Appel Is Forever: A Child’s Memoir

Epilogue

EPILOGUE The farm summer was truly a happy time. After that, several young men fell in love with me at the university. I was still too childlike to respond, emotionally or physically. I continued to commute during my second year at university and worked part-time as a receptionist at a dance studio located across campus on the south side of the midway. At the start of the third year, in 1953, I moved into a very large private house on campus owned by the parents of a U-High friend. They rented out many rooms and I arranged to do housework in exchange for a lowered rent of seven dollars per week. Now I was on my own. A confluence of public and private events brought me to the brink of breakdown. This was the time of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. Every day the Chicago papers headlined another accusation. The era of witchhunts, blackballing, loyalty oaths, and jail sentences began. To me it sounded like the beginning of fascism. Not yet really understanding the intricacies and checks and balances of the American political system, I became more and more frightened. At the same time I was coming to the end of my college years. In this crucial transition time, hard for most young adults, I had to make decisions: "What's next? Do I work? At what? Do I go to graduate school? In what field? How?" I also met my future husband in my third year and this time I was ripe for love. To all this I could bring the strengths of my childhood . But these weren't enough for adult tasks and decisions. All other energy and emotional potential for growing up had been diverted to survival , learning a new culture, holding on, and staying sane. Finally, driven by fear to the University of Chicago mental health clinic, I was 163 EPILOGUE referred to Michael Reese Hospital. There I talked with a psychiatry resident once a week for all of six weeks. Somehow I got patched together for the time being and continued my path to adulthood. At that time I made some resolutions; I gave myself some guidelines. First, I would not complain nor seriously take to heart anything unpleasant or difficult as long as I had food, safety, and warmth. Secondly, I would never indulge in quarreling about unimportant matters. Nothing was worth that misery unless it was a matter of "life and liberty." And, most important, I decided that I would live a "normal" life. No matter what it would take I would study, find work, marry, and raise children as though nothing unusual or terrible had ever happened to me. I would be just like "other" people. I became a teacher and a therapist. I married and raised three children to adulthood. No one has ever known how hard it has been. The entry price of immigration is to have a vast subcontinent break away from the land mass that is the self. The radical rupture turns every known memory into an estranged one. Further, as a child I did not know that the decades of the twentieth century spewed forth refugees from countries around the world and deposited these refugees in a wild mosaic worldwide. As a child I did not know the statistics of murder or the specifics of the executions of my people. For decades there was complete silence. And so I could not allow inner knowledge of what I had experienced and what I felt. The numbness and the shutting off or hiding deeply of my feelings made it possible to go on. It also ensured that I would lose, gradually, all sense of who I was. After many years I found my way back to Judaism. To live the seasons of the year and the cycles of life in a Jewish way is my task and my joy. To celebrate daily life—to experience and express gratitude for ordinary life events—is a gift of my Jewish heritage. We came to America, America the huge. I arrived an unwilling settler , aghast at the loss of everything I still loved—my friends, my language , my place: "Mokum my Amsterdam." My Holland whose air, light, and ever-moving sky I loved. We came to America, America the hope. I found acceptance. My merits enabled me to make a good life. We came to America where the ideals of the Founding Fathers and the republic...