Neighbors as Lifelines

Before I knew the backstory of my boss, Rose Morgenstern, whenever anyone asked me about my childhood, my response would always be, “I was raised in captivity.”

My parents, dead ringers for the couple in Norman Rockwell’s iconic “American Gothic” painting, had me exactly nine months after my two brothers turned twenty-one and left home – after polishing off their birthday cake, of course – to seek life’s adventures now that they were legal in every state.

To my parents’ credit, they did always insist that they’d “planned” me and even fortified that assertion with, “Because we always wanted a girl.”

But choosing to re-start their child-rearing careers at forty-three and forty-five in a much less safe and secure world than it had been when my brothers were growing up seemed unlikely. It led them to become hypervigilant about protecting me…as in, I believe I was seven before I realized my name wasn’t, “No, no; that’s dangerous.”

So, of course the moment I graduated from college (and I I’m sure I don’t have to mention that I was given no choice but to attend the lone college in our area while living at home), I left my bucolic little nest and, with my degree in English Literature and Creative Writing in hand, headed for The Big Apple.

Enter Rose Morgenstern, whose single-line ad in the neighborhood paper read: Looking for someone to help me write my life’s story.”  I imagined this as my Horatio Alger opportunity: socially deprived-and-stunted girl from the boondocks arrives in NYC, ghost-writes autobiographical best seller, becomes famous and lives happily-ever-after amidst her milieu of friends, adoring fans and business associates.

I called the number in the ad and had my first brief-but-illuminating conversation with Rose Morgenstern. Her voice had the reedy rasp of someone far down life’s road, and her pronounced German accent made deciphering her words more than a moderate challenge.

But throughout our exchange, no matter how many times I had to say, “I’m sorry; could you please repeat that?”, she remained unhurried and congenial. It was that graciousness that urged me to listen when my Little Voice said, “Do not abort this mission. Forge onward.”

Her apartment was ample and tidy with furniture like an aging movie star trying to remain alluring. Newish, tasteful throw pillows were arranged strategically, to take the focus away from lines across the sofa cushions that time and too many visitors’ derrieres had dulled.

“Coffee?" she asked. "Tea?”

When I demurred, she led me to a chair beside an antique writing desk laden with a tower of exquisite leather-bound journals. A single sheet of linen stationery lay like a fallen headstone across the vast mahogany surface. A gold pen in a rigid holder stood sentry at its top.

“Have a seat,” said Rose Morgenstern “and let me see your penmanship.” The words from her ad, “help me write my life’s story,” immediately changed the trajectory of my Horatio Alger fantasy. But I complied with her request, reminding myself of the adage: “Sometimes, people don’t recognize Opportunity when it knocks because it comes disguised as Hard Work.”

Plus, at long last, I finally felt validated about all those hours and hours I had spent in my secluded, quasi “only child” youth entertaining myself with the art of perfecting my handwriting.

I was hired on the spot and became changed forever as I became privy to the history of this extraordinary woman.

She wanted her tale written in longhand, she said, because it added to its authenticity. And from the beginning, she encouraged me to use my writing and editing training to make her words flow better. It was rare, though, that I needed to do that. She was an exquisite narrator.

She began with, “Where you live does not matter” then added, “Always make it a point to know and be kind to your neighbors.”

I thought of the girl with the purple-striped hair and multitudinous cats one door down from me and visibly winced.

She waited before continuing. “Everyone has a story before their lives connected with yours, my Dahlink, right?” Her blue eyes, lash-less and hooded with the heaviness of time weighing them down, lasered mine and held them accountable.

She continued. “In Germany, I was a new teacher, and my husband was a graduate student when we were first married. We were renting a tiny house next to that of a doctor.” I conjured up an image of my new boss as a Newlywed Teacher: petite, kind-but-No-Nonsense, excited for all life held for them in the future.

“When word came that Jewish schools were being closed and Jewish families were being rounded up and sent off to Dachau and Bergen-Belsen, that doctor, our neighbor, came to our door and offered to hide us from the Nazis.” She closed her eyes for a beat. “All he knew of us was that we were young and Jewish and his neighbors. He was in his forties, he had a wife and two children and a successful medical practice. If the Nazis knew he’d even offered to hide us, let alone that he actually did it, they would have tortured and killed his entire family in front of him and then killed him, too.”

Her words came quicker now and with increasing fervor.

“But he hid us in a crawl space in his attic for three years. He and his wife fed us every day by using a pulley system at the back of a storage area over their kitchen. They also took away our waste in buckets that way every day, too.”

Again, she lasered me down to my deepest depths with those omniscient blue eyes. “Now THAT was being raised in captivity, my Dahlink, yes?”

While I tried to swallow down the baseball of guilt and shame that had fossilized in my throat, she said, “A large contingent of Germans considered Hitler to be the anti-Christ. The people like our neighbor, who risked everyone and everything they loved to sabotage his cause were the true heroes of that war.”

I had to stanch my tears with my fingertips quickly, or I knew they’d mottle the pages I was filling with her words and my beautiful penmanship.

“Once the war was over,” she said, “we celebrated with our neighbor-hero and then soon afterward emigrated to America.”

She looked out her window and sighed.

“We’ve had a wonderful life here,” she said. “We made it a point to make friends with every family who ever lived in this building while we were here. When my husband died last year, every single one of them – including all the ones who moved away – dropped by to share stories of what he’d done for them. So many kindnesses I’d never even known about!” The adoration in her eyes was practically palpable. “Enough to fill up all these journals,” she said, sweeping both hands toward the books.

At the end of our first workday, before I could stop myself, I boldly gathered my newfound treasure of an employer into my arms and said, “Thank you for everything today. I already love you so much.”

And then, on the way home, I stopped at a Mom-and-Pop store and bought a dozen tins of high-end cat food for the girl with the purple-striped hair who lives one door down from me.