Shattered Crystals - Mia Amalia Kanner (that summer book TXT) 📗

been assigned to the fifth grade in Brooklyn, received an immediate promotion to the top sixth grade class. School officials said since she was a year older than I was, we could not be in the same grade. Neither of us ever had any difficulty with our schoolwork there. In fact, rapidly overcoming the language barrier, we excelled from the start.

Often, when I finished my homework, I was urged to go outside, get some fresh air and play. Apartment houses, filled mainly by Jews, lined our side of the street. Opposite us were old brownstone houses occupied by Catholics whose children attended nearby Parochial schools and who did not play much with the few children on our side. It didn’t help that I was a klutz. Occasionally I joined in, but I spent much of my time slowly bouncing a ball on the sidewalk silently chanting, “A, my name is Alice” or practicing hopscotch by myself. Later when I went to junior high school, I became aware of another divide. Amsterdam Avenue on the eastern end of the block was an invisible border between whites and blacks.

Less than two weeks after I came to Washington Heights, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and the U.S. declared war against Germany, Italy and Japan. With patriotism at fever pitch, I decided that it was essential for me to disassociate myself from anything German. As soon as the French declared war against Germany, they had arrested my father as an enemy alien. So while I was extremely proud to be Jewish, I thought that New Yorkers might not differentiate between a German Jew and a German who was a Nazi any more than the French had.

The first step was to rid myself completely of any trace of a German accent. In school, on the street and in stores, I listened and copied not only words I heard, but their pronunciation. If asked where I had come from, I said France. To improve my English and expand my vocabulary as well as to occupy myself, I read voraciously, borrowing books every week from the local public library on St. Nicholas Avenue, less than a quarter mile from the house on 162nd Street.

In school we had air raid drills. We scrambled under our desks or lined up in inside hallways, when practice sirens sounded. I did not tell anyone I had lived through real air raids in France, nor that I thought these exercises silly. I was sure it would be impossible for Nazi planes to reach New York, but kept these views to myself as well.

One day my teacher announced to our class that we must all make sacrifices for the war. “How many children have fathers who are in the army or navy, fighting for our country?” She asked. “Raise hands!” She commanded. Almost half the children raised their hands. “Brothers?” she asked. More hands went up. “Uncles?” Now all the children except me excitedly waved their arms. I sat motionless. My father had been in concentration camps. He was still in France; he might be arrested again at any time. But that was not the teacher’s question. Stunned and confused I began to tremble, unable to decide if I could or should raise my hand.

During our first months in New York, Ruth and I corresponded fairly regularly with our parents in France. Mama hid these letters with other papers and retrieved them after the war. Some time in 1942 their letters to us stopped. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that something terrible must have happened. I came to believe I no longer had parents, that they must have died, but I could not talk about this fear to anyone, not even to Ruth.

Like the other OSE children, Ruth and I were under the supervision of the Foster Home Bureau, and a social worker came to see us once a month. I would be alone with the social worker in the living room, sitting on the edge of Tante Rosa’s sofa. She would ask how I was, I would say fine, and after a few minutes, she left. The social worker assigned to us changed often. This did not matter to me. I was not prone to confiding in adults, certainly not in these women who were total strangers to me.

The Bureau was responsible for our clothing. Periodically, I traveled with a social worker to a warehouse somewhere in the city. Open iron shelveswere filled with large cardboard boxes that held underwear, socks, white cotton blouses and shoes. A clerk at a counter asked what size I wore and returned shortly with items of clothing I was entitled to. The social worker held them up and nodded. Shoe styles were limited to brown oxfords, so that’s what I always wore. As the younger of two sisters, I also got hand-me-downs Ruth had outgrown. Oh, how I longed for clothing that was bought in a store just for me.

In school, I did not feel I was dressed any worse than my classmates, except in one respect. At the weekly school assemblies, girls wore sailor-like, white, V-necked cotton midi-blouses with a tab at the bottom of the “V” through which to slip a red tie. Girls who did not have midi-blouses could wear plain white tops, and I became one of that small group, because midi-blouses were not on the Foster Home Bureau list of necessary clothing. It was an insignificant matter, but at the time I felt so poor and ashamed in my ordinary shirt.

In the summer of 1942, when Ruth and I had been in Washington Heights for eight months, a social worker told us we were to go to a different home. Tante Rosa was not well and could not continue to look after us. It hadn’t occurred to me that we caused a great deal of extra work. But surely, I thought, we could help ease Tante Rosa’s burden by taking on more responsibilities in the household. That might make it possible for us to stay on.

We didn’t have that choice. Ruth says we did have a choice of a new foster home. She recalls the social worker offering places in two different families, one with children and one without, but I don’t remember that. Years later, Ruth told me that at the time she thought I had already experienced a home where there were other children; she felt the likely competition wouldn’t be a good thing.

Imagine not having any recollection whatsoever of such an important discussion! Nor do I remember anything about leaving the family or the home in which I had grown reasonably comfortable. I suppose that I didn’t want to go, didn’t want yet another change, another home, another family. So, in my distress, I reverted to my old defenses and blocked out the memory.

The one advantage of the move was that it would free me from the son of the family, who teased me unmercifully every day, at every opportunity and invariably brought me to tears. Decades later during a condolence visit after Tante Rosa’s death, he surprised me with an unexpected confession. “You know, when you lived with us I wasn’t very nice to you,” he said. “I used to tease you all the time and make you the butt of my jokes. I used to make you cry.” He was silent for a moment, and then he said, “I don’t know why I did that, but I remember it to this day.”

THE THIRD FOSTER HOME

July 1942 - October 1946

Led by the social worker, my sister and I left Tante Rosa’s house on a sunny August day in 1942. Ruth was to start junior high school in September, but, our guide pointed out, as our new family lived just two blocks away, I was very lucky; I wouldn’t even have to change schools.

When we stepped off the curb on 162nd Street and Broadway, the woman said, “Look, look, there she is, your new foster mother.” She began to wave, and I asked, “Where?” I didn’t see anyone who could fit the role of mother. “There, across Broadway. See, she’s waving back.”

Something was wrong. The heavyset, white-haired woman in the faded, print housedress with its uneven hem was so old she could not possibly be a mother for us. But she was. We were to call her Auntie, not aunt anyone, just Auntie. Her husband, a taxi driver whom we met later that afternoon, was Uncle.

We walked the two blocks to their first floor apartment in a six-story building somewhat newer than Tante Rosa’s. It had five rooms, a living room, kitchen and three bedrooms, one for Auntie and Uncle, a second for their two single adult daughters and the third for Ruth and me. Their oldest daughter, who was married, had an apartment in the same building. She and her two sons, aged 10 and 4, were waiting to welcome us.

Now we were with a truly American family. Auntie was born in the U.S. around 1880 and Uncle arrived in America as a teenager before the turn of the century. He was without family and had always made his own way. All seven of their children had been born in America. For many years the family had lived in a small city in Pennsylvania, a world away from Washington Heights with its Jewish refugees and a world away from Nazism. Unlike the fathers in my first two foster families who worked in the fur trade, which was dominated by Jewish immigrants, Uncle had been a baker before he became a taxi driver.

Auntie was a good, kind woman, who certainly saw to all my basic needs. Hardworking all her life, she had successfully raised seven children, including five daughters, and now had nine grandchildren. A tenth was to be born the year after we came. It was not her fault that I did not warm to her. The divide between us was more than that between a 65-year-old woman and a young girl. It was the difference between her American roots and living in safety in New York and my own uncertainty and displacement brought on by Nazism.

Being forced to leave Tante Rosa’s home added to my uncertainty. The lesson from that enforced move was that no place was secure, that I could never count on having a permanent home. I concluded that the one thing I could do to lessen the possibility of ending up without any home at all was to avoid creating any difficulties whatsoever. It was already my unconscious modus operandi. I was by nature a quiet child; now I worked hard to be helpful, obedient and agreeable and to avoid arguments at all costs. If ever there was a child who was seen and not heard, it was I.

I remember a great deal more about my third foster home than I do about the other two. I remained there longer, I was older, and except for occasional blips the language problem had disappeared.

Auntie was a great fan of radio soap operas. So when Ruth and I came home from school for lunch, we would all sit at the oilcloth covered kitchen table and listen to Our Gal Sunday and Ma Perkins, while we each ate a white bread sandwich and drank a glass of milk. Then we would say good bye and walk back to school.

The family had a dog, a toy pomeranian called Patti, so named because they had gotten him on St. Patrick’s Day. I had never lived in a home with a dog before. Unlike many American children, I had never yearned for a dog, or any other pet for that matter. The concept was foreign to me. European Jews like my family just did not have pets.

Patti became very important to me. When I was told that walking the dog would be one