The People Under the House

By Dene Hellman

Very few European Jews escaped the death camps of Nazi Germany. Of those who survived, nearly all had been successfully hidden by friends. A handful had no such friends and co-conspirators, but managed to stay alive through a rare combination of wits, intuition and luck. Werner Hellman was one of the latter.

After liberation by the Allies in 1945, Werner declined to join his brother who lived in Israel. Instead, he opted to emigrate to the United States to eke out a living as best he could. Continuing to live by his wits, he became a toy designer behind such innovations as a code ring premium in cereal boxes, the Astro Ray gun, and updates to the world-famous Duncan yo-yo. In 1962 he met Dene, a typical 20th century housewife with a frustrated yearning to become a working journalist. He told her his story and she took the copious, never before published, notes that -- after more than 50 years -- make up The People Under the House.

The two of them married four years later and began a 34 year saga of a love/hate relationship that was complicated by his (undiagnosed) post traumatic stress disorder and her struggles with the traditional status of women in the 20th century. This is their story, completed by Dene after Werner’s death. It does not mince words and is unique in its exploration of the warts, as well as the achievements, of their lives together.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Indigo Sea Press
• Release date: Sep 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9781630660758

Book preview

PART ONE

Colonial Ridge

THE MAN ON THE BOARDWALK

We were teachers—at one time the closest occupation to migratory workers. Maybe it still is a little like that but most public school systems have adopted salary schedules and these may be adequate in some places. At the very least—if the economy is going all right—the good people who have cast their bread upon the waters of academia know what to expect from year to year. The time I’m talking about, however, was in the 1960s and we were moving for the seventh time in 12 years.

From year to year we had chased a few hundred additional dollars across four Iowa school systems. Bill and I started out, right after we were married in the fall of 1950, with two back bedrooms in the home of a widow who had no running water in her house. There was an outhouse out back and we had a water bucket, a wash basin and, of utmost importance, a slop pail for our stale dishwater and discards. Sometimes, if the outdoor temperature was very cold, we peed in it. I also vomited in it when I had morning sickness. It bothers me that I can’t remember what we did with the contents.

But now, in September 1961, after we had transitioned to the Chicago suburb of Des Plaines, Illinois, and cautiously rented a small duplex for a couple of years, we moved into a brand-new townhouse, the first home we had ever owned. Located in a development poetically named Colonial Ridge, we thought it a winning choice.

We got to pick the color scheme and I was excited about the yellow kitchen, the Wedgewood blue carpeting, the white wrought-iron staircase that led to three upstairs bedrooms. I went to downtown Chicago to look for a few affordable accessories, something, anything that would add even more pizzazz to the décor. The handsome yellow area rug that I bought in Carson Pirie Scott was perfect for the pretty powder room just off the kitchen. It cost $12, a fortune considering our budget, to spend on such a trivial item. I probably tore up the price tag before Bill saw it, although he was never one to criticize.

That powder room was, to me, a kind of symbol of how far we had come in the decade since we’d been married. We now had two toilets; a grand luxury because, over the years, we had all perfected the art of jiggling as we waited for a lone bathroom to be vacated.

The move over, the unpacking chores executed, I was disappointed that it wouldn’t quit raining. I put the new powder room floor mat down anyway, too eager to wait for better weather, and it quickly showed the outline of a dirty footprint. All of that represented, I knew, one of my character flaws—this inability to wait for appropriate circumstances before taking action. I was a whiz at self-castigation and did so now, even as I admired the raised Greek-key design on the rug.

All around us, other people moved into their new homes, battling the mud to get their belongings from the nearby street to their front doors. The management office belatedly set planks where sidewalks would eventually go, dividing the area that marked off the narrow yards in front of each townhouse unit from the yards in the opposite units.

I stood in our big bay window with our youngest daughter, seven-month-old Kate, in my arms and watched the intermittent downpour. Kate gurgled her approval of all she saw, reaching her arms toward the outside world as I bounced her up and down in rhythm to a made-up song.

A middle-aged couple came from the parking lot and gingerly negotiated the improvised boardwalk, their arms filled with curtain rods and department store packages. I guessed they had moved into the end unit that was located diagonally across from ours, and watched their progress curiously.

The woman, who looked to be in her 40s, was tall, slender and attractive. Her steps were careful, to avoid getting mud on her shoes, but she carried herself with confidence. Ruefully, I thought she looked like a person who would never lay an expensive new rug on the floor in wet, muddy weather just because she couldn’t wait to see how it looked.

The man was not as attractive. His clothes were baggy and his dark hair was slicked back in a European haircut that looked oddly out of place in this Midwestern environment where most men still had conservative barbering. He was very little taller than his wife and walked with a see-saw motion as if one leg was shorter than the other.

I could not take my eyes away from him.

While my gaze was riveted to this man, something happened that had never happened to me before upon sight of a stranger and never has since. A shiver ran through me as if I was chilled to the bone. My Iowa grandmother had a phrase for unexpected trembling, whenever she observed such. Somebody just walked on your grave, she would declare.

I put Baby Kate down on the floor where she could practice her creeping skills and stepped away from the window. Puzzled about the shudder, I stuck it into the mental category of the never-to-be-explained—where it everlastingly remains. Over the years I have occasionally taken it out of its brain cocoon to speculate why it happened but there has never been a logical explanation. A Buddhist friend once said, You must have recognized him from a former life.

Maybe. It’s as good an explanation as any.

AN ORIGIN OF SPECIES

The townhouse units filled up in a fairly short time. In the 1960s, residential areas on the north side of Chicago were still white-bread unvaried with people of color inevitably living elsewhere. Many of the north-side locations—Colonial Ridge among them—were home to so-called white collar workers. The farther north one got from Chicago, we had been told, the better the family income. Des Plaines wasn’t very far north but Maine East, where Bill taught, drew its student population from both Des Plaines and Park Ridge, with Park Ridge considerably the higher on the prosperity scale. Prior to our move from Iowa to Illinois, Bill was offered teaching jobs in New Trier and Wilmette, both far north-shore suburbs with wonderful schools, but we knew we couldn’t afford to live in either of them so we chose as we did, opting for a good school in a less pricey environment.

The breadwinners in Colonial Ridge—there were seldom two of those in a family—tended to be young and fairly low on the white-collar totem-pole. Bill was a history teacher with no aspirations toward administrative duties so we fit into the marketing package very snugly. Similarities even extended to the way we all arranged our furniture—a sofa in this place; a coffee table in that, a television and maybe a stereo on another wall. Eventually, the sameness would bore me to tears but that was in the future. For now, I had my Wedgewood blue carpeting and my Carson Pirie Scott powder room rug.

Bill could actually walk to work, a miracle of sorts in the busy urban environment. Our new home, located between his school, Maine East, and a big hospital, assured us of a lifestyle that wouldn’t eat up hours of commuting time for him or put a strain on our elderly car. This felt normal to us. Regardless of where we had lived in the past, our feet had taken us most places we needed to go and some of the time we didn’t even own an automobile. Once, in the case of a family death, we rented a vehicle, putting the cost on a credit card that was barely up to the misfortune of dire emergencies. Sometimes, if I needed more groceries than I could carry in a paper bag—while managing toddlers who wanted to try out every porch between our home and the store—I reluctantly called a taxi. These years-long privations, however, saved us enough money to pay for yet another summer of college for Bill if we added the pay for the last month of teaching.

The car we now owned was a big, green second-hand Chrysler that leaked globs of oil on every driveway and wherever else we parked, including the Colonial Ridge parking lot. It also guzzled gas, underscoring the practicality of continuing to think in terms of walking. As for me, I didn’t even know how to drive. Years before, as a bride, my inexperience behind the wheel had led me to drive our ancient 1940 Ford over a gas pump. I was lucky that nobody asked to see my license because I didn’t have one. It was a scary episode and I then and there decided to defer driving until I could do it properly. Pregnancies kept me away from the steering wheel and then, in deference to the safety of the resultant children, I stayed in the passenger seat. Eleven years later, as we moved into Colonial Ridge, a time for me to drive had not yet materialized, thanks to unending penny pinching combined with procrastination.

The teachers we knew, men who had taught with Bill back in Sioux City, Iowa, bought homes in newly sprung developments like Elk Grove Village and car-pooled to their jobs so their wives could use the family car to get wherever they needed to go. I had stupidly sworn to never live in what I considered a suburban ghetto so, while our friends’ houses accelerated in value for years to come, Colonial Ridge had a spotty future ahead of it. It was simply a different kind of ghetto, one with less going for it in the long run.

Nevertheless, on this rainy day in September 1961, the new townhouse, my sweetheart of a baby girl, plus the sense of having made it through some tough times to achieve a long-held ambition, all combined into a kind of euphoria. A new day had dawned and I was sure it held promise.

Unexplained shivering at the sight of a new neighbor was quickly set aside.

I’d never been inclined to keep track of my neighbors but the proximity of all our townhouse units made it hard to avoid. The usual quota of busybodies kept everyone informed and the big bay windows in the living rooms and big patio windows off the dining areas made mutual observation inevitable. Sears got a lot of orders from Colonial Ridge for pinch-pleated curtains that could be drawn to shut out prying eyes.

O’Hare Airport was only a few miles away so our development immediately got its share of transient airfield personnel. A man who trained good-looking young single women to become stewardesses moved into our neighborhood. He was pleasant and offhand in the way he presented himself but was envied by all the husbands, who figured the guy had the equivalent of a harem. Colonial Ridge women tended to hold in their stomachs and straighten their postures when they walked past his townhouse. Maybe that was defiance. Most of us were young and some were good-looking but we knew we were over the hill compared with dewy-fresh stewardesses. The 1960s were high season for airline ads that featured coiffed and uniformed young women saying things like Fly me! and Coffee, tea or me? Many applicants for such jobs were turned down, not quite up to standards set by airline gurus. We young matrons of Colonial Ridge knew in our hearts that we would be on the reject list.

A retired couple that was tired of keeping up a big family home bought an end unit where the wife could have a few extra feet of ground for a flower garden. We were impressed when she set out plants in the rain, saying it gave them a good start. A daughter of theirs had been a runner-up Miss America, as she quickly let us know, and that impressed us, too.

A young couple bought the unit next to ours. He worked for an advertising agency and commuted to downtown Chicago. She stayed home to care for their three young children, a perfect example of the kind of family his ad agency sought to target. One summer evening I saw him sitting out on the back patio with a Chicago newspaper. I made a casual comment about how industriously he was going through the pages and he replied, I’m looking for weekend events where I can take my family.

Imagine that! I wistfully said to myself. We never went anywhere except to the Des Plaines Lutheran Church on Sunday mornings.

The woman directly across the sidewalk from us hadn’t been able to lose weight after having a baby so she wore pajamas and robes all day, every day, and spent her spare time rearranging her furniture into increasingly complex groupings. Her husband helped move the heavier pieces when he got home from the office in the evening. Sometimes he asked other men to help when his wife decided to move heavy things upstairs and, later, down again. Sometimes she kept her pinch-pleated Sears draperies closed for days at a time. The neighbors laughed. Post-partum was an unfamiliar concept, little acknowledged by anyone, including physicians. The periodicals of the day, Bibles to earnest, middle class housewives, did not discuss it.

The two people I had watched pick their way along the rain-soaked boardwalk were different enough from the rest of us to attract extra attention. The Hellmans were German—which accounted for his slicked-back European haircut—and had lived in inner-city Chicago since their immigration. Not as young as most of the rest of us, they appeared to be in their 40s. Of all the newcomers, they seemed the most prosperous.

The couple, eventually known to us as Elfi and Werner, went about furnishing their townhouse in style. Their peach-colored carpeting was above the Colonial Ridge offerings in quality and was privately installed. Their sofa was white silk; a mural graced one living room wall; all their appliances were top-grade; their television set was in one of the upstairs rooms that they called a den and we were particularly impressed that they had jacks in all their rooms to better accommodate several phones.

I alternated between amazement and laughter when they placed a blue paper border around the edge of their rooms to prevent the light streaming through the big windows from fading the carpet color. Neighborhood gossip held that anyone entering their door was required to take off his or her shoes at the entrance. The concept of germ-laden shoe soles wasn’t part of the 1960s culture in the United States so we were shocked when we got first-hand reports from angry workmen doing follow-up building chores that the Hellmans instructed them where to leave their footwear. We felt a little sorry for their 15-year-old son, Michael, who had to comply with the severe regulation.

Michael was the chief reason why his parents had decided to leave inner Chicago, where they lived in a neighborhood of other German immigrants, to come to Des Plaines and, specifically, to buy one of the townhouses in Colonial Ridge. They had determined that Michael would become a pediatrician and he must consequently have a class-A education. They sent him to a private school when they lived in the city but it was too expensive to continue that through his high school years so they did their research and found that Maine East was a highly regarded suburban high school. Sleuthing excursions led them to Colonial Ridge, which they found attractive, convenient and economical.

Werner was said to be self-employed, working from home at we knew not what. He came and went several times each afternoon. Elfi commuted one day a week to a job doing payroll for a Chicago company and the rest of the time she was a housewife.

BEHIND PINCH-PLEATED CURTAINS

The Hellmans became the neighbors we got to know the most quickly. They probably instigated the friendly interaction and it was surely because of Bill. He was a teacher in the school their son would attend and, while their overtures were understandable from that aspect, they had come to the U.S. with the traditional European attitude toward teachers. To them, Bill was not just another underpaid public servant; he was Herr Professor, and worthy of respect on that account.

They often asked Bill for advice. Michael wished to wear gym shoes to school and said it was done by all the kids. Was this so? Why was school dress so informal? A uniform had been required at the private school.

Bill assured them gym shoes were fine.

Should they arrange for Michael to travel the short way to school on a bus? Although Bill walked to work, managing the distance along the side of busy Dempster Street with little difficulty, was it not too dangerous for their 15-year-old son?

Bill told them if Michael used good sense, he shouldn’t have to be bussed.

And he didn’t doubt that the boy would use good sense. The kid was intelligent and courteous. With those attributes, plus considerable charm and his mother’s handsome features, he was the perfect teen and likely would exceed at whatever he chose to do, including walking safely to school.

As we came to know the family better, we realized how much Michael was the center of his parents’ lives. He was coddled, instructed, disciplined, indulged and admired as befit an only child. He wasn’t sure why he was supposed to become a pediatrician but was agreeable about it. The worst part of his life, I later learned, was that his parents didn’t get along with one another, in treaty only on the importance of their son as the basis of staying together. It was a heavy burden for him to carry.

In addition to Bill’s Herr Professor status, baby Kate was a hit attraction, especially for Werner. She loved the living room window where she could watch people go past on their trips to the parking lot or the street. A beautiful child with blond curls and sparkling eyes, she was unusually outgoing and spirited. She soon learned that when Werner passed he would stop outside the window to play peek-a-boo games and make delightful faces at her. Sometimes he would even step to the door and talk to her. She waved her arms and jabbered whenever she spotted him coming down the sidewalk.

I wasn’t used to men of leisure; Bill’s trudge down Dempster to Maine East took place quite early every morning and he came back only shortly before dinner. His classes were made up of accelerated students, a specialty he maintained for his entire career, and he loved the challenges posed by young, dynamic brains. There was a lot of preparation work to do; even weekends at home were eroded by papers to correct, parents to call, resource books to read. Maine East became his life very quickly. This was the occupational goal he had reached for during the many summers spent in Iowa City growing his M.A. While I had no accomplishments beyond my efforts to be a perfect housewife, his current status was a matter of pride. Our Masters Degree and our journey from a tiny Iowa town that didn’t even have running water to a great, good school like Maine East represented significant success, we thought. We had aspired to something; we had worked hard and sacrificed to make it happen, and we had succeeded!

In contrast, Werner Hellman struck me as a man with unusual and, perhaps, sinister time on his hands. I even speculated to myself as to whether he might be involved in some kind of Mob activity. My curiosity probably showed when I chatted with his wife, Elfi. She wasn’t reticent about letting me know that her husband rarely rose from bed until noon, stayed up most of the night watching talk shows, and was a free-lance toy designer whose afternoon excursions were connected with his business.

The origin of toys had never crossed my mind. Girl toys were mostly small replicas of things their mothers cradled (babies) or used (little ironing boards, stoves, dishes, etc.) Boys’ toys came mounted on wheels or were pointed at people accompanied by a shout of Bang! What was there to invent?

I evidently had not been paying attention. An entire industry was in full-swing and creative people regularly brought new ideas to toy manufacturers. Huge international conventions were held each year in New York and in Europe for the purpose of showcasing the newest products in the field. Individual toys ascended into popularity overnight and descended to obscurity almost as quickly.

With all of this yet to learn, I merely thought of the Hellman family’s well-appointed townhouse and suggested to Elfi that her husband must do very well at this unusual occupation.

Not at all! she said. I am so jealous of people like you who have regular incomes and know exactly, from one month to the next, how much money you have to live on!

Ludicrous, I thought to myself.

After all, one of the shocking things about our move to the Chicago area was the discovery that, although the numbers on Bill’s paycheck were higher than any we had previously seen—and an excellent retirement plan was in place, to be claimed at some far-off time—the higher cost of living caused the familiar scrimping and struggling if we were to make ends meet. In my memory, nobody had ever suggested that our income was enviable.

If the pay is regular but not enough to live comfortably, it’s still a problem, I replied.

Our two older daughters, Ann Marie and Patricia, were born 22 months apart during the first three years of our marriage. A big part of our efforts to move along to a living wage was about them and the good dental care, good nutrition, good books and good music that we wanted them to have. We didn’t have the money to take them on vacations but we talked to them freely about life in general—as we knew it, which was a highly idealized New Testament version. We enjoyed them tremendously, each for who she was.

Annie was creative, keenly observant of human foibles, and had a wacky sense of humor. More reserved, Patty was strong of character, dependable and compassionate.

After almost a decade, we got careless and Katherine Elizabeth joined the family.

Her birth wasn’t a convenience but she was beautiful, lively and smart and there were four of us to take care of her so she wasn’t a vast inconvenience, either. It may have been her January arrival that pushed us into scraping together a thousand dollar down payment to buy the townhouse.

Each day, school buses whisked Patty and Ann to their new schools, Bill went oh-so-happily to his classroom, and Kate and I were then alone. Kate took both morning and afternoon naps, which meant I had time to catch up on the tasks connected with traditional housewifery.

That tradition included cleaning, washing, ironing, cooking and, in my case, writing checks to pay the bills, plus doing whatever was needed to properly care for the children.

Tasks aside, September was a delight. The new townhouse came equipped with matching yellow appliances that included a washer and dryer. Although automatic laundry equipment had been around for a number of years, wringer washers and outdoor clotheslines were all I had known. In some of the places we had lived, that required heating wash-water on the stove. Outdoor clothes-drying had its pleasant side in good weather but was challenging in colder months, particularly when there were a few dozen cloth diapers to be harvested from the line and all of them were frozen into stand-alone stiffness. Now, the new appliances made me positively giddy. Kate’s diapers were a cinch. Of course, they still had to be folded but look at all the time already saved by these automatic machines!

All that first month I experienced a kind of elation, looking up from my ever-present ironing board to such exciting innovations—for me—as the breakfast bar with its stylish wicker stools (another extravagance), the pretty blue carpet that curved away from the dining room into the living room and up the handsomely appointed staircase, and our very own Sears and Roebuck pinch-pleated curtains that could be drawn across the big windows at nighttime. For this little while—throughout this 1961 September—I thought of myself as, at last, one of those lucky women who lived in the glossy magazine ads.

It was a shock when, in October, I realized that I was pregnant again.

THE PARADOX IN PARADISE

The pregnancy surely came about thanks to the turmoil of packing, moving and child care. There were no memorable romantic moments to recall. While Bill’s libido was certainly normal, his lovemaking was always very quickly finished. It was a major problem for us, one that caused much anguish early in our marriage. We had talked about it, even cried about it, but it was a situation that, Bill reported, had no known medical cure. He had been told so by the medical doctors and the psychiatrist he had consulted. That meant that we had to live with it.

I attempted to set my own feelings aside while making an effort to remain kind and responsive to my husband’s needs. A virgin from a strict Lutheran background when we married, I knew little about what I was missing and Bill was nearly as inexperienced. I was still a virgin a week after our church wedding because he simply hadn’t yet been able to accomplish what he knew was expected of him.

Shamed, he soon learned to ignore his problem altogether and we lived on an affectionate, companionable plateau. He seemed to find sufficient atisfaction in our short but frequent couplings and, since I hardly knew to attribute my increasing frustration to his premature ejaculation, I controlled my misery. We did not fight or argue, mostly because Bill was so readily agreeable, a definite antidote to my more volatile nature. He unfailingly responded to anything I said with, You may be right! Where, when and why he had achieved this conspicuous serenity was foreign to me, but I accepted it without protest, much as I sometimes would have appreciated the release of a heated discussion.

Why won’t you fight with me? I once screamed at him. He said nothing, just looked bewildered.

It was evident from our first year of marriage that, despite everything, we were extremely fertile. In another era, we would probably have been one of those families with 17 or 18 children, all begotten without planning. How had our parents managed? Bill and I were both only children with almost no extended family on either side and both of us had regretted that. Wanting a family and a more abundant life, we had begun our marriage determined to have a half-dozen kids and create our own clan.

The economics of living on a teacher’s salary had fairly quickly cooled that ambition, just as the Great Depression had undoubtedly cooled our parents’ outlook. However, Bill refused to get the vasectomy that would back up our practical decision and was horrified at the thought of trying to cope with condoms.

Annie’s and Patricia’s reasonable 22 months spacing was thanks to tentative efforts to employ the rhythm method as a family planning effort. After Patricia’s birth, I was fitted with a diaphragm and credited that with a cessation of child bearing. But now, after ten years had gone by with lengthening periods of complacent carelessness, the inevitable result was another pregnancy.

Kate’s unplanned birth was an economic hardship but it brought pleasure with it. Ann and Patty were old enough to take care of some of their own needs so there was time to devote to a baby. I nursed her for months and was thrilled by her developing awareness of the world around her.

Now, however, I was pregnant again and this new child would be a mere 16 months younger than Kate. How could our household income stretch to cover yet another baby? How could I give quality care to two little ones at the same time? How could I ever ever have a life apart from childrearing?

This was another factor—this one largely unseen and undiscussed. I wanted to finish my own education and I wanted a career. A grade school teacher from age 18 until my marriage, teaching wasn’t where my ambitions lay. I had inched my way through two years of education classes, one summer at a time between stints in rural classrooms, but that didn’t reflect my long-held purpose. From the time I had been in high school, I ached for a degree in journalism and a job to match. It wasn’t encouraged by my parents, who insisted that teaching was necessary if I wanted to buy my way to a degree. Besides, early marriage was expected of young women and my mother thought grandchildren preferable to seeing me with a diploma in my hand. I lacked the resolve and encouragement necessary to buck the current.

So there were two potholes in our current arrival in the bliss of Colonial Ridge—Bill’s shortcomings as a lover and the gaping hole of unfulfilled personal ambition that was invisible to everybody but me. As a matter of fact, both potholes were invisible to everyone who knew us and we were often complimented on our ideal marriage.

Now, a mere month after moving into Colonial Ridge, the biology of pregnancy pushed me into a malaise that I couldn’t shake. I didn’t have morning sickness but I was so tired, mentally and physically, that I could hardly creep up the stairs to put Kate down for her naps. All the joy I had experienced in both our new home and in Kate’s development had dissipated into thin air after only one month.

I lived with the debilitating weakness for at least three months, doing what needed to be done to keep family life going but unable to manage anything more. Simply put, Kate lost the enthusiastic mother she had known. I was there in body but my mind and spirit were only going through the motions. By the time of her first birthday, in January of 1962, she was expert at fighting for attention and frequently threw tantrums of astounding intensity.

My loneliness was overwhelming. I needed someone to talk with and nobody was available. Bill more or less ignored the whole situation; he had his classes to think about. His parents, earnest first generation Scandinavian stock from Minnesota, said, Well, maybe THIS time you’ll have a boy! My mother had died when Ann and Patty were toddlers, my best friend lived hundreds of miles away, and new acquaintances were just that—acquaintances. Bottom line: there was little in the way of perspective and comfort to be had. My father, a retired eccentric back in Iowa, cared about me but was the last person I could have turned to with domestic problems.

I told the news to our neighbors, the Hellmans, and they responded predictably. Elfi, true to her competent nature, made the practical suggestion that I look for medical help to terminate the pregnancy, despite the illegality of abortion. Werner, a lone positive voice, was excited. Another baby in the neighborhood! He had himself wanted more children, he said, but Elfi had refused. Later, he told Bill that she not only didn’t want more children but was totally uninterested in sex. Birth control was a cinch in their family; there just wasn’t any need.

Elfi had her own take on their situation and sniffed to me, If I had another baby, do you think he would get out of bed and help take care of it? I know who would have all the work and it would be me!

As to the kind of activity that produced children, she said that she was continuously puzzled about the amount

Reviews for The People Under the House

[sheiladeeth_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Dene Hellman tells a compelling three-part story in The People Under the House, with a short fourth part bringing it all to completion. It’s a tale that begins with a 60s housewife and, whose perfect life, with all those extras long-hoped for, long-promised, seems suddenly dull and gray. The perfect husband works hard for a living, and the perfect children are truly admirable. But wife and mother loses sight of herself and feels like a servant below-stairs in the rich man’s home. Many women today, though the world has certainly changed, will still recognize themselves in her dilemma.The chance to interview a German Jew, survivor of WWII, just might be what the lonely housewife needs to revive lost dreams of being a writer. Or it might serve to shatter the dreams she’s in danger of losing now.Part two gives a new and haunting perspective to the tale. The wife who has everything is brought, together with the reader, into the life of a man who lost everything. The trials of a 60s housewife, or a wife and mother today, seem as nothing compared with the slow shattering of childhood hopes, Kristallnacht’s swift shattering of lives, and all those small incidental betrayals required just to stay alive in Hitler's Germany. Werner’s no hero, but he proves to be a determined survivor. Meanwhile his story has romance but no fairytales. And his dreams are still born of nightmares.By the end of part two, the reader’s primed to believe there must be hope. But this story continues with real-life trials and tribulations while fairytales fade. There are other wounds besides being hunted or ignored. The lives of the everyday can be filled with secrets every bit as painful as the lives of the lost. And living below-stairs might be preferable to what’s to come.I love the first two parts of this tale. Fast-flowing, deeply involving, painfully relatable, they contrast beautifully as the protagonists meet on a 60s housing development. But this novel is memoir, and real-life conclusions can be messy, complex and sad. Warts and all, the story builds on post-traumatic stress and lifestyle trauma into a picture of two real lives, separate, intertwined, and finally far enough apart to be knitted back together at the seams.Disclosure: I was given a free ecopy and I offer my honest review.