A Ritchie Boy Read online

  She placed her violin and bow down, blushing, and quickly asked if he’d like an iced tea. As she went to fetch two glasses in the kitchen, a wave of grief for Danik suddenly rushed to the surface, catching in her throat. This pushed against other feelings, for Eli, undefined just yet. There was so much she chose not to share it choked her heart. She took several deep breaths to tamp down the swirl of emotion before stepping back to the living room.

  The two continued to talk about their shared Eastern European roots well into the afternoon. The music had created a bond, a comfortable bridge between her rural, sheltered world and his urban, exposed one. Yet there was a wide gap between their experiences as war approached. After all, in the spring of 1938, Tasa was just finishing lower school with a promising future ahead as a violinist. She lived amid the countryside of eastern Poland in a gorgeous new house outlined by linden trees on land bordered by a lake, among family and friends whose illusory wall of safety was just beginning to show cracks. Eli lived in Hitler’s immediate shadow, among men in Nazi uniforms exchanging greetings of “Heil Hitler!” He seemed reticent at first to talk about the months and days leading to his family’s departure.

  “You don’t like to talk about it. Why?” she asked him.

  “It was the Anschluss. I was there. Coming back from a school ski trip. I knew then the futility of a Jew remaining in Austria.”

  And so Eli began to share what happened to him when he was fifteen, the same age as Tasa when her family argued on a hot, humid day about the possibility of war.

  AN IMMIGRANT’S ODYSSEY

  January 1948

  IT HADN’T BEEN EASY for Arthur Zeidl to locate Lila Stoff. He’d last seen her at her father’s funeral, a full year before the Nuremberg Laws would officially have robbed him of his professorship at the University of Vienna. He didn’t wait around for that to happen. Not long after that service, he fled to Shanghai. Lila escaped a few months after the Anschluss, immigrating to America and, he learned, settling in Ohio. When he arrived at her home with his life’s possessions contained in a single suitcase, he’d only planned a brief visit.

  He knew it odd. A middle-aged bachelor living with his first cousin, her husband, and their son in their tidy apartment in a Jewish neighborhood in Columbus. Yet it filled him with a deep contentment he hadn’t felt since long before the war. The Stoffs and their tight-knit community welcomed him. This Midwestern town of immigrant neighborhoods made him feel, finally, at home.

  Lila had just gone to bed—Bart had turned in even earlier—and Arthur’s conversation with her still echoed in his head as he waited up for Eli. He felt even closer to Lila than during their childhood. Beyond the fact of their mothers being twins, this deeper bond came from sharing the uncertainty of not knowing when and how each had died at the hands of Nazis. As he sat with Lila, their cups of steaming tea in hand, so much of their talk kept going backward. It always began with the guilt.

  “If only I had asked for more visas.” Lila once again admonished herself for her omission—for not specifically requesting a visa for her mother in the desperate letter she wrote to New York, to her childhood friend Zelda Muni. By then, the ports were closing one by one; destinations were growing fewer and fewer by the day for Jews trying to find a way out. Three visas arrived for Lila, Bart, and Eli. Arthur knew how much Lila’s oversight plagued her.

  “You think your mother would have left Vienna? She was as obstinate as mine,” he told her as he recalled his own urgent appeals back then, his mother refusing to leave her sister, her home, or the city she loved.

  Arthur shared the wistful effect the loss of his mother still had on him. Lila voiced the same nostalgia, tied to a loss of their Viennese childhoods, of their fathers and grandparents—all gone. She asked him what he remembered about his mother, her aunt Miriam. And Arthur had to chuckle as he blurted without a pause: “Her bad cooking.” Lila then described her cherished memory: the afternoon when Eli turned three and she brought along her fancy new camera on their family outing in Stadtpark. Arthur saw her eyes glisten as she spoke of the country’s strength—the Great Depression hadn’t yet arrived—and how happy they were as a young family. Bart and Eli were frolicking, so Lila decided to practice using the camera on a more stationary subject, her mother. Arthur admired that lovely portrait from where he now sat. It was as if his aunt Jenny were there with them in the living room.

  Vienna seemed present, too, as he continued to replay their conversation, which inevitably moved to their much-adored city. He liked remembering the Vienna of their past. All their talking brought that place and time back to life: meeting friends at the sidewalk cafés for Sachertorte and Viennese coffee, strolling along the Danube, attending Sunday matinees at the Volksoper for opera or Friday evening open-air concerts in summer, the sounds of violins playing Shubert, Mozart, or Strauss wafting like a gentle breeze. Lila shared her delight in going to Prater, the amusement park, and riding the Reisenrad, but Ferris wheel rides weren’t Arthur’s favorite pastime. He loved the snowy hills of Vienna and the Austrian winters. And best were the times their families sat around telling stories late into the night, as he and Lila had done this evening.

  Arthur’s immediate family, like Lila’s, was secular, assimilated. They were Austrians first, Jews second. But the economic malaise and political unrest of the ’30s changed that allegiance for him. Anti-Semitic slogans were smeared on shop windows he used to visit as a child. He began to hear rumblings at the university that he found insulting and incriminating: falsehoods and accusations about Jews and their role in Austria’s financial demise. What did religious views have to do with a country’s fiscal trajectory? The university—like the country itself—used to be civil, not vindictive and punitive. He felt this increasing animosity even from non-Jewish friends. With each Nazi salute of Heil Hitler he witnessed, Arthur grew more agitated, felt more threatened. The last straw was when Lila told him of her visit to her father’s gravesite, the cemetery desecrated and vandalized, with headstones throughout the Jewish section overturned, swastikas painted everywhere. In quiet desperation, he began searching for a safe haven. But it was hard to get passports, and he learned that many countries strictly capped immigration.

  When he first heard Shanghai whispered in the streets, it sounded exotic and remote and he sought details, trying to understand why this city might offer a refuge. Visas and police certificates weren’t required; passport inspection didn’t greet émigrés upon arrival there. The Chinese didn’t even expect proof of financial stability as so many other countries demanded. Arthur relayed all this to his mother, but she thought him foolhardy. Lila and her family were too shaken over her father’s death then to make any decision. He had nothing keeping him in Austria, so he finally moved ahead with his plans alone, despite his misgivings at leaving his homeland and loved ones.

  At the emigration office, he found long queues and gruff uniformed men shooting barbs at the Jews. He was told to sign an affidavit that would remove his rights as an Austrian, marking him as a displaced person. His passport was stamped with a J—and he realized secular Austrians like himself were lumped together with the religious Jews, all by a single letter. As he recounted this story to Lila, he told her: “We all had become outsiders in our own country.”

  “At least we never had to watch the synagogues burn and the streets fill with shattered glass,” Lila reminded him. True, he hadn’t experienced that horror. He’d been living in Shanghai for nearly a year when he caught the news about Kristallnacht. “Our beloved Vienna. What a ravaged mess it became,” she said with a sigh. “All its civility and finery slaughtered along with our people.”

  THE CUCKOO BROKE ARTHUR’S reverie. Ten o’clock. He rubbed a hand across his forehead, Lila’s gentle goodnight kiss still freshly imprinted. He stood and stretched, then walked to the kitchen to boil more water for tea. With the January cold seeping into the cozy apartment, he warmed his hands on the cup. Funny how in Shanghai he drank tea all day despite the sweltering
heat, or even because of it.

  He heard the creak of the porch screen and the shutting of the door and strode back to the living room to find Eli. “I was just making tea. Would you like some?”

  “Yes! Please. It’s bitter out there.” Eli removed and hung up his wool hat and overcoat.

  “I had a nice evening with your parents. Your mother and I spent some time reminiscing.” Arthur brought out another cup and sat on the couch next to Eli.

  Eli put his tea down and leaned back, a wide grin on his face. “It must be the cold weather that just made me think of this, but remember the time you took me skiing? You talked so much about the beauty of Austria’s snow-capped mountains—I assumed you were an expert.”

  “Okay, okay. I’ll admit I never was an athlete. But I did adore the scenery.” Arthur brought the cup to his lips, sipping, as his mind drifted to the image of his stop-and-start run down the slopes as ten-year-old Eli tried to offer him pointers. “Back then, you were more respectful.”

  He loved his banter with Eli, an ease that came from being like an uncle, as Eli affectionately called him, even though they were in fact second cousins, an ease not present between Eli and his own father. It wasn’t just that Bart was an older father, now sixty—twelve years older than Lila, a decade senior to Arthur—but he was a man more set in his ways, less intellectually curious. It made his transition into American life more difficult—he struggled with the language, the customs, the pace. When Eli and Bart were together, Arthur observed the interaction between an eager, assimilating youth and an old-world immigrant. He sensed a father’s love but not a fatherly understanding of what motivated Eli or captured the boy’s imagination. Arthur wasn’t sure he could really know, either, but he wanted to try.

  “I deserve your teasing. You’d become a great skier by the time I left Vienna a few years later. It was just after your Opa died and, then, so many changes for all of us. But at least we still have your mother’s Wiener Schnitzel.”

  “Thank God for that! Mama keeps Vienna close in her kitchen. Every day.”

  “Also when we get the chance to hear her play the piano—all those wonderful Mozart concertos.” Arthur played piano himself, but rarely when in the Stoffs’ presence.

  “I love when Mama plays ‘Eine kleine Nachmusik.’” Eli grew quiet, as though lost in some thought of his own. Arthur felt no need to fill the silence, broken only by the ticktock of the cuckoo clock. “Do you miss Vienna, Uncle?”

  “I carry it with me. Along with all the family and friends who are lost to us.” Arthur’s thoughts strayed to the hot chocolate and roasted marshmallow he’d order at Demel’s pastry shop, where he’d go with his parents on a cold wintry evening like this. And to the summers. “Vienna’s music is still in the air I breathe, just like the aroma of the roasted wieners peddled in Stadtpark.”

  “Why did you go to Shanghai when so many of us were trying to get into America?”

  Eli’s question caught him off guard. “You know, ships from Vienna went to many ports besides the United States—to Palestine, Australia, Canada, South America. Where we all ended up had to do with timing and getting affidavits.” The tea roiled in his stomach, like the sea, with the memory. “It took a month to get there. I wasn’t the best traveler in bad weather.” Arthur shared his escape with Eli, including his journey on an Italian ship that traveled from Genoa some seven thousand miles to Alexandria, through the Suez Canal, sailing along the Red Sea to Bombay to Hong Kong to Shanghai.

  “It took us two weeks to get to New York, and that felt like forever.” Eli sunk deeper into the couch. “What was it like when you got there? I can’t even imagine … I mean, where did you live?”

  Arthur drew in a deep shuddering breath, trying to retrieve those very visceral impressions he had fresh off the boat. “Taking in the whole scene, that whole chaotic spectacle … it was … well, it was nothing like the life we had in Vienna, or like anything I’d ever experienced.”

  He recalled the vertigo of his odyssey. “I arrived in the morning. It was already sweltering. Wobbly rickshaws darted in and out of traffic. The streets were packed. People everywhere. And trolley cars. The odor of garbage and sewage sickening.”

  Eli’s eyes widened. “I know this isn’t really any comparison, but when we got to the Lower East Side it was August, and I remember sweating through my clothes. There was a lot of squalor on the streets and a pungent smell. I guess from the mix of all the kosher and Chinese restaurants. A Jewish aid group who met us at Ellis Island found us our temporary apartment there. Where did they put you up?”

  Arthur laughed. No one was waiting for him in Shanghai. He and the others were on their own, but they quickly got the lay of the land. He learned about an old church that housed transient refugees. Before long, the nuns who ran the place were trying to convert him and other Jews. He had brought with him a small sum of money and soon applied for an apartment. He got one in “French Town,” where other refugees settled. As a single man with few needs, he lived in a small portion of the space—with a cot, a small bathroom, and a kitchenette—and rented out the rest to a young German family for income. Over time, he invested in other apartments and rented them out. That became his income while he volunteered at a nearby school and taught English.

  “So, you had to find a new way of getting along on your own. You must have been lonely, Uncle. I had to find my way, but I had my parents.” Eli talked about their brief stay in New York and his mother’s desire to move to a town where they could assimilate, with a university. “The Jewish agency gave us a list. I chose Columbus because of that Olympic star Jesse Owens. He’d gone to Ohio State and made Hitler look bad.”

  “Ah, so that’s how you ended up here.” Arthur had figured the family was assigned to the city. “I wasn’t lonely for long. There were so many of us refugees. We stuck together. But enough of all that. Tell me about your plans right now.”

  Eli spoke about his schoolwork, how he would graduate from Ohio State in June with a business degree, that he didn’t know what to do next. His part-time work with Levi Eisen at the supply store could become full-time, but he was thinking about going to law school. “You know, if it wasn’t for the GI Bill, I wouldn’t have been able to finish college when I came back from the Army. With my degree, I can get into law school. Work days and go to classes at night.”

  “Sounds like a great plan. Now, tell me about the girl. That’s where you were tonight?” Lila had told Arthur about the Polish émigré named Tasa who Eli met last September.

  Eli nodded. “She’s really nice. Intelligent. Pretty. And she plays the violin beautifully. The Eisens plucked her from her family in Atlantic City two months after they arrived at Ellis Island.” He stopped at that.

  “It all sounds wonderful. Does she make you happy?”

  “Well, yes. I’m really fond of her.” Eli squirmed a bit on the couch and stood up to stretch. “Can I take your teacup to the kitchen?”

  Arthur handed his cup to Eli, thanking him. He sensed Eli had more on his mind but decided to let him take the lead.

  Eli returned with a plate of Viennese fingers. “Another treat from the homeland. Mama used to make these all the time for my friends when we first got to Columbus. I was pretty popular.” He grinned broadly before he dropped back onto the couch. The munching of butter cookies replaced conversation.

  “It might have been even better with a fresh cup of tea.” Arthur wiped his mouth with his napkin.

  Eli pushed the plate away after popping the last cookie in his mouth. “So where did I leave off? Oh, yeah, Tasa.” He paused. “I like her a lot. But I worry about our differences. I mean, well, we both have Eastern European roots, but she’s literally just off the boat—”

  “Might I remind you that you were just off the boat as well at one point.” Arthur offered his message with a twinkle in his eye.

  “You’re right. Absolutely right. It’s just that Tasa grew up really sheltered. I mean, she lived in a rural enclave in some
tiny Polish village until she left for a nearby private school. Closely cared for there by a family friend. Even when the war broke out and she had to live in hiding, it seems like her father shielded her.”

  “So, you think this different experience is something that would cause … some discord between you?”

  “I’m not saying that. It’s just that I grew up like you: in a cosmopolitan city. I served in the U.S. Army and saw much of the world in an unprotected way, if you know what I mean.”

  “It sounds like Tasa saw a bit of the world as well, protected or not. Where did she go after the war?”

  “She spent about eighteen months in Vienna waiting for visas from her uncle in Atlantic City.”

  “Ahhhh.” Arthur nodded, as if to himself. “You know, it sounds like this young lady might have had quite an interesting journey. And, living in Vienna after the war … not an easy time to be there.” He paused, pensive for a moment. “I look forward to learning more, maybe from her directly. Might you arrange a time for the three of us to get together? I certainly must hear her play the violin.”

  ARTHUR HAD LOOKED FORWARD to this evening, when he would join Eli and Tasa for dinner downtown. Eli said he’d already taken Tasa to this restaurant, The Tremont. “They have prime steaks broiled to order, free parking, an organist playing show tunes, and—you might want to know this—the best-looking waitresses.” Arthur chuckled to himself thinking how Eli tried to entice him, as if their company wasn’t enough. He decided not to remind Eli the get-together had been his idea to begin with.

  He drove with Eli to pick up Tasa, calling out to him as he walked to the Eisens’ front door. “Don’t forget. I’d like her to play for us after dinner.” He watched their easy repartee as they approached the car, Tasa cradling her violin. He could see how Eli could fall for this pretty young woman—her thick dark hair spilling over her shoulders, her petite stature, the fetching way she smiled up at him, then slipped her free arm into the crook of his. Her greeting to Arthur was equally warm. “I’ve heard such wonderful stories about you from Eli,” she said, clasping his hand in hers, her thick accent making heard sound like “hurt” and wonderful coming out “vonderful.”