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My Father Always Said Mimi Schwartz For years I heard the same line: "In Rindheim, you didn't do such things!" It was repeated whenever the American world ofhis daughters took my father by surprise. Sometimes it came out softly, in amusement, as when I was a Pilgrim turkey in the P.S. 3 Thanksgiving play. But usually, it was a red-faced, high-blood-pressure shout—especially when my sister, Ruth, became "pinned" to Mel from Brooklyn or I wanted to go with friends whose families he didn't know. "But they're Jewish," I'd say, since much of our side of Forest Hills was. The eight lanes of Queens Boulevard divided the Jews, Irish, and Italians pushing out of Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Manhattan from the old guard WASPs of Forest Hills Gardens. No Jews or Catholics over there—except for a few blocks near the Forest HillsTennis Stadium where, from fifth grade on, we kids all went to watch what is now the U.S. Tennis Open, our endof -summer ritual before school. "You're not going," my father would announce before all such rituals. "But everybody's going." It was the wrong argument to make to a man who fled Hitler's Germany because of everybody. But I couldn't know that because he rarely talked about that Germany, only about his idyllic Rindheim where everybody (as opposed to the everybody I knew) did everything right. Ifmy friends didn't have an aunt, grandmother, or great grandfather originally from Rindheim or vicinity, they were suspect. They could be anybody, which is exactly why I liked them—not like theWeil kids whose mother was "a bornTannhauser," as if that were a plus. "I don't care about everybody!" my father would shout (that was his second favorite line); but it was a losing battle for him. My sister smoked at fifteen , I wore lipstick at twelve, we had friends with families who were third-generation Brooklyn and Rumania, and we didn't give a hoot that "In Rindheim, you didn't do such things!" 17 18Fourth Genre The irony ofthose words were inchoate—even to him, I realize now— until we went back to his village to visit the family graves. It was eight years after the war, I was thirteen, and he wanted to show me, the first American in the family, where his family had lived for generations, trading cattle. He wanted me to understand that "Forest Hills, Queens is not the world" (his third favorite line). A hard task to tackle, but my father was tough, a survivor who had led his whole clan out of Nazi Germany and into Queens, NewYork. He was ready for an American, newly turned teen-age me. "So Mimi-a-la, this is Rindheim!" my father boomed as the forest opened upon a cluster of fifty or so red-peaked houses set into the hillside of a tiny, green valley. We had driven for hours through what looked like Hansel and Gretel country, filled with foreboding evergreens that leaned over the narrow, winding roads of Schwarzwald. Even the name, Schwarzwald, which meant Black Forest, gave me the creeps after being weaned on Nazi movies at the Midway Theater; but I was optimistic. Life did look prettier than in Queens. We drove up a rutted main street and stopped before a crumbling stone house with cow dung in the yard. "This was our house!" my father announced, as I watched horse flies attacking the dung, not just in our yard but in every yard on EelingerWeg. And there were cows and chickens walking in front of our rented car. What a bust! My mother at least came from a place with sidewalks (we had driven by her old house in Stuttgart, sixty kilometers north, before coming here), but my father, I decided at once, was a hick. All his country hero adventures about herding cows with a book hidden in one pocket and his mother's raspberry linzer torte in the other were discounted by two cows chewing away in stalls where I expected a car to be. A stooped, old man with thick jowls and a feathered...

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