On their trip, her mother showed her the once-elegant home where she lived the life she had before Lerissa, the one of leisure and elegance and no small privilege afforded ordinary Christians in 1930s Berlin. They visited the bank where her father worked, and where he swiftly became its youngest manager. They sat in the café where her parents had savored sweets with milky coffee every Sunday afternoon while their first child, a son, doodled or painted.

Lerissa’s mother, then in her eighties and too wary about her balance to hike her beloved trails, walked slowly yet purposefully from the car to the edge of the forest, to a home-made monument to dead soldiers, where she told her daughter, “Every dead soldier’s mother mourns. Every one,” no doubt a reference to that delicate, artistic son who didn’t survive basic training, much less military action. “No more paintings, no more theatre scenery, no more art. Such a beautiful boy, the army was no place for him.”

Lerissa, speaking to me in a careful, precise way, adds, “My parents emigrated during the the war, from Germany to Canada, where I was born after a few years.”

“I remember you telling me that,” I chime in, finding a tiny pause in her story to speak. An image of the day I told my family about the new girl at work, a Canadian born of German parents, flashes across my mind. “And, what did her father do in the war?” my parents had both asked as if playing the same chord of a song. I knew that part of history, of course, and had absorbed the message that it could happen again. My uncles, my father, sons of Jews who fled nineteenth-century Russia with its despotic tsar and cruel pogroms, had all returned intact from World War II. None of my family perished in concentration camps, under bombs, from hunger or the duplicity of those who collaborated with devotees to that era’s axis of evil. We all now lived a completely assimilated life; I had several friends who weren’t Jewish, yet I never thought to ask about their parents or what they did during the war. Wasn’t it enough that anyone who shared my interests offered a good basis for a friendship?

That was then; on this day, after decades of Lerissa’s friendship, I do ask, “How did your parents get permission to leave Germany once the war began?”

She brushes some crumbs off the tablecloth, rearranges the silverware, folds and unfolds the napkin before saying, in an atypical monotone, “My father, he did some favors.”

A chill cloaks me. My emotions fly all over the place, yet I’m mute. We both remain quiet, then I push for an answer, not quite trusting my voice to be calm, “Favors? For whom?”

She keeps her eyes on her hands, now clenched in her lap.

I repeat, “Who did he do favors for? What favors?”

“Well, you know, he was a banker. With many men working for him, many were friends,” her voice trails off. “Some were Jewish. Then, in 1938, after Kristallnacht, everything changed. My father…”

“What?”

“My mother said he had no choice. His hands were tied. He was thinking of her, my mother. My brother, he was dead by then.”

“And?”

“My father might have mentioned bank information to certain officers. Or, maybe just names,” she whispers.

“Might have? No wonder he drank himself to death!” I try to swallow the words back but they’re already out, hovering over our friendship. I could not understand—why this confession? How could this woman, who had known since forever that I was Jewish, who acknowledged every Chanukah and Rosh Hashanah, tell me this story? Why now?

I never met her father but she spoke of him, often mentioned his drinking, how he had never worked after leaving Germany, much less in a bank; how he hung out all day either at home or in the neighborhood pub while his wife took in boarders, cooked for them, cleaned up their rooms; took in piecework sewing; sold her special cakes and cookies—all humble, dogged efforts to survive in Canada until the emigration many years later to the States. By that time, it was a pubescent Lerissa and her mother only, the father dead and buried in Canada, left behind so to speak, as they ventured off to another life chapter.

“Maybe that’s why I drink,” Lerissa says, “to be close to my dad. He wasn’t in my life that long. I was twelve when he died. Sometimes I forget his face,” she adds, with an unresolved flatness, like how an ellipsis might sound.

Silence drapes the room no longer infused with daylight. As I turn on a lamp, I see her eyes: glassy, pleading, as if the sins of her father require my forgiveness. Lerissa has no need to atone, let alone to me. So why am I unmoved, numbed by her revelation? Is it anger I feel, to have shared a friendship with a person whose family contributed, even in a small way, to annihilating Jews in this part of history? No, I don’t hold children responsible for the actions of their parents, even those who were Nazis or their collaborators. And yet …

Several times, Lerissa and I attended concerts with her mother, who loved classical music and the outdoor charm of the Hollywood Bowl. That woman was always giggling, even when things were not funny. She never failed to tell me that she was often mistaken for someone’s Jewish grandmother. Once, again with that damn giggle, her mother told me she’d contemplated ending the pregnancy with Lerissa. “I’m so lucky I didn’t. Look what a wonderful daughter I have,” she said, as if this was typical small talk while waiting for the musicians to enter from the wings onto the stage. Lerissa’s face showed nothing; perhaps she’d heard this story too many times to have feelings about it anymore. What kind of mother says such a thing so casually, with her daughter sitting right next to her? Was the giggle embarrassment, nervousness?

When her mother died a few years ago, I went to the funeral, of course. Friends are needed at such times, and Lerissa and I continue to be there for each other during dramatic changes: new jobs, moves, divorces, other deaths. We no longer live in the same town, so our friendship is sustained through emails, phone calls, only the occasional visit.

Not once have we spoken of that day. I still wonder why she shared her story of the choices made by that high-level banker in 1930s Berlin; whom he knew; what he did, willingly or not. If my parents, if I, had known the answer to “What did Lerissa’s dad do in the War?”– could this friendship have even begun?

Dear Phebe: The Dickinson Sisters Go West

by Judy Wells

Dear Phebe is an out-of-the ordinary autobiography, an encounter with the myth (and truth) of Judy Wells’ own origins and destiny. Sorting through family letters, the Berkeley poet hears voices from her ancestors—three Dickinson sisters who went out west in the 1860s to seek their fortunes as pioneer schoolteachers. I loved every twist and turn of this mind-tripping story and laughed with glee when the author finds herself in the after-life with the Dickinson sisters, and then ends up returning her great-grandmother Phebe's 100-year-overdue book to the San Francisco Public Library. — Bridget Connelly, Forgetting Ireland With Dear Phebe, poet Judy Wells has produced a cutting-edge work of art that combines family ancestry research with poetic interrogations. Each Dickinson sister she profiles has a unique trajectory to California; all are waylaid by what Jane Austen called “the marriage plot.” Wells sings to them, dances with them (and away from them), challenges them, excavates them from a box of letters into the light of the 2lst-century and a world they could not have imagined. This book is a wholly new form, fusing history and poetry, inspiring both disciplines. — Lauren Cooley, author of California: A Multicultural Documentary History and The Same River Twice “Go West, young man,” is the famous command, but young women also heeded this advice. Among them were Judy Wells’ great-grandmother Phebe Marsh Dickinson and her two sisters, Delia and Abbie, distant cousins of Emily Dickinson, who came to California from Massachusetts in the late 19th century. In Dear Phebe, Wells chronicles their stories in poetry and prose in narratives that are so compelling I didn’t want the book to end. — Lucille Lang Day, Married at Fourteen: A True Story and Becoming an Ancestor To Order: Contact Judy Wells directly at jwellspoet@att.net Website: www.judywellspoet.com

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