The Book of Unconformities by Hugh Raffles

Author:Hugh Raffles [Raffles, Hugh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-08-25T00:00:00+00:00

“The disaster ruins everything,” wrote the philosopher Maurice Blanchot, “all the while leaving everything intact.”6 Emma and Helga took the train to Bournemouth, the seaside town where my grandparents were staying. It was the High Holidays between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and they heard David Kusevitsky, the acclaimed cantor, and Emma, Helga remembers, was overwhelmed by the quantity of food at their kosher hotel. Helga was a young English-speaking nurse in postwar London, twenty-one years old and looking to the future, living in the moment, as she told me, then, as now, so caught up in the fullness of her life, the fullness of the moment, that she would forget the time, maybe even manage to forget the world, “trying to be as English as possible” despite the enemy alien card she’d carried since she turned sixteen, drinking tea with milk, throwing off the past. She had left school at fourteen with no qualifications, but here she was, the supervising nurse in an operating room and with no intention of ever departing this recovering city into which the energy of peacetime life was flooding back. For Emma it was different: postwar London faced an intense housing shortage, and without money or effective English, this woman who before the war had run her own franchise of a well-known clothing store, now worked as a live-in carer for the sick and elderly and applied for reparations from the German consul who told her that people in London had endured a harder war than those, like her, who had the privilege to spend it in Theresienstadt. Eventually, together with a friend from Berlin, she rented a basement flat in Kilburn and, with Helga’s help acquired a Singer sewing machine on which she taught herself to turn cuffs and mend bedsheets. Mother and daughter moved to Montreal in 1957 and, four years later, to Los Angeles, where Helga used her training as a nurse to build a new immigrant life, working in operating rooms, eventually as an anesthetist on an open-heart surgery team, marrying a NASA engineer, moving to Santa Barbara, volunteering at the natural history museum, running marathons, and skiing the steep slopes into her late eighties. Emma, for her part, fought emphysema caused by a lifetime of cigarettes and perhaps pneumoconiosis from exposure to mica dust. But she also went often to the movies and loved the German crossword puzzles that she bought on Hollywood Boulevard; so she was happy, Helga told me, despite the isolation of being so far from her friends in this sprawling city.

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