With the Flanders
=================
The webpage of Jonathan Flanders (see in main index:
"Romane, Aufsaetze und Briefe") with the testimony of Donald
Flanders, Sara Flanders and Richard Courant responding to the
Atomic Energy Commission's 1952 challenge to Donald Flanders'
loyalty, has unlocked for me a flood of memories from my child-
hood, 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'
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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?
And what about the Flanders themselves? They needed
money, yet they clearly derived no monetary benefit from
their magnanimity. The transcript shows that were socially
conscious and responsible. Was their offer to take me an
expression of their social conscience? Was it an echo of
the Quaker tradition in which Sara Murray was raised? Was
it an expression of Moll and Sally's satisfaction or
dissatisfaction with their family, with their children, with
themselves? Was it an attempt to demonstrate to themselves,
to the world, and perhaps also to Richard Courant, that they
were sensitive to the plight of refugees from the Nazi
terror? Or was it an expression of this fact? What, if any
was the consequence of my presence for them and their
family? What, if any, was its effect on the parents, on the
children? What, if any, was the relationship of the parents'
experience of my presence on the rearing of their fourth
child, who would be born the year after I left? What
- 13 -
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
May 25, 2005
ernstmeyer@earthlink.net
Copyright 2005, E. J. Meyer
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