CHAPTER 1
Zwingenberg an der Bergstrasse
A few days before her death, having spent the past three months in a Bronx nursing home, my mother suddenly blurted out: “I want to go home.”
“Home?” I asked. “Where is home?”
“Zwingenberg,” she said. “I want to go back to Zwingenberg,” naming the small German village of her birth that she had left in 1930, seventy years earlier, and to which she returned only once for a brief final visit to her family in 1934. The full name of the village, Zwingenberg an der Bergstrasse, translates literally as “Between the Mountains on the Mountain Road,” the mountains in question the low hills of the Odenwald, whose many vineyards produce the robust white wines for which the region is famous, and the Bergstrasse the old post road running alongside the mountains between Heidelberg and Darmstadt.
Like many young Jews of her generation with liberal leanings and few resources beyond intelligence and ambition, she had left Germany permanently after the Nazis came to power. But in 1962, while visiting Europe for the first time since her departure so many years earlier, she made an afternoon’s stop at her old village. That visit, in its way, reflected many of the ambiguities of postwar German life. Exiting the train, she walked from the station toward her childhood home, but hesitant to ring the bell she continued down the street toward the opposite end of the village. There she encountered an old schoolmate, whom she recognized and who immediately recognized her. He greeted her warmly, informing her that other members of their class still lived in the village and offering to
