To listen to the interview, go to http://www.theauthorsshow.com/

Crumstadt, Germany

My mother’s cousin, Elisa Levi, recently sent this email after reading, Is It Night or Day?. When Elisa was a child, she and her family fled Crumstadt, Germany for Uruguay. My mother and Elisa have corresponded and visited each other since 1938, the year my mother left Germany.

Dear Edith:

I finished reading Fern’s book. It made me relive all the sorrows and fears I experienced in Germany in school and on the streets of Crumstadt the year before my departure. I also remember the first months in Montevideo when my mother read us the letters from your mother, which talked about your trip to the US and your relationship with Aunt Mildred. Even though I was unable to say it then, I felt for you and I suffered with you.

I think the book is profound and touching. I sense there is a deep feeling between you and Fern. I can imagine it. You certainly must have suffered a lot again.

Love,

Elisa

American writer and intellectual Walter Lippman

“The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.”

-Walter Lippman

“Remember, remember always that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.”

-Franklin D. Roosevelt

Computer scientist and U.S. Naval Officer Grace Murray Hopper

“I handed my passport to the immigration officer, and he looked at it and looked at me and said, “What are you?”

-Grace Murray Hopper

The Deutschland

Gertie Katz (from an unknown German town) and Edith Schumer (my mother) of Stockstadt am Rhein immigrated together on the Deutschland. The ship left Bremen, Germany on a cold, gray day, March 8, 1938 and arrived in New York City on a sun-splashed March 19, 1938. Gertie and Edith, who were both 12 years old, became inseparable on the ship.

“We had so much in common,” Edith says. “We both left our parents and we turned to each other for support during the passage. She immediately became my best friend since I didn’t have many friends left in Germany.”

Passport photos: Gertie Katz and Edith Westerfeld

When the two girls parted in New York, Gertie gave Edith this photo. On the back, she wrote 21 März 1938. Zur Erinnerung Deine Freudin, Gertie Katz. “March 21, 1938. For remembrance. Your friend, Gertie Katz.”

“Gertie didn’t know where she would be living,” Edith remembers. “All she knew was that she would be placed in a home with strangers in Seattle. I gave her my address, but I never heard from her again. I always wondered what happened to her.”

That was 72 years ago.

“Gertie?” Edith says, “I’ve thought about you all these years. I’d love to hear from you or your children.”

Edith’s email is edielar@aol.com.

Both books, Is It Night or Day? and Motherland, tell part of this story.

Edith Westerfeld Schumer

My mother, Edith, who is now 84 years old, still types with two fingers and thinks that only birds “tweet,” posted her first Facebook message on my wall yesterday:

“Dear Fern, Congratulations–Thank You for bringing my story to the world.
Love Mom”

Note: She still capitalizes the pronoun “you,” which is correct German grammar.

My barren trellis

Three years ago, I spent way too much money on a large climbing rosebush which I hoped would weave an ornate blanket of apricot flowers through the trellis on the front of my house. The first year, the bush did not disappoint. In fact, it produced 47 roses. Believe me, I counted…every day.

I patted myself on the back; my money was well spent. I looked forward to counting more and more blooms each year as the rosebush established itself. I had this fantasy that I would count well over 100 Royal Sunset roses with my grandchildren-to-be.

But the next year, the bush suffered a terrible fate. Maybe aphids attacked it. Maybe it simply froze to death over the Chicago winter. No matter, the bush looked deader than a doornail.

Demoralized, I yanked the brown skeletal, thorny stalks and roots out of the ground and brought the remains back to the garden center with the hope that I would get some of my money back. Standing by its product, the garden center gave me a complete refund. Then, I bought and planted a few hardy “Sweet Autumn” climbers — not nearly as impressive, but more reliable than roses.

The sprig of my Royal Sunset rosebush

To my great surprise, this spring, a small red shoot popped out of the ground where my lush Royal Sunset rosebush once grew.

When I made the discovery, I thought, how instructive for immigrants — for that matter, for all of us.

As the saying goes, “Bloom where you are planted.”

I read this quote this morning: “To emigrate is to become a foreigner in two places at once.”

Or to emigrate can mean living in two places at once. As I wrote in Motherland: “Memory for most is a kind of afterlife; for my mother, it is another form of life…For her, scenes from decades ago had their own immediacy. Her inner life is schizophrenically filled with both the here and now and the there and then.”

And, in time, living in two places at once can lead to a deeper sense of alienation within the family. After she had married an Israeli and moved to Israel, an American friend of mine once said: “I didn’t realize that when I married someone from another culture I would produce children who would be foreigners to me.”

A foreigner with foreign children, in two places at once.

The Jewish Babe Ruth, "Hammerin' Hank"

Baseball star Hank Greenberg is a small but significant character in my new book, “Is It Night or Day?”

The book, based upon my mother’s experiences, captures Edith’s immigration in 1938 and her assimilation into American culture. Frightened, isolated, and ridiculed in her new environment, Edith finds solace in baseball.

At that time, Comiskey Park offered free admission for women on Thursdays (Ladies’ Day), and Edith was introduced to America through the games. Hank Greenberg, the Jewish slugger for the Tigers, emerges as both a role model and surrogate father for Edith.

Greenberg, one of the premier power hitters of his time, blasted 58 home runs in 1938. The American League twice named Greenberg the Most Valuable Player and he was a five-time All Star player.

Harvard law school professor Alan Dershowitz says that Greenberg was “the most important Jew of that period, giving hope to all the others through his accomplishments, allowing them to think that they could fit into the mainstream. He was articulate, a great player, a great role model, had a great work ethic, and though not a religious Jew he realized how important his heritage was and how others looked up to him to do what is right.”

Though he was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1956, Greenberg still lacks the recognition he deserves, and my hope is that this novel will help address his relative obscurity. In Is It Night or Day?, Hank Greenberg and baseball give Edith, who has suffered terrible losses, a glimpse of hope for the future

Searching for a metaphoric home

Pulitzer-prize winning novelist Carol Shields once said that “a great novel should follow the character’s search for a metaphoric home.”

I’ve thought a lot about that comment recently; it resonates with Is It Night or Day? in two ways.

First, that is the trajectory of Edith’s story. She is a child immigrant searching for a home, physically and metaphorically. Young Edith’s bewildered efforts to assimilate in America are as poignant as her struggle against constant feelings of abandonment and isolation. Through the prism of Edith’s story, readers experience urgent themes that resonate with today’s headlines: families torn and children threatened by immigration issues, war, natural disasters, and the daunting work necessary to rebuild a life in the face of unspeakable loss.

Second, with the book’s launch only weeks away, the book and the story are searching for a home and an audience. The book explores the little-known One Thousand Children project which rescued some 1,200 youngsters from the Holocaust.

My hope is that this book will give Edith a home and the One Thousand Children a place in history.

A memorial statue in Hanko, Finland, commemorating the thousands of emigrants who left the country to start a new life in the United States

The definition of immigration is “a person who comes to a country to take up permanent residence or a plant or animal that becomes established in an area where it was previously unknown.” But the concept can encompass much more and much less than that.

Immigrating connotes coming to a new place while emigrating connotes leaving. My mother actually emigrated from Germany, but is it fair to say she immigrated to America?

That implies that there was some pull to this country. She did not share the spirit of those who left shtetls in Russia or Poland for America in the 19th century. They believed the streets were paved with gold, but nothing pulled my mother to a new country. She was only 12 years old when she emigrated; she wanted to remain in Germany with her parents.

In the process of emigrating, my mother also became an immigrant in another aspect of her life. As she entered adolescence, she sought meaning and coherence, mirroring every young person’s journey from childhood to adulthood.

A broad interpretation of immigration would include children entering adolescence since they are introduced to “an area … previously unknown.” It also would include adults who, say, leave an unhappy marriage, as they are coming to a new “country to take up permanent residence.”

Through major life changes, we are both emigrants and immigrants.