In her letters, Lili's primary concern is taking care of Charlie (Heini in the letters) and getting him to a good, permanent home. This is not with her in Czechoslovakia, as much as she adores Charlie. It is clear that she herself is trying to leave Czechoslovakia as soon as she can. And she ultimately does, going to Seattle, Washington, where her sister Gusti and Gusti's husband were living.
The three major possibilities for Charlie were London, where Lili's niece Anny lived, the US, where her sister Gusti lived and where Charlie's three uncles (my father, Sam and Henry) lived, and Palestine. There were problems and roadblocks to each option.
Last year, I found an undated letter written by Anny to my father, discussing the London option, and did a blog post about that. You probably don't remember that, but here's the link to the post. "Anny" signed the letter Hana Lefkovits, and, while she is willing to do anything she can for "poor orphan Heinele," the England she describes is right out of Foyle's War, with severe housing and food shortages.
Anny and her husband ultimately rejected their Jewish heritage and went to Hong Kong, where "Ann Lett" had her own TV cooking show, a la Julia Child. She was divorced twice. Lili would not have been happy.
An option Lili might have been happier with was Palestine. In a letter from November 14, 1945, Lili writes to my father:
Now to business. We have not yet advanced one step with the USA consul. Perhaps you could undertake something there. I am trying everything here, and there is a possibility from England, but all is so uncertain and not yet ready. They say that some children will go to a Yeshiva [in England], and the child could be among them. Otherwise, Anny is still working in England separately [on other options].
Here in a short time there will be a children’s aliyah to Erez [Palestine], and the child could also [go] with it. But Heini knows that you are not in favor of that and therefore the child has lost all desire and now no longer is considering that proposal. Objectively, however, I must admit that the children are doing well there and also they go to good schools and, what is decisive, that the children who were there are all alive and those who were here were 99% killed. This pursues me day and night.. Besides it appears that from Israel also an emigration to the USA is possible, as indeed the case of Ryfka shows, and you know all the steps how it is done. [My Aunt Regina emigrated from Palestine to NY in September, 1945. I don't know how hard that process was. I do know that my father paid for her passage.] Please write to me why you are so against it and also the grounds concerning it. I repeat to you, I want to neglect nothing in the interest of the child, nothing at all, we have unfortunately neglected enough.
When Chuck emailed me this translation he asked, "As for the contents, do you have any idea why your father was opposed to Charlie's going to Israel? Of course, it wasn't yet Israel in 1945."
That was a really interesting question. Here are my thoughts:
1) After their parents died in 1928 or 1930, Charlie’s mother Marta and my father took over the family business and responsibility for the family. Sam, Henry and Regina were in their early teens, Erna in her late teens. Marta and my father were 23 and 20, respectively. Even before the war I think my father saw it as his responsibility to take care of the family and keep it together. Regina loved Palestine, and I don’t know why Regina came here in 1945, but my guess is that having the family together may have been a big factor.
2) Regina had been in Palestine from 1938 through 1945. I wish my father had saved her letters. Whereas the three brothers in NY all were married and had jobs and growing families, Regina was single (i.e., “unsettled”) and living a subsistence existence. My mother used to complain that Regina was always begging for money and my father would send her money (which, according to my mother, they didn’t have) and Regina would go out and buy umbrellas for all her friends, of which she had many. I don’t think that would have painted a picture of Palestine as an ideal place for Charlie, though, in actuality, he probably would have done well there, too.
3) As Chuck pointed out, it wasn’t Israel then, and there was probably not a lot of confidence that it ever would be. And my father wasn’t one for rosy predictions. As Chet said, he was always practical. My father WAS an avid Israel supporter and the only non-business international trip I think he ever took was to Israel. But my guess is that he wasn’t a Zionist in Europe. Another interesting question I’ll probably never know the answer to. In any case, Palestine in 1945 was a British mandate with an uncertain future and undoubtedly a challenging place to live.
4) It was also true that the survivors who went to Palestine had a difficult time being accepted by the pre-war settlers, though that may not have been evident at this time.
But my guess is that it was my father’s sense of his responsibility for Charlie and the family that was the major factor. I asked Chet this morning what he thought, and he had the same reaction.
As a side note: writing this brings back memories of my parents sending boxes of our old clothes to Israel……until, I think, our relatives got insulted that we were dumping our old clothes on them and told us they really didn't need them.
---------------------------
I've taken some significant liberties with Chuck's translation to try to make the letters more readable. Hopefully, I'm not changing the meaning too much.
No comments:
Post a Comment