October 18, 1944: Full Assimilation

Letter from Opa to Grandmother, October 18, 1944

October 18, 1944

Darling,

I am waiting at the doctor’s to get my g.i. glasses; it is 9 a.m., and I have a hard time staying awake. The nice thing about this going to the doctor is that it gets you out of classes. 

Last night, I was a good boy for a change, right after finishing my letter to you, I went to bed, i.e. at nine o’clock. That gave me almost eight hours of sleep, which I haven’t had since I joined the army.

            

It’s seven p.m. now, and this letter is apt to rather short since I am terribly tired and want to go to bed really early.

            

Your nice long letter came today, and I was so pleased to get it. Don’t bother yet about sending me money; I still have some dollars left. The charges for my field jacket will be taken out of my next pay. Out of my laundry, please send me all shorts and undershirts, unless they are too badly torn. 

Eilleen’s card to us certainly was swell. She is the most thoughtful person I know. I’ll try to send her a long letter as soon as I find some time. 

Your mother told me that you had to stand up in the bus all the way from Topeka to Lawrence, and she was very concerned about. Don’t worry: I wasn’t. So you made a game out of trying to find who or what those soldiers were? Above all, you must be really bad off for men if you resort to negroes. 

Your Jayhawk looks okay to me, now, where I run away from the Wildcats. If you are hunting a fourth school to send letters from, how about a cook school?

I don’t know what happened, but I am tired today and my muscles sore. The one hour of “Physical conditioning” today didn’t exactly help, so I’ll hit the bed as soon as this letter gets written. 

Went to my company commander today and showed him the letter of the Immigration Service. He has never had a case like me, so he has to look up some regulations before taking any action, but I believe I can depend on his assistance.

Good night, my little Margie; I probably won’t dream tonight, but if I do, it will be about our weekend together. 

 

Love,

Tom

One of the many wonderful results of embarking on this project (that I admit has been a journey of fits and starts, sprints and marathons) is connecting with long-lost relatives. There are many consequences of war that people don't think much about. One of them is the diaspora of people affected. Yes, we talk about refugees and immigrants, but we don't often think about the fragmentation of large (or even small) families that result in decades (or an eternity) of non-communication. It's the same for so many families of this time, fragmented by geography and death, trauma and survival. Even when and if they reunite, they have been gone from each other for so long they are strangers. 

Opa and one of his cousins rarely interacted after their emigration to the US around the same time. They were overwhelmed with their own paths of survival, their own smaller families to track and support if they could. That cousin's daughter and I are now close friends. Our connection was happenstance - my husband made a cold call based on a rabbit-hole online search - and she answered. And now we go bra-shopping together and she was at our last family Thanksgiving celebration. My long-lost cousin has her own treasure trove of letters from her mother and grandparents, her own journey through them, and a completely different hand of cards that the trauma of war dealt her. Her mother and my grandfather's paths start from the same larger family and neighborhood in Berlin, and go distinctly different ways from there.

This cousin and I were talking about assimilation, the survival instinct imbedded in it, and the tension that it created between family members. Opa was a "lucky one," getting out of Germany in 1938, before things got really bad. When he arrived in the US in 1939, His survival tactic as a German half-Jew was to assimilate into the American culture as quickly as possible. Those left behind had different survival needs and tactics. I noted that Opa seemed to be quite good at assimilation, and hungry to be accepted (and safe, with a future). It later caused tension between himself and those who remained in Europe, and even with some who had emigrated but held more tightly to their history.

As I'm reading these letters, I notice the longer Opa is in the United States, the Army (only briefly now), the more I see American culture in his letters. For Opa to go from discussing the injustice of apartheid with his Quaker youth group, to making a racist joke about my Grandmother's interest in black men, shows me how quickly he assimilated. I'm sure that he carried some of the inherent racism of the German culture with him to the US, but that joke felt very American to me.

It makes me wonder about the lines between culture, conscience, religion, and all other influences that get blurred when someone moves to a new country. That must be so confusing and difficult. How do you know what to keep safe and sacred, and what is good to have stretched? When you throw in the pressure to fit in, especially if it determines your level of safety, how far do you go to protect yourself? The United States, while being a melting pot, has always required varying levels of assimilation for acceptance and safety, but the price of not assimilating feels especially high right now. What is funny to me is, I don't know that we can clearly define American culture. It shifts with time and depends on where you are in the country. 

I know my thoughts today aren't really connected to much of this letter, but seeing these "Americanisms" creeping in is giving me pause, reminding me of the complexity of what happens when people of different cultures combine, clash, and connect. This is giving me a new glimpse into the immigrant experience.

Then there is the individual underneath it all: I think they often go into hiding. That makes me sad. I wonder what Opa hid.