What the Living Remember. Nancy Gerber

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      Advance Praise

      “In What the Living Remember, Nancy Gerber gives us a coming-of-age story of a German Jewish boy who turns thirteen in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler assumes full control of the German government. Karl Walter faces typical adolescent “crises”: first puppy love; trying to figure out who he is; loneliness; defining his masculinity. But all these are textured by the increasing aggression against Jews (boycotts of Jewish businesses; assaults by Hitler Youth; the Nuremberg Laws) and the ambivalence of highly assimilated, middle class German Jews which prevents many from recognizing what is unfolding before their very eyes. This is an important story that brings the reader into the psychological world of these Jews as they grapple with the “social death” they experience in the pre-war years. It is also a form of Kaddish for the many who found themselves ensnared in the Nazi death trap, unable to escape, and who ultimately perished.”

      — Ann L. Saltzman, Professor Emerita of Psychology, Director Emerita, Center for Holocaust/Genocide Study, Drew University

      What the Living Remember

      What the Living Remember

      A Novella

      Nancy Gerber

      Copyright © 2020 by Nancy Gerber

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission from the publisher (except by reviewers who may quote brief passages).

      This is a work of fiction. All elements—with the exception of some well-known historical figures­—are products of the author’s imagination. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

      First Edition

      Casebound ISBN: 978-1-62720-272-5

      Paperback ISBN: 978-1-62720-273-2

      Ebook ISBN: 978-1-62720-274-9

      Printed in the United States of America

      Design by Alessia Hughes

      Editorial Development by Lauren Battista

      Promotion by Dominika Ortonowski

      Back cover image is a postcard sent to author’s father September 11, 1938.

      Apprentice House Press

      Loyola University Maryland

      4501 N. Charles Street

      Baltimore, MD 21210

      410.617.5265

      www.ApprenticeHouse.com • [email protected]

      The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.

      —Cicero

      Acknowledgements

      I would like to express my grateful appreciation to the devoted friends whose careful reading and supportive comments helped guide this manuscript to completion: Ellen Sherman, Fran Bartkowski, Lisa Sturm, Marilyn Papayanis.

      To Christine Redman-Waldeyer of Passaic County Community College and editor of Adanna Literary Journal, for welcoming me to her classes and publishing my poems about the Holocaust and its aftermath.

      To my colleagues at the Academy of Clinical and Applied Psychoanalysis, whose dedication continues to inspire. To Dr. Charles Pumilia, for listening.

      To my friends. You know who you are.

      To Emily Blumenfeld and Patricia McKernon Runkle of the First Fridays Writing Group, for encouraging me.

      To the students at Apprentice House Press and Director Kevin Atticks, for supporting this project and giving it a beautiful home.

      To my family: my husband, Bob; my sons and daughters-in-law, Josh and Lesley, Adam and Rebecca; my new granddaughter, Lila; my brother and sister-in-law, Larry and Judy, my nieces Jessy and Emmy and my extended family. You are my hope and ballast.

      Preface

      Nancy Gerber’s What the Living Remember tells the story of an adolescent boy in a city resembling Berlin facing the “end of the world.” Karl, who turns 14 in the course of this novella, is living in 1930s Germany. He is tested and tormented by bullies at school who are learning to despise him. His mother suffers, sensing the danger growing for Jews, even those like this family who consider themselves more Germans than Jews. His father is a doctor whose Christian patients cut their ties to him due to the race laws enacted after Hitler becomes Chancellor, Führer.

      The end of the world as Karl knows it opens on a scene of Karl seeing the red, white and black banners outside the windows of his family’s home, “blood-red with a white-hot center…and a black cross on its side with four angled legs.” Gerber leads readers to inhabit the daily and the dreadful, and how it tears at and begins to scar this family, their friendships, their work and emotional lives. What the Living Remember narrates coming of age at a time of palpable fear, making scapegoats of those deemed different, and therefore, not fit to live among those making the new laws of this country where citizens and neighbors are rendered contaminated strangers.

      For Karl the end of the world is also marked by finding and losing his first love on a visit to family in the country. The end of the world is sounded because his father thinks Karl’s drawing and painting is unmanly. The end of the world comes in overhearing his parents argue about his father’s affair with a woman at his office. The end of the world looms when his best friend’s parents are among those who read the signs—and they are increasingly everywhere—and move their family to Amsterdam well before Kristallnacht.

      The end of the world becomes yet more real for Karl in the move to New York, to a growing immigrant community of German Jews exiled, banished, fleeing, taking refuge in a new language, new country, with new names and a new self he has yet to become as this novella opens onto his future. Gerber’s telling is moving and masterful, offering insights grasped by this writer in our present who deciphers the sense of a past she has never lived.

      FRANCES BARTKOWSKI

      Rutgers University-Newark

      Author, An Afterlife

      Author’s Note

      What the Living Remember is inspired by my father’s experience as an adolescent who came of age in pre-war Nazi Germany. Born in Frankfurt in 1922, he fled Germany with his father and sister in late October 1938, a few short weeks before the smashing of synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses in the national government-sponsored pogrom known as Kristallnacht. My father rarely spoke of his past, and I know few details of his early life. The characters in this novella are products of my imagination and my desire to understand what it might be like to grow up as a Jewish child during the Nazi era.

      In order to better understand what was happening to Jews in Germany in the years 1933 to 1936, the period in which the novella is set, I consulted a number of books. Those most helpful to my research were Peter Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich (Harvard University Press, 2008), Doris L. Bergen, War & Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), and David M. Crowe, The Holocaust: Roots, History, and Aftermath (Westview Press, 2008). The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum provides a useful timeline of events on their website.

      —N.G.