The Emigrants

Our relatives' summer visits were probably the initial reason why I imagined, as I grew up, that I too would one day go to live in America. More important, though, to my dream of America was the different kind of everyday life displayed by the occupying forces stationed in our town. The local people found their moral conduct in general — to judge by comments sometimes whispered, sometimes spoken out loud — unbecoming in a victorious nation. They let the houses they had requisitioned go to ruin, put no window boxes on the balconies, and had wire-mesh fly screens in the windows instead of curtains. The womenfolk went about in trousers and dropped their lipstick-stained cigarette butts in the street, the men put their feet up on the table, the children left their bikes out in the garden overnight, and as for those negroes, no one knew what to make of them. It was precisely this kind of disparaging remark that strengthened my desire to see the one foreign country of which I had any idea at all. In the evenings, but particularly during the endless lessons at school, I pictured every detail of my future in America. This period of my imaginary Americanization, during which I crisscrossed the entire United States, now on horseback, now in a dark brown Oldsmobile, peaked between my sixteenth and seventeenth years in my attempt to perfect the mental and physical attitudes of a Hemingway hero, a venture in mimicry that was doomed to failure for various reasons that can easily be imagined. Subsequently my American dreams gradually faded away, and once they had reached vanishing point they were presently supplanted by an aversion to all things American. This aversion became so deeply rooted in me during my years as a student that soon nothing could have seemed more absurd to me than the idea that I might ever travel to America except under compulsion. Even so, I did eventually fly to Newark on the 2nd of January 1981. This change of heart was prompted by a photograph album of my mother's which had come into my hands a few months earlier and which contained pictures quite new to me of our relatives who had emigrated during the Weimar years. The longer I studied the photographs, the more urgently I sensed a growing need to learn more about the lives of the people in them. The photograph that follows here, for example, was taken in the Bronx

in March 1939. Lina is sitting on the far left, next to Kasimir. On the far right is Aunt Theres. I do not know who the other people on the sofa are, except for the little girl wearing glasses. That's Flossie, who later became a secretary in Tucson, Arizona, and learnt to belly dance when she was in her fifties. The oil painting on the wall shows our village of W. As far as I have been able to discover, no one now knows the whereabouts of that picture. Not even Uncle Kasimir, who brought it with him to New York rolled up in a cardboard tube, as a farewell gift from his parents, knows where it can have got to.

So on that 2nd of January, a dark and dreary day, I drove south from Newark airport on the New Jersey turnpike in the direction of Lakehurst, where Aunt Fini and Uncle Kasimir, after they moved away from the Bronx and Mamaroneck in the mid Seventies, had each bought a bungalow in a so-called retirement community amidst the blueberry fields. Right outside the airport perimeter I came within an inch of driving off the road when a Jumbo rose ponderously into the air above a truly mountainous heap of garbage, like some creature from prehistoric times. It was trailing a greyish black veil of vapour, and for a moment it was as if it had spread its wings. Then I drove on into flat country, where for the entire length of the Garden State Parkway there was nothing but stunted trees, fields overgrown with heather, and deserted wooden houses, partly boarded up, with tumble-down cabins and chicken runs all around. There, Uncle Kasimir told me later, millions of hens were kept up to the postwar years, laying millions upon millions of eggs for the New York market till new methods of poultry-keeping made the business unprofitable and the smallholders and their birds disappeared. Shortly after nightfall, taking a side road that ran off from the Parkway for several kilometres through a kind of marshland, I reached the old peoples' town called Cedar Glen West. Despite the immense territory covered by this community, and despite the fact that the bungalow condominiums were indistinguishable from each other, and, furthermore, that almost identical glowing Father Christ-mases were standing in every front garden, I found Aunt Finis house without difficulty, since everything at Cedar Glen West is laid out in a strictly geometrical pattern.