Conversations that could have been

When I was a little girl, I once announced at a family gathering that “mommies are for hugging, daddies are for driving you places.”

Everyone laughed. Even my father.

But I’m older and somewhat wiser now, and those words make me feel bad. I wonder if they made my father feel bad back then, too.

He was stoic, a quiet reserved man who would not have shared hurt feelings, even if he had them. He was a product of a generation and upbringing where men kept emotions inside.

Even so, in a way, my words were kind of true. My mother was the demonstrative one, and she didn’t drive, which was not uncommon in those days, so my father was always behind the wheel when the family went anyplace.

Still, that long-ago and innocently-stated observation of the family dynamic seems so dismissive of all the important things that my father was in my life. I came to understand that as I matured, and I’m happy to have good memories of him and of my childhood.

But there was so much more about this quiet man that I never knew, not until after he died, things I never could have imagined. Some of what I learned continues to break my heart today – because I didn’t know sooner and, hence, missed the opportunity to speak with him about it.

I hadn’t been married long when he died in the 1970s. It was then that my mother began to mention previously unspoken of events from their early-marriage years. One thing she told me was especially riveting and revealing.

My father was born in Germany, which I knew, of course, and had immigrated to America in the 1920s when he was in his late teens. He proudly became an American citizen. He met and married my mother, herself the daughter of immigrants, in New York City, where they lived for a number of years. I was born there after World War II.

Here’s what I learned after he was gone – in the late 1930s my father began receiving letters from family and friends back home singing the praises of Germany’s new leader, Adolph Hitler. The letters continued and, if I understood what my mother was telling me, they were encouraging my father to become active on behalf of the new Germany.

True, the horrors that would come from Hitler and the Nazi regime were still in the future and weren’t even imagined at the time – hopefully, not to my father’s family either – but my father recognized something in Hitler’s rhetoric and in the extreme language and scapegoating that sent a chill down his spine.

Before long, he sent the family letters back unopened. How much that must have pained him.

Even though New York City was a big place, it was – and is – made up of many smaller communities. The Germans who leaned left and those who leaned right, or who had no leanings at all, knew each other or at least had general knowledge of what was going on within the community there.

Among the things they knew about were the activities of the German American Bund, an American Nazi organization that worked to promote a positive view of Nazi Germany and boycotts of Jewish-owned businesses. They would hold clandestine meetings, often in the heavily German section of Yorkville in Manhattan, at the end of which they would break out in song – “Die Fahne Hoch” (“Raise High the Flag,” known more commonly as the Horst Wessel song).

My father and his like-minded friends would sneak into those meetings. When the words to the Horst Wessel song began to fill the room, my father – who could not carry a tune to save his life – and his pals would sing “The Star Spangled Banner” loudly and proudly.

My mother would get vague about what would happen next, but I was able to glean that at the very least, there were fistfights. Whether there was law enforcement intervention, I never knew. I don’t need to know.

What I learned was that my father went back time and again to sing for the stars and stripes – yes, with a German accent and off key. He also punched out a Nazi soap-box orator in Washington Square Park. I couldn’t be more proud.

He never spoke of these things to me and probably never would have. Looking back at the man I remember, I think what happened in Germany and because of the German Nazis back then hurt too much. Or maybe that’s just not something you discuss with your daughter.

But as an adult, I sure would have liked to have had the chance to try. Dad and I made a lot of little trips together by car. Maybe that’s where the conversation could have taken place. Driving down the highway seems to bring out introspective and special conversation, sometimes the kind that naturally happens there and nowhere else.

It would have been my pleasure to have been behind the wheel. Daughters can be for driving you places, too.