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  • My Father at the BorderReconciling What a Son Remembers
  • Peter Trachtenberg (bio)

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THIS PAGE AND OPPOSITE:

COURTESY OF THE LEO BAECK INSTITUTE'S ANATOL TRACHTENBERG COLLECTION VIA PETER TRACHTENBERG

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[End Page 65]

Keep a file of all of these documents or a copy of these documents in a safe place. Tell your children, family members, and emergency caregiver where to find this file in an emergency.

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This is my father, Anatole Trachtenberg (1911–1984). His titre d'identité et de voyage, the French refugee's passport he carried when he immigrated to the US in 1939, gives his name as "Naftula Anatol Trachtenberg." I don't know what to make of "Naftula." It's not a name he ever used; I never heard anyone call him by it. It may be a misspelling of "Naftali," his Hebrew name, which ordinarily would come after his first one: Anatole Naftali. He used it only for religious occasions.

The photo was taken when he was about twenty-eight, though to my eye he looks older. Back then people entered maturity earlier than they do today, and my father had had a hard life, having been a refugee twice [End Page 66] before. He'd immigrated to France from Austria in 1938, following the latter country's absorption—unresisting and in some quarters enthusiastic—into the German Reich. His parents were either too old and frail to leave or were simply unable to get exit papers and consequently died within the next few years, his father of sickness and malnutrition in Vienna, his mother, I recently learned, in the gas chamber at Sobibor.

The family had come to Austria from Russia during the civil war of 1918–1921, when my father was ten. He remembered riding in a wagon, hidden under a haystack. He was delirious for much of the journey from an ear infection that, in the absence of a doctor, had to be treated with "blood eagles." That's what he called them in the stories he told me when I was a child, and it wasn't until years later that I realized he'd been speaking of leeches, the German word for which is Blutegel. The use of leeches in medicine is very old and, since their saliva contains a powerful anticoagulant, not without merit. Still, they didn't help his ear infection. At around the same time I realized what blood eagles were, my father saw a doctor who informed him that for much of his life he'd been deaf in one ear, presumably the one that had been treated with leeches. It's startling to think that a man can go through life unaware of having only half his hearing, especially if, like my father, he was once a professional musician and listened to music regularly and with discernment. As long as he lived in New York he was a regular at the Met, and when listening to WQXR could almost instantly tell you what aria was playing, the opera it came from, the singer, and often the conductor. All with one ear.

It wasn't until recently, after my stepmother died at the age of ninety-four, that I acquired a dossier containing the physical documentation of my father's migrations. These documents, beginning with the one that records his family's membership in the Jewish community of Baden, Austria, give the sketch of his early life a definition that was previously missing. They authenticate those stories, pulling them toward history. Stories are private, personal, often unverifiable. They have fluidity. Nobody gets too upset if the stories their parents tell them keep changing in their particulars. We left in summer. We left in winter. The hay was to protect us from the cold. The hay was to hide us from the Cossacks. The money was hidden in a pot of marmalade. It was stowed under the wagon bed. The infection was in my left ear; it was in my right. But history is public, fixed, monumental. A...

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