of their kitchens; they are our neighbors. (They were certainly mine in my North Bronx childhood.) The geography is familiar—a photo of a family dinner in a recognizable Bronx apartment (sconces on the wall, steam-heat radiators); then the upwardly mobile move to Mamaroneck, in Westchester; then the retirement community in New Jersey. To get to Fini and Kasimir, drive south from Newark on the Jersey Turnpike and head for Lakehurst and the Garden State. In search of Uncle Adelwarth in his last years: Route 17, Monticello, Hurleyville, Oswego, Ithaca. There are no ghosts in these parts. It is, all of it, plain-hearted America.
But turn the page: here are the ghosts. A photo of UncleKasimir as a young man, soon after his apprenticeship as a tinsmith. It is 1928, and only once in that terrible year, Kasimir recounts, did he get work, “when they were putting a new copper roof on the synagogue in Augsburg.” In the photo Kasimir and six other metal workers are sitting at the top of the curve of a great dome. Behind them, crowning the dome, are three large sculptures of the six-pointed Star of David. “The Jews of Augsburg,” explains Kasimir, “had donated the old copper roof for the war effort during the First World War, and it wasn’t till ’28 that they had the money for a new roof.” Sebald offers no comment concerning the fate of those patriotic Jews and their synagogue a decade on, in 1938, in the fiery hours of the Nazis’ so-called
Kristallnacht
. But Kasimir and the half-dozen tinsmiths perched against a cluster of Jewish stars leave a silent mark in Sebald’s prose: what once was is no more.
After the roofing job in Augsburg, Kasimir followed Fini and Theres to New York. They had been preceded by their legendary Uncle Ambros Adelwarth, who was already established as a majordomo on the Long Island estate of the Solomons family, where he was in particular charge of Cosmo Solomons, the son and heir. Adelwarth helped place Fini as a governess with the Seligmans in Port Washington, and Theres as a lady’s maid to a Mrs. Wallerstein, whose husband was from Ulm in Germany. Kasimir, meanwhile, was renting a room on the Lower East Side from a Mrs. Litwak, who made paper flowers and sewed for a living. In the autumn succahs sprouted on all the fire escapes. At first Kasimir was employed by the Seckler and Margarethen Soda and Seltzer Works; Seckler was a German Jew from Brünn, who recommended Kasimir as a metal worker for the new yeshiva on Amsterdam Avenue. “The very next day,” says Kasimir, “I was up on the top of the tower, just as I had been on the Augsburg Synagogue, only much higher.”
So the immigrants, German and Jewish, mingle in Americamuch as Germans and Jews once mingled in Germany, in lives at least superficially entwined. (One difference being that after the first immigrant generation the German-Americans would not be likely to continue as tinsmiths, just as Mrs. Litwak’s progeny would hardly expect to take in sewing. The greater likelihood is that a Litwak daughter is belly-dancing beside Flossie in Tucson.) And if Sebald means for us to feel through its American parallel how this ordinariness, this matter-of-factness, of German-Jewish coexistence was brutally ruptured in Germany, then he has succeeded in calling up his most fearful phantoms. Yet his narrative continues as impregnable here as polished copper, evading conclusions of any kind. Even the remarkably stoic tale of Ambros Adelwarth, born in 1896, is left to speak for itself—Adelwarth who, traveling as valet and protector and probably lover of mad young Cosmo Solomons, dutifully frequented the polo grounds of Saratoga Springs and Palm Beach, and the casinos of Monte Carlo and Deauville, and saw Paris and Venice and Constantinople and the deserts on the way to Jerusalem. Growing steadily madder, Cosmo tried to hang himself and at last succumbed to catatonic dementia. Uncle Adelwarth was obliged to commit him to a sanatorium in
But turn the page: here are the ghosts. A photo of UncleKasimir as a young man, soon after his apprenticeship as a tinsmith. It is 1928, and only once in that terrible year, Kasimir recounts, did he get work, “when they were putting a new copper roof on the synagogue in Augsburg.” In the photo Kasimir and six other metal workers are sitting at the top of the curve of a great dome. Behind them, crowning the dome, are three large sculptures of the six-pointed Star of David. “The Jews of Augsburg,” explains Kasimir, “had donated the old copper roof for the war effort during the First World War, and it wasn’t till ’28 that they had the money for a new roof.” Sebald offers no comment concerning the fate of those patriotic Jews and their synagogue a decade on, in 1938, in the fiery hours of the Nazis’ so-called
Kristallnacht
. But Kasimir and the half-dozen tinsmiths perched against a cluster of Jewish stars leave a silent mark in Sebald’s prose: what once was is no more.
After the roofing job in Augsburg, Kasimir followed Fini and Theres to New York. They had been preceded by their legendary Uncle Ambros Adelwarth, who was already established as a majordomo on the Long Island estate of the Solomons family, where he was in particular charge of Cosmo Solomons, the son and heir. Adelwarth helped place Fini as a governess with the Seligmans in Port Washington, and Theres as a lady’s maid to a Mrs. Wallerstein, whose husband was from Ulm in Germany. Kasimir, meanwhile, was renting a room on the Lower East Side from a Mrs. Litwak, who made paper flowers and sewed for a living. In the autumn succahs sprouted on all the fire escapes. At first Kasimir was employed by the Seckler and Margarethen Soda and Seltzer Works; Seckler was a German Jew from Brünn, who recommended Kasimir as a metal worker for the new yeshiva on Amsterdam Avenue. “The very next day,” says Kasimir, “I was up on the top of the tower, just as I had been on the Augsburg Synagogue, only much higher.”
So the immigrants, German and Jewish, mingle in Americamuch as Germans and Jews once mingled in Germany, in lives at least superficially entwined. (One difference being that after the first immigrant generation the German-Americans would not be likely to continue as tinsmiths, just as Mrs. Litwak’s progeny would hardly expect to take in sewing. The greater likelihood is that a Litwak daughter is belly-dancing beside Flossie in Tucson.) And if Sebald means for us to feel through its American parallel how this ordinariness, this matter-of-factness, of German-Jewish coexistence was brutally ruptured in Germany, then he has succeeded in calling up his most fearful phantoms. Yet his narrative continues as impregnable here as polished copper, evading conclusions of any kind. Even the remarkably stoic tale of Ambros Adelwarth, born in 1896, is left to speak for itself—Adelwarth who, traveling as valet and protector and probably lover of mad young Cosmo Solomons, dutifully frequented the polo grounds of Saratoga Springs and Palm Beach, and the casinos of Monte Carlo and Deauville, and saw Paris and Venice and Constantinople and the deserts on the way to Jerusalem. Growing steadily madder, Cosmo tried to hang himself and at last succumbed to catatonic dementia. Uncle Adelwarth was obliged to commit him to a sanatorium in
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