Read Online American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest by Hannah Nordhaus - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Hannah Nordhaus
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the local Germania Hall because the merchants wouldn’t let their employees take the time off. “The Almighty Dollar is closer to the Jews of Santa Fe than our holy religion,” it lamented. There was, in Santa Fe, no temple, no Hebrew school, no kashruth. Indeed, there seemed to be nothing particularly Jewish about Abraham’s life in Santa Fe except the history, and the wife, he brought from Europe. He didn’t need Israel; he had already found his promised land.
He was American now. His children would be, as well. I imagine that he wanted the same for his wife.
Joanna
O N THE I NTERNET , I ran across a blog written by a relative I’d never met before—a third cousin named Robby. “My great-great-grandmother was a profoundly unhappy woman,” Robby wrote in a post. A few years before, he had exchanged emails with a writer named Joanna Hershon, who was researching a novel based on the Staabs. It had recently been released.
The book is called The German Bride , and it tells the story of Eva Frank, a wealthy German Jewish girl who falls into a relationship with an attractive, if morally unappealing, Gentile painter in Berlin. The affair ends in a horrible accident, and Eva’s grief propels her into the arms of a dapper, if morally unappealing, local boy gone west, Abraham Shein, who has made his fortune selling dry goods in Santa Fe and has returned to Germany to find a bride. Seeking to escape her sorrow and lured by promises of adventure and wealth in a place far away, Eva marries him, travels the wagon trail, and arrives in Santa Fe. It turns out, though, that Abraham isn’t the great success he has represented himself to be. Nor is he, as Hershon puts it, “the most fiscally conservative man in town.” Rather, he lives in an adobe hovel on Burro Alley, “scraping along in squalor amid large insects, peculiar cooking smells, and refuse from chamber pots.”
There isn’t even a bathtub in the house—Abraham Shein orders one for Eva, the first in Santa Fe—but there is nowhere to put it, so it gathers leaves and rainwater in the back courtyard. Later, Eva and Abraham conceive a child in that tub. In Joanna’s book, Abraham isn’t a kind man: he doesn’t allow Eva to keep kosher, and he has a gambling, boozing, and whoring problem.He is deeply indebted to the madam across the street, and he measures his character by “the fact that he hadn’t ever come close to pawning his wife’s jewels.”
This is an imagined version of Julia’s world, her story transfigured by imagination, supposition, and history—through art. But Joanna’s interpretation of Julia’s life isn’t all that different from those stories handed to me by Misha the psychic and Lynne the genealogist. Abraham was a cad; Julia was his prey. She had hoped for love in America; instead she found treachery.
Was this how it had been between Abraham and Julia? Was there any love between them? Did they share anything besides a bed? In Julia’s day, marriage was a contract, arranged to deliver the basics necessary for survival and reproduction; it was not a celebration of passion and compatibility. Did Julia have any right, in her time and place, to expect such things?
I was not, of course, the only member of my family who speculated on these matters. Everyone was intrigued by Julia’s ghost story. The older generation joked about it without much conviction; we younger ones gossiped and plotted visits to her room.
We were all haunted, in one way or another, by the notion of Julia marooned in the desert, and many of us found in Julia a muse and a metaphor. My mother, a poet related to Julia not by blood but by marriage, composed a poem some years ago about her famous in-law. “This harsh land with its alien colors, flowers sheathed in spines, sky breeding clouds above the sword-encircled blossom . . .” A third cousin, Kay, wrote a children’s book titled Jews of the Wild West . In it, she explained that Julia was sad, because a child
He was American now. His children would be, as well. I imagine that he wanted the same for his wife.
Joanna
O N THE I NTERNET , I ran across a blog written by a relative I’d never met before—a third cousin named Robby. “My great-great-grandmother was a profoundly unhappy woman,” Robby wrote in a post. A few years before, he had exchanged emails with a writer named Joanna Hershon, who was researching a novel based on the Staabs. It had recently been released.
The book is called The German Bride , and it tells the story of Eva Frank, a wealthy German Jewish girl who falls into a relationship with an attractive, if morally unappealing, Gentile painter in Berlin. The affair ends in a horrible accident, and Eva’s grief propels her into the arms of a dapper, if morally unappealing, local boy gone west, Abraham Shein, who has made his fortune selling dry goods in Santa Fe and has returned to Germany to find a bride. Seeking to escape her sorrow and lured by promises of adventure and wealth in a place far away, Eva marries him, travels the wagon trail, and arrives in Santa Fe. It turns out, though, that Abraham isn’t the great success he has represented himself to be. Nor is he, as Hershon puts it, “the most fiscally conservative man in town.” Rather, he lives in an adobe hovel on Burro Alley, “scraping along in squalor amid large insects, peculiar cooking smells, and refuse from chamber pots.”
There isn’t even a bathtub in the house—Abraham Shein orders one for Eva, the first in Santa Fe—but there is nowhere to put it, so it gathers leaves and rainwater in the back courtyard. Later, Eva and Abraham conceive a child in that tub. In Joanna’s book, Abraham isn’t a kind man: he doesn’t allow Eva to keep kosher, and he has a gambling, boozing, and whoring problem.He is deeply indebted to the madam across the street, and he measures his character by “the fact that he hadn’t ever come close to pawning his wife’s jewels.”
This is an imagined version of Julia’s world, her story transfigured by imagination, supposition, and history—through art. But Joanna’s interpretation of Julia’s life isn’t all that different from those stories handed to me by Misha the psychic and Lynne the genealogist. Abraham was a cad; Julia was his prey. She had hoped for love in America; instead she found treachery.
Was this how it had been between Abraham and Julia? Was there any love between them? Did they share anything besides a bed? In Julia’s day, marriage was a contract, arranged to deliver the basics necessary for survival and reproduction; it was not a celebration of passion and compatibility. Did Julia have any right, in her time and place, to expect such things?
I was not, of course, the only member of my family who speculated on these matters. Everyone was intrigued by Julia’s ghost story. The older generation joked about it without much conviction; we younger ones gossiped and plotted visits to her room.
We were all haunted, in one way or another, by the notion of Julia marooned in the desert, and many of us found in Julia a muse and a metaphor. My mother, a poet related to Julia not by blood but by marriage, composed a poem some years ago about her famous in-law. “This harsh land with its alien colors, flowers sheathed in spines, sky breeding clouds above the sword-encircled blossom . . .” A third cousin, Kay, wrote a children’s book titled Jews of the Wild West . In it, she explained that Julia was sad, because a child
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