1. Family Matters When Margaret Erle was six years old, her favorite toys were dolls. She combed their hair and bathed them, kissed their hard plastic foreheads, and rocked them to sleep. Margaret liked to imagine what her own grown-up life would be like one day, away from her New York City apartment. She imagined a spacious house with lots of rooms and even more trees, a big, strong husband, plenty of children, and a menagerie of animals. Whenever she had time to herself, she retreated to her soft pink room and sang lullabies to her little figures. She swaddled them, talked to them, washed and pressed their dresses. Soon enough, her desire for make-believe had faded: By the time she was eight, she had real babies to tend to.
The outgoing Margaret was so trustworthy, parents in her neighborhood asked her to watch their children. Her mother, Gertrude, fretted that she was too young, but Margaret pointed out that she''d had plenty of experience taking care of her little brother, Allen, who was two years younger. And by the time she was finishing fourth grade, Margaret had a busy after-school and weekend schedule, wrangling strollers up and down stairwells and wheeling babies around her block. She boiled bottles and knew instinctively how to hold infants'' heads and change their diapers. The giant pins made her a little nervous at first-what if she poked a leg?-but she got the hang of it quickly. She got a dime each time she babysat. After school she helped Gertrude in the kitchen, peeling carrots and potatoes as soon as her hands were deft enough. She wasn''t allowed to touch knives-she could hurt herself, hurt someone else, be reckless.
Margaret was helpful and eager, but also careful. Gertrude, who showed little approval and even less affection, had rules, and one was expected to obey. Like most of her friends in Manhattan''s Washington Heights in the 1950s, Margaret was the child of Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe. Her German-born parents never spoke of their past comfortable lives, of the tragedy they''d evaded. Now they waited for disaster in America, even as their kids plunged into its promise. Nobody was warier than Gertrude, who had wounds she both felt and wore. Deserted by her first husband, fate dealt an even crueler blow when she was diagnosed with breast cancer at fifty. She felt that the surgeons who removed her breast also stripped her of identity as a woman, leaving her with scars that stretched from her collarbone to the bottom of her ribcage, red ropes beneath her porcelain skin.
A few months after the operation, Margaret came home unexpectedly and caught a glimpse of Gertrude as she dressed behind the bathroom door, opened to let steam escape. Gertrude, suddenly aware of her daughter''s gaze, slammed the door shut with one hand as she tucked her bulky foam prosthesis into her bra with the other one. Silence was how the family coped with their pain: Nobody talked about the breast cancer that had also maimed Margaret''s aunt and grandmother. And nobody ever mentioned the relatives the Nazis murdered, or for that matter, the war itself. In fact, any longing for the bourgeois world of music, food, art, and culture Gertrude and Josef had left behind in Europe was also unspoken. While Margaret felt loved by her extended family-cousins, a grandmother, and aunts and uncles who had miraculously reassembled nearby-what the family had lost hung over her childhood like an invisible veil. Her parents spoke German to relatives, and to each other when they were angry, but Margaret knew better than to ever ask questions about what they were discussing. She also didn''t ask questions about the pretty blonde that Josef met when he took her and Allen to a nearby park on weekends.
Josef always greeted the young woman, Irene, warmly. A few minutes later, Irene''s mother would show up to push the children on the swings while Josef and Irene disappeared, they said, to go chat at a diner for an hour. Margaret somehow understood that coffee was a euphemism. When the two returned, they always seemed in high spirits. Silence extended to puberty and sex as well. When she got her period at twelve, Margaret had no idea what was happening, so she asked a girlfriend what to do. The friend instructed her how to use sanitary napkins, and Margaret, embarrassed by her own lack of knowledge, pretended to know more than she did. Older girls called menstruation "the curse," and that''s certainly what it felt like, another secret not to be broached.
Although no one explained its meaning to her, Margaret sensed that it was some kind of milestone in her own femininity. The timing couldn''t have been worse: It seemed to have arrived just as her mother''s had vanished. She borrowed pads from her aunt, and wadded up the used ones at the bottom of the garbage can. The Erles were modern Orthodox, abiding by kosher dietary laws and strictly observing the Sabbath as a day of prayer and rest. Margaret was an active member in her synagogue, Congregation Beth Israel, where she attended Hebrew school and joined her peers for Torah study groups over bagels on Sunday mornings. She learned to read Hebrew, and drew strength from the ancient prayers she chanted in the separate women''s section. While other girls gossiped, Margaret would concentrate on studying. But the synagogue offered another outlet: it was a sanctioned escape from home.
Gertrude had grown up comfortably in Fulda, a small German city with a medieval monastery, a town square with brick Gothic arches, and timbered buildings with fairy-tale spires. Gertrude''s father, a shoemaker, had a shop on the ground floor, while the family lived in an airy apartment on the floor above. After high school, the striking brunette took a job as a bookkeeper, and yearned for horizons beyond Fulda. Alone, she set out for the United States, landing in New York in 1927, where she became a governess. One day, a photographer who admired her high cheekbones, ruby lips, and patrician carriage approached her to offer her work as a hat model. Before long, her elegance attracted the notice of a debonair young printer, and they married after a brief courtship. But when the stock market collapsed in 1929, his business did, too, and a year later he disappeared without a word. Gertrude came home from work one day to find herself locked out of her apartment.
Her husband had failed to pay rent for months. Humiliated, she had to rely on friends for help, and later learned that her spouse had taken up with a wealthy woman. Eventually they dissolved their marriage. Divorce was shameful, and rare. For a religious Jew, it was more stigmatizing still, and Gertrude fell into deep despair. After a few years, she rallied, forcing herself to socialize at a club for German ZmigrZs. There she met a baker named Josef Erle. The son of a cattle dealer, Josef was the oldest son of thirteen children.
He had held a respected job as a yeshiva teacher in the small town of Baisingen and had grown increasingly concerned after the Nazis came to power in 1933. When his father died in 1935, Josef became adamant that the family flee. Two of his married sisters already lived in the United States, and signed the required affidavits promising they would financially support their immigrant relatives. Josef drained the family resources, selling cattle, the house, silver, and china to secure visas for eleven family members before finally leaving Germany himself in 1938. Exhausted and penniless, he arrived in New York at age thirty-five. He shortened his name from Erlebacher to Erle on Ellis Island, still harboring hopes for a new start. It didn''t take long for his dreams to dwindle: New York was saturated with Jewish refugee-scholars, and without fluency in English, a teaching position-or any office job-was impossible to obtain. So Josef took the work he could find, landing a job in a relative''s bakery.
The focus of his life shifted from intellectual inquiry-starting out the day dressed in a tailored jacket and tie-to grueling manual labor. Every morning he rose before sunrise and walked to the bakery, where he put on a white apron and cap and learned to make yeasty challahs and sandwich bread. Josef never complained about his new vocation, but after work, he spent a good half hour coughing before he''d light the first of his many evening cigarettes. Inhaling flour and powdered sugar all day further strained his lungs. As the war raged in Europe, Gertrude and Josef, by then in their late thirties, put their faith in the future, marrying in 1940. Gertrude was thirty-nine when she had Margaret in 1944, and forty-one when she gave birth to Allen two years later. On the outside, they seemed like the ideal American family. But photographs show more than just new-parent fatigue: although they proudly held their hopeful new Americans-the symbol of their family''s unlikely survival-their faces looked worn and solemn, as if the future itself was not to be trusted.
Little, it seemed, was going their way. Shortly after the war ended, Josef bought a pastry shop of his own, where he crafted jam-filled rugelach, rich chocolate babkas, and elaborate wedding cakes. His creations were as delicious as they were beautiful, but his timing could not have been worse. By the late 1940s, New York supermarkets had begun overtaking smaller specialty stores, and the one near Josef''s shop offered cheap, mass-produced cookies and cakes. The new bakery lost money from the start, and went under two years later. Colleagues and friends urged him to declare bankruptcy and walk away, but Josef refused. He insisted on paying back all the relatives from whom he''d borrowed. Josef''s econ.