There were no songs in our house in Queens, New York, because my
parents knew only German songs, which they would never sing. My father
forbade even speaking the language of the country that betrayed him, so the only
music I remember was my grandmother playing classical on the piano. No words.
My first lyrics came from the radio in my older sister’s room: I would sing
“I’m a Big Girl Now” and “Doing What Comes Naturally” and feel very American,
which I liked, being the first in my family born here after my parents fled Hitler in
1937. The words showed me how to think about my life as I shuttled between an
Old World culture at home and the New World outside my front door. One song,
in particular, saved me from what I was certain would be doom far from home.
It was 1947, I was seven, and there was a polio epidemic that made
everyone afraid, especially of summer crowds, especially for kids. Everything fun
was to be closed. No public swimming pool. No movies. Not even ice cream sodas
at Addie Vallins. Nothing. Fearful parents were sending their kids away to camp,
and mine decided on one in Maine, nine hours north by train and bus. My sister
Ruth, who was fourteen and boy crazy, was thrilled. She’d have eight weeks of
freedom from my parents’ pestering to “Behave!” But I was terrified, especially by
the words, “camp” and “train.” My family had not talked to me about the
Holocaust—that came in the early 1950s after Anne Frank’s Diary— but I’d heard
their whispers and felt their fear. Plus, I’d seen enough Movie Tone News before
the double feature at the Midway Theater to know what could happen: People
who took trains to camp didn’t come back. And if they did, they were skeletons.
I stood in my green and white uniform under the sign “Camp Inawood” at
Grand Central Station, biting my lips not to cry. Kids picked on crybabies. I knew
that from the schoolyard of P.S. 3. If you told your teacher, you were labeled a
tattletale, worse than a crybaby. And if you told your parents, you’d be a
schliemiel, which is what my father called my grandmother whenever she got
teary-eyed. “Don’t be like Omi!” he’d warn, making tears a danger. (You might
end like my Uncle Walter who had cried in our living room about American life
and hung himself a week later.) The message to me from adults was definitely
Figure it out. And be grateful you are alive.
My parents hugged me goodbye, my sister disappeared with the big kids,
and I waited to board, comatose with worry. My sister was supposed to look out
for me, but she was unreliable when fun was around. I was about to lose it, when
a song came into my head: When you walk through a storm hold your head up
high and don’t be afraid of the dark…. It was a new hit on the radio, sung with
biblical solemnity, like God speaking (aka Frank Sinatra), and it came from
Broadway’s musical, Carousel. Aunt Nettie sang it to comfort Julie Jordon after
Billy Bigelow dies—and I breathed the words, in and out, until a girl about named
Jill, about my size with a big smile, sat beside me on the train. We played Tic, Tac,
Toe and Hangman, and she made me laugh enough so that when the other kids
starting singing, Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, I managed to join in. And
when we finally climbed onto the bus in Maine and everyone sang, We’re here
because we’re here, because we’re here, I almost sounded like everyone else.
By day I’d play dodgeball and “Red Light, Green Light,” and look for frogs
with Jill, filling a shoebox full of them on the bunk steps. But at night, while my
bunkmates slept, I’d creep into the bathroom and cry silently for my parents’
comfort. The camp only had one phone booth for 100 kids (no cell phones then),
and my few minutes of talk time with them on Sundays was enough for How are
you? I am fine, nothing more. Besides, I was not going to be a schlemiel -–except
at night on the toilet, crying until I got too cold and went back under the covers.
That was my camp life until around week three when the song’s last stanza
miraculously came true: At the end of the storm, there’s a golden sky and the
sweet silver song of a lark. I began dreaming about passing the lake test and riding
a wild horse named Andy, and suddenly the bugle would sound. Reveille. Time to
get up!
I still whispered the storm song while waiting to go on stage as the Cheshire
Cat, smiling my heart out for team points during Color War. And in mess hall
when a counsellor tried to make me finish wet and runny scrambled eggs that
smelled of the New Jersey Turnpike. I sat there. She sat there. I didn’t cry, but she
did because I threw up on her. And she got yelled at! Exhilarating! My summer of
doom, I decided, might not happen after all.
The following spring we got a TV, and my father learned his first American
song from a puppet show I liked to watch. He’d charge into my room every
morning, belting out in his German accent: It’s Howdy Doody time, rise and shine!
as I’d pull the covers over my head, embarrassed by his silliness. But he’d keep
singing until I got out of bed.
His “Howdy Doody” was a marker for my sister’s salvation and mine. It
signaled my father’s growing ease in America, a lessening of immigrant isolation,
an attempt to fit in. He had fewer shouting matches with my sister about wearing
red lipstick (not ladylike in his German village!) and going out with Barry from
Brooklyn, whose genealogy he did not know. His favorite saying– “I don’t care
what everyone else does!” –was gradually replaced by “I’m off to play golf” and I
dated boys from families he never met without much hassle.
Around then, a new comfort song came on the radio: Whistle a Happy
Tune. It was full of 1950’s optimism that World War II was behind us, fascism and
Hitler had been defeated, and we Americans would conquer whatever came next.
For me, it was algebra tests and blind dates. For the country, McCarthy and
blacklists. Not to worry, the song said: if you whistle a happy tune, not only will
no one know you’re afraid, you won’t feel afraid. Anna in The King and I sang it to
her son, and Frank Sinatra sang it to the rest of us. I couldn’t whistle (still can’t),
but I’d hum the words on a dark street or in the shower (after seeing Psycho), and
it worked every time. The words convinced me I’m not afraid!
Seven decades later, I have no song for comfort. I’ve lived through enough
storms to believe in a few more golden skies, and if they don’t appear, I can
accept that. Lives, like songs, do end. Still, when a thick fog closed in on Interstate
91 last week—a total whiteout when a truck could easily rear-end you, when you
could drive silently off the road into the dark Connecticut River below—the half-
remembered lyrics of my younger self rose up inside. I sang them out loud,
driving on.
Mimi Schwartz’s latest of seven books is Good Neighbors, Bad Times Revisited- Echoes of My
Father’s German Village. Recent essays have appeared Lilith, Ploughshares, Gray Love, Short
Reads, The Boston Globe, Assay, among others. She is Professor Emerita in Writing at Stockton
University and lives in Princeton, New Jersey. For more about the author, go to
www.mimischwartz.net