's passionate
philosemitism, if you will permit me to call it that, was far
more representative of contemporary American Jewish culture
than Joe Meyer's enlightened and generous tolerance. My father
"converted" to American Lutheranism because that community
opened its arms to him in a way that, to put it mildly, was
beyond the capacity of the Jewish establishment.

My father, were he alive today, would very much disagree with
my analysis.  He was very critical of persons who adopted
religious convictions as a matter of expediency.
He was a passionate believer in "free will".
He was adamant that his convictions were a matter of choice for 
him and an expression of what he "decided" was the "right" thing
to do. But he was not an astute psychologist. To me it is obvious
that the classical adage: cujus regio, ejus religio is a fact of
nature which few can even partially escape, and none can escape
entirely. What is more obvious than that the child is under the
rule (regio) of its parents, and therefore it acquires its parents'
faith (religio).  Later in life, the dominating spouse inflicts
its faith on the spouse that is dominated. 

When you write: "My father, with his fierce, unbendable loyalties
and commitments, could not get over your father's conversion from
Judaism," you are correct, but only if you acknowledge that those
fierce, unbendable loyalties and commitments were loyalties and
commitments to your mother or to your mother's flavor of Judaism,
not to the Judaism of Joe(l) Meyer in which Ernst Joachim and Fritz and
Heinz were brought up. There's nothing wrong with that. Such fierce
unbendable loyalty to ones spouse makes for a happy marriage.

The sentence in which you write of your father:
"He considered it (Heinz's conversion) an offense to their parents."
is more problematic. If you interpret Heinz's "conversion" as
his marriage to Marga Roessner, then you must reconcile this
claim with the fact that Marga Roessner was escorted to her
civil marriage in Oerlinghausen by Fritz holding her left hand
and Joe(l) holding her right hand, with Joe(l) declaring in 
the presence of his more observant wife:"Ich habe selbst ein
Christenkind fast geheiratet." (I almost married a Christian girl
myself.) If, on the other hand, you interpret Heinz's conversion
as his decision to become a "medical missionary" in southwest
Virginia for the United Lutheran Church in America, then you
must accept his "baptism" as analogous to malaria or typhoid
prophylaxis required of him prior to embarking on a mission
into the jungle. From what I know about Joe(l), I think he might
have approved of this "conversion" as a pragmatic act of survival,
and I rather suspect he might have been somewhat critical of
Heinz's expulsion from the family. About Elfriede, I don't know.
She let me scream for a month.

I myself profess no public religion, but intellectually, I 
consider myself very much a disciple of dialectic, i.e. I derive
satisfaction from showing that it is almost always possible to
reinterpret a given set of facts or circumstances in terms of
contradicting theory. In this spirit, if one accepts Joel Meyer's
Lessing-like tolerance: "Ich habe selbst ein Christenkind fast
geheiratet," as the "true religion", then it would be Fritz rather
than Heinz who was the apostate. Whatever Heinz's beliefs might
have been, they never included the premise that his brand of
public religion was the only true path to salvation. Heinz was
never critical of any person who did not share his beliefs, as I
did not; he never accused me of having betrayed his faith. He
never attempted to "convert" any one to his point of view. A
recurring mantra for him was the devise of Frederick the Great:
"In meinem Staate soll jeder nach seiner Fasson selig werden."
"In my state each person shall find salvation after his own 
fashion." Heinz never expressed any belief that could have been
construed as even remotely anti-semitic, and neither did Marga, -
although it might be argued that she had cause.