American Girl: a memoir

...Her talents, along with those of her father, were amply proven to us on a "talent night" staged one rainy evening on the sunporch, during which Hope and her father waltzed to a record of "Parlez-moi d'amour," then tap-danced to "Bye, Bye, Blues" and "I Got Rhythm," with encores...

...Though a year or two older than I, she was hardly taller, only sturdier—an American quality, I felt sure...

...My father also took us on the climb up Mount Something, and initiated the fishing...

...There were, of course, others: they really were from New York, New Jersey, or maybe "Philly...

...Nobody said that, at least not at first, but it was implicit in the foreign accents...

...The teacher, soon enough discovering my exotic origins, induced me to tell the class, with the aid of a wall map, where I'd been born and by what mysterious byways I had come to this land...

...a breakdown...

...Such an American was our friend Hope Zee (formerly Zitlowsky, the story went...

...We bought equipment: a rod and reel for my father, red-and-black enameled wood bobbins for my brother and me...

...Underlying everything, though I wasn't conscious of it at the time, was my parents' worry about my grandmother, aunt, uncle, and the others who had stayed behind in Czechoslovakia...

...The main building's sunporch housed, in addition to the rattan furniture and flowered carpets, a jukebox, abomination to my parents, secret delight to me...

...It provided a sunset view of the other brick apartment buildings— "brick glow," my father termed it, ironically summoning up the "Alp glow" of the sun setting on the Swiss peaks that he had loved...

...My classmates, uncomprehending but docile, listened...

...The Americans were for the most Moment...

...My father, a straw hat protecting his bald spot, looks surprisingly healthy, his tee-shirt taut across his chest, his skin tanned to the dark shade that once made someone take him for an Indian...

...A sailor cap, that summer's fad, perches on top of Hope's curls— more Orphan Annie than Shirley Temple—while an identical cap, brim down, flattens my already lank coiffure...

...Other savings went for a pocket knife, the most expensive purchase I'd ever made...

...In one dusky picture I peer over the edge of a hammock...

...At me, mostly...

...My mother, the previous summer, had suffered a collapse of Harriet Poll, whose articles have appeared in Midstream, The New York Times, and the Jerusalem Post, among others, is a writer living in California...

...Luckily they didn't...

...It consisted of a main building of two or three floors containing some single rooms, kitchen, dining room, lounge, sunporch...

...Where we went that June was to The Little Club in Schroon Lake...

...Little else made dinners memorable, at least for a kid who hadn't yet discovered the joys of eating...

...It was surely no club, unless the fact that all its residents were of the same ethnic group—faith—what have you—made it clubbish...

...But for purchases like the pocket knife, I needed to augment my allowance, and so I learned free enterprise by catching frogs to sell to the serious fishermen for bait...

...My parents, by contrast, took walks (all the refugee parents I knew took walks, usually inducing their children to accompany them), swam without getting their faces wet, sat in the lounge chairs, read the New York Times and the German-language Aufbau, and occasionally conversed with other refugees...

...Little as I minded leaving the school or the apartment, I was somewhat sorry to leave my only friends, the twins Eva and Erika, refugee kids with whom I used to roller skate along the sidewalks and tried to learn the jump rope rhymes that the American girls seemed to have been born knowing...

...They were Americans, accentless...

...Formidably talented though she was, Hope was anything but "stuck-up...

...crowded classrooms conducted in a language which I barely understood...

...What brought us all to the same place, refugees and Americans, was—I had no notion of it at the time, having been reared in a totally secular, assimilated household—that all were Jewish, and The Little Club was a Jewish resort, in an age of segregated vacation spots...

...The two years in New York had been hard on us all...

...For a time my brother had to pick me up from school and walk me home to protect me from the tough kids who had several times cornered me in the school yard to lift my skirt and jeer at my "bloomers"—the knee-length underpants that my mother believed would ward off autumn chills...

...why was my hair always such a mess, not to mention my fingernails...

...This is her first appearance in moment...

...people would always exclaim...

...We were no longer from New York, having abandoned it...

...The mountains and forests were more like the home they would never see again than the brick walls of New York had been...

...there were always plenty of Americans ready to do so...

...The others were mostly from New York—and before that, from Vienna, or Berlin, Hamburg, Prague, or Frankfort...

...I loved the mystique of sinkers, hooks, floats, different kinds of lines...

...The frogs, which had to be caught by hand in the late afternoon or early evening, sold for a nickel each...

...It was, in all, a sweet time...

...We come from Albany, and we sell apples...

...and several two-story "cottages," each containing guest rooms, all ringed around a not too neat lawn fronting the truly lovely Schroon Lake...

...That—together with the unaccustomed strain of the daily commute from Long Island to Manhattan, the new job, hectic new surroundings, and the mysterious but debilitating "tropical illness" he had suffered when we had lived in Havana—broke my father's health, and he lay in bed for weeks, at first with sciatica, then with a blood clot in his leg...

...There must have been other people who were, like us, in limbo...

...As for the fish, strings of which my brother still holds up proudly and awkwardly in the yellowing photographs, I prided myself on my indifference to their anguished floppings before the fatal knock on the head...

...A my name is Alice, and my husband's name is Al...

...undiagnosed origins—"nerves...

...and away from the intense company of all the other refugees—in Lake Placid we were one of only four refugee families—the war must have seemed farther away also...

...I had thought that only my parents and their friends had foreign accents...

...J B my name is Betty...

...I was still busy, in those years, becoming a Girl Scout, becoming a bobby soxer, becoming American...

...cold after cold kept me at home, my mother reading me stories while I inhaled steam under a towel...

...It wasn't until much later that they found out that my grandmother had been sent to Terezin on July 13th, to Treblinka in that same fall in which I showed the fifth grade where Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, and Cuba were located on the map...

...The year is 1942, the place a mountain in the Adirondacks near Schroon Lake...

...As a way to spend time, it was definitely preferable to P. S. 3. The apartment we left consisted of one bedroom for my brother and me, a kitchen, and a living room with hideaway bed for my parents...

...my skinny one is bent partly backwards at the elbow ("You must be double-jointed...

...Bambi, the Felix Salten novel, an early Pocket Book, was also the first book I ever bought, and I bought it that summer with money from the allowance I had started to get...

...Other pictures from that summer show ten-year-old me, if not in shorts then in bathing suit: fishing, sitting on the lawn holding one of the cats, rowing, swimming...

...Luckily I never had to use my own nickels...

...And although her mother had died not long before, she was always ready for a swim or a game of croquet...

...I had little patience for any of this, nor for grown-up pleasures such as the newspapers, and the movie that played in Schroon Lake that summer to universal (grownup) acclaim: "Citizen Kane...

...To me they were marvels—friendly, laughing, knowing the latest songs—unlike my parents, who stuck to themselves or to a few others like themselves, rarely laughed, were easily irritated...

...we had no answer...

...Unexposed to the hordes of refugee kids who so often beat their New York peers in spelling bees and arithmetic tests, the smalltown kids didn't ask me why my parents had "run away" instead of staying to fight the Germans...

...where had I disappeared to during a long, boring walk...

...My movie, though it cost me many a tear, was "Bambi...

...5 part what the mainly German or German-speaking refugees no doubt referred to as Ostjuden, Eastern European Jews...

...My parents, too, seemed happier...

...And they fretted...

...we hadn't yet gone anywhere else, although Lake Placid, farther upstate, was our destination, which we were to achieve before school started again in the fall...

...The photographer must have been my brother, who had made the climb with us but doesn't appear in the picture...

...It was the year of "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree," to which I still know all the words, as well as "Jersey Bounce" and "Give Me One Dozen Roses...

...My passionate love for animals— Bambi, the hotel cats—did not extend as far down the evolutionary ladder as frogs, and I had no qualms over their fate—nor that of the nightcrawlers, which we caught, with flashlight and tin can, for our own use...

...It was far later yet that / found out...

...Domesticity and commercialism 50/ Moment were built in...

...For me, New York—Forest Hills, to be precise—was: playing on the sidewalks or in the rubble-strewn lot behind the hastily constructed brick apartment building where we lived, a building that saw three fires during our two years there...

...Whatever it was, it was serious enough for them to send my brother and me off to stay with friends for the few days before we were sent to the even more alien environment of summer camp, the scars of which, literally as well as figuratively, I still carry...

...Fits of anger that blossomed out of nowhere like jungle weeds...

...There was croquet, and wooden row-boats to fish from, and a handball court for the athletic (and lost handballs for enterprising kids to find...

...and split shifts, mornings for my brother, afternoons for me, so that I didn't even have the security of knowing that he was there in the same building with me...

...To the inevitable "Where are you from...

...That June, after school was out, my parents put most of our few belongings in storage, packed up our car with the remainder—including my two turtles in their mayonnaise-jar traveling aquarium—and left New York City for good...

...like us, she wore rumpled shorts, did belly-flops...

...I was the First in the family to catch a fish, though it wasn't big enough to take back to the kitchen, where they would cook your catch and serve it to you at dinner...

...Many croquet games and sunburn blisters later we left Schroon Lake, with much more sentiment than we'd expended on New York City three months earlier...

...Tanner and sturdier, happy to become a smalltown girl, I started the fifth grade in Lake Placid, where the other kids knew little about the war aside from the shortages of bubble gum and sweets which it had unfortunately occasioned...

...Most of all, there was the lake and the lawn, and wood-and-canvas lounge chairs, and all those other people...

...small wonder that our generation became the quiet conformists of the 50s...

...never had I met so many strangers all at once who had them...

...Daughter of a show biz family, Hope was herself training for a career on the stage...

...and produce some-ssing awful, like tapioca pudding...

...There was always our waitress, a refugee of course, who when asked what was for dessert, would answer, "Some-ssing goot...

...and since, as soon as the weather got cold, we all wore wool ski pants to school and everywhere else, nobody had the opportunity to reveal my shameful bloomers...

...Bitterness over: when could I go back into the lake after a cold...

...but if so, I didn't know them...

...We differed from everyone else in not being "from" anyplace...