Oma

 

Mutti's mother (my grandmother), in the photo Mutti showed me.

The last time Mutti visited me from Germany I made it my goal to talk to her about her childhood and about mine. Even now, after all these years, there are some things we cannot talk about. However, Mutti loves to talk about her childhood and youth.

This is a recreation of one of our conversations.

Mutti has been with us for a week now. We still have two more weeks before she has to fly back to Germany again.

One morning Mutti comes downstairs, an unfamiliar photo album under her arm. She smiles at me. “I brought some pictures.”

We sit on the sofa, and Mutti opens the album. She points to a yellowed black and white photo of a young woman walking down the street, wrapped in a fur coat. A large hat shadows her face, and her expression tells of self-confidence and an awareness of her own beauty.

“That’s my mother,” Mutti says. “She was still young, and she wanted to have some fun and be married again after my father’s death.”

“How old were you when your father died?”

“About five. After my Vati died, Mother used to go out a lot. Sometimes she’d come home with a new boyfriend, and then she told me to go out and play.”

Mutti smiles. “That was before Hitler rose to power. After Vati passed away, I became a real street urchin. My friend’s mother was a widow too and worked all day. So Mädi and I used to play in the streets after school. We knew that whole area of Berlin like our backyards. We never got lost or in trouble.”

I think of my own childhood, where I was in a different town every week or so. “It must have been nice to grow up in one place.”

“It was. I never grew tired of being outside. After my mother remarried, I still spent a lot of time outside, just to be out of her hair, especially when Max was home.”

Mutti flicks through the pictures. I had never met her mother, which is my grandmother, until I got married at 23, right before I left for the United States. I realize Mutti's childhood probably wasn’t what she remembers now. It must have been hard for her to have been on her own all the time. Even now, Mutti doesn’t realize how unloving her own mother had been.

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!