Unraveling the mystery of an unconventional mother undone by war, separation and love
- Written by Ruth Balint, Professor of History, UNSW Sydney
Who am I? Where do I come from? These became defining questions in the late 20th century for a generation whose parents and grandparents had endured the cataclysm of the Holocaust.
Raven Mother: War, family and inheritance: a memoir – Jane Messer (NewSouth Books)
Since the turn of this century, the desire to discover and document the histories of families whose worlds were decimated by the Nazis has driven a publishing phenomenon. It’s not just a Jewish project. Millions around the world have taken up the hunt for their family origins, helped in part by the rise of genealogical sites such as Ancestry or My Heritage, and a revolution in DNA science.
This accelerated modern-day quest to solve what for many has become the greatest historical detective story of our era – the puzzle of our identities, presumed to be rooted in our very DNA – is now the fastest growing hobby in the western world.
For second and third generation Holocaust survivors, there is the added urgency that comes with the loss of parents and grandparents, many of whom remained silent about their experiences either because they couldn’t bring themselves to speak of the horrors they had endured and the people they had lost, or because it was felt such experiences were best suppressed as they forged new lives and new families.
Many have detailed the “ambiguity and secrecy” that permeated childhoods growing up with Holocaust survivors. Secrets surrounded lost spouses, old lovers, missing family members or the parentage of children.
As Jane Messer discovers in her own quest to unravel the mystery of her Jewish grandmother, Bella, there is no single truth to a life. Messer never knew Bella, who died before she was born. But when she was in her early twenties, her parents decided it was time to tell her the truth of Bella’s suicide, which until then had been their own dark secret.
Bella committed suicide in 1949, two years after arriving in Australia to join her husband and two grown children living in Melbourne. From the day Bella died, she was rarely spoken of.
Messer sets herself the task in this book of discovering this grandmother she never knew, a woman who defied many expectations of her era, yet ultimately was undone by the tragedies of war, displacement, exile and separation.
A different kind of woman
Born in Berlin, Bella grew up during the early years of the 20th century in a comfortably assimilated middle class family. She trained as an early childhood teacher, taking this training with her into World War I and later again, during World War II when she was in Palestine.
These scraps of information, bestowed by her father in his factual but brief typewritten account, “The History of My Family”, are the beginning for Messer’s considerable odyssey to uncover Bella’s life. She writes:
For years all physical traces of her were kept out of sight; these documents and photographs were stored in cupboards and sheds. They were never discussed, never brought out to look over.
It’s a lot of material work, Messer informs us, and footwork too, taking her across the world in the search for traces of her grandmother.
In the process, Messer attempts to find a different kind of woman to the one whose memory her father has been carrying, of a woman who abandoned him as a child in England in 1935, and 14 years later, abandoned him with her suicide; of a woman who he believed never loved him.
In 1935, Messer’s father Michael was eight years old when, together with his older sister, Ruth, he was enrolled in an “exile” school set up by a German-Jewish education reformer Dr Anna Essinger for German Jewish children in Kent, England.
It was made possible by Bella’s friendships with the network of educators forged among women such as Essinger, and was an extremely lucky escape for Michael and Ruth from Nazi Germany, at a time when it was becoming increasingly dangerous for Jews and countries around the world were closing their borders.
But for Michael, the sudden absence of his parents, the feeling of being left by his mother, was a betrayal he never recovered from. “She abandoned me, and she lied to me,” he told Messer. “She said she’d be back, and she never came.”
After securing the safety of their children, Bella and her husband Willy, a wholesale cap manufacturer, returned to Berlin, where they set about organising their own emigration to Palestine in 1937.
Two years later, the family was separated once more. Although the plan had been to come to Australia together, there was a problem with the landing permits, and only Willy and daughter Ruth were able to arrive in 1939.
Landing permits for Jewish refugees were becoming increasingly rare; it was not uncommon for one family member to emigrate to Australia first, in the hope of bringing out the rest of the family at a later date. The outbreak of war, however, shut down possible travel routes. The family remained separated across three continents: Michael spent the war years in Kent, Bella remained behind in Palestine. Most of the rest of their family were murdered in the Holocaust.
In 1947, Michael, now a young man, joined his sister and father in Melbourne. His mother came ten months later. Yet, writes Messer, she “didn’t survive the surviving”. In December 1949, she overdosed on barbiturates while her husband was at work. From then on, her death shaped a wounded silence that settled over the family, “separating one from the other for the rest of their days”.
Messer also learns another “terrible secret even more unspeakable than suicide”: her grandmother was, allegedly, a “nymphomaniac”. This accusation, originating with his father Willy, had led Michael to believe that his mother had never come back for him as a child at school in Kent because she “had been too busy having affairs”. Her apparent promiscuity was another nail in the coffin of her failed maternity.
Yet Bella had simply fallen in love another man who was not Willy. She had met Walther Strauss in Berlin sometime in the 1930s, before he also immigrated to Palestine together with his wife and child.
Messer is also at pains to address some of the broader inheritances – as the subtitle of her book indicates – of the histories through which her grandmother lived, in particular that of Israel.
The fact that Bella spent a decade there is the occasion for Messer to investigate the years leading up to the creation of the Jewish state in 1948, when Bella had already left for Australia. She wonders often about the suffering this history has caused.
Many will applaud the history presented here. But others will be uncomfortable with some of its assertions and its moral activism. The historical labour of the book is immense, but at times distracting from the thread of the family story.
A puzzle
At the end of the book, Messer returns to the puzzle of Bella’s love affair with Walther Strauss. Under Messer’s forensic investigation, we learn Strauss was educated and handsome, becoming a leading professor in the field of public health. Bella and Walther had shared interests and purpose, not just sex.
Messer is strongest when contemplating the greater puzzle of how to understand, to unknot, the mystery of a person’s life.
I might guess at but finally know nothing absolute about what was in Bella’s heart or loins, or how she experienced her marriage to Willy, or who she loved the most as a mother, or if mothering was important to her.
There is a beautiful relationship between father and daughter at the heart of this book, and through this journey of writing it, a healing between her father and his long-dead mother that is, to my mind, an incredible gift.
Authors: Ruth Balint, Professor of History, UNSW Sydney
