Inklings 2020

TRANSPORTED BACK Phoebe Beber-Frankel When I was four years old, my parents read bedtime stories to my twin brother and me. We did all the Harry Potter books. Then we tried Hugo — not a hit. My parents learned that 1776 would put us to sleep. One night, they read us The Times of My Life and My Life with the Times by Max Frankel, or Biba, as we know him — our grandfather. It was a mesmerizing tale of a little boy from Germany who grew up to become the editor of The New York Times . I’ve reread Biba’s memoir at least twice and now know it as the gripping and fascinating tale of how Biba made the journey from a small town near Berlin to New York City and from aspiring opera singer to a legendary newspaper career. Biba and his mother — MomPop — escaped Germany and made it to New York in 1940. Seventy-four years later, my twin brother and I led the Torah service at our Bar and Bat Mitzvahs. To celebrate that long and strenuous accomplishment, Biba and GrandmaBiba — my grandmother — took our family on a World War II trip through Europe. Their goal was to help us understand what Biba endured as one of the almost ten million Jews who were displaced, killed, or driven into hiding during the Holocaust. The trip transported me back to my early childhood bedroom when I listened to my dad read about Biba and MomPop, and I imagined that little boy and his fierce, independent mother who had escaped persecution. Biba’s hometown of Weissenfels was not the shtetl I had pictured. The family-of-three’s apartment building was not the crumbling stone home that seemed vivid in my mind. Instead his small town was normal. The Weissenfels town square, where the Frankel shop had once been, was clean and modern. In this same square in 1938, hundreds of Nazis and Reich supporters had marched as Biba watched from his bedroom window. Etched into the cobblestones in front of homes all over town were brass-coated stones with the names of the Jews who had been killed. Biba’s grandfather and numerous family friends were among them. Standing next to my grandfather as we looked at those cobblestones brought a whole newmeaning to the trip: my life was only possible because of how previous generations overcame their suffering. 40