Mommi never talked much about her childhood to me. I got the impression that her father, not knowing how to raise a child on his own, busied himself with managing a Gasthaus after being made a widower and spent little time at home. Mommi was raised by nannies and to some extent her friends’ mothers. Then, when my grandfather died, an aunt and uncle who lived in Stuttgart took Mommi in. They’d had no children and were as unskilled in parental duties as my grandfather had been. Mommi moved out on her own as soon as she could. She was nineteen when she met Papa. He was twenty. They were married the same day he graduated from the university, a year after they met. My mother told me once that Papa’s parents were the first people she had ever known—she could not remember her own mother—to treat her like a daughter, someone they loved and cared for because of who she was and not for anything she did or didn’t do.
A Sontag cousin had emigrated to America the year Papa began his studies at the university, and as time went on, the word at family gatherings was that Cousin Emil had secured a good job in New York, had married an American woman, and was very happy. Papa wrote to Cousin Emil and asked him what it had been like to leave all that was familiar and strike out for America. Papa was itching to emigrate to the States, too, but he knew it was no small step. To emigrate was to leave for good the land of your beginnings and start anew somewhere else. And while this truth unsettled Papa somewhat, it also fueled his motivation to go. The promise of a new start was alluring. It was hard for a young couple like my parents to make their own way in Germany in 1925. The country was economically devastated from the First World War, and reparation payments to France and Great Britain—which it could not afford—coupled with stiff international tariffs, had made the terrible situation worse.
Cousin Emil told Papa that saying good-bye to the homeland had been easy because in America there were only possibilities—not limitations. America was a beacon, while Germany was a flickering fire that no one in government knew how to properly kindle back into a healthy flame. There were some who thought they knew what to do to make Germany prosperous again, but their ideas were radical and unconventional, as Papa told me many years later. Besides that, there didn’t seem to be many opportunities for a young man with a degree in chemistry. A pair of Sontag uncles back in Pforzheim, who were watchmakers, had been willing to train my father in the intricacies of their craft, but Papa had no interest in making timepieces. He wrote to Emil and asked if he would be willing to sponsor him and Mommi, and Emil agreed, although somewhat reluctantly. Emil’s wife, Gladys, hadn’t been overly keen on having houseguests for an indeterminate time, even if they were her husband’s family. Emil, who’d been in America for four years by this time, spoke fluent English, and after my parents arrived, he and Gladys would have heated conversations about the situation; at least that’s what my parents thought they argued about. Papa didn’t know what his cousin and his wife were saying to each other, but he imagined Gladys was repeatedly asking, “How much longer are they going to be staying with us?” and Emil kept answering, “How should I know?” My parents couldn’t wait to find jobs and move out on their own.
Three months after arriving in New York, Papa got a job as a hospital janitor after convincing the person doing the hiring—in broken English—that he was an expert in chemicals and could be trusted to manage a cart full of cleaning supplies. Mommi was hired as a seamstress at a factory that made baseball uniforms. She didn’t have to worry too much about the language barrier because all her employer cared about was whether she could follow a pattern. She had learned to make her own clothes at the home of the elderly aunt and uncle she’d moved in with when she became an orphan, so following a sewing pattern was easy for her. My parents moved out of Emil and Gladys’s apartment and found their own little place on the other side of the Bronx. They worked long shifts during the day and at night they attended language school. Life was busy, but my parents were happy. They were in love, they were together, and they were earning money that was actually worth something, which had not been true for the German marks they had been earning before.
They missed the beauty of the German landscape, the smell of fresh Br?tchen at the corner B?ckerei, the sounds of church bells around the corner on early Sunday mornings, and Oma and Opa, but every day Papa and Mommi found new reasons to love their new country. It’s funny how just having an unobstructed view of the possible future can make you think you’re capable of achieving anything.
My parents decided to speak only English to each other after just six months in America. They also subscribed to the New York Times, which they read every evening from front to back, and spent any leftover grocery money on theater tickets or books penned by American novelists. They listened to American radio stations and ate weekly at the corner diner, ordering the cheapest item on the menu, just to sit and listen to all the conversations around them. In three years’ time, they were both fully conversant in English.
They wanted to be Americans, Papa told me twenty years later, on the deck of the ship that was deporting us back to Germany. He wanted to do and be everything American, even though inside his skin, he knew he was still German. You don’t shed who you are inside just because you change what you’re wearing on the outside, he’d said. He was a German man living an American life. He had thought he could just go on doing that, especially when he got the chemist’s job at Boyer AgriChemical just outside Davenport, Iowa, a city where so many other German immigrants had settled. There were German clubs and restaurants and even a German newspaper in Davenport. It was easy to be a German American in Iowa. Papa had a good job and was able to rent a nice house.
The year I was born was also the year the American stock market crashed, but my parents had no debt other than a monthly rental payment, which they were able to continue to make, even though every employee who was kept on at Boyer had to take a reduction in salary. My brother, Max, was born five years into the Great Depression, in 1934. Both Max and I were raised to speak English only.
Mariko’s parents had been very different from mine in this respect. Mariko had been born the same year as me in Los Angeles; she was as much an American citizen as I was. But her parents made her speak Japanese at home. When I would go over to her quarters, I couldn’t understand a word anyone said, not even her words. When she was at my house, she sounded just like me.
Papa wanted my brother and me to think of ourselves as Americans only. Max and I loved my mother’s J?gerschnitzel and sauerbraten, and the Bavarian cuckoo clock that hung above the china cabinet in our dining room, and the sounds of the oompah band during Davenport’s yearly Oktoberfest, but I never felt like a German girl, even though my parents spoke slightly accented English and envelopes bearing colorful German stamps showed up regularly in our mailbox. I was named after Papa’s mother, Elsa Sontag, but I didn’t feel like a German granddaughter, not even when we were repatriated in 1945 and I saw my Oma for the first time when we showed up on her doorstep.
As dire as the financial situation had been in the States during the Depression, my parents never imagined they would return to Germany other than for a visit to Pforzheim, which they had hoped to make after the U.S. economy turned around. A voyage for all four of us was going to be expensive, and saving money during the Depression was nearly impossible. Papa had faithfully written to his parents every turn of the seasons, and Oma and Opa in turn wrote to him. Papa saw from his father’s letters that things had been changing in Germany in the 1930s. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party had been in existence for only five years when Papa and Mommi left Germany, but by my first birthday, the Nazi Party—as it was abbreviated for ease of conversation—had become the largest party in the German parliament, and a former Austrian and vocal anti-Semite named Adolf Hitler was its champion. Then, in 1933, all political parties other than the Nazi Party were banned in Germany. Opa hadn’t been overly concerned by this development, and his letters to Papa had been full of praise for Chancellor Hitler’s ideas and programs. Papa wrote back to my grandfather with his reasons for concern, namely that he felt a single-party regime could give rise to a dictatorship. But of course on the day the FBI searched our house it was not my father’s cautionary letters to Opa that they found, but Opa’s laudatory letters to him, which Papa had kept purely for sentimental reasons.