May 25, 2005
 
 With the Flanders
 =================
 
 The  webpage of Jonathan Flanders with the testimony of Donald Flanders, Sara Flanders and Richard Courant responding to the  AEC Challenge of Flanders' loyalty, has unlocked for me a flood of memories from my childhood, memories of April, May, June, July and August 1939, when, not yet nine years old, a refugee, newly arrived from Germany, I lived for five months in the household of Donald and Sara Flanders and their children, Peter, Ellen and Jane, first in Chappaqua, then on their farm in upstate New York.
 
 My father, immediately upon being released from Buchenwald, had come to this country in December 1938. My mother, my sister and I followed in March of the subsequent year.  On Friday, March 31, we arrived at Pier 46 on Manhattan's west side.  My father, my Onkel Fritz and my Onkel Georg were there to receive us.  Friday night and Saturday night I slept on the examining table in Onkel Georg's uptown Broadway apartment-office. The next day, Palm Sunday, - I remember pedestrians carrying palm fronds such as I had never seen, - Onkel Georg drove my sister Margrit and myself, accompanied by our parents, to our new foster homes in Westchester County, first to White Plains, where the Rev. Everett W. McNair and his family received my sister, then to Chappaqua and the old farmhouse on North Bedford Road where Professor and Mrs. Flanders were expecting me.
 
 The transfer was soon accomplished. The single suitcase containing my clothes was set in a corner. I remember my mother and my father standing in the living room, my mother unable to speak, - she knew no English. My father's words must have been perfunctory, awkward and stilted. The two of them were crushed by the loss of the economic, social and as they would have said, cultural contexts in which they had lived.  If the word "Kultur" had been pronounced, Sally would have disapproved; but language barriers, if nothing else, intervened to foreclose misunderstandings. My parents soon left.  All they had promised me was that I might come to visit them every other week.
 
 I was desolate. My young life had devolved in intimate and intense devotion to my parents. I had never been able to tolerate separation from them. Three years previously, on the occasion of having been sent for a summer's holiday to a children's camp on the Westfrisian island of Juist, I had been unconsolably homesick, unremittingly despondent, and had roiled the attendants by my implacable melancholy.  My parents' optimistic surmise that I had matured was not to be confirmed.
 
 Mrs. Flanders took me upstairs to show me the room where I would sleep.  She led me up a steep, straight staircase, and at its head pointed out Professor Flanders' study, a very small room, it seemed to me. I understood he was not to be disturbed. For the length of my stay, I remained very much in awe of him and his silence.  My bed was in the same room as Jane's, who was a year younger.  It was a closed-in porch, I seem to remember. Jane was very much unlike my sister.  She didn't know what to think of me.  I can't remember that we ever fought or quarrelled.  I think we just ignored each other.
 
 It was Peter, four years older than myself, with whom I really wanted to play.  Peter had fashioned, out of a sizable piece of wood, a boat onto which he had mounted or proposed to mount the spring driven motor from a discarded phonograph turntable.  I think I remember the small brook not far from the house, on which, now sixty-six years later, my mind's eye sees the improvised contraption floating, the short stub of its drive, like a truncated mast, extending upward from its surface, with no provision for translating the vertical rotations to a horizontal shaft which might drive a propeller or a paddle wheel.  I was much impressed with this project and wanted to participate in it, but Peter rejected my advances: "Too many cooks spoil the broth." he told me.  It was the first proverb in English with which I became acquainted, and turned out to be a truism that has loomed as the leitmotif of my professional and social existence ever since.
 
 From time to time over the years I have reflected on the technical challenge that Peter's scheme presented. Even now I would have no idea, given the tools available, how one would have proceeded to accomplish Peter's purposes. I doubt that he himself knew, and I suspect that his rejection of me was a protective reaction. I understood then that he didn't like me.  I was an illegitimate addition to his family.
 
 But Ellen seemed different.  Whether Ellen actually liked me, or even cared about me, I don't know; but I liked Ellen.  I felt that she had sympathy with my unhappiness, or at least, was not offended by it.  Realistically, in retrospect, I find no reason to think that Ellen had love for me, in any sense of that encompassing word.  I rather suspect she was somewhat withdrawn, like her father, and the unobtrusiveness of her person, as distinct from her mother, provided me with an image on which to project my longing for affection and understanding.
 
 Aside from the abortive exercise in nautical engineering, I have no memory of playing with the children at all.  Togetherness was achieved by regular picnic expeditions which Sally arranged for us.  On some occasions she must have come along. Moll never did.  The destination was the wooded eastern slope of the slight valley in which the farm was located. At that time the Saw Mill River Parkway ended at the level of the Chappaqua railroad station, onto what I believe was Quaker Street. Further north, in the woods where we picnicked, only preliminary surveying had been done.  I remember frying hot dogs in the open flame, and the sticky marshmallows impaled on improvised spits.  But how the fire was laid, who tended and who extinguished it, has escaped my memory.  I suspect it was some manner of camping stove that furnished us with a flame.  I liked these outings because they provided what one would now call structured activity in which I was more able to participate than in anything else that the family undertook, and trudging to and fro through the tall grass carrying my share of the picnic provisions at the same time that it liberated me from the confines of the farm house, provided me with a visible role in family affairs.
 
 There was, I remember, a parlor game, a charade in which the player mimicked a phrase secret from and to be identified by the audience.  As I now reconstruct what went on, it must have been a game with which Moll and Sally, being the only adults, entertained primarily each other, with us children as props making the performance plausible, albeit an incompetent audience whose guesswork was wholly inadequate to the challenge.  I remember Moll strutting about the living room like a Buckingham Palace guard, with gestures demonstrative of the most extensive of landscapes.  That, he explained to us, was his exhibition of the newspaper's name: The New York Herald Tribune.  I remember Sally drawing a comb, though hardly of gold, through her closely cropped, blond, if not altogether golden, hair.  Perhaps that reference to Heine's Lorelei, "sie kaemmt ihr goldenes Haar," was a gesture to me, which I was slow to understand, inasmuch as I was unfamiliar with the seductive text, for the reason that, as a matter of propriety, my mother was wont to prohibit all conversational allusions to sexuality.  She would have deemed Heine's enchanting lyric too risque to be quoted, let alone to be sung, by my father.  I don't remember whether in this instance, Sally invoked an English translation or whether this particular charade was addressed solely to Moll and myself.
 
 The Flanders had been described to my parents as a family devoted to music, a description amply corroborated in the transcripts of the AEC proceedings.  My parents, for their part, were self-made devotees of music, to the extent that the musical arts, or any others, were cherished in neither my father's nor my mother's family tradition.  Consequently neither my father nor my mother played a musical instrument. Rather music, specifically the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and to a lesser extent the Lieder of Franz Schubert, came to constitute the framework of their religious experience.  Each spring they made the pilgrimage to the Thomaskirche in Leipzig to hear die Matthaeus-Passion a ritual which as an adolescent, I imitated for several years in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
 
 Religion being, at least to my mind, an ineluctably inward, subjective experience, I consider impertinent even the most tentative surmise as to the possible religious significance of music in the lives of Donald and Sara Flanders.  All that I will permit myself to report is what I heard, what I saw, what I understood, and even this must be qualified by the vagary and deceptiveness of memory.  Moll Flanders played violin, and I suppose I must have heard him practice on occasion, but not so assiduously that it impressed my memory.  Peter's or Ellen's instrument, I cannot say; perhaps it was my envy of their skills that silenced my memories.  If pressed, I would hazard the wildest of guesses, that Peter played cello, and Ellen, violin; but I search my memory for the sounds of their music in vain.  Sally I remember as presiding at the piano.  The score from which she was playing, if I were to guess, was a keyboard transcription of a symphony by Brahms.  It was startling to me that in the Flanders household the three B's: Bach, Beethoven and Brahms should be equated.
 
 The transcript confirms that the Flanders played chamber music, initially with the Courants, later with others for whose political reliability the government demanded assurance, and not least with Joseph Stein of Belmont who, the world being small as it is, invited me, decades later, to chamber music in his home, an invitation which, to avoid the embarrassment of demonstrating my inability to play, I declined.  In 1939, in Chappaqua, there was no remedy for my lack of musical skills.  When I tried to relate to her my family's  affection for the music of Bach, Sally expressed surprise at the incongruity of my professed love for music and my technical incompetence.  The echo of her justified rebuke distresses me to the present day.
 
 As I sit here now and let the stream of memories which the Internet discovery has unearthed, run its course, I am startled not to remember the names with which I addressed my foster father or my foster mother.  I am certain that it was not Papa and Mutti, for these names were holy to me, not father or mother, for English was a foreign language, The term "Daddy" would have been too strange and incomprehensible for me to adopt.  How the other children, Peter, Ellen and Jane, might have addressed their parents, I don't remember, but the differing names for our parents are obviously of critical importance for understanding my own position in the family.  I rather suspect that the children called their mother Sally and their father Moll, using the same names that the parents used for each other.  And I assume that I was instructed to do likewise, and to an extent complied with these instructions, however incongruous and improper they might have seemed to me.
 
 The day after I arrived, it was Monday April 3, 1939, Sally enrolled me in the Horace Greeley School in the center of Chappaqua. The school's chief attraction for me was its proximity to the railroad station, and to the railroad tracks beckoning to New York City, where I knew that my parents were, and where I would visit them in two weeks. I believe it was the third grade into which I was placed by the school authorities: that was the level from which I had left the Pestalozzi Schule in Braunschweig earlier that year.  The teacher was a youngish woman who seemed to accept with equanimity my inability to understand or to speak English.  She made no academic demands of me, but assigned a girl of obvious competence to teach me the language.  My tutor seemed much older than my classmates.  I don't know where she came from; I assume from a higher grade, perhaps, like my eldest granddaughter in the Belmont schools, to fulfill an obligation to perform community service.
 
 I did not like my tutor.  In addition to having me repeat simple English words and sentences, she seemed intent on propaganda, to reconcile me with the political system which I had just escaped and from which I recoiled in horror.  She echoed a sentiment then not at all unusual among Americans, to the effect that Hitler was not all bad, and her apologies were uttered with such conviction that I felt threatened.  I struggled to assert my disagreement; but I could summon no words to describe my horror.  The best I could do to defend my image of political reality was to repeat to her: "Hitler is an elephant," and to this day I don't know whether I said it in German, knowing that she would understand the words, cognate as they are in the two languages, or whether in English, because these words were the only ones I knew.  But even then I was embarrassed by the pathetic inadequacy of what I was saying.
 
 The most oppressive part of school was the recess, when I was sent out to play with the other children, and we were not allowed to leave the school grounds.  The game they played was baseball, which I didn't know how to play, and their explanations of which I was unable to understand.  I stood around awkward and aimlessly, feeling left out, and wishing the bell would ring, so that my isolation would cease to be so visible.
 
 The most lasting, and perhaps the most valuable lesson I learned at Horace Greeley was that on occasion the price of freedom is disobedience.  Once I had learned to disobey the rules, recess became the high point of my school day.  I was ordinarily a very obedient child, but now I found myself in a situation where disobedience was the expression of a quasi-religious experience. It was an affirmation of my belonging to a world remote from Chappaqua, distinct and separate from the Horace Greeley School, and identifiably independent, above all, of the Flanders family.  Disobedience was now an expression of freedom.  What required me to break school regulations, though I would have been hard put to describe it at the time, was my allegiance to the world which my parents represented for me.
 
 It was a consequence of the circumstance that no one was paying attention to me, that no one cared, how I felt or what I was doing, which made it possible for me to escape.  It became my fervent habit, when no one was looking, to slip unobtrusively across South Greeley Avenue.  My destination was the pedestrian bridge that arched over the railroad tracks, a vantage point where I could gaze over the railroad station from which, on that longed for Saturday, I would be leaving to visit my parents.  I could hear, from far in the distance, the train from Mount Kisco as it approached Chappaqua, The bridge on which I stood trembled as the engine with its train of passenger cars rumbled underneath, then stopped momentarily at the Chappaqua station.  There in my loneliness and longing, I imagined myself climbing aboard, and as I saw the train beginning to move, I felt myself transported with it at ever increasing speed down those perfectly parallel tracks to the City, which albeit invisible from where I stood, constituted the most compelling reality in my life. Sometimes there were no trains, and my gaze had nothing but the empty parallel strands of track as guides for my yearning.  In time, before recess had ended, I returned to the school, edified by the reassurance that the tracks and the trains which would take me to my parents were real and were still there.
 
 After school, I walked home. I don't remember ever walking together with Peter, Ellen, or Jane. I remember the low rise of King Street, the sharp left turn on North Bedford Road, and the familiar farm house on the left hand side. For some days I was puzzled by the yellow traffic signs with the legend "Men Working" I did not know what the word "Working" meant, I thought it spelled "Walking", and I wondered, if men were indeed walking down Route 117, why I never saw them, and how they could walk very far, if the sign announcing their activities stayed forever in the same place.
 
 I don't remember what I did when I got to the house.  The school work, if any, must have been negligible.  I remember making an effort to validate my academic credentials by gratuitously composing some arithmetic problems in addition and subtraction, solving them, and showing my work to Sally for her approval.  I made the mistake, - or was it a mistake - of writing down a column of subtrahends which I purported to subtract serially from a single minuend.  When Sally objected to my method as incorrect, I replied that this is how I had been taught in Germany.  She made no further comment, and I don't know what, if anything, she thought, but I knew soon after I had spoken, that she was right, and that I had made a mistake, which, however, I felt too vulnerable to admit.
 
 I was very unhappy.  Frequently, without apparent cause, in the course of some activity or other, not in school, but in the house, I would suddenly become aware of and overwhelmed by my separation from my parents, and would lapse into uncontrollable sobbing.  I don't remember that Sally or any of the three children ever tried to comfort me.  But neither did they make fun of me.  They couldn't understand, and I think the best they could do was to ignore me.  As I remember it now, I cried myself to sleep virtually every night.  I wonder whether my weeping might have served as a ritual to reconcile me with my separation from my parents, and to make that separation in fact bearable for me.  But as the years have passed, I have become more and more aware, how perplexing my unhappiness must have been for each member of the Flanders family in his or her own way.  And with the years, my shame and my embarrassment have grown.
 
 It must have been some weeks after I first arrived in Chappaqua that I began to understand that the Flanders family planned to spend the summer at their farm in Canaan in upstate New York.  This awareness came as a profound shock to me, especially since my days in Chappaqua had been organized, and in a sense made bearable for me by the expectation of visiting my parents in New York City every two weeks.  The move to Canaan would make such trips impossible.  I remember trying to come to terms with my dismay and distress by writing to my parents about my discovery, but to no avail. They could do nothing to help me.
 
 As the fateful day approached, I gave up all hope for a reprieve.  I am not certain I can remember the model of the automobile in which we traveled. If I had to, I would say that it was a black Ford Model A, convertible sedan, without windows, leaving the occupants exposed to the elements.  But that conjecture, I would not even call it a memory, may be in error.  The price of gasoline, I seem to remember, was 25 cents per gallon.  The parkway network, as I mentioned, had not yet been extended to the north.  I think we must have driven up Route 9, through Poughkeepsie and Hudson to East Chatham and Canaan.  The trip couldn't have taken more than three hours.  I remember sitting at least for part of the trip, in the left side of the rear seat, gazing over the sill of the door.
 
 The farm house in Canaan, - in his testimony before the AEC, Professor Flanders refers to it, without doubt technically correct, as being in New Lebanon, yet at the time I was with them, the Flanders spoke of it as being in Canaan, and it is that address by which I have remembered it all these years. The house was rustic, rural, simple, primitive in a style which was undoubtedly congenial to the Flanders, but which was unfamiliar and frightening to me.  From the transcript I learn that Moll Flanders had bought it in 1930, in the depth of the depression, and it is probably fair to say that not much had been done to improve it. I remember the dim light of kerosene lamps, and furnishings that were of the utmost simplicity. If there was an inside toilet, I cannot remember it. If there was an outhouse, I cannot remember that either.  
 Speaking of Thayer Hobson, Priscilla Fanslers first husband, Sara Flanders testified:
 
 "I have been extremely fond of Prossie since my sister's freshman year in college. When she married Thayer Hobson, we both felt--I think all of my family felt a little distressed because he was not the kind of person that we are. He was much better dressed, and took us to front row seats to see Gilbert and Sullivan--I think it was--the night that we went there for dinner. He was just out of our financial and intellectual group I would say.  It was an entirely different background.  While that went on we didn't see much of Priscilla. Although we were always--we are fond of her still--and sent Christmas presents, things of that sort. But I don't remember exactly when I met Alger. All I remember is that it was -- it seemed perfectly wonderful that Timmie would now have a really satisfactory father, and it was wonderful that Prossie and he were so happy, and the whole thing had turned out so beautifully."
 
 It is interesting, and perhaps worthwhile to speculate to what extent the differences between Thayer Hobson and Alger Hiss, whose academic and cultural backgrounds were so remarkably similar, who were married, successively, to the same woman, whether these perceived differences reflect in fact the characters of these men, or whether they reflect the need of Sara Flanders for recognition of her peculiar personal characteristics, for a quality of sympathy of which Alger Hiss was capable and of which Thayer Hobson was not.  I rather suspect that Thayer Hobson would not have been so comfortable at Flanders' Canaan Farm as was obviously Alger Hiss. As for my parents, they would have invited the Flanders to front row seats not to see Gilbert and Sullivan but to hear Bach's Mass in B Minor or his St. Matthew Passion, and they would not have approved of the dingy simplicity of the Canaan farmhouse.  Most likely, Sally Flanders would have found them as uncongenial as she found Thayer Hobson; to the extent, not inconsiderable, that my parents' values and tastes were reflected in my nascent personality, Sally Flanders may have perceived me also, to be "of an entirely different background," a rejection however unconscious on her part, that might have communicated itself to me through her demeanor, and would have made it impossible for her to assuage my loneliness and my anxiety, even if she had felt a need to do so.  
 
 My memories of those three months, June, July and August on that Columbia County farm are sketchy and fragmentary.  Each weekday I awaited the rural mail delivery for a letter from my parents.  Most likely, I spent some time picking blackberries.  I could not have wandered far from the house by myself: There was nowhere to go.  There was no garden, nor do I remember that any of the fields were mowed.  I remember no fruit trees.  Practically all our walking was on the dusty road.  I remember only one excursion to the remote perimeter of the farm.  I think there must have been occasional trips to bathe in Queechy Lake: the name is prominent in my memory only after I recognize it on the map.  But I have no memory of any shoreline or any bathing facilities.  I remember walking down the road through woods to the General Store in Canaan, whose floor was located some feet off the ground and was reached via wooden steps over a narrow porch. Even on these trips to the store, the clothing worn by us children seemed scanty to me, and for years thereafter I was troubled by fleeting nightmares that I found myself there in that store, naked among strangers, with nothing to hide my shame, and no escape from the stares that gloated over my nakedness.  As I think back, it seems possible that my nightmares reflect the circumstance that the adults also dressed more scantily than was compatible with my comfort, but if this was the case, I have suppressed all pertinent memories.
 
 On one of our walks along the country road toward the village, Peter saw a woodchuck, and ran back to the house, appearing soon thereafter with his father's rifle. I think the woodchuck must have fled in time, because I have no memory that any shot was fired, nor was there any bloody trophy of the hunt.  I do remember Sally's  rebuking Peter and prohibiting him from taking the gun again.
 
 The high point of the summer for me, was, of course, my trip to New York City to visit my parents. This had been arranged, quite logically, to divide the long summer into equal parts.  For some reason, I have no memory of the trip.  Sally must have driven me to the train in East Chatham, and met me there on my return. I cannot have stayed with my parents more than a night or two. But after I came back, I could forsee the summer's end, the days passed more quickly and seemed more bearable to me.
 
 The high point of the summer for the family was perhaps the performance of Gilbert and Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore which was staged, if I remember correctly, a scant two or three thousand feet away on the front lawn of the farmhouse owned by Roberta Fansler and her husband. Even at the time, I thought it remarkable that Mr. Fansler was nowhere in evidence.  From the hearing transcript I note that Thomas and Roberta ultimately divorced. Perhaps they had already separated that summer of 1939. I can't remember what role, if any I had in the performance, most likely as a member of the chorus. Given the emphasis on instrumental chamber music in the hearing transcript, I would have expected an orchestral accompaniment, but by whom? The three children were almost too young to participate. Of Sally, I remember only that she played the piano; but how a piano would have been provided on Roberta Fansler's front lawn I could not guess. I do remember the music, the choruses, and particularly the solos.  The social and political implications of the iconoclastic text were lost on me.  I was much taken with the pathos of Ralph Rackstraw's "Farewell my own, light of my life, farewell", but I had the uncomfortable feeling that I was alone with my sympathies, and that I would seem ridiculous if I revealed how I felt.
 
 As the summer drew to a close, my spirits rose. My father had passed his medical examinations and my parents, my sister and I would be going south to my father's new medical practice in Virginia before winter set in.  Meanwhile there would be space for my sister and myself in the two rooms my parents were renting on West 61st Street near Columbus Circle. I rode back to Chappaqua with the Flanders for the opening of school. But I myself did not return to Horace Greeley. Instead, Sally drove me into the city to my parents' recently rented apartment.  In the car, on the way down, she said something to the effect that she was sorry that I had been unhappy with them. It was her first acknowledgment to me that all had not been well.
 
 It was a gracious leave-taking on all sides.  My parents were happy to have us back, in part because our return symbolized the restoration of their household.  Sally surely had every reason to be relieved to get me off her hands.  But for me is was a rebirth into a world whose difficulties and opportunities lay veiled in the future.
 
 Not one of the sixty-six intervening years has passed in which I have not remembered and meditated on the months of my sojourn in the Flanders household.  It was an ordeal for me, but surely I was also an ordeal for each member of the Flanders family.  Some years later, when my father was again making a living, my parents wrote to the Flanders a thank-you note with an all too modest check that was graciously acknowledged. As for myself, there remains a burden of guilt which grows more explicit with each succeeding year, guilt not for what I did or did not do as a nine year old child, but embarrassment and shame for a personality that I could not change, and worse, that I would not have wanted to change, had it been in my power.  It was curiosity and chance that led to my discovery on the Internet of the AEC hearing transcript.  I have no words to describe an admiration that borders on reverence for the simplicity and truthfulness and humanity of Donald Flanders' testimony.
 
 Postscript
 ==========
 
 Virtually an entire lifetime, sixty-six years, have passed since I stayed with the Flanders.  All the while, the memory of those five months has loomed large in my understanding of myself.  I ask myself, to what extent that episode in my life made me the person I subsequently became or defined the person I already was.  I often wondered what happened to the Flanders, what memories they had of me, and what the consequences, if any, our association might have had for them.  At the time is was only a child.  I was told very little about their family.  I had no inkling of the circumstances of their lives.  I struggled to grasp my own.  Should I blame myself that in subsequent years I made no effort to get in touch with them?  Is it surprising that they made no effort to get in touch with me?  Correspondence or visitations, the sharing of experience, of ideas and emotions, would in effect have reconstituted the relationship, superimposing on and possibly blotting out the very experiences that my memory now succeeds in retrieving from the distant past.  Perhaps the insulation brought about by my shyness, embarrassment and/or ingratitude, like the volcanic dust of time, has preserved the images of memory as an archeological treasure.
 
 The Flanders treated me like one of their children.  To the best of my memory, none of us was ever scolded, not to speak of being subjected to physical punishment.  I intend no criticism, and no impairment of my gratitude to them, when I write that I now understand my position in their family as that of a step-child, and my distress was such as is the step-child's fate.  Each of the other children filled its accustomed role.  Their relationships to their parents and to each other were established.  For me to be put in an equivalent position would have required on the part of the parents an infusion of affection and effort far in excess of what they were providing their own children.  I was not assigned an inferior status, deliberately or otherwise, but that status devolved on me simply because I was bereft of my natural parents.  That bereavement was nobody's fault, nor was anyone to blame that the bereavement was not compensated.  It was not compensated because it was not recognized; and it was not recognized because in a sense, we are all step-children; and the idea of being a true child that was implicit in my dependence on my parents is perhaps an idealization, pathological in its extreme, and realized perfectly, nowhere at all.
 
 In any event, to overcome or to compensate for my loss, special efforts would have had to be made.  For example, Moll might have given me lessons in math, Sally might have given me lessons in music.  My fluency in the German language might have been made occasion for the teutonization of the entire family: they might all have learned some German.  Yet, in a world where thousands of children like myself were asphyxiated in gas chambers or burned alive in the conflagrations of war, it seems preposterous even to suggest that more might have been done for me.  In the background are the questions about the sequence of events, the chain of causes, that led to my transient adoption in the Flanders family. Ella Bruell, Kurt Friedrichs' mother-in-law, was clearly instrumental in arranging both the MacNair and the Flanders adoptions. Did all this occur at the Friedrichs' initiative?  Were the Friedrichs concerned that they might be called upon to make good on the affidavit of support for our family that they had given to the American immigration authorities?  Might this arrangement in fact have been a condition of their subscribing to the affidavit?  Or did my father's relatives Margot and Fritz, Georg and Erika, insist on this arrangement?  memories, traditions, stories, legends, if any, has my transient association with their family left behind?  Perhaps I should not even ask these questions, given the circumstance that it is impossible for me to reach any conclusions concerning the effect and the consequences, if any, which my sojourn in Chappaqua and Canaan had on my own life.
 
 
 
 Ernst J. Meyer
 ernstmeyer@earthlink.net