They Were Good Germans Once: My Jewish Émigré Family

By Evelyn Toynton

“This priceless recapturing of darkened history . . . [is] stunningly intelligent and elegantly written . . . Utterly engrossing.” —Phillip Lopate, author of To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction
 
In this moving collection of essays, Evelyn Toynton, “a wordsmith of the highest order” traces her family history, from her mother who left Germany as Hitler came to power to her relatives who escaped after suffering persecution and internment at the hands of the Nazis (Library Journal, starred review). Toynton only fully understood her harrowing genealogy as an adult living in New York, where she first came to terms with her connection to other Jews in America. Growing up, her family was German first, retaining the attitudes and the characteristics of the homeland they still loved and longed for, even as they built new lives in America, Israel, and England. Some, like her father, appeared to assimilate easily, while others never lost the feeling that they were living in exile. Powerfully rendered by an acclaimed author, They Were Good Germans Once is a remarkable account of survival, starting over, and the search for meaning and hope in a world forever altered.
 
“A poignant memoir . . . The author’s tone is often elegiac. . . . A thoughtful, notable addition to the literature of the Holocaust.” —Kirkus Reviews
 
“With Toynton’s signature intelligence, subtlety and wit, she describes members of her family—deracinated through no fault of their own—in portraits that are by turns surprising, hilarious and heartbreaking.” —Lynn Freed, author of The Romance of Elsewhere
 
“[A] tragic, comic, sharply observed memoir.” —Carole Angier, author of Speak, Silence: In Search of W.G. Sebald

• Language: English
• Publisher: Delphinium Books
• Release date: May 14, 2024
• ISBN: 9781504096034

Evelyn Toynton

Evelyn Toynton’s work has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Prospect (UK), the TLS, the New York Times Book Review, and other publications. Modern Art was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and her novel The Oriental Wife (2011) has been optioned by Magnus Films for a feature film. Her biography of Jackson Pollock (2012) was published by Yale University Press as part of its Icons of America series. She lives in Norfolk, England.

Book preview

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They Were Good Germans Once

My Jewish Émigré Family

A Memoir

Evelyn Toynton

The duality of German and Jew—two souls within a single body—would preoccupy and torment German Jews throughout the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth.

—Amos Elon

The German-Jewish marriage was a rare event, and rarely has the Jewish partner courted love as in this instance … [but] the Jewish-German marriage ended in definitive divorce.

—Joseph Taubes

For Joseph Olshan, editor extraordinaire, who talked me into writing this book and then made it better

PREFACE

When I was a child, I had a sense of my relatives not as foreign per se but as having more layers to them than other people. Even their accents—though they all spoke impeccable English, the older ones in particular still had distinct German accents—seemed like a sign of some inner richness; they carried another, mysterious world inside them that marked them out from the Americans around me. Now I can see that they were, in their way, displaced persons, strangers in a strange land, not that they whined or complained about it: they did not bemoan their fate, though when I look back at some of their histories, they would seem to have had sufficient cause. Trauma was not a word they would have used, or perhaps even recognized; it did not exist in their vocabulary. Nor did culture shock. Maybe they felt they had no right to pity themselves: they were the lucky ones, after all—they had survived, as so many of their friends and relatives had not. Or they may have felt that to give way to grief would be a form of self-indulgence, a lack of that discipline so valued in German culture.

While no one in my grandparents’ or parents’ generation attempted to pass as Gentiles, it had been many years since they had actively practiced their religion; their whole culture, their entire sense of their identity, was German. And right up until the advent of Hitler, they were patriotic to the core. All the men of the family who were of age to fight in the First World War volunteered for service in the German Army. My two grandfathers, my great-uncle, and several of my second cousins were awarded the Iron Cross and commended for their bravery in battle. One of those cousins died in the fighting in France in 1914, just a few weeks into the war. My father’s father suffered a war wound on the Eastern Front that left him with a permanently damaged arm.

Unlike the Eastern European Jews, they had always eaten Apfelstrudel and schnitzel rather than gefilte fish and latkes, and had spoken only German, never Yiddish. I don’t remember hearing a single word of Yiddish, except maybe meshugenneh, until, when I was nineteen, I became friends with someone who’d been raised in a cramped apartment in Brooklyn with his Yiddish-speaking grandmother, a refugee from the pogroms in her native Russia. Not only was my new friend’s speech littered with Yiddish words, but he was deeply suspicious of German Jews—yekkes, as Yiddish speakers like his grandmother called them.

Nobody had ever told me before about the class warfare between people like my relatives and his. But yekkes, he informed me, considered themselves the aristocracy of Jewry, far more civilized and refined than their co-religionists elsewhere—particularly those peasants from the shtetls of Eastern Europe, whom they regarded with distaste and distanced themselves from as much as possible. I’d never heard any member of my family express such snobbish views, but as he pointed out, they may have had no occasion to: they probably associated only with other yekkes. (Years later, the editor of a distinguished scholarly journal would tell me a riddle about German Jews. Question: "What’s the difference between a virgin and a yekke? Answer: Once a yekke, always a yekke.")

My friend even darkly suggested that the yekkes, along with all their other sins, had been so eager to fend off Bolshevik incursions that they’d supported the Nazis in their early years. No proof of that allegation existed in the history books, so I managed to persuade him that it wasn’t true, but in his eyes, even if they’d never colluded with the Nazis, German Jews would always be more German than Jewish. That wasn’t something I could argue with, given some of my relations’ undeniably German traits: punctuality was a cardinal virtue for them, they placed a very high value on discipline and hard work, their characteristic mode was seriousness. Certainly they weren’t given to my friend’s exuberant brand of joking and mockery, any more than they went in for immoderate displays of emotion; hugs and extravagant professions of love were not part of their repertoire.

My friend accused me, too, of not being Jewish enough—not only didn’t I know any Hebrew, or many Old Testament stories, according to him I didn’t look like a Jew, didn’t act like one, didn’t sound or even laugh like one. Yet he, more than anyone else I’d met, made me feel my Jewishness as intrinsic to who I was, as though some buried part of me were coming to the surface. Once, after spending an afternoon listening to an acquaintance from Tennessee describe her frontier ancestors and the quilts her family had handed down from generation to generation, I phoned him and said, I just realized something: I’m a Yid. And he said, I know that, but if you never say it loudly enough, no one else will ever figure it out.

While his grandmother had told him in harrowing detail about the Cossacks rampaging through the shtetl, no member of my family ever talked to me about what the Nazis had done. I wonder how much, in my early childhood, right after the war, they thought of those other Jews, the ones who’d perished in the camps, or in mobile gas vans, or at the trenches the Einsatzgruppen made them dig before shooting them en masse—both the ones they had known and all those millions they hadn’t. Even later, when books on the Holocaust began appearing in great numbers in America, I don’t remember seeing a single one on their bookshelves. At the age of ten, I read The Diary of Anne Frank, but not because any member of the older generation had mentioned it; my sister heard about it from a friend and, after reading it herself, passed it on to me. Though we talked about it endlessly between ourselves, and I had nightmares for months afterward about the Nazis coming for us, we never mentioned the subject to our parents. It would have felt cosmically tactless to remind people who had lived through that time of what the Germans had done. It was not a subject to be discussed outside our bedroom—it was too scary, too dangerous.

So many of the Nazi-era stories I tell in this book, the back stories of my relations who came of age in Germany, I learned long after their deaths. Most of the real horrors happened to people I never knew well, or people who died before I was born or when I was very young. In those cases, it is their widows, some of whom I did know well, who form the subject of the memoirs collected here. But what happened to their husbands was so much a part of their story that to describe them without relating what they had gone through before I knew them would be to strip away much of what made them who they were.

CHAPTER ONE

Mothers and Daughters

My grandmother may be as responsible as the Nazis for my mother’s inability to stand up for herself when her fate depended on it. My mother learned the habit of submission at such an early age that when it came time for her to fight for her rights, she meekly accepted the judgment of others on what she was entitled to, with disastrous consequences.

I cannot remember my grandmother as anything but an old lady, with witchy white hair sprouting from her chin and above her lip in a way that fascinated me as a child, and that now makes me check my own face regularly for such growths. Nor can I remember her smiling, except very rarely, such as when she beat me at Chinese checkers, our main pastime together. These games took place at the small round table in the foyer of her shabby apartment in Inwood, a largely German Jewish neighborhood in upper Manhattan, where I, too, lived for my first nine years. We talked very little at those times, concentrating hard on the worn board between us. My grandmother was not given to telling me stories about her life before she arrived in America, though there would have been many stories to tell.

She had begun life as the daughter of a rich industrialist, a stern paterfamilias who had rigid ideas about the role of women. And so, although women were already being accepted, in however small numbers, at German universities, he refused to allow my grandmother to attend, though she had been the star pupil at her school. Her brother, her one sibling, was a different matter: he was not only allowed to get a university education, it was impressed on him that his father expected and demanded that he excel at his studies. When he failed an examination—he may have been less intellectually gifted than my grandmother—he killed himself rather than face his father’s wrath. In the living room of the apartment where those games of Chinese checkers took place was a large, handsomely framed portrait of this brother. But only from my mother did I learn what had become of him.

How my grandmother had managed to get that painting out of Germany in 1939 is a mystery, though she had also brought with her a number of tablecloths richly embroidered with peacocks and dragons and swans, and stacks of linen kitchen towels, each still neatly held together with lavender ribbon, each with her married initials on them and marked for a distinct purpose: some were for plates, others for glasses; there were even separate ones for forks as opposed to spoons. There were also evening bags, elaborately beaded and encrusted, swaddled in ancient tissue paper. None of these relics of a once affluent existence was ever used in America; when she died, we discovered them, in tidy piles, in the wardrobe in her bedroom, along with several Galle vases and wooden packing boxes containing a complete set of Limoges china, edged in gold; my older sister and I divided all these expensive things between us. My grandmother must have had to forfeit any number of even more valuable things when she left Germany, to be allowed to take those remnants of her former life with her.

If she never told us about her brother, she also never mentioned her husband, who had emigrated with her but died when I was just two years old. Theirs had not been a love match. My grandfather’s beloved younger sister was engaged to be married, but could not afford a dowry, and so my grandfather married my rich grandmother in order to provide her with one. It doesn’t speak very well for his character, yet my mother adored him, just as he adored her, which was the root of the problem in that household. My grandmother must have realized that her witty and charming husband had not married her for love, that he much preferred their daughter to her; she was ferociously jealous of my mother, though my mother was vague about the details of the form that jealousy took. The full story was only told to me after my mother’s death, by her cousin, the son of my grandfather’s brother: they had lived next door to each other in Fuerth, an industrial city not far from Nuremberg, and both being only children, had been more like brother and sister than cousins, seeing each other every day.

It seems that my grandmother’s dislike of my mother did not stop at coldness or other forms of emotional punishment. She was furious that my mother was left-handed, and tried to force her to use her right hand instead, though she never entirely succeeded; when she caught her writing with the wrong hand during her school years, she would hit her repeatedly with a belt. Nor were those the only times when she resorted to physical force. She beat her terribly when she was in a rage, her cousin told me. "We all knew about it, but what could we do back then? Nowadays, she would have