Food and New Year's!

What I remember best about New Year’s Eve is the food. Even though it was the middle of the winter and money was tight, Mutti made canapés every year. When we were poorer, they consisted of square cut pieces of rye bread (the cheap kind we ate every day) spread with margarine and tiny cubes of the cheapest cheeses Mutti could find.

Eventually she added bits of ham, and when I was a teenager and we had a little more money, she added fish. Our canapés were covered with anchovies and pickles, pickled herring and boiled red beets, cheap caviar and sometimes bits of sardines. Besides the fish, Mutti still made cheese, ham and salami canapés, garnished with green and black olives, pickles and bits of apple and grapes. How I liked to taste the different flavors and let them melt in my mouth!

Today I still love to make my own version of canapés for New Year’s Eve. I just go easy on the fish, since that’s not so popular with my family.

As a child, I slept through many New Year’s Eve celebrations, but when I got older, I joined the family. At twelve o’clock, or a few minutes earlier, we went outside our carnival home to watch the spectacle.

If you’ve ever been in Germany on New Year’s Eve, you know what I mean. I’ll tell you more about what still happens in Germany at twelve o’clock on New Year’s Eve tomorrow!

Chicken, Potatoes, and Raisins!

Oh, the joys of eating chicken! Chicken Cordon Bleu with melty sweet Swiss cheese and crisp crumbs on the outside is one of my favorite chicken dishes. Chicken in yellow gravy, made from a can of creamy chicken soup and poured over potatoes can still make my mouth salivate.

That day so long ago, we ate chicken and self-picked dandelion greens with young nettles, and it seemed every bit as delicious to the little girl I was, as an expertly prepared Chicken Cordon Bleu would taste today.

After we ate, Mutti saved the rest of the chicken. The next day, she cut it into small pieces and heated them in a yellow gravy. We had boiled potatoes with it. What a delight!

We had potatoes every day. They were cheap and grew well in Germany after the war. I never got tired of them, and I still love them.

That evening, supper consisted of raisin bread with margarine and an apple. Carmen said, “Yuck! I hate slimy raisins,” and picked them out.

“Don’t be so dumb,” Mutti said. “Raisins are good for you.”

But Carmen pushed her little pile of raisins away.

Josefa watched with wide eyes. “Yucky,” she said, and picked out her raisins, too.

Mutti said, “Little brats.” She picked up Carmen’s raisins and ate one. “Oh, well. More for the rest of us.”

I, too, poked a raisin out of my slice of bread and tried it. Carmen was right. They were slimy and gushy and icky. But I wanted to make Mutti happy. I swallowed it.

Mutti smiled. “At least Sonja eats them,” she said. “She’s a good eater.”

Pride swelled my breast. I smiled at my sisters across the table.

Vait took a swallow from his coffee cup. “She eats so much, but never gains weight. Maybe she’s sick.”

I wasn’t worried about being sick. Mutti was pleased with me, and Vati was thinking about me. I resolved to always be a good eater, so Mutti would approve.

Today I have learned to love raisins, especially in hot oatmeal. And I do have to rein in my appetite so I can stay healthy!

Greens

One sunny autumn morning, when I was maybe four or five, Mutti turned to Carmen and said, “Watch Franz. I’ll have to find something green for lunch.”

She called Josefa and me, put on her gloves, even though it was warm outside, grabbed her shopping basket, and left. We hurried after her in the morning sunlight.

Mutti strode along the street of the little village we held our carnival in that week. We passed a big building that may have been the city hall. Long slats of wood were all over it, and they almost hid the big burnt hole in the upper story. People climbed all over the wood, working on the broken bricks.

When the sidewalk ended, Mutti turned into a path marked with grassy ruts. Josefa and I hurried to keep up with her. We tried not to stumble on the uneven ground. The damp grasses left cold streaks on my bare legs.

We reached a small pond, and Mutti stopped. Stinging nettles grew in profusion by the pond, their dark green fleshy leaves crowding out other grasses. Mutti checked her gloves and broke off the smaller nettles, piling them into the basket. Josefa was reaching out to copy Mutti, but Mutti slapped her hand away.

“Don’t do that,” she said. “They’ll sting you.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You don’t know anything.”

Josefa kicked my leg. I screamed and hit her. She started crying.

Mutti ignored us.

I ran from my sister, being careful not to touch the nettles. Josefa quit crying, sat in the grass, and played with a dandelion.

When the basket was almost full, Mutti turned toward the meadow on the other side of the path. She picked the dandelion leaves and piled them on top of the nettles. Some of the blooms had turned a gossamer gray and Mutti left them alone. When I picked a gray one and blew on it, the gray dissolved into many tiny parachutes, which floated softly in the breeze.

Josefa and I ran around the meadow, picking dandelions and blowing them, until Mutti yelled at us. We trudged back after her past the bombed out city hall to the grassy commons, where Vati had already put up the back and sides of the shooting gallery in front of our caravan.

Vati stopped working, picked something white from the ground next to the half-erected shooting gallery, and followed us to the caravan home. He held up a dead chicken, his broad hands grasping it firmly by the feet. Its head dangled from under its white, feathered body, wings half-spread. The eyes were closed and its beak stood open. I thought the chicken looked sad.

“I exchanged this for free tickets,” Vati said and smiled.

Mutti put down her basket and clapped her hands.

“We’ll have a feast today,” she said and took the chicken. She shooed Carmen and Franz from the caravan, but left the door open. Franz sat down by the steps and played in the dirt. Josefa and I watched Mutti.

Mutti put the chicken in the wash bowl. Its head dangled over the rim and she tucked that into the bowl too. The feet were sticking straight up. After she heated water on the coal stove she took the chicken outside and poured the boiling water over it. Then she left and let it sit on the caravan steps for a while.

Josefa and I turned to play with Franz who drove an imaginary car through the dirt, making car noises.

When I looked up again, Mutti sat on the steps, plucking the feathers off the chicken. They fell in an untidy heap next to the caravan home’s wheels. When she was done, she cut the belly of the chicken open and dug out the insides.

I watched, eyes and mouths open.

Josefa joined me. “Yuck,” she said.

Mutti pulled out the intestines. “Most of this isn’t good to eat. But the rest will taste great.” She looked at Josefa. “If you don’t want it, we’ll eat it for you.”

“I want it, I want it,” Josefa said, but she sounded doubtful.

Mutti rose and took the chicken inside.

For lunch we had potatoes with green stuff, made from the greens we and Mutti had picked that morning, and parts of the chicken.

Carmen and Josefa each got a foot. Mutti showed them how to strip the scaly skin off the foot and lower leg and eat the meaty gristle from between the bones. I got the head. I cracked it open and ate the brains out of it. It was delicious, much better than the greens we helped Mutti pick.

***

Many years later, in my spacious kitchen in America, I remind Mutti of the chicken head. “I couldn’t eat that now. But then it tasted delicious.”

“I remember,” Mutti says. “We did what we had to. My children never went hungry.” She sighs and helps me finish washing the dishes.

Food for Christmas

Oh, the joys of Christmas feasting! Turkey with all the trimmings, pumpkin and apple pies, fudge and cookies in all kinds and shapes, eggnog and chocolates!

In Germany, when I was a carnival child, the foods were different, but the joy was all the same.

***

By the time late October came around we settled down for the winter. Vati’s little Deutz truck tuckered into the chosen location. Vati moved our home caravan to the most sheltered spot under the threshing roof, or wherever else we wintered that year, and connected the electricity. And we children got ready to attend school regularly for a few months.

December started with the advent calendar. Mutti always bought one at the end of November. Behind the little windows, tiny pictures of toys waited to be discovered day by day, and we children fought over who would open one every morning.

On the night of December 5^th, Mutti didn’t need to remind us to shine our boots. Saint Nicklaus would come in the night and place goodies into one shoe or boot for every child. He might also bring some coals for the more naughty child, so we all did our best to be good the whole day on December 5^th.

In the morning, we jumped out of bed, not heeding the freezing cold, and slipped into our clothes before running through the living room compartment, where Mutti and Vati slept on the pull-out sofa, to inspect our treasures.

I grabbed my boot and pulled out a tangerine and an apple, and under them I spied a handful of mixed nuts, still in their shells. I shook them onto the kitchen table, next to my sister’s treasures, and found a piece of hard candy among the nuts! Hurriedly I ate my buttered roll and drank my breakfast milk, put on my coat and stuffed my nuts and the candy into my coat pockets.

“I’ll keep the fruit for you, children, until you’re back from school,” Mutti said and shooed us on our way.

The apple and tangerine made a wonderful snack after school.

A week before Christmas, Mutti baked a Stollen, a kind of dry, yeasty Christmas bread with candied fruit. I came home from school and could smell the sweet smell of baking. But we couldn’t eat it until the next day, since it had to sit and age. We had Stollen slices with margarine for breakfast and often for supper, until it was gone.

A few days later, I came home from school and could already smell the wonderful scent of baking cookies before I opened the door. The kitchen table was dusty with flour on which Mutti had rolled out a sugar cookie dough. She cut out shapes with her old cookie cutters and placed cookies in the shape of stars, bells, and Santa Claus on a cookie sheet, while another baked in the oven, as I could smell. Mutti pulled one sheet of cookies from the oven and placed the other one in. she allowed us to each have one cookie, and the rest she wrapped in butcher paper and stowed them in the highest closet in the kitchen, for Christmas, as she told us. We never frosted the cookies. They appeared again on our goodies plate on Christmas Eve, when we received our presents from the Christ child.

As I grew older, Mutti added some Marzipan and chocolate to our goodies plate, but when we were little, we probably couldn’t afford such delicacies, since our money had to last until spring, when the carnival circuit started again.

Spinach Part Two

Margot sat in front of the mess on her table, not moving. If she’d try again, she’d throw it up again. But what else could she do? Eventually she took the spoon again, scooped up a fresh, smaller part of the mess and swallowed it quickly. Her stomach heaved, but she took a deep breath and it stayed down.

Mutti glanced up from her paper. “There you go. Now eat the rest and don’t be so stubborn.”

Margot didn’t dare to eat another bite. The spinach in her stomach felt as if it wanted to crawl up her throat. There must be something wrong with her. Other people ate spinach, why couldn’t she? She hung her head.

Brigitte’s cries from the hallway faded. She must have fallen asleep again.

Margot stared at the spinach for an eternity. Finally the front door slammed.

Mutti rose. “Is that you, Max?”

Max came in. A raindrop glistened on his nose. “Hi Elfriede, hi Margot.” He put his lunchbox onto the table and kissed Mutti on the cheek. “What’s going on? It’s after four. What’s Margot doing still eating?”

Mutti’s forehead creased. She glanced at Margot, eyes hard and cold like ice. “You know how she is. She’s determined not to eat her spinach, no matter what. And I’m determined that this time, for once, she will.”

“But I don’t like it,” Margot wailed.

Max came closer, staring at Margot’s plate. He pointed. “Is that throw-up?”

Margot shrunk tighter into her chair. In spite of her efforts, hot tears squeezed from her eyes. “I’m sorry.  I couldn’t help it. It just came up again. I tried to eat it. I really tried.”

Without another word, Max turned, took Mutti by the elbow, and pulled her into the hallway. The kitchen door snapped shut.

Margot swallowed. Maybe this was her chance to rinse the mess into the sink. But if Mutti would catch her again, she’d beat her with the wooden spoon, besides making her eat it. She couldn’t risk it. She stared at her plate without seeing it. Her bottom was hurting from sitting in the hard chair for so long.

The door to the hallway opened. Max came in.

Faintly, Margot heard Mutti in Brigitte’s room, talking to her in that soothing, sing-song voice she used for the baby.

Max marched up to her, took her by the elbow, and pulled her out of the chair. “Go into your room and don’t come out again for the rest of the day. I’ll bring you a sandwich in a while.”

Margot turned to him. “And I don’t have to eat that spinach anymore?”

“No, you don’t. Your mother will be fine in the morning. Just stay out of her sight today.”

Margot threw her arms around his waist. “Thank you! Thanks so much.”

Max disengaged himself from her embrace. “Hurry up now. I’ll see you later.”

Margot tiptoed past Brigitte’s open bedroom door and gently shut the door to her room behind herself. She threw herself on the bed and buried her head into her pillow. She might be a bad girl because she couldn’t please her mother, but if she ever had children, she would never make them eat stuff they didn’t like, especially not spinach.

***

And she never did.

Spinach, Part One

Oh, the joys of good food! The first time I tasted a hot artichoke spinach dip with celery, I thought I'd never eat something that tasty again. But different foods mean different things to different people.

Even if they had artichoke spinach dip in Germany, I know my mother would never want to even try it. Here is the story of little Margot (my mother's name) and her relationship to spinach.

Margot unlocked the door to the apartment, slipped in, and shrugged her satchel from her shoulders. She sniffed the air and her stomach tightened. She was hungry, but that smell!

She stood in the hallway, coat still on her slight ten-year-old frame. Maybe Mutti was in a good mood today and wouldn't make her eat it. 

“Is that you, Margot?” Mutti’s voice came from the kitchen. “Hurry up, food’s on the table.”

Margot stretched to hang her coat on the hook, pushed her satchel under the coat rack, and hurried down the hallway to the kitchen.

Little Brigitte sat in her wooden high chair, waving her spoon in the air. Mutti looked up from putting mashed potatoes onto the plate in front of Margot’s chair. “How was school?”

Margot pulled the chair out and sat down. “Fine.” She shrugged. “What are we having?”

“Mashed potatoes, spinach, and eggs.”

Margot’s shoulders slumped. She’d hoped against hope…

Mutti ladled a large glob of pureed spinach onto her plate.

Margot suppressed a shudder. It looked like a fresh cow patty and smelled like one too. She looked up. “Can I just have eggs and potatoes, please?”

Mutti placed a fried egg on top of the unappetizing mess. “No. You need to eat your spinach, too.”

“I don’t like it.”

“Oh well. I’ll take some off.” Mutti scooped a tablespoon of spinach from under the egg and plopped it on her plate. “But you need to eat the rest of it.” Mutti turned and put a plate with a cut up egg, some spinach and mashed potatoes in front of two-year-old Brigitte, next to her at the table.

Margot carefully removed the egg from the cow patty of spinach and ate it. She stirred a little spinach into her mashed potatoes and put the mix into her mouth. If she concentrated on the taste of the potatoes, it wasn’t too bad. Before she knew it, though, the potatoes were gone, and the pile of spinach looked even larger than it had before. She opened her mouth to ask Mutti if she couldn’t get up. After all, she ate some of the spinach.

At that moment, Brigitte waved her pudgy arm and swiped her bowl onto the table. It hit her glass of milk on the way down and milk spilled all over Mutti’s apron and dress.

Mutti jumped from her seat. “Darn brats,” she muttered and wiped her face with her cloth napkin. She jerked Brigitte from the chair. Brigitte wailed.

“You’re done eating,” Mutti hissed. She dragged the soggy napkin over Brigitte’s face and hands, and left the kitchen with her. Brigitte’s screams faded into the hallway.

Margot looked around. Maybe she could rinse the spinach down the sink while Mutti was gone. As she rose and grabbed her plate, Mutti stormed back in. “What do you think you’re doing?” She grabbed Margot’s plate and pushed her back into her seat. “You stay here and eat your food.”

“But Mutti! I don’t like it!” Margot wailed.

“I don’t care. You stay here and eat, if it takes the whole day.”

Maybe if she sat really quiet and didn’t move, Mutti would let her go eventually.

Mutti finished her plate, then cleaned up the mess Brigitte had made and washed the dishes.

Margot fidgeted. “Mutti…”

“Don’t you say another word. You finish your plate. That’s that. No more discussions.” Mutti wrung out the dishcloth and wiped the table around Margot.

Margot shrunk into her seat, staring at the spinach. It seemed to glare back at her. She glanced at Mutti. Spinach couldn’t be too bad. Mutti ate it. The green goo on her plate seemed to grin. Margot grabbed the spoon, scooped up a large spoonful, and stuck it into her mouth. The stuff was slimy, as expected, but now it was also cold. I’ve got to eat this, Margot thought and swallowed. The gooey stuff slid coldly down her throat. Suddenly an image of a cow doing its business came into her mind.

Her stomach convulsed and without being able to help it, Margot threw the spinach back up onto her plate.

Mutti dropped the dishcloth into the sink, and stormed to Margot’s chair. Her hand connected with Margot’s wet cheek. “Darn brat! You did that just to spite me. You will eat this, no matter what!”

Margot bit her lip and squeezed her eyes shut. Crying would just make Mutti madder. She shrank into her chair and wrapped her arms around herself.

"Mutti, Mutti," A sleepy voice sounded from the hallway.

“You stay there and eat this,” Mutti yelled. “I’ll be watching.” She grabbed the newspaper and sat opposite Margot, ignoring Brigitte’s cries.

Food

The next few entries will be about food. About Mutti and food when she was little, about food after the war in Germany, and about food in our little caravan when I was a child.

Let's start with an account of Mutti's and my relationship to food. This is a dialogue between Mutti and me when she visited me in the States a few years back.

 I’m in the kitchen, preparing a late breakfast. I’m frying bacon and eggs.

“Oh God, no,” Mutti says. “I can’t believe you are eating that for breakfast. You have to watch your figure. You’re not skinny anymore.”

“It’s common in America. When you eat breakfast late, you make bacon and eggs and skip lunch,” I explain.

Mutti sighs. For her, breakfast consists of bread or cereal and coffee. “Sure you’ll skip lunch,” she says. “Please, none of that for me.”

Mutti wasn’t raised in the Jewish faith. She doesn’t disapprove on religious grounds. Many times, when I was small and we could find and afford it, we had pork chops for lunch.

I smile and assure her she won’t have to eat eggs and bacon.

An hour later, after we finished eating (Mutti had Müsli and coffee, while Ken and I enjoyed our bacon and eggs), my 17-year-old gets up. She comes from her room and rummages in the refrigerator. “What’s there to eat?”

“We already ate, just a little while ago,” I answer. “Eat whatever you can find.”

After some more rummaging, Liesel settles on a peanut butter sandwich. She gulps it down with some milk, then grabs her purse from the table and kisses me on the cheek. “I’m going now, Mom. I’ve got to be at work in ten minutes."

I hug her. Her hair tickles my cheek.

“Bye, Mom, bye Oma,” she says and is off.

“I didn’t have time for hugs and kisses when you were small,” Mutti says. “But I did cook you a hot lunch every day.”

I rinse the egg off a plate and think back. I can’t remember going hungry as a little child. But I still remember Mutti pushing me away when I tried to hug her and she was at the kitchen stove, or feeding the new baby.

“Once, at the end of the winter, we ran out of money. We only had bread and jam left to eat,” Mutti reminisces. “I think that was in Weilburg, in 1954, the year your little sister, Eva, was born.”

I was seven then and remember it well. Toward the end of that winter, before we went out again to run the carnival circuit, we eventually had bread to eat every breakfast and supper, and often also for lunch. Mutti bought the cheapest rye bread and spread it with margarine and Vierfrucht, a jam made from four different types of fruit.

We ate margarine and Vierfrucht sandwiches seemingly forever. I still remember the taste. Or we had rye bread with lard and salt, or rye bread with margarine and sugar. I never got tired of rye bread, but I did miss a hot meal at times. I never went truly hungry, though.

Learning

One sunny spring morning when I was five, I woke and wandered from the bedroom compartment in the very back of the caravan home through the living room into the kitchen on the other end, ready for breakfast, when Mutti announced, “You’re going to school today.”

She made me take off yesterday’s dress, and pulled a clean, but rumpled one over my head, attacked my short brown hair with a brush and put a bobby pin into my bangs.

School? How nice! I thought while eating a fresh bun Mutti had bought at the baker’s earlier that morning. Going to school meant I’d be big, like my sister Carmen.

Carmen and I hurried after Mutti across the town commons, to the elementary school of the town we were holding our carnival in that week.

In the school hallway, she asked where the third and first grade classes were. They were both in the same classroom. She marched us into the room and gave the teacher the two little booklets that would record our school attendance for the weeks we were traveling.

Mutti left. The teacher stared at us. He asked Carmen for her name and what grade she was in, and asked one of the little boys to move over to make room for her.

He turned to me. “You look a little small,” he said. “I’m almost six,” I answered.

“Have you gone to school before?”

I shook my head.

"Well, it doesn't matter." He led me to an empty seat on the other side of the room.

He drew some numbers and signs onto the left side of the big board in front of the room and told the older children to copy them and solve the problems. 

One my side of the room, he had the smaller children take out their slate boards and the styluses that went with it. 

He made a squiggly mark onto the other side of the board. "That's called an S. You first graders will practice your S's on your slate board today."

           When he noticed I didn’t have one, he gave me a slate board and said I could keep it. I focused 

hard and did a pretty good job writing S’s onto the slate board. Later the teacher handed out papers and

pencils and had us trace the S’s onto lined paper. I made three rows full.

At the end of class I could hardly wait to get home and show Mutti what I had learned. I know how to draw S’s, and how to pronounce them. The teacher had told me that my name began with just that letter, the S.

I ran home over the commons. “Mutti, Mutti, I know how to make an “S,” I said. “Look here, I made three rows full.”

My baby brother Franz yelled and chased little Josefa, who was too small to go to school. She was crying and saying, “He’s pulling my hair. Make him stop.”

Mutti, with a spoon in her hand, grabbed Franz as he ran by and shook him.

She turned to me. “Shut up and get ready for lunch,” she said, not even noticing the paper in my hand.

Mothers and Babies

Mutti gave birth to seven children. The first, a girl, was premature and died shortly after being born. This baby came into the world in the middle of the war, at a time when the Nazis had instituted the Final Solution, and Mutti's life was in constant danger. Too afraid to go to a hospital, my mother gave birth to my oldest sister in the circus caravan, with only my father's sister, a circus dancer, in attendance. I can't imagine the grief and sadness Mutti must have felt.

She became pregnant again a few months later. The war was over when Mutti was eight months along, and she got married right before the baby was born. But Mutti, like everybody in Germany at that time, had had no food and was not in best health. Carmen, too, was premature.

I'm telling the story of Mutti's first two babies at the beginning of my memoir, Carnival Girl. This memoir will be published in June, and I'll keep all of you informed, so you can read that amazing story.

Mutti eventually had three girls, a boy, a girl, and a boy.

I gave birth to seven children. The third, a girl, died at birth, from complication after a car accident. I always felt that I was missing a child after that, and that feeling still is with me today.

Eventually I had a boy, a girl, a boy, and three girls. Such are the parallels in mine and my mother's life!

Parallels

I have always seen myself as about as different from my mother as a daughter can be. Mutti is pessimistic, pragmatic, and unemotional. I see myself as optimistic, affectionate and considerate. Who knows, maybe I'm all wrong on that score! But may that be as it is, thinking about my mother last night I was surprised and amazed at the parallels I see in hers and my childhood.

Even though Mutti was born the eldest of two daughters in a well-to-do family, she was born with two strikes against her. Her beloved father, who was much older than her mother, passed away when she was only five years old. Mutti's father had been Jewish, a wealthy banker. He left her Aryan mother a nice apartment and quite a bit of money. And his daughter, my mother, he left the legacy she least needed; black eyes, curly dark hair and the obvious looks of a Jew in a Germany that rapidly deteriorated into despising and hating Jews.

I was born with two strikes against me also. I was born in a tiny circus caravan in utter poverty in a country that was reeling from an unjust war. I was born the second of six children. My parents had neither resources nor affection enough for all their children.

As a child, Mutti experienced prejudice in thousands of tiny gestures and actions of the other children, of her neighbors and even of her relatives. From earliest childhood on, she doubted her self-worth. When she was thirteen, she learned in school that half-Jewish children are inferior to Aryan German children. She learned that half-Jews like her, are stupid and ugly. That day, she ran home from school as quickly as she could and inspected her budding self in the bathroom mirror. In spite of her young age, she decided that she was definitely not ugly, and that decision has pretty much guided her life. She always dressed up prettily, and often talked about how beautiful she had been as a young girl.

As a child, I experienced prejudice in thousands of tiny gestures and actions of the different children we went to school with every week. In my family I was one of many, not getting any attention unless I did something wrong or bad. I heard about God in school, and, from a very young age, I developed faith in a loving God who'd love me in spite of all my faults. When I was fourteen, I met the Mormon missionaries and learned about and accepted the Gospel. That decision has guided my life and made me who I am now.

After all these years, I have a lot of love and respect for my mother who survived unimaginable injustice, without any recourse to a loving God. And I hope Mutti is proud of me also, in spite of my gullible ways and my strange American church!

On Mothers

Now that my childhood memoir is about to be published, my mother is a lot on my mind. My mother, who now is 91 years and is still strong and healthy, lives in Stuttgart, Germany. Mutti, as I still call her, was the most powerful influence in my young life. But even as a little girl, torn between loyalty to her and my own perception of what is truth, I couldn't always agree with her or do what she expected of me.

Mutti was born a few years before Hitler ascended to power, in the most important city of Europe, Berlin. Her father, who passed away when she was only five, was Jewish, and her mother a well-to-do Aryan. With her black eyes and dark hair, Mutti stood out from the other Germans around her. She struggled for self-validation all her life, but never quite was able to see herself as equal to everybody around her.

In order to come to grips with Mutti's disregard of affection and praise, I have written the story of her life as a novel. This novel, which I call Walk on a Wire, has received the distinguished Eaton award for best unpublished manuscript of the year, but has not been published yet. In this story I tell of my mother's struggle to stay alive in the Third Reich. She eventually hid in a circus, where she met my father, the rightful owner of the circus. After the war, Mutti and my father were married. They kept the circus for a few years more, but then had to abandon it in favor of a tiny carnival. With a merry-go-round and a shooting gallery, they traveled the small towns in central Germany, trying to keep their rapidly growing family fed.

And my memoir, Carnival Girl, is the story of that life, as seen through the eyes of one little girl.

I will post bits and pieces of that life, parts that didn't make it into the book and parts I had forgotten, on this blog. I'll also be talking about forgiveness and grace and the miracles that happen in spite of the mistakes we make.