On Oct. 15, 1937, my father crossed the border from Kehl, in the southwest corner of Germany, into Strasbourg, France. Five days later he boarded the SS Bremen in Cherbourg for the five–day voyage across the Atlantic to New York.
Window into an Exotic World
Among the items Dad brought with him when he arrived in New York was an album covered in beige canvas containing snapshots of family, friends, and landscapes. They were pictures of elegantly dressed, confident-looking people, secure about their place in the world. There was no hint of the catastrophic events that would soon envelop them and millions of other European Jews.
Liniment and Vanilla
One of Dad’s first jobs in New Haven was working as a night clerk at the Hotel York, a residential hotel in a sketchy neighborhood near the railroad station. He earned $10 a week, which even in those days was a paltry sum. In January 1939 he took a job as a salesman for the J.R. Watkins Company, a Minnesota-based maker of soaps, spices, extracts, and other household products.
Beyond the Pale
Bibs and Tuckers
My parents were both Ashkenazi Jews from not-very-observant families, but that’s where their similarities ended. My father grew up in a world of big houses, fancy cars, and vacations at posh resorts. My mother was the product of a tight-knit family of modest means. She was 31 when she married and had lived with her parents in the same house virtually her entire life.
Matriarchy
Willow Street
I grew up in the first-floor flat of my grandmother’s house on Willow Street in New Haven. It was a neighborhood of stout, three-story shingled houses a mile or so from the ivy-covered neo-Gothic halls of Yale University. It was a tight-knit community of immigrant families, mostly Italian, Irish, and Jewish.
Matinee
Once or twice a year Dad took the family to New York for a weekend matinee. The show that made the deepest impression on me was a performance by the French mime Marcel Marceau. From the moment he shuffled onto the stage in his signature striped sailor shirt, tight-fitting black vest, and white bell-bottom trousers, I was completely in his thrall.
Showroom
Glass Dynasty
A Retirement Home in Bohemia
On Tuesday, August 18, 1942, Train Da 503 pulled away from Platform 40 of Frankfurt’s Grossmarkthalle. Its destination was a small town north of Prague, near an old fortress called Theresienstadt. The train was packed with more than a thousand elderly Jews. Among them were my grandfather Otto Kupfer and his sister Mina.
