Why a grandfather committed suicide after visit to post-war Germany - book review

In 1956, Hugo and Lucie Mendel, who had fled Germany in 1933, returned for a visit. In Dusseldorf, Hugo experienced exhaustion, spinning and shortness of breath. Perhaps he collapsed on a street corner, Emanuel Rosen, his grandson, speculates; or fainted in a hotel dining room. 

“Maybe it was something else.”

Soon after the couple came home, Hugo jumped to his death from the third story of an office building on Allenby Street in Tel Aviv. Lucie and Mirjam, their daughter (whose husband, financial adviser to the Israeli army’s chief of staff, had recently died of a heart attack), told everyone, including three-year-old Emanuel, he had fallen down the stairs.

In If Anyone Calls, Tell Them I Died, Rosen – who grew up in Israel, served in the army, and became an executive in Silicon Valley, California – tells the story of his attempt to solve the mystery of Hugo’s suicide by retracing his grandparents’ journey and “their sorrow.” His book is a deeply personal, poignant, and powerful account of the impact of Nazi persecution on three generations of survivors.

Hugo’s family had lived in Germany for generations. Hugo served in the German army, received a Ph.D. from the University Greifswald, and opened a law office in Hamm, where he became a pillar of the Jewish community. When the Nazis took over, Hugo was prohibited from appearing in court. He emigrated to Israel after he was arrested twice by Gestapo agents who were searching for lists of Jewish activists.

Determined to shield their children, Hugo and Lucie auctioned the furniture in the house while they were at school and announced they were embarking on a family holiday in Rome, Naples and Athens.

A lukewarm Zionist, Hugo never felt comfortable in Palestine. Realizing that he would have to learn Hebrew and English and build a client base for his law practice from scratch at age 42, Hugo bought a factory that made barbed wire and mesh wire fences. Opened during the Great Depression, the business failed, and Hugo became a salesman for the company he had created. Withdrawn by nature, he became increasingly pessimistic and bitter. Rosen doesn’t know what his grandfather expected to find in Germany in 1956, but he imagines Hugo felt like a stranger; and “it hurts to be nameless in a place that used to be home.”

Rosen wonders as well whether Hugo’s impatience, distemper, and depression played a role in his mother-in-law’s fatal decision to end her extended visit to Tel Aviv in 1935 and return to Nazi Germany. Convinced that “something” like this happened, Rosen senses that this “something was always there between Lucie and Hugo.”

Following Hugo’s death, Rosen discovers, Mirjam spent years petitioning the government of North Rhine Westphalia for compensation. Her claim hinged on whether the wrongs done to Hugo by the Nazis in 1933 were responsible for his suicide 24 years later. The plot thickens when the court appoints a psychiatrist with a questionable past to render an expert opinion.

Throughout If Anyone Calls, Tell Them I Died, Rosen leavens his narrative with touching and funny anecdotes involving his mother and Oma. Many of them, not surprisingly, concern food. Lucie and Mirjam, he tells us, made it their life goals to teach him good table manners. They gave him permission to eat chicken drumsticks with his hands because “even Queen Elizabeth does it.” Whenever he is alone and has spread creamy cheese on a slice of bread, Rosen invokes this flexibility, puts the knife in his mouth and cleans it off “like a sword swallower.” He then looks up and imagines his mom, “covering her eyes, shaking her head, laughing and begging, ‘Enough.’”

When Raphi, Emanuel’s uncle, got a job as a busboy, he demonstrated his skill stacking dishes on one hand to Mirjam and Lucie. When Oma said she was impressed, Raphi repeated the family mantra, “Gelernt ist gelernt,” turned around, and the dishes fell to the floor. In the ensuing years, every time Emanuel carried more than one dish from the dining room to the kitchen, he was treated to a chorus of “Gelernt ist gelernt.”

As a holiday in Cyprus ended, Lucie (“the entertainer who would blow the trumpet on blades of grass and bring pistachio nuts on the weekends”) told her family to expect a grand reception at the Tel Aviv airport. Standing on her hotel bed in her nightgown, she impersonated a radio reporter interviewing prime minister David Ben-Gurion, who had come to welcome them home. Before that moment, Emanuel recalls, he had no idea Oma knew who Ben-Gurion was.

When he reached the age at which Hugo died, Rosen reveals, he remained angry at his grandfather, but felt surges of compassion and sadness. After all, by convincing Lucie to leave Germany in 1933, Hugo saved his family. Rosen also acknowledges that he still does not know very much about tortured souls. That said, whenever Emanuel hears that someone has committed suicide, he thinks of his mom “banging on the steering wheel and crying ‘Those damn guilty feelings,’” and is sad she carried them with her for so many years.