Where From and Where To

Elizabeth Petuchowski

Description

This memoir tells the story of a Jewish girl who fled Nazi Germany to World War II-England and later came to America: her new life in Cincinnati.

What impact did the rise of Nazi dictatorship and mandatory anti-Semitism have on a Jewish child and young girl in Germany? How did her family live a Jewish life in Germany? How did she reach England and, during World War II, attend a London school evacuated to the provinces and a university department evacuated to a coastal town?

In Where From and Where To, author Elizabeth Petuchowski narrates her story and answers these questions set against a background of contemporaneous events. She talks about her post-war work in London’s Fleet Street for a publisher of trade journals, her marriage to a Berlin-born rabbinic student with whom she came to America, how she coped with culture shock and got used to living in America.

Petuchowski recalls colorful characters; gatherings with students and with many others, well-known and not well-known; her own studies in Cincinnati, Ohio; and seeing England and Germany again years later. Where From and Where To shares a story of a most varied and fortunate life during times of momentous world happenings.

Sujets

• Personal Memoirs
• Segunda Guerra Mundial
• Biography
• Post-War
• History of the Jews in Germany
• Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion
• Memoir
• World War II
• Autobiography
• Immigration
• Seconde Guerre mondiale

Informations

• Publié par: Archway Publishing
• Date de parution: 26 juillet 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781665708913
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

One of the Last Self-Told German Jewish Life Stories

Where From and Where To
 
 
 
 
ELIZABETH PETUCHOWSKI
 
 
 

 
Copyright © 2021 Elizabeth Petuchowski.
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
 
This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.
 
Archway Publishing
1663 Liberty Drive
Bloomington, IN 47403
www.archwaypublishing.com
844-669-3957
 
Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
Scripture taken from the King James Version of the Bible.
The Luther Bible
The Buber-Rosenzweig Bible
The JPS TANAKH
The Schocken Bible Series by Dr. Everett Fox
 
ISBN: 978-1-6657-0893-7 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6657-0892-0 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-6657-0891-3 (e)
 
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021913133
 
Archway Publishing rev. date: 7/21/2022
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1BOCHUM: SCHARNHORSTSTRASSE 1924-1933
Early Childhood—Some rooms in our flat—Some family members—Grandmother Julie and the day of her funeral—Early Gestapo intrusion—A carp, a bird, a new brother, my toys—Aunt’s wedding—Rottstraße 7 and Grandfather Leo—Grumme and other outings—Hitler’s rise and immediate effects; Nazi calendar dates—Jewish elementary school—Jewish families emigrate
Chapter 2BOCHUM: NEUSTRASSE 1934-1939
Rooms and furnishings—Why we did not yet leave Germany—My brother—Movies, songs, singing—A songbook—Rathenow—Compulsory one-pot meals—Uncle Otto and horse races—Cigarette cards—Olympic games—Nuremberg Laws—Uncle Fritz and aunt Else—High school teachers and subjects—My Jewish life in Bochum—Visits to Berlin—Vacation destinations—Grandmother Bertha in Bochum and in Camberg—Grandmother’s house—Juda Elsas— Anschluss— Camberg: a prototype? Some thoughts—Red J— Kristallnacht at Neustraße 17—Helga Schmidt—Sneaking to Mönchengladbach
Digressions: Family holidays— Urfaust or Faust I? —Part B of a Bible verse—Assimilation, anyone?
Chapter 3ENGLAND AND WAR YEARS AT SCHOOL 1939-1943
Narrow escape to England—Parents’ hard times—Some ways of getting acquainted with England—Uncle Ernst—Evacuation of London school children: arrival in Kettering—Outbreak of World War II—My first billet—My hosts and their parents—War in continental Europe—A most fortunate meeting—Dame Alice Owen’s Girls’ School evacuated to Kettering—My second billet—My host, his baby and baby’s nurse —Country walks, books, tennis—High school in wartime—English instruction—School prayers—Jewish contacts—Bombing of Coventry
Digressions: King Solomon—Digression from a Digression
Chapter 4UNIVERSITY IN ABERYSTWYTH AND LONDON 1943-1945
University College London (UCL) evacuated to “Aber” (Aberystwyth) by the sea in Wales—Friends in the dorm—French subsidiary—A strange Passover Seder—German literature studies in wartime—Learning to see—Leibniz at Cwm—UCL back in London—My room: renters from Prague and Vienna—UCL: studies, New Phineas , social life—West London Synagogue—My future husband—Hiking in Lincolnshire, Surrey and Kent—Marriage proposal
Digression: Franz Landsberger
Chapter 5LONDON; THE END OF THE WAR 1945-1948
Should I marry him?—My mother, her entrepreneur employer, her acquaintances—Signs of war in London—The three rabbis at our wedding: Baeck, Italiener, Reinhart—Jakob at the West London Synagogue—Edgware: Rabbi Ignaz Maybaum—Monday Morning Circle—Synagogue hopping—My work in Fleet Street—Jakob’s aunt Elsa—After our wedding—Cricklewood—Some London arts in wartime—London parks—America beckons
Digression: Fog
Chapter 6CINCINNATI: THE EARLIER YEARS 1948-1961
Flying to Cincinnati—Some dates in Jakob’s life—What struck us as American—Carplin Place—Student congregations in Lawrenceberg, IN, Welch, WV, Roanoke, VA, Laredo, TX—Hebrew Union College (HUC and HUC-JIR[see below]) teachers and friends—Student Wives’ Club—More HUC teachers and friends— The American Israelite —Carplin Place (ctd.)—Rabbi Leo Baeck—Ordination—Wilson Avenue near the Cincinnati Zoo—A unique party—Queen’s coronation—Middleton Avenue—Washington, PA—Return to Cincinnati—East Mitchell Avenue—Visitors there—Seen on TV there—American vacations
Digressions: Steven Schwarzschild—Our first car—Book Club—Opera
Chapter 7CINCINNATI: YEARS AT GREENLAND PLACE 1961-ca 1991
Our first house—Neighbors—Nearby Jewish Community Center—Nearby Congregation New Hope—Julia Child—Jakob’s epithets and jingles—Baptized Jews—Study with cake—Family routines—Christian friends—Musical Cincinnati—Old and new acquaintances—A surprising discovery—University of Cincinnati (UC)—First return to Germany: Berlin, Wannsee—Post-PhD—Literature of the Holocaust—Oral History project—Four events in the news—More HUC
Digressions: Jury duty—Hadassah—How not to
Chapter 8TIME OFF
JERUSALEM 1963-64—HUC-Jerusalem—Israeli tour guide from Munich—Jerusalem housekeeping—Sardines, fur coats, and imported cars—Jerusalem, a meeting place—HUC-Jerusalem hospitality—Day of the khamsin—Trips to southern Israel—Trips to northern Israel: Jakob’s cousins
TRIPS TO ENGLAND: London, Oxford: Y arnton, Blenheim
SWITZERLAND: Poschiavo, Chur
SCOTLAND: East Lothian coast
ROME: For love of the world
NORTHERN SPAIN: An inn on the pilgrimage route
GERMANY: Freiburg in particular; Gertrud Luckner
CANADA : Laurentian Mountains; David Hartman
CAMBRIDGE, M A: 42, Francis Avenue
T EMPE , AZ
AUSTRALIA: E agle Heights, Queensland; Rudi Levy
Digressions: Leopold Krakauer—Else Lasker-Schüler—Gertrud Luckner
Notes for the Images
Bibliography
Introduction
Or A Chat with the Reader
It is not enough to recount experiences; they must be weighed and sorted; they must be digested and distilled, so that they may yield the reasonings and conclusions they con tain.
Montaigne, “On the Art of Conversation”
Dear Reader,
You are right, this is a quaint greeting, a bit antiquated; but what is written matter without readers? Readers are an indispensable part of the book lovers’ enterprise. They should, I think, be valued accordingly and addressed respectfully.
This book took me a long time to write, not because I had trouble recalling incidents and fine-tooth combing names and dates to ascertain facts. It was the picture of the reader that kept swaying.
One impatiently looking for tidbits about members of the faculties at the UC and the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR) might get impatient with pages devoted to a childhood in Nazi Germany. One curious about the home front in England during World War II will not know what to make of street names in Cincinnati, Ohio. Art work in Coventry (England) will leave cold a reader who picks up the book for an immigrant’s first impressions of America.
Unless targeting a specific readership, an author knows nothing about the readers. How do they relate to texts? Some feel comfortable reading about something with which they can identify—“Yes, I know exactly where that is,”—while others—“What? Not again!”—look for something they did not know before. Not everyone is a cultural historian happy to find exemplifications for a theory. So, for what indistinct readership was I laying out an account of my life, chapter by changeful chapter?
Conflicting reader anonymities held me up for years. I decided at last to set things down without regard to their reception among diverse readerships, geographical or cultural. After all:
Our doubts are traitors,
And make us lose the good we oft might win,
By fearing to attempt.
Shakespeare, Measure for Mea sure
All readers will find something old and something new in the following pages which touch on disparate subjects and issues, joined only in that they impinged on my life.
Why this life story at all? What is its purpose?
I am aware of myself as a specimen of a dying species: a Jew from Germany. There is no shortage of studies about such a Jew, but they deal with earlier generations. Pre-Holocaust Jewry in Germany has been held up as a cautionary tale in which, “according to . . . folk-wisdom, there lived in Germany a Jewish population that was more assimilated than any other in the world. The Jews of Germany distorted or hid their Jewishness in a desperate effort to win the acceptance of their gentile neighbors.” 1 Statistics support this folk-wisdom. I do not recognize myself in these findings which may have been true for an earlier time. Whereas I have not been delegated to represent Jews of my generation—surviving or cut down before their time—my life is not unique. As has been said: “in und hinter dem Einzelnen soll die Zeit erkennbar werden, die auch viele andere denken und handeln ließ wie ihn ” [within and behind any one individual, an era should be perceivable which made others think and act like this individual].