Love in a Global Village: A Celebration of Intercultural Families in the Midwest

Convergence: Vilma & Tom

Convergence vilma& tom Tom, Vilma, & Zoe. Photo by Jessie Grearson. hen we ask Vilma Seeberg what was most difficult about moving, at twelve, from her childhood home of Hamburg, West Germany, to Washington , d.c., we are not surprised that she tells us it was culture shock, but we are interested to learn that the source of her discomfort had little to do with the challenges people typically name — like language or climate. “The first thing that registered with me was that girls here were wearing bras. I was a girl, not a woman in any sense of the word, but I had to make a real quick shift from being a person who happens to be a girl, to being a young woman with boys around and dating — all that creepy stuff. Everyone had autograph books at the time, and I remember making a million faux pas because everything had a connotation I wasn’t aware of.” She shakes her head at the memory and turns to look at her own baby daughter. “Germans wouldn’t think of turning preadolescent girls into Barbie-doll types.” We can’t imagine Vilma ever trying to fit in with the Barbie and Ken crowd, but we are meeting her some thirty-odd years later, and the distance between the little German girl looking with dismay at her American counterparts and the woman who sits across from us now is vast. This Vilma lives with her partner, Tom Jacobs , and their recently adopted daughter, Zoe, at their home in historic Shaker Heights, just outside of Cleveland. This woman — with her short, slightly funky hairstyle and lively, intelligent eyes — radiates a peaceful self-confidence that puts those around her at ease. We sit on a comfortable leather couch in the couple’s living room, a haven from the hubbub of airports and hotel lobbies. The room is long, and the pleasantly worn furniture in it is arranged in enclaves that encourage conversation. Books on art and music are 238 { Convergence } W stacked on the coffee table; on a nearby mantelpiece, contemporary authors compete for space with colorful children’s stories — and even the air seems scented with books and the smell of smoke from an old fire. The bay window area where we sit is ringed with the living green of plants. While she talks with us, Vilma reaches back and deftly trims a drying leaf from a bamboo tree. Vilma is at once relaxed and poised; she answers our questions so quickly and precisely that it seems she’s been expecting them, and is equally ready to laugh at a joke or to make a playful quip of her own. In contrast, Tom’s long pauses before he answers our questions are disconcerting at first, but he responds thoughtfully, and his voice is pleasing and sophisticated. He looks sophisticated too, we think, with his graying hair and glasses, introspective eyes, eloquent piano player’s hands. His worldliness is amicable, as though he has met and befriended many people from different places and is prepared to like us as well. Vilma and Tom seem particularly in tune with one another and deeply compatible, although we rarely talk to them at the same time and our conversation occurs in shifts. In fact, it took Vilma and Tom many years following different but parallel paths to arrive at this peaceful place together. Vilma came to the United States in 1960 when her father, who worked in the film industry, took a job in Washington, d.c., and the family followed him. It wasn’t necessarily easy for a German family to move to the postwar United States — Americans were openly hostile to Germans, all Germans, regardless of the role their families had played in World War II. “Oh, there were all the jokes about Germans wearing boots and the Nazis, not seriously mean stuff, just high school ignorance.” Vilma is dismissive of these early difficulties, has to think hard to remember them at all. She { Vilma & Tom } 239 focuses instead on the excitement of a new life in a country poised for change. Vilma remembers Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington; the excitement of the sixties was one her whole family participated in. “Kennedy had just been elected, which was for my family . . . well, maybe there’s hope for the world. Postwar Germany was rather a depressing place.” By the time she was...