Number 86 on the Random House Board’s list of 100 Greatest Novels is Ragtime. A business associate had given me the book as a present. I finally got finished reading it.
Ragtime tells the story of life in New York City in the years before World War I. It brings together a number of famous contemporaries of the time, including Henry Ford, Houdini, the famous anarchist revolutionary Emma Goldman, J.P. Morgan and many others, and weaves them into the fictional characters of Doctorow that tell a compelling story of racism in America.
The main storyline is about Coalhouse Walker, a black American Ragtime musician who, through talent, hard work and discipline creates a successful life for himself in New York. He can even afford a car, and the drives around in a new shiny black Model T. Most whites cannot afford cars, and when he runs into a roadblock in front of a firehouse, the firemen thugs are harassing him. But Coalhouse Walker does not bend to injustice. He starts a one-man war, and it does not end well for the firemen and the city of New York.
More poignant than the story itself are the graphic description of life of the common man, the black man, and immigrants, at that time in our history. Here is an excerpt on immigration:
Most of the immigrants came from Italy and Eastern Europe. They were taken in launches to Ellis Island. There, in a curiously ornate human warehouse of red brick and gray stone, they were tagged, given showers, and arranged on benches in waiting pens. They were immediately sensitive to the enormous power of the immigration officials. These officials changed names they couldn’t pronounce and tore people from their families, consigning to a return voyage old folks, people with bad eyes, riffraff and also those who looked insolent. Such power was dazzling. The immigrants were reminded of home. They went into the streets and were somehow absorbed in the tenements. They were despised by New Yorkers. They were filthy and illiterate. They stank of fish and garlic. They had running sores. They had no honor and worked for next to nothing. They stole. They drank. They raped their own daughters. They killed each other casually. Among those who despised them the most were the second-generation Irish, whose fathers had been guilty of the same crimes. Irish kids pulled the beards of old Jews and knocked them down. The upended the pushcarts of Italian peddlers.
— page 16
I have been to Ellis Island. This description does not match the glorious pictures we have in our minds of immigration into the United States over the years. It matches more the descriptions of Trump today, does it not? Ragtime is a novel, of course, and not reality, but it paints a very dark picture of our history that does not match what we like to tell ourselves today about “this great country.”
Life in New York was very different a hundred years ago. I have always loved the city. When I walk through its streets today, as I did 45 years ago when I first came to this country, I always think about its rich history and all the stories that its walls and streets and parks and sidewalks could tell – if they could speak. Here is a particularly graphic paragraph depicting city life not as we think about it:
That evening White went to the opening night of Mamzelle Champagne at the roof garden at Madison Square. This was early in the month of June and by the end of the month a serious heat wave had begun to kill infants all over the slums. The tenements glowed like furnaces and the tenants had no water to drink. The sink at the bottom of the stairs was dry. Fathers raced through the streets looking for ice. Tammany Hall had been destroyed by reformers and the hustlers on the ward still cornered the ice supply and sold little chips of it at exorbitant prices. Pillows were placed on the sidewalks. Families slept on stoops and in doorways. Horses collapsed and died in the streets. The Department of Sanitation sent drays around the city to drag away horses that had died. But it was not an efficient service. Horses exploded in the heat. Their exposed intestines heaved with rats. And up through the slum alleys, through the gray clothes hanging listlessly on lines strung across air shafts, rose the smell of fried fish.
— page 19
Racism in America needs more coverage. Reading Ragtime today, thinking of our current policies as they relate to immigrants and racial minorities, opens our eyes about our sketchy history and terribly flawed past. Our politicians always talk about:
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Oh no, those are illustrious words, but we haven’t really lived up to them, and we’re not living up to them today.
Ragtime is a powerful book, with 320 pages a fairly quick read, that I highly recommend.
The Other Side of World War II – A German Soldier’s View
August 3, 2019 by Norbert Haupt
My paternal grandfather was a German soldier in World War II under Hitler. He was born in 1905 and was therefore 34 years old in 1939 when the was conscripted. As a private, he was a low-ranking soldier who spent the entire war away from his family and his five small children. At the end of the war he was stationed in Italy.
After he returned from the war, he became a tax preparer. I remember him working from home behind a huge desk with piles of papers. Grandpa.
He passed away in 1985. My father obtained some of his belongings, and made a surprise discovery. However, my father did not share any of this with us (his children) until just now, in 2019, when he showed one of my sisters some of this treasures. This is how I came about this information.
The photo on the left shows my grandfather’s driver’s license (Führerschein). Driver’s licenses in Germany were cardboard booklets, about 4 by 6 inches, and required a little folder so they didn’t get torn up as they were lugged around in jacket pockets over the years. When he died, my father found some letters that my father had written to him as a child when he was in the war, hidden behind the license in the booklet. Apparently he had carried those letters along with his driver’s license for the rest of his life, from 1945 to 1985. Nobody knew he had those letters, let alone that he carried them with him everywhere he went for all those decades. Here are some of the contents.
Below is a drawing of him my father made when he was about seven years old as part of a letter he sent to his dad toward the end of the war when the Russians started to close in on the eastern front in Silesia, where they lived at the time.
The drawing was done around Christmas, so you see a Christmas tree. My father is color-blind, so somebody must have helped him with the color of the tree and the candles on it, but then gave up. Hence the moon is green and the sun violet. Above the soldier he annotated my grandfather’s name, Gerhard Haupt. On the left is says “Mein lieber Vati” (my dear daddy) and on the right, around the tree “ich wünsche dir ein frohes Weihnachtsfest” (I wish you a merry Christmas). My grandfather is shown in a blue uniform, with a backpack, a green rifle on his shoulder, and a green hand grenade in each hand. There is a cat by his legs.
Here is the address page of the military field letter. Apparently the military mail worked quite well still in 1944/1945.
This is notable because of the slogan written in old German script:
(valor, sacrifice, steadfastness are the pillars of independence of a nation)
Gerhard von Scharnhorst was a Prussian general during the Napoleonic Wars. This was propaganda by the Nazis on their field post envelopes that were obviously used by German children to send letters to their fathers during the war.
Below is one of the letters my father wrote to his dad that he found 40 years later in the driver’s license booklet:
(My dear daddy, I write to you quickly in bed. We all sleep in the living room now. Mom also sleeps in the living room. On the 21st we have vacation and we won’t have to do homework. Good bye, your son Norbert?)
The reference to sleeping in the living room is interesting. This was just before the Russians closed in on the eastern front, and German families were getting ready to flee toward the west to escape capture by the enemy. Millions packed up their meager belongings, whatever they could carry in backpacks and suitcases, and literally started walking west. My father’s mother, in her 30s, with her mother, an aunt, and five small children, made that journey. They slept in the same room so his mom could keep an eye on all of them together in case of an invasion of their home by the Russians.
Here is another letter:
(Daddy, my dear, could you not send me a “Tuschkasten” if you can get one, please buy me one. Good bye, your son Norbert.)
A Tuschkasten is a water color set. That was his wish. Obviously, in Germany in 1944, there was no way to obtain such luxuries. He thought that his father could round one up in Italy and mail it to him.
War is cruel. There are no winners. There are only losers. Many die, many get injured, and many carry damages with them for the rest of their lives. My grandfather, without anyone else knowing it, carried these letters for the entire second half of his life. My father discovered them in 1985, and then he kept them to himself for all these years.
War is cruel.
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