Free The Archivist by Martha Cooley

into their new world, into a new life.
    Roberta was born five years later. The family moved into a larger apartment on one of Hoboken’s narrow side streets. Kurt’s small painting business had begun to flourish, and they could afford the light-filled rooms in which Roberta spent the first decade of her life. Kurt hired several men to work with him, and Trudy took design courses at the local polytechnic college. Her instinctive decorative sense and familiarity with the principles of Bauhaus design made her an excellent student, and she soon added her skills as an interior designer to her husband’s business. She also proved to be a sharp entrepreneur, and through her efforts, Manhattan opened as a market for the couple’s enterprise.
    Their daughter entered their world as proof — the largest, brightest proof — of the rightness of their choices. With emigration and conversion everything had changed. The war years were an inexplicable lapse from the grace to which they had been restored as followers of Christ. Loss was a caesura in a larger rhythm of gain and growth, of prosperity.
    Roberta stressed to me that her parents were quiet people, disinclined to proselytize. The war had taught them to keep to themselves — a habit of being that altered, in America, only insofar as they allowed themselves to join in the activities of their congregation. They had almost no friends or acquaintances outside that safe circle. Their expressions of faith took the form of practical acts centered on the maintenance of the house of worship itself — an unconscious throwback, Roberta felt, to their experience in that other holy place that had sheltered them against all odds. Every third year Kurt painted the church and its rectory, and Trudy designed beautiful altar cloths and choir gowns.
    Yet their Christianity was not confined wholly to the narrow locus of the church building and its congregants. They understood that they had larger responsibilities, ones that rippled out to the world they had left. They read the New Testament every day and subscribed to several periodicals dealing with the urgent theological questions that Bonhoeffer’s writing had initially raised for them — ethical and political questions about which they held strong if silent opinions. They considered themselves both politically aware and liberal. Theirs was an intellectual Christianity, but they believed deeply that Christ was the guarantor of all human survival. The absurdity of their own survival had at last been made bearable.
    Roberta grew up surrounded by Dutch, Irish, and Italian immigrants. The decade after the war’s end brought Germans and Eastern Europeans to Hoboken, including some Jews. One childless couple, the Rosens, lived above a small market they owned on Washington Street, across from the first apartment Kurt and Trudy had rented. As a girl Roberta went into the market every day. Mr. Rosen stood behind the meat counter; he had thick hands covered with curly grey hair, and on his left forearm was a number in dull blue ink. Mrs. Rosen gave Roberta hard candy and spoke to her mother in German. Between the two women Roberta sensed a strong affinity and an equally strong tension. It was not until many years later that she realized that their bond was the result of a recognition that neither woman could express, and the tension an outcome of what one woman suspected and the other denied.
    Denial was necessary. Kurt and Trudy Spire treated the tangled threads of history and identity as if they had always been and would always be separate, two skeins that did not braid. What had happened to them had nothing to do, now that it was over, with the individuals they had become. Conversion meant not that they had once been Jewish and were now Protestants, but rather that their having been Jewish was — and here Roberta quoted Eliot as she struggled for the right words — an unattended moment, a moment in and out of time.
    “But any shrink will tell