THE DOLLHOUSE FURNITURE

"Otto was creative and made a lot of things that other people bought."

We never called my grandfather Grandpa or Granddad or Grampy. When his first grandchild was born, he said he didn’t feel old enough to take on one of those names. So we just called him by his real name, Otto.

Otto and Granny were German, with strong German accents. We had weekly Sunday dinners at their brick bungalow in Oak Park, Illinois, often with gemüse salat, a German cold pea salad we grandchildren always wanted to spit out. There was much political discussion at the table (Otto had a keen interest in American politics) and the lingering scent of cigar smoke (he smoked a cigar constantly—basically lit a new one from the old one, snuffed it out long enough to eat dinner and then relit). Otto joked and teased us, but we knew he loved us very much. He called me Di-chen, a sweet German nickname meaning “little Di.”

Before Oak Park, Otto and Granny had lived in Berlin. When Hitler came to power, they’d just purchased a lovely home in the suburbs with orchards of pear and plum trees. Although ancestrally Jewish for generations, they’d both been baptized, as had their daughters, and Otto thought they were safe. But soon stormtroopers were marching in the streets, windows were being broken and the Nazis were tracing all Jewish-to-Christian conversions. Otto lost his engineering business and was forced to carry an identification card. Finally, after a long wait for visas, sponsored by a cousin, the family was able to leave in June of 1939.

Strange though it sounds, I knew none of this—nothing about my mother and grandparents’ Jewish backgrounds—until I was in my early 20s, when Otto finally started to talk about his past. Even then, he didn’t talk much. It was too painful. He’d left his mother behind with a plan to send for her once he and Granny were settled in America. Instead, she died in the Holocaust. He once wrote that leaving his mother was “a thorn in my heart I can never get rid of."

Despite all their losses, my grandparents were stoic and pragmatic. While they had grown up with ponies and governesses, they arrived in the U.S. with almost nothing yet never complained. When I was a girl, they saved plastic bags, paper bags and tinfoil to reuse. They bought only what they needed, when they needed it. Their pantry rarely held more than a few cans of beans or corn. I remember a single box of Corn Flakes.

Otto was creative and made a lot of things that other people bought. When my sister and I were small, he made us a special set of dollhouse furniture, including a drop-leaf table, a sideboard with drawers that opened, a four-poster bed with a mattress and coverlet sewn by Granny, and a grandfather clock with a hand-drawn face. On one of the dressers, he’d glued a tiny tinfoil mirror to reflect our faces. 

My sister and I played with the dollhouse and its furniture for hours on end, concocting elaborate family scenes and dramas. But more than five decades and multiple moves later, the pieces I still have—and I still have most of them—are intact. The drawers still open and close. The tinfoil mirror never tore. I can still read the numbers on the grandfather clock. We didn’t know what our grandfather had suffered, but somehow, even as little girls, we knew to play with his precious gifts gently.

—Diane Forman

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Diane Forman lives, writes and teaches north of Boston. You can find her on Twitter @WriterForman.

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