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July 23, 2004/Av 5 5764, Vol. 56, No. 44
Lunch at home with Gerda Klein
VICKI CABOT
Contributing Editor
I call Gerda Weissmann Klein and suggest meeting to talk about her new book.
"Come for lunch," she insists, even as I demur. We make a date.
I arrive on a hot summer afternoon. The table is set for two with homey-checked placemats and napkins. There is a plate of tomatoes, red and ripe, lightly salted to draw out the fruit's natural sweetness. The slices are artfully arrayed with rounds of cucumber and ripe black olives and a hunk of cheese, knife inserted at its center for easy eating.
Klein deftly tosses a salad and then rushes back to the kitchen to return with a loaf of crusty bread, toothsome and sour. She offers it with sweet butter. I spy a bowl of ripe red berries on the counter - dessert.
"There is something about food and home," she says simply.
Indeed there is.
Both inform the moving vignettes spanning nearly 60 years that comprise her latest book, "A Boring Evening at Home," (Leading Authorities, $18.95 hardcover). Culled from reflections Klein penned over the years, the collection captures both the essence of home and the comfort of a simple meal.
Klein, a Holocaust survivor, spent six years brutalized by the Nazis - three in hiding with her family in Poland, the next three as a prisoner in a slave labor camp, and then a 350-mile death march from Germany to Czechoslovakia as the war was ending. She was liberated by American troops; saved, literally, by U.S. Army Lt. Kurt Klein, who became her belov-ed husband. Klein recounted those years in the classic, "All But My Life," in print for 47 years and published in 57 editions. It's required reading in many high schools, and excerpts appear in a series of textbooks published by McDougal Littell which teach Holocaust history and literature. A later book, co-authored with her late husband, "The Hours After: Letters of Love and Longing in War's Aftermath," tells of their courtship, separation and efforts to be reunited and married after the war.
"A Boring Evening at Home" does not pick up where the others left off. As Klein's son James notes in the foreword, the book is not compiled chronologically, nor is it meant to be read at one sitting. Like a delicious lunch, it is meant to be nibbled slowly, savored in small bites.
It was pulled together over a two-year period, interrupted by the death of Kurt Klein. James Klein and his two sisters, Vivian Ullman and Leslie Simon, encouraged their mother to complete the project, even as her grief overwhelmed her. The three played a role in helping her sort out the material and make the final selections, retaining the peripatetic tone of a good conversation.
The book skitters over time and place, interspersing heartrending references to Klein's suffering during the Holocaust with heart-warming remembrances of life before, and after, that awful time. It includes comic episodes of family life, a la Erma Bombeck, and wrenching passages that are almost too difficult to read. It moves from past to present and back again, and then on to the future with a poignant tribute Klein writes to her late husband and a beautiful letter she writes to her grandchildren.
The collection opens with a story from 1946, with Klein, newly arrived in the United States, sitting on a windowsill in her Buffalo apartment devouring an entire loaf of bread. It recalls how as a prisoner she hoped that the last ladle of soup might yield a precious bit of potato. It tells of the raspberry her beloved friend Ilse plucked through the barbed wire at the camp and carried with her an entire day to present to Gerda.
"Imagine a world in which your entire possession is one crushed raspberry and you give it to your friend," she writes.
The references to food abound, recalling not only the severe privation of those years but the deep appreciation for the bounty she came to enjoy - and the need to share it.
Family and home figure prominently in the book as well. Klein's parents perished in the Nazi death camps; her older brother, Artur, was conscripted into the Russian army and never returned. Klein's eyes tear up when she speaks of Artur's unknown fate. She writes, "I do not know where my brother's grave is. I have whispered the question a thousand times, no matter what the season. ... Artur, where are you?"
She tells of receiving a box of family photos, nearly 20 years after the Holocaust, hidden by a Polish neighbor.
"With trembling hands, I spread out the pictures on the floor and studied the faces that were staring at me," she writes. "How I wished they were alive so that I might embrace them. Here was the only tangible proof left that they had ever existed. ... (and the photos had) arrived in Buffalo, at the home of the only person on earth who knew the name of every person in those pictures."
She writes of her girlhood friend, Gerta, who walked to school with her, shared a desk with her, and later announced, after the German occupation, "I don't talk to Jews."
"You expect that from the Nazis," says Klein now, the hurt still in her voice, "but not from your friends."
She recalls a moving visit to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam in 1978 and a later interview with a Dutch journalist who introduces Klein to her adult son.
Klein mourns for all that Anne Frank was denied. She writes, "But what I grieved for most was that she had been denied the joy of ever saying the words, 'Meet my son.'"
She tells of her work with the students at Columbine High School, helping them heal after the tragic shooting in April 1999 and the loss of 12 of their classmates. And she speaks of her horror at the Oklahoma City bombings and her grief on Sept. 11, 2001.
Yet each of the tragedies renewed Klein's desire to assure that "good will come out of pain."
The Gerda and Kurt Klein Foundation was founded to promote tolerance and understanding and assuage hunger and need. Its programs encourage action and communal service. Klein communicates her message widely, speaking most recently at the national convention of Brandeis University National Women's Committee in Waltham, Mass., where she received the prestigious Sachar award, and just last month at the annual conference of the Leadership Florida Network.
And so Klein travels the trajectory of time, drawing on her past as she seeks to make sense out of an increasingly frightening world.
"The key to my survival in the dark years of slavery was the memory of what I had before," she writes, "memories of my family and childhood."
And so, the preciousness of a boring evening at home.
Klein used the phrase when she accepted an Academy Award in 1996 for the documentary, "One Survivor Remembers."
It seemed an apt title for this collection of reflections that embodies Klein's appreciation for the ordinary activities of daily life and her desire to give back in gratitude.
"Being at home has always restored me," she says.
And over lunch, it is clear that Gerda Weissmann Klein is most at home, at home.
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