Remembering my mother on her 110th birthday

My mother was born 110 years ago today (March 25) at a Midwifery Institute in Celle, Germany. It was the middle of the First World War and her father was out of the picture. I grew up with rumors of what happened to him - we knew he was still alive and raising a.second family - but details were sparse. All we knew is that Bertha Rühmann, whom I knew as Grossmutter, was effectively a single parent of twenty who had no viable means of raising a child. 

One of Bertha's sisters, Johanne, was married to a man named Paul Gundelach and living in his home town of Braunschweig. Johanne had just had a child as well, Paul Jr., about a month before my mother was born, and took my mother in.  Living in a country which has just lost a World War was a challenge, but the Gundelachs lived on a farm and had food to eat.  Her daughter now cared for, Bertha got a job as a stewardess on the Hamburg-Amerika Steamship Line and traveled the world.

Sometime in the next eight years Paul and Johanne were able to make a deal with an uncle named Henry Aust who had emigrated to America some years before to sponsor them as indentured servants and in 1923 Paul finally fulfilled a vow he had made to himself watching soldiers being blown to bits in Russia. He and his wife, Johanne, their son Paul Jr. and their niece/adopted daughter, climbed aboard the good ship Bayern in Hamburg and sailed away to a new life in America, landing in New York on October 26, 1923 and making their way to Torrington, Connecticut, where Henry Aust called home.

Paul and Johanne Gundelach legally adopted my mother - she had come across the ocean as Klara Schultheis, her original birth name - and had two more children, Carl (written American-style, with a C) and Rose (a name which worked equally well in both German and English). That adoption notwithstanding, four years later, Grossmutter's ship docked in New York and she made her way to Torrington, where she decided she had no choice but to stay, take my mother back, and live happily ever after in America.

Carl and his wife had two children, eventually, and Rose and her husband had three, giving me a bunch of cousins to grow up with on my mother's side of the family, to match the four I had on my father's side. The families remained close and it wasn't long before Johanne and Paul Gundelach became known by everybody in the family and far beyond as Mutti and Vati - the German equivalent of mommy and daddy.

Gundelach family gathering circa 1955
back row first four heads: Uncle Paul, My father, Uncle Carl, me
next row in, from left: Aunt Rose, Vati, Mutti, Klärchen (my mother), Aunt Connie, Grossmutter, Uncle Pete (Grossmutter's third husband)
front row: three kids: cousin Nancy (Uncle Carl/Aunt Connie's daughter); my sister Karen,  cousin Jimmy, Nancy's brother

Mutti and Vati continued to refer to my mother as their daughter.  They called her Klärchen, as they had when she was a little girl.  I often reflected on the fact that I had not the normal two, but three, sets of grandparents - and with them all the extra aunts, uncles and cousins. We have not kept in close contact, but the connection among the few survivors are still there.  My sister, the tallest of the three kids in front of my mother, turns 80 this year and is a great-grandmother.

My mother died of a heart attack at the young age of 60. Today she would be 110, and I am acutely aware she has been gone for a full half century.

As the years go by, my fantasy of finding a time machine only grows stronger.  If I could go back in time, I would want to get my mother out of bed and to a doctor rather than take a pill and see how she felt in the morning - a decision which was to be her last.  I'd also enjoy getting to know her as a woman twenty-five years younger than me.

All the questions I would bug her with.

So many questions.

Happy Birthday, Mom.

 

Remember Executive Order 9066 and Nuanced Thinking

Living in a Japanese-American household (we even have a dog named Sachiko), I couldn't fail to mark the anniversary last week of Franklin D. Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066.  Compared with the battle between truth and accuracy and manipulation of and by the media, Executive Order 9066 may feel like a  back burner item.  But it shouldn't. It's part of the same story.

On February 19, 1942, following the failure to distinguish Japanese immigrants to the United States from Japanese loyal to the Japanese Emperor and in support of the bombing of Pearl Harbor two months earlier, Roosevelt determined that Japanese ethnicity was sufficient reason to rip ordinary Japanese-Americans from their homes and ship them - 120,000 of them - to ten internment camps away from the West Coast: Heart Mountain in Wyoming, Tule Lake and Manzanar in California, Topaz in Utah, Poston and Gila River in Arizona, Granada in Colorado, Minidoka in Idaho, and Jerome and Rowher in Arkansas.

Nearly 72,000 of these were American citizens and we now know that all but a tiny slice of that population were indistinguishable from other immigrants to the U.S., saw it as their only home, and had no reason to work against its best interests. It was a crude political action, based on the racist belief that ethnicity and culture are indistinguishable from political loyalty. Throwing them out of their homes and seizing their property cost the Japanese-American community a net income loss of $2.7 billion dollars, calculated in 1983 dollars.

The Oakland Asian Cultural Center has produced a superb memorial on this, the 83rd anniversary of this black mark on American democracy, which you can view here.

I say this insult to the civil rights of American citizens is tied to modern-day events because it's obvious the same lack of nuanced thinking and behavior is currently front-and-center. One of the participants in the Oakland Asian Cultural Center presentation argues Executive Order 9066 was not an exception to the American Way but part of its legacy. Genocide of the American native population, slavery and segregation, police brutality based on race, and Islamophobia, she argues, are merely earlier examples. Today we have a president who creates conspiracy theories such as spreading the cruel and hateful untruth that Haitian immigrants are eating the pets in Springfield, Ohio, and that Ukraine, and not Putin, started the war there, that Zelensky is a dictator with only 4% of his population behind him, when the actual number is something like 57%.

Rather than make the common distinction between right and left wing (or red states and blue states) I think it makes sense to see an important distinction between closed and open-minded thinking and coming down in favor of open-mindedness because it matches the scientific method which defines truth as what we know as of the present moment and always subject to change as new information becomes available.

It's a small world, and we are not alone in our folly.  If you watched the German election last Sunday, you saw that the battle between progressives and authoritarians in Germany is quite similar. The two centrist parties, the center right Union Parties under Friedrich Merz and the center left Democratic Socialists under Olaf Scholz, will form a coalition, probably with the Green Party (the only other more-or-less centrist party left) because all of the German parties are united, despite vast differences, in refusing to work with the Alternative for Germany (AfD) Party despite the latter's rapid growth into the second largest political party in the country. The reason is their nationalistic anti-immigrant policy and desire to downplay the Hitler legacy.  Meanwhile, by the way, our Vice President goes to Germany, ignores the Chancellor and meets with and throws his support behind the head of the AfD Party.  The new American ethic of might makes right has blurred American eyes. It apparently takes too much work, too much thinking, to separate the person from their ideas and the person's rational thoughts from their irrational ones. Where will this all lead?

It's no easy job spot and reject jingoism and insist on a nuanced acceptance of a national legacy with all its scars and warts. The immature parts of us want to root for the home team, "my country right or wrong." My main concern these days is the fact that we in the U.S. have surrendered to the oligarchs. We have allowed the likes of of Rupert Murdoch, the Koch Brothers, Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, JD Vance, Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon and their ilk to "flood the zone" with mis- and disinformation, and have decided to follow a leader who openly and unabashedly shows total disregard for objectivity in reporting facts. Or, to put it in plain language, to distinguish between good guys and bad guys.  In the 1940s it was Japanese = traitor; today it's Muslim = terrorist; black man = thug; authoritarian (non-, even anti-democratic) leader = admirable strongman.

Where is the ability to draw a line between decency and integrity on the one hand and self-serving tribalism on the other? Where did that distinction go? How do we get it back?