Crossing the Borders of Time

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Authors: Leslie Maitland
Tags: Non-Fiction, WWII
result, her old autograph book, in which friends inscribed little poems, aphorisms, and colorful drawings full of whimsy and talent, includes entries from 1938 addressed either “Liebe Hanna” or “Chère Janine,” based on whether the entry was dated before August or later. At the border, Hanna-now-Janine buried the German girl living inside her. Then she allowed France to change her, a transformation she quickly embraced to create a new life.
    “After four weeks in France or six weeks in America, we pretended to be Frenchmen or Americans,” Hannah Arendt wrote firsthand of the German Jews’ efforts to reshape themselves and their lives, an assimilationist struggle typified again and again by my mother in every new country. “In the first place, we don’t like to be called refugees ,” Arendt also declared, explaining how degraded German Jews felt after fleeing their homes, stateless, unwanted, and empty-handed.
    It was unnerving, when I read Arendt’s words, to remember how deeply my mother had hated my father’s derisive nickname for her, which he tended to use as a verbal stiletto whenever she voiced her own contrary views on political issues. The “Ref,” he would say, knowing each time how the term would wound her. “Listen to the Ref.” But in my mind, the Ref was the woman who slipped into my high school pep rallies and, to her own surprise, cried—tears that sprang from some unexplored zone that had a great deal to do with all she had been through. Unnoticed, she stood in the back of the rowdy auditorium and quietly cried when she saw me alone on the stage, performing routines that required two batons at a time, the captain of the baton twirling squad—a role so totally out of character for me—a serious girl, insufficiently “bouncy” in my father’s opinion.
    It was also the Ref, I see now, who would not permit me to step down from the squad when the war in Vietnam somehow made my white tasseled boots, thigh-high satin skirt, and towering majorette’s hat of black bunny fur unappealing to me. The flags, the salutes, the marching and music—in that era it all seemed uncomfortably militaristic. I had a moral responsibility, my mother insisted, not to abandon the squad. Privately, though, I had my suspicions: the girl forbidden to wear the bold bandolier and tasseled kneesocks of the Nazi girls’ troop in Freiburg, the girl who needed to master French, Spanish, and English and in each of them fretted over her accent, was the very same person who wanted her daughter to strut in the happy parades that took over the streets when our football team won and when crowds waving American flags stood waiting on Main Street to cheer us on Memorial Day. And so when my closest friend resigned from the squad, this refugee’s daughter had no choice but to stay, to belong , and to point her silver baton toward the flag while a wobbly school band bleated its way through her mother’s adopted national anthem.
    In what would prove to be just the first stop on a six-year journey from Freiburg to safety, the family settled into a two-bedroom second-floor apartment at 18 avenue Roger Salengro in Mulhouse, overlooking the chestnut and pine trees of the parc Salvator in the back and just up the street from the ivy-wrapped Lycée de Jeunes Filles that Janine and Trudi would be attending. When the girls’ school began taking boys in 1971, its name was changed to the Lycée Michel de Montaigne, its fifth name change in a century, all four earlier ones reflecting the switches of language required by the back-and-forth status of French and German control of Alsace. So, too, the region’s mixed background spawned a distinctive double-tongued dialect that its own citizens mocked by mingling French and German in rhyming ditties that my grandmother Alice often recited to me when I was a child:
Voulez-vous Kartoffel soupe?
Non, madame, je danke vous .
Je n’ai pas appetite dazu .
     
    All the same, in Mulhouse, despite

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