Ebook Letters from Europe (and Elsewhere) epub

e that lasted more than 61 years. Indeed, Moms cancer diagnosis came just a couple weeks before she and Dad marked their 61st wedding anniversary. The year before, for their 60th, we had held a party, which they presided over wearing fanciful paper crowns made by the child of friends. This year, despite her illness, we also had a party; small groups of friends and family commuted between my brothers house and the hospital, where Mom sat in bed in a fluffy, pink bed jacket, a present from my aunt, and unlike anything I had ever seen her wear before. The photo of Mom in the short shorts takes pride of place on the first page of the oldest of our family photo albums, with the caption, in Moms handwriting, "What started it all." On the same page is a photo that Dad sent her from Iran, a handsome young man, sitting musing in a forest. After her funeral, I, the only daughter, spent several days going through Moms things, separating what to put away, what to give to friends as keepsakes, what to send off to charities. In doing so, I learned something that I had never realized and which, given my own wardrobe preferences, is rather remarkable: My mother did not own a single piece of black clothing. Mom was very organized. Storage bags were clearly labeled; drawers and shelves and hangers were neatly arranged; shoes were in boxes. Still, before I put anything in the charity bags, I checked pockets and opened handbags to make sure they were empty. In one handbag, an old, brown, leather purse that had been made, decades ago, by a craftsman friend, I found something wrapped up in tissue paper and further protected by a plastic bag. I took it out and removed the wrappings. There, carefully folded, was a dark brown cotton garment, decorated with buttons. I unfolded it. It was the pair of shorts Mom had worn in the picture. The one that had started it all. Ruth Ellen Gruber September 2007 A LETTER FROM FLENSBURG: GERMANYS KLEZMER CRAZE Published April 7, 1997 Flensburg, Germany I DONT REMEMBER ever hearing of the north German town of Flensburg until shortly before my recent trip there. But when I called a friend in Budapest and told him where I was going, he reacted immediately. "Oh, its a very famous place," he said. "Its home to the main computer of the German traffic police, the one that keeps track of everyones traffic violations and how many points you have to go before your license is taken away." So now I knew. Flensburg is 120 kilometers almost due north of Hamburg, at the narrow tip of a fjord opening eastward into the Baltic Sea near the top end of Schleswig-Holstein, just below the Danish border. I first traveled in this region when I was a child. It was 1959 and my father, an anthropologist, was on sabbatical in England. Our family took a trip, our first on the Continent, to visit a Danish colleague of his. Stopping in Brussels to tour the site of the 1958 Worlds Fair, we gawked at the "Atomium," the Fairs symbol, a massive and at that time ultra-contemporary tribute to the Atomic Age. (For years its schematic form would define the worlds vision of matter -- so much so that, in the collective imagination, atoms looked like an agglomeration of spheres rigidly connected by tubing.) From Brussels, our nice Jewish family of five piled into our new Hillman station wagon and set off for Denmark. It was 14 years after the end of World War II, but the scars were still obvious. Back in London, great areas around St. Pauls Cathedral were still swaths of rubble, and in France we had encountered building after building pockmarked by bullet holes. My father did not want to stop in Germany. We left Brussels in the morning and just kept going -- all day and, eventually, through the night. My brothers and I sprawled in the back, trying to sleep. Reaching Denmark at dawn, we stopped at the border post, showed our passports, and crossed out of Germany. I remember the sun coming up, a huge red ball in a clear summer sky. My father pulled the car over, got out, stretched his arms wide with the rising sun in front of him, then got back inside and went to sleep. Now, decades later, I was going to Flensburg for a klezmer music concert, one of the stops on a German tour by the American klezmer group Brave Old World. The trip was research for a book Im writing on non-Jewish European interest in Jewish culture. Its working title is "Klezmer in the Wilderness". 1 Looking at the map, I thought Flensburg would be an appropriately out-of-the-way place to hear East European Jewish music. I traveled from Berlin with Brave Old Worlds sound man, Florian, a big, bearded man who, it turned out, came from Flensburg. He had even worked at the traffic police center -- back in the late 1960s, before the facility was computerized. "My job was in the Ss and Ts," Florian told me, as we sipped huge 5-mark paper cups of coffee in our comfortable Intercity train coach. "A lot of names began with those letters, so I saw all sorts of thi