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6 The “Family” I was the oldest of four children. Our parents came to the United States in 1938. My father was Peter Drucker, the economist. He had left Vienna, gone to work at a newspaper in Frankfurt, and was forced to leave in 1933. He first went to England. My mother, Doris Schmitz, had met my father briefly while she was studying international law at the University of Frankfurt, where he was a teaching assistant. She went on to work at the Hague for the League of Nations in international law. She also left and went to London when Hitler came to power. There, to their surprise, they re-met each other on the up and down escalators in Harrods department store. My grandmother massively disapproved, but they lived together anyway. My mother has written about this in her own memoir, Invent Radium or I’ll Pull Your Hair.2 Peter and Doris stayed and worked in London. Eventually our father was sent to America to write a series of newspaper articles on U.S. attitudes preceding entry into World War II. At that time my parents decided to marry, and they sold their wedding gift, a complete set of the Encyclopædia Britannica , to pay my mother’s shipboard passage. That is how they arrived in New York. They already knew they would not go back. I was born soon after, family lore had it, on a fire engine during the hurricane of ’38. Struggling with joblessness, after managing to get much of the “family” out of Europe, my parents settled in Vermont. My father had been offered a modest, not quite full-time faculty position at Bennington College , teaching comparative religion. My paternal grandparents lived with us much of this time until my grandfather also got a university position. He ended his days at the University of California in Berkeley. My mother took care of her parents, whom she managed to get out of Germany. They were living sometimes with us and sometimes in England. Nevertheless, we lost family in the extermination camps of Europe. Our parents never spoke of this in front of us, not once. Our mother kept the family going; she managed our victory garden, sewed all our clothes, cooked and canned and bottled, baked bread, and made maple syrup from the Vermont trees. At one point, she made sauerkraut . The barrels where the cabbage was fermenting exploded, and for months we were picking cabbage shreds out of the nearby apple orchard. In • The “Family” 7 the midst of this she managed to get a master’s degree in physics. She continued to work and follow her intellectual interests, and showed us that it was normal for women to have both a career and a family without seeming conflict. She also took time to encourage my creative interests. She was the person I most admired. The parents embraced America—with its tolerance and freedom. They gave us Anglophone names. They fell in love with baseball, though it was my mother who tried to get my brother and myself interested in pitching, catching, and batting. My brother Vincent was my best friend. We were terrified of sports that involved things being thrown in our direction, and ran away from the ball! Patiently, “Fa,” who couldn’t even see a flying object, he was so nearsighted, tried to play “catcher.” Baseball was the national sport, our parents insisted. They wanted us to fit in. They put up a basketball net. But they also sat with us for hours over homework or as we practiced our music. They were, and still are, the most amazing people I have ever met. It was a refugee story. They would shelter their children. Now piecing together a life, they were hopeful. My parents had no self-pity, ever. They helped countless others escape from Europe. My father was very involved with the International Rescue Committee and also with Care, two organizations that helped refugees. We overheard a lot about DP camps too. Peter Drucker, who seemed mild at home, was a powerful force: on the one hand an authoritarian, on the other a pussycat. My mother was strong on the authoritarian side, but with a wonderful eye for human interest and detail and humor. They approached life with enthusiasm. My father had written several books already, both in Germany and in England, about history and political theory. The Druckers were curious and interested in everything. They took their children everywhere...

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