Merchant businessman and importer. "Vati" is an affectionate form of the German word for Vater (father). He worked for Arnhold Karberg & Co., a British export firm with offices throughout China and Europe. Vati was in the company's office in Tientsin (now Tianjin, Tianjin Municipality, China).
EDWARD CARL FERDINAND LÜDERS
(An undated biography transcribed from handwritten notes by his daughter,
Gerda Lüders Zander):
"My father, Edward Carl Ferdinand Lüders – Vati for us – was born in 1881 in Hanover, to a comfortably settled family whose roots and branches spread through the countryside. The town, half circled by woods of fir and larch – his favorites later – lay at the meeting of two small rivers between the emptiness of the Lŭneburger heath and the uplands of the Harg.
"I remember his father as a gentle, friendly, small man; he was choral director at the Opera House, pleasingly "a classic, the most beautiful and large in Germany" said an old Encyclopedia Brittanica. This was in the new part of town; the family lived in the old, in a house Vati's mother's mother had come to as a bride. She lived with them, in a room whose walls were covered with enormous violets, a completely charming person, gay and witty. It must have been a very old house indeed, as the windows leaned out over the street; the youngest added to its legends when he once slipped a disliked pudding out of an open casement and onto the hat of an approaching visitor. This brother was my father's close friend through life, and his double except that Vati was a longer, narrower version – the army found him too narrow for military duty. Both had their mother's thoughtful, observant eyes. They were handsome boys and men, though the strain was given to a regrettably early baldness.
"There had been a sadness over his mother's and grandmother's lives before he was born, when his grandfather, during a depression in which his factory failed, hanged himself so that his young family would have the use of insurance money, and this must have influenced the grandchildren. But now life was assured and cheerful. There were large family visitations in the country, vacations in the hills, and a friendly exchange of entertainment in town centering on an affectionate, happy family at a fairly happy time, a sunlit homeland for my father's memories.
"He finished a classical education with a sound grasp of Latin and Greek, and then pragmatically apprenticed himself to a woolen mill run by cousins. From this he went to Manchester, the center of the woolen trade at that time, to learn the im- and export side of it, and then to Hongkong in 1903, a few years after the Boxer Rebellion had provided an opening for the expansion of European influence and trade.
"There's an album of photographs my father kept, off and on, of his early years in China. They begin with a rather quiet, reserved young man on free-day outings with other newcomers of his age, swimming from empty rough beaches or boating among the islands (he had a very small silver cup from the Royal Hongkong Yacht Club as a crew member) – and of riding parties in the Kowloon hills. Later the photographs show older couples and their unattached young friends, and now he's at ease and almost debonair, a part of the colony's social life. Indeed, he was assured enough to wear light Chinese tunics, elegant garments, in the heat when tie, waistcoat, and jacket were uniform. Behind this was the work week, long, concentrated and dominant. He meant to get ahead, and Business was a game and a hobby as well as a livelihood. He seemed to know the country and the treaty parts well, and acquired Chinese in formal and dialect forms, with a familiarity with attitudes and habits of thought; the Chinese liked and respected him.
"After some years Vati's photographs focus increasingly on a visitor, a young Irish woman, so that one expects the happy wedding scenes which follow. About the same time he was given a controlling position in his [Arnhold, Karberg & Co.] firm's Tientsin [now Tianjin, China] office with a residence to match, perhaps not without his planning it so. They were both new in town, and became a much liked and invited couple. There was a small daughter [Erna], and life was happy; but his wife died, and the photographs stop for a while.
"I wish I had details to fill in such a faint outline. My father never talked much about himself, although he was not a taciturn man and could be greatly interesting on politics or international dealings or history. In business he was much in demand as arbitrator or judge, and his opinion had weight. He liked and was good company, more of men than of ladies, although it was pleasant to be gallant.
"With this he had an underlying seriousness of mind, and deep attachments without any sort of demonstration – (but I can remember, when the daughter who had been his first were married, how the feeling of his prayer held the space around him).
"He marries our mother [Phyllis], a quiet, shy young woman, when his daughter [Erna] was about five years old. She was a nurse at the British hospital to whom he had arranged an introduction, having observed her when they were walking their respective dogs mornings. It gave him a companion who was a strength to him all his life. They went on a long honeymoon/sabbatical year around the world with their young daughter, meeting each other's families and friends, and seeing the best of the Europe they knew.
"The 1914 war [World War I] broke a few months after they had gotten back to Tientsin, blowing over the ways of their world. My father's British principals remained friends and somehow arranged that he keep on with the firm; when this became untenable he took his growing family to a house he had designed and almost completed at Peitaiho, a summer resort on the China Sea.
"What must be my first memory was of a happy Christmas Ever about a warm great fireplace in the central hall, which ended when my father carried us children upstairs, festooned about his arms and shoulders. This staircase would up around the hall to a balcony of bedrooms – a hall in the old sense for everything people did together; when the weather warmed they moved out to the deep veranda surrounding it. The house had something of the look of a pagoda. Around it lay the gardens to be, and then a lower slope of hill to the beautiful sea; behind a steeper slope rose to stony hills and pine woods. It was one of the loves of my parents' lives, and this must have been an almost serene time in spite of the lack of news from home and the uncertainty of the future.
"With the end of the war all Germans were ordered deported with belongings limited to one suitcase. People Vati had worked with, English and Chinese, did what they could to help, but there wasn't much to be done, though an old comprador ["A person who acts as an agent for foreign organizations engaged in investment, trade, or economic or political exploitation"] lightened Vati's spirit by finding shelter for his family in the native quarter while they were waiting for embarkation, my father staying in a camp. They were reunited when an old cargo ship whose hold was being arranged for use was ready. The heterogeneous line struggled aboard past the confiscating inspectors, Mutti [her mother] letting one of us carry Vati's banking and business papers sewn up in a golliwog [doll], for the long lot journey to Europe.
" 'All the Germans in China' – or this shipload – turned out a very mixed lot which clearly needed regulations in the close quarters provided, and my father and some friends set up a temporary civic organization with a patrol, work he later carried on in the demoralized shambles his homeland had become.
"They arrived at Hamburg [Germany] in the fall – I can remember a dark, high-ceilinged hotel room, very cold, and the youngest baby sick and miserable. It must have been the bleak beginning of a grim time for my parents. They kept us children unworried.
"They were better off than most Germans with the help of the golliwog assets. Vati found a comfortable house outside of town with a long garden down to the river, and sisters from one of the farming villages to help my mother; these also made it easier to find food. The eldest was [a] cook, and kept a wonderful pot of goose fat – schmaltz – behind the kitchen door, to be rationed out at meal times, but she was kind about an occasional swiping finger. It was a pleasant life for children who didn't know life beyond home, but my father did patrol duty at night in a time of violence and arson when people stayed at home after dark while my silent mother waited.
"He took the train to an office in Hamburg in the mornings, and came home with the evening commuters, but there was no work to be done and no foreseeable stability. In the end, after troubled talks with my mother, he left to go back to China again. Germans were still interdicted, but he knew the back ways, and reached Tientsin informally one evening. Happily and totally inexplicably one of his former compradors was on hand to welcome him. Other old connections held good, and Vati had reestablished himself enough to send for his family after a year. There was a joyful reunion at Singapore, and he escorted his people home again – one he had got ready with the help of much of their old household staff. When summer came they went back to their Peitaiho again.
"But the world didn't give serenity or security to their generation, as it seemed to have to their parents'. The Chinese were restive, no longer taking European power for granted among other unsettling thoughts, and the Japanese, who'd known better for some time, were advancing down the continent – and it was time the children be given a better schooling than could be got locally.
"At about this time his old firm suggested the need of new management in its New York office, a happy solution for my father if it hadn't been for the prerequisite ousting of the current head, who was suspected of embezzlement. The good was greater than the onerous, and he took the offer. My mother was gaily happy and my father soberly so. America was the land of promise, and they would become its citizens.
"Leaving China this time was more complicated, with affairs to wind up and a large household to move – an army friend said moving a regiment was easier. Our parents must for a while have liked the long laziness of crossing the Pacific, remembering the time they had done this before when they had just married and life seemed easier.
"Now they arrived in New York with a golden autumn and settled in a hilltop house with enough of a garden, from which Vati could walk the mile or so to the bay ferry for town, and then two blocks to the office overlooking the water.
"Here there was more trouble than had been foreseen, the incumbent having embezzled for investment with a set of gangsters. He understood the purpose of my father's arrival and tried to have him deported as an enemy alien, not very reasonably six years after the war, and as an alternative mentioned help from his friends. My mother was more fearful than she had been before, but it was kept from us children. I don't know how this was resolved, excepting that people in the office came to my father's help at some danger to themselves.
"Life [at] home was happier: my father joined a German Verein [Society] and my mother a British one, and they had a considerable social life between the two, old China friends, new acquaintances and pleasant neighbors; on weekends they took the children for long picnic drives into the countryside. The public schools turned out to be less than they had imagined, and they took on the burden of private schooling for their horde, but things were good, and it was a new beginning. One day the youngest child [Peter], a small friend to the world, died in pain of burns and left the house desolate.
"We moved to New Jersey a few years later, where the schools were said to be better: tuition payments were growing with each grade, and there were many grades to go. Now they took a small house with a garden patch, an hour's commuting by train and tube and subway from the office. It wasn't satisfactory. My father never spent as much on style of living as friends of similar income did, although he very much enjoyed such pleasantnesses, and my mother followed suit. Perhaps he didn't trust the future, and in this case he may have felt the rumblings of the Great Depression. But a garden was their recreation and love, a house only less so. They started spending weekends on the search for a house, but after months bought a lot on a hillside in newly divided farmlands still further out. It had the remains of an orchard, rich earth and an ancient stone wall, and behind the open fields were woods and a stream.
"My father and mother designed the house every evening, with one improvement after another, splendid ideas, practical revisions – there was to be quality rather than quantity – and happy expectations. They and conscript offspring started work on the garden long before the house was done, as grubbing deep roots and stones and rich groves of poison ivy, turning the earth, raking and smoothing for a lawn, pruning the old orchard trees and adding grafts – in general putting in loving hard labor, mostly in the hot months.
"When the house was ready, not on a single day but as furniture and utensils were brought in and set about, there was that much more time for the garden – only the commuting took half as much time again for my father. Perhaps this wasn't very important, though when my sister and I later took to it the grimy long journey with shuttling between car, train, tube and subway and the grey dozing faces of our fellows were the wearing part of the day. Still, home was that much farther into the countryside.
"The house was safely my father's when the Depression broke over everyone's hopes and plans. My father's firm, already handicapped by the turmoil in China and looking for ways to cut back, recommended paring the New York staff. My father made a considerable cut in his own salary to avoid some of this, but I can remember his coming home from the office one Saturday, drawn and silent, having to let a colleague go. In the course of years life became more secure, but there was no more confident zeal. We children, who had been our parents' great care, were growing up and becoming strangers.
"One great and lasting pleasure came with the introduction by friends to a summer colony in the wooded hills up the Hudson which had been organized at the turn of the century by members of a German club [the Elka Park* Association]. Each has built a solid house encircled by verandas, planted specimen trees, and set about establishing an easy, friendly way of life which lasted for generations. It must have reminded Vati of the hills near Hanover and he loved it, as did my mother. It helped him when the Germany of his memories became Nazi and took to war.
"The office was doing well again – my father was an astute business man and they had arranged new trade in new materials from Canada and Argentina besides the familiar commerce with the East. He had a good many friends downtown who met for roundtable lunches at Gusto's across the street. Life at home was good in spite of the afflictions of adolescence, and he and my mother, usually with one or two of us along, spent as many weekends as they could in the hills [of the Catskills]. After a long business tour of old familiar places in China he came home with no longing for the old days.
"A young relative of the firm's owners who had been sent to Argentina to learn this new side of the business now joined the New York office, and after a while, desiring my father's position, he went to work on ousting him. This couldn't be formally arranged, but daily unpleasantness, hampering and frustration and a fog of sleaziness brought my father, who customarily overworked, close to a nervous breakdown. The trouble passed after a long strain, but Vati was tired and without resilience, and the war [World War II] overshadowed his thoughts.
"He did arrange one coup I heard about as I worked in a shipping office nearby which must have given him some of the old pleasure in the game and made local trade history. Vessels under neutral flags had been noisily loading scrap iron at the Jersey docks across the river for months, and a number of these had got beyond the twelve-mile coastal limit on their way to Japan when Pearl Harbor was attacked; by invoking an arcane Admiralty law Vati petitioned the seizure of his firm's cargos on the open seas, which the navy was happy to do; the other consigners followed suit and a massive tonnage was redeemed.
"The war dragged on for long years, and my father grew older and more tired. The children had all left home and the house, too large and empty now, had lost the fields and woods behind and become part of a suburb. They sold it to buy one of the old houses in the hills of the Hudson, a modest, splendidly solid one with a large garden needing every sort of attention, through which a brook slithered down and sometimes over its dry-walled channel. There was almost disappointingly little to be done to put the house in order, though Vati painted all the darkly paneled interior into light. He took vacations now – there had been no regular or longer ones since Peitaiho – and they went to Europe some summers, but this had become home, their longest and perhaps best.
"My father put off retiring as long as possible, until he had to, and then found nothing pleasant in such leisure. The winter months were apartment-bound, and they both looked forward to spring more than most people do. They'd go back to the hills at its first sign and have them to themselves before the summer brought their friends; afterwards they'd stay until the frosts had undeniably come. It was a sunlit time.
"Our father died there one summer, and rests with his wife under trees in the hills, his pilgrimage done, carrying more for others than for himself."
* = El Ka is the German sounding of L K, the initials of the Liederkrantz Club centered in NY. Liederkrantz = 'songs-coronet', singing (and drinking) being original central activities of the social organization.
EDWARD CARL FERDINAND LÜDERS
(An undated biography transcribed from handwritten notes by his daughter,
Gerda Lüders Zander):
"My father, Edward Carl Ferdinand Lüders – Vati for us – was born in 1881 in Hanover, to a comfortably settled family whose roots and branches spread through the countryside. The town, half circled by woods of fir and larch – his favorites later – lay at the meeting of two small rivers between the emptiness of the Lŭneburger heath and the uplands of the Harg.
"I remember his father as a gentle, friendly, small man; he was choral director at the Opera House, pleasingly "a classic, the most beautiful and large in Germany" said an old Encyclopedia Brittanica. This was in the new part of town; the family lived in the old, in a house Vati's mother's mother had come to as a bride. She lived with them, in a room whose walls were covered with enormous violets, a completely charming person, gay and witty. It must have been a very old house indeed, as the windows leaned out over the street; the youngest added to its legends when he once slipped a disliked pudding out of an open casement and onto the hat of an approaching visitor. This brother was my father's close friend through life, and his double except that Vati was a longer, narrower version – the army found him too narrow for military duty. Both had their mother's thoughtful, observant eyes. They were handsome boys and men, though the strain was given to a regrettably early baldness.
"There had been a sadness over his mother's and grandmother's lives before he was born, when his grandfather, during a depression in which his factory failed, hanged himself so that his young family would have the use of insurance money, and this must have influenced the grandchildren. But now life was assured and cheerful. There were large family visitations in the country, vacations in the hills, and a friendly exchange of entertainment in town centering on an affectionate, happy family at a fairly happy time, a sunlit homeland for my father's memories.
"He finished a classical education with a sound grasp of Latin and Greek, and then pragmatically apprenticed himself to a woolen mill run by cousins. From this he went to Manchester, the center of the woolen trade at that time, to learn the im- and export side of it, and then to Hongkong in 1903, a few years after the Boxer Rebellion had provided an opening for the expansion of European influence and trade.
"There's an album of photographs my father kept, off and on, of his early years in China. They begin with a rather quiet, reserved young man on free-day outings with other newcomers of his age, swimming from empty rough beaches or boating among the islands (he had a very small silver cup from the Royal Hongkong Yacht Club as a crew member) – and of riding parties in the Kowloon hills. Later the photographs show older couples and their unattached young friends, and now he's at ease and almost debonair, a part of the colony's social life. Indeed, he was assured enough to wear light Chinese tunics, elegant garments, in the heat when tie, waistcoat, and jacket were uniform. Behind this was the work week, long, concentrated and dominant. He meant to get ahead, and Business was a game and a hobby as well as a livelihood. He seemed to know the country and the treaty parts well, and acquired Chinese in formal and dialect forms, with a familiarity with attitudes and habits of thought; the Chinese liked and respected him.
"After some years Vati's photographs focus increasingly on a visitor, a young Irish woman, so that one expects the happy wedding scenes which follow. About the same time he was given a controlling position in his [Arnhold, Karberg & Co.] firm's Tientsin [now Tianjin, China] office with a residence to match, perhaps not without his planning it so. They were both new in town, and became a much liked and invited couple. There was a small daughter [Erna], and life was happy; but his wife died, and the photographs stop for a while.
"I wish I had details to fill in such a faint outline. My father never talked much about himself, although he was not a taciturn man and could be greatly interesting on politics or international dealings or history. In business he was much in demand as arbitrator or judge, and his opinion had weight. He liked and was good company, more of men than of ladies, although it was pleasant to be gallant.
"With this he had an underlying seriousness of mind, and deep attachments without any sort of demonstration – (but I can remember, when the daughter who had been his first were married, how the feeling of his prayer held the space around him).
"He marries our mother [Phyllis], a quiet, shy young woman, when his daughter [Erna] was about five years old. She was a nurse at the British hospital to whom he had arranged an introduction, having observed her when they were walking their respective dogs mornings. It gave him a companion who was a strength to him all his life. They went on a long honeymoon/sabbatical year around the world with their young daughter, meeting each other's families and friends, and seeing the best of the Europe they knew.
"The 1914 war [World War I] broke a few months after they had gotten back to Tientsin, blowing over the ways of their world. My father's British principals remained friends and somehow arranged that he keep on with the firm; when this became untenable he took his growing family to a house he had designed and almost completed at Peitaiho, a summer resort on the China Sea.
"What must be my first memory was of a happy Christmas Ever about a warm great fireplace in the central hall, which ended when my father carried us children upstairs, festooned about his arms and shoulders. This staircase would up around the hall to a balcony of bedrooms – a hall in the old sense for everything people did together; when the weather warmed they moved out to the deep veranda surrounding it. The house had something of the look of a pagoda. Around it lay the gardens to be, and then a lower slope of hill to the beautiful sea; behind a steeper slope rose to stony hills and pine woods. It was one of the loves of my parents' lives, and this must have been an almost serene time in spite of the lack of news from home and the uncertainty of the future.
"With the end of the war all Germans were ordered deported with belongings limited to one suitcase. People Vati had worked with, English and Chinese, did what they could to help, but there wasn't much to be done, though an old comprador ["A person who acts as an agent for foreign organizations engaged in investment, trade, or economic or political exploitation"] lightened Vati's spirit by finding shelter for his family in the native quarter while they were waiting for embarkation, my father staying in a camp. They were reunited when an old cargo ship whose hold was being arranged for use was ready. The heterogeneous line struggled aboard past the confiscating inspectors, Mutti [her mother] letting one of us carry Vati's banking and business papers sewn up in a golliwog [doll], for the long lot journey to Europe.
" 'All the Germans in China' – or this shipload – turned out a very mixed lot which clearly needed regulations in the close quarters provided, and my father and some friends set up a temporary civic organization with a patrol, work he later carried on in the demoralized shambles his homeland had become.
"They arrived at Hamburg [Germany] in the fall – I can remember a dark, high-ceilinged hotel room, very cold, and the youngest baby sick and miserable. It must have been the bleak beginning of a grim time for my parents. They kept us children unworried.
"They were better off than most Germans with the help of the golliwog assets. Vati found a comfortable house outside of town with a long garden down to the river, and sisters from one of the farming villages to help my mother; these also made it easier to find food. The eldest was [a] cook, and kept a wonderful pot of goose fat – schmaltz – behind the kitchen door, to be rationed out at meal times, but she was kind about an occasional swiping finger. It was a pleasant life for children who didn't know life beyond home, but my father did patrol duty at night in a time of violence and arson when people stayed at home after dark while my silent mother waited.
"He took the train to an office in Hamburg in the mornings, and came home with the evening commuters, but there was no work to be done and no foreseeable stability. In the end, after troubled talks with my mother, he left to go back to China again. Germans were still interdicted, but he knew the back ways, and reached Tientsin informally one evening. Happily and totally inexplicably one of his former compradors was on hand to welcome him. Other old connections held good, and Vati had reestablished himself enough to send for his family after a year. There was a joyful reunion at Singapore, and he escorted his people home again – one he had got ready with the help of much of their old household staff. When summer came they went back to their Peitaiho again.
"But the world didn't give serenity or security to their generation, as it seemed to have to their parents'. The Chinese were restive, no longer taking European power for granted among other unsettling thoughts, and the Japanese, who'd known better for some time, were advancing down the continent – and it was time the children be given a better schooling than could be got locally.
"At about this time his old firm suggested the need of new management in its New York office, a happy solution for my father if it hadn't been for the prerequisite ousting of the current head, who was suspected of embezzlement. The good was greater than the onerous, and he took the offer. My mother was gaily happy and my father soberly so. America was the land of promise, and they would become its citizens.
"Leaving China this time was more complicated, with affairs to wind up and a large household to move – an army friend said moving a regiment was easier. Our parents must for a while have liked the long laziness of crossing the Pacific, remembering the time they had done this before when they had just married and life seemed easier.
"Now they arrived in New York with a golden autumn and settled in a hilltop house with enough of a garden, from which Vati could walk the mile or so to the bay ferry for town, and then two blocks to the office overlooking the water.
"Here there was more trouble than had been foreseen, the incumbent having embezzled for investment with a set of gangsters. He understood the purpose of my father's arrival and tried to have him deported as an enemy alien, not very reasonably six years after the war, and as an alternative mentioned help from his friends. My mother was more fearful than she had been before, but it was kept from us children. I don't know how this was resolved, excepting that people in the office came to my father's help at some danger to themselves.
"Life [at] home was happier: my father joined a German Verein [Society] and my mother a British one, and they had a considerable social life between the two, old China friends, new acquaintances and pleasant neighbors; on weekends they took the children for long picnic drives into the countryside. The public schools turned out to be less than they had imagined, and they took on the burden of private schooling for their horde, but things were good, and it was a new beginning. One day the youngest child [Peter], a small friend to the world, died in pain of burns and left the house desolate.
"We moved to New Jersey a few years later, where the schools were said to be better: tuition payments were growing with each grade, and there were many grades to go. Now they took a small house with a garden patch, an hour's commuting by train and tube and subway from the office. It wasn't satisfactory. My father never spent as much on style of living as friends of similar income did, although he very much enjoyed such pleasantnesses, and my mother followed suit. Perhaps he didn't trust the future, and in this case he may have felt the rumblings of the Great Depression. But a garden was their recreation and love, a house only less so. They started spending weekends on the search for a house, but after months bought a lot on a hillside in newly divided farmlands still further out. It had the remains of an orchard, rich earth and an ancient stone wall, and behind the open fields were woods and a stream.
"My father and mother designed the house every evening, with one improvement after another, splendid ideas, practical revisions – there was to be quality rather than quantity – and happy expectations. They and conscript offspring started work on the garden long before the house was done, as grubbing deep roots and stones and rich groves of poison ivy, turning the earth, raking and smoothing for a lawn, pruning the old orchard trees and adding grafts – in general putting in loving hard labor, mostly in the hot months.
"When the house was ready, not on a single day but as furniture and utensils were brought in and set about, there was that much more time for the garden – only the commuting took half as much time again for my father. Perhaps this wasn't very important, though when my sister and I later took to it the grimy long journey with shuttling between car, train, tube and subway and the grey dozing faces of our fellows were the wearing part of the day. Still, home was that much farther into the countryside.
"The house was safely my father's when the Depression broke over everyone's hopes and plans. My father's firm, already handicapped by the turmoil in China and looking for ways to cut back, recommended paring the New York staff. My father made a considerable cut in his own salary to avoid some of this, but I can remember his coming home from the office one Saturday, drawn and silent, having to let a colleague go. In the course of years life became more secure, but there was no more confident zeal. We children, who had been our parents' great care, were growing up and becoming strangers.
"One great and lasting pleasure came with the introduction by friends to a summer colony in the wooded hills up the Hudson which had been organized at the turn of the century by members of a German club [the Elka Park* Association]. Each has built a solid house encircled by verandas, planted specimen trees, and set about establishing an easy, friendly way of life which lasted for generations. It must have reminded Vati of the hills near Hanover and he loved it, as did my mother. It helped him when the Germany of his memories became Nazi and took to war.
"The office was doing well again – my father was an astute business man and they had arranged new trade in new materials from Canada and Argentina besides the familiar commerce with the East. He had a good many friends downtown who met for roundtable lunches at Gusto's across the street. Life at home was good in spite of the afflictions of adolescence, and he and my mother, usually with one or two of us along, spent as many weekends as they could in the hills [of the Catskills]. After a long business tour of old familiar places in China he came home with no longing for the old days.
"A young relative of the firm's owners who had been sent to Argentina to learn this new side of the business now joined the New York office, and after a while, desiring my father's position, he went to work on ousting him. This couldn't be formally arranged, but daily unpleasantness, hampering and frustration and a fog of sleaziness brought my father, who customarily overworked, close to a nervous breakdown. The trouble passed after a long strain, but Vati was tired and without resilience, and the war [World War II] overshadowed his thoughts.
"He did arrange one coup I heard about as I worked in a shipping office nearby which must have given him some of the old pleasure in the game and made local trade history. Vessels under neutral flags had been noisily loading scrap iron at the Jersey docks across the river for months, and a number of these had got beyond the twelve-mile coastal limit on their way to Japan when Pearl Harbor was attacked; by invoking an arcane Admiralty law Vati petitioned the seizure of his firm's cargos on the open seas, which the navy was happy to do; the other consigners followed suit and a massive tonnage was redeemed.
"The war dragged on for long years, and my father grew older and more tired. The children had all left home and the house, too large and empty now, had lost the fields and woods behind and become part of a suburb. They sold it to buy one of the old houses in the hills of the Hudson, a modest, splendidly solid one with a large garden needing every sort of attention, through which a brook slithered down and sometimes over its dry-walled channel. There was almost disappointingly little to be done to put the house in order, though Vati painted all the darkly paneled interior into light. He took vacations now – there had been no regular or longer ones since Peitaiho – and they went to Europe some summers, but this had become home, their longest and perhaps best.
"My father put off retiring as long as possible, until he had to, and then found nothing pleasant in such leisure. The winter months were apartment-bound, and they both looked forward to spring more than most people do. They'd go back to the hills at its first sign and have them to themselves before the summer brought their friends; afterwards they'd stay until the frosts had undeniably come. It was a sunlit time.
"Our father died there one summer, and rests with his wife under trees in the hills, his pilgrimage done, carrying more for others than for himself."
* = El Ka is the German sounding of L K, the initials of the Liederkrantz Club centered in NY. Liederkrantz = 'songs-coronet', singing (and drinking) being original central activities of the social organization.
Merchant businessman and importer. "Vati" is an affectionate form of the German word for Vater (father). He worked for Arnhold Karberg & Co., a British export firm with offices throughout China and Europe. Vati was in the company's office in Tientsin (now Tianjin, Tianjin Municipality, China).
EDWARD CARL FERDINAND LÜDERS
(An undated biography transcribed from handwritten notes by his daughter,
Gerda Lüders Zander):
"My father, Edward Carl Ferdinand Lüders – Vati for us – was born in 1881 in Hanover, to a comfortably settled family whose roots and branches spread through the countryside. The town, half circled by woods of fir and larch – his favorites later – lay at the meeting of two small rivers between the emptiness of the Lŭneburger heath and the uplands of the Harg.
"I remember his father as a gentle, friendly, small man; he was choral director at the Opera House, pleasingly "a classic, the most beautiful and large in Germany" said an old Encyclopedia Brittanica. This was in the new part of town; the family lived in the old, in a house Vati's mother's mother had come to as a bride. She lived with them, in a room whose walls were covered with enormous violets, a completely charming person, gay and witty. It must have been a very old house indeed, as the windows leaned out over the street; the youngest added to its legends when he once slipped a disliked pudding out of an open casement and onto the hat of an approaching visitor. This brother was my father's close friend through life, and his double except that Vati was a longer, narrower version – the army found him too narrow for military duty. Both had their mother's thoughtful, observant eyes. They were handsome boys and men, though the strain was given to a regrettably early baldness.
"There had been a sadness over his mother's and grandmother's lives before he was born, when his grandfather, during a depression in which his factory failed, hanged himself so that his young family would have the use of insurance money, and this must have influenced the grandchildren. But now life was assured and cheerful. There were large family visitations in the country, vacations in the hills, and a friendly exchange of entertainment in town centering on an affectionate, happy family at a fairly happy time, a sunlit homeland for my father's memories.
"He finished a classical education with a sound grasp of Latin and Greek, and then pragmatically apprenticed himself to a woolen mill run by cousins. From this he went to Manchester, the center of the woolen trade at that time, to learn the im- and export side of it, and then to Hongkong in 1903, a few years after the Boxer Rebellion had provided an opening for the expansion of European influence and trade.
"There's an album of photographs my father kept, off and on, of his early years in China. They begin with a rather quiet, reserved young man on free-day outings with other newcomers of his age, swimming from empty rough beaches or boating among the islands (he had a very small silver cup from the Royal Hongkong Yacht Club as a crew member) – and of riding parties in the Kowloon hills. Later the photographs show older couples and their unattached young friends, and now he's at ease and almost debonair, a part of the colony's social life. Indeed, he was assured enough to wear light Chinese tunics, elegant garments, in the heat when tie, waistcoat, and jacket were uniform. Behind this was the work week, long, concentrated and dominant. He meant to get ahead, and Business was a game and a hobby as well as a livelihood. He seemed to know the country and the treaty parts well, and acquired Chinese in formal and dialect forms, with a familiarity with attitudes and habits of thought; the Chinese liked and respected him.
"After some years Vati's photographs focus increasingly on a visitor, a young Irish woman, so that one expects the happy wedding scenes which follow. About the same time he was given a controlling position in his [Arnhold, Karberg & Co.] firm's Tientsin [now Tianjin, China] office with a residence to match, perhaps not without his planning it so. They were both new in town, and became a much liked and invited couple. There was a small daughter [Erna], and life was happy; but his wife died, and the photographs stop for a while.
"I wish I had details to fill in such a faint outline. My father never talked much about himself, although he was not a taciturn man and could be greatly interesting on politics or international dealings or history. In business he was much in demand as arbitrator or judge, and his opinion had weight. He liked and was good company, more of men than of ladies, although it was pleasant to be gallant.
"With this he had an underlying seriousness of mind, and deep attachments without any sort of demonstration – (but I can remember, when the daughter who had been his first were married, how the feeling of his prayer held the space around him).
"He marries our mother [Phyllis], a quiet, shy young woman, when his daughter [Erna] was about five years old. She was a nurse at the British hospital to whom he had arranged an introduction, having observed her when they were walking their respective dogs mornings. It gave him a companion who was a strength to him all his life. They went on a long honeymoon/sabbatical year around the world with their young daughter, meeting each other's families and friends, and seeing the best of the Europe they knew.
"The 1914 war [World War I] broke a few months after they had gotten back to Tientsin, blowing over the ways of their world. My father's British principals remained friends and somehow arranged that he keep on with the firm; when this became untenable he took his growing family to a house he had designed and almost completed at Peitaiho, a summer resort on the China Sea.
"What must be my first memory was of a happy Christmas Ever about a warm great fireplace in the central hall, which ended when my father carried us children upstairs, festooned about his arms and shoulders. This staircase would up around the hall to a balcony of bedrooms – a hall in the old sense for everything people did together; when the weather warmed they moved out to the deep veranda surrounding it. The house had something of the look of a pagoda. Around it lay the gardens to be, and then a lower slope of hill to the beautiful sea; behind a steeper slope rose to stony hills and pine woods. It was one of the loves of my parents' lives, and this must have been an almost serene time in spite of the lack of news from home and the uncertainty of the future.
"With the end of the war all Germans were ordered deported with belongings limited to one suitcase. People Vati had worked with, English and Chinese, did what they could to help, but there wasn't much to be done, though an old comprador ["A person who acts as an agent for foreign organizations engaged in investment, trade, or economic or political exploitation"] lightened Vati's spirit by finding shelter for his family in the native quarter while they were waiting for embarkation, my father staying in a camp. They were reunited when an old cargo ship whose hold was being arranged for use was ready. The heterogeneous line struggled aboard past the confiscating inspectors, Mutti [her mother] letting one of us carry Vati's banking and business papers sewn up in a golliwog [doll], for the long lot journey to Europe.
" 'All the Germans in China' – or this shipload – turned out a very mixed lot which clearly needed regulations in the close quarters provided, and my father and some friends set up a temporary civic organization with a patrol, work he later carried on in the demoralized shambles his homeland had become.
"They arrived at Hamburg [Germany] in the fall – I can remember a dark, high-ceilinged hotel room, very cold, and the youngest baby sick and miserable. It must have been the bleak beginning of a grim time for my parents. They kept us children unworried.
"They were better off than most Germans with the help of the golliwog assets. Vati found a comfortable house outside of town with a long garden down to the river, and sisters from one of the farming villages to help my mother; these also made it easier to find food. The eldest was [a] cook, and kept a wonderful pot of goose fat – schmaltz – behind the kitchen door, to be rationed out at meal times, but she was kind about an occasional swiping finger. It was a pleasant life for children who didn't know life beyond home, but my father did patrol duty at night in a time of violence and arson when people stayed at home after dark while my silent mother waited.
"He took the train to an office in Hamburg in the mornings, and came home with the evening commuters, but there was no work to be done and no foreseeable stability. In the end, after troubled talks with my mother, he left to go back to China again. Germans were still interdicted, but he knew the back ways, and reached Tientsin informally one evening. Happily and totally inexplicably one of his former compradors was on hand to welcome him. Other old connections held good, and Vati had reestablished himself enough to send for his family after a year. There was a joyful reunion at Singapore, and he escorted his people home again – one he had got ready with the help of much of their old household staff. When summer came they went back to their Peitaiho again.
"But the world didn't give serenity or security to their generation, as it seemed to have to their parents'. The Chinese were restive, no longer taking European power for granted among other unsettling thoughts, and the Japanese, who'd known better for some time, were advancing down the continent – and it was time the children be given a better schooling than could be got locally.
"At about this time his old firm suggested the need of new management in its New York office, a happy solution for my father if it hadn't been for the prerequisite ousting of the current head, who was suspected of embezzlement. The good was greater than the onerous, and he took the offer. My mother was gaily happy and my father soberly so. America was the land of promise, and they would become its citizens.
"Leaving China this time was more complicated, with affairs to wind up and a large household to move – an army friend said moving a regiment was easier. Our parents must for a while have liked the long laziness of crossing the Pacific, remembering the time they had done this before when they had just married and life seemed easier.
"Now they arrived in New York with a golden autumn and settled in a hilltop house with enough of a garden, from which Vati could walk the mile or so to the bay ferry for town, and then two blocks to the office overlooking the water.
"Here there was more trouble than had been foreseen, the incumbent having embezzled for investment with a set of gangsters. He understood the purpose of my father's arrival and tried to have him deported as an enemy alien, not very reasonably six years after the war, and as an alternative mentioned help from his friends. My mother was more fearful than she had been before, but it was kept from us children. I don't know how this was resolved, excepting that people in the office came to my father's help at some danger to themselves.
"Life [at] home was happier: my father joined a German Verein [Society] and my mother a British one, and they had a considerable social life between the two, old China friends, new acquaintances and pleasant neighbors; on weekends they took the children for long picnic drives into the countryside. The public schools turned out to be less than they had imagined, and they took on the burden of private schooling for their horde, but things were good, and it was a new beginning. One day the youngest child [Peter], a small friend to the world, died in pain of burns and left the house desolate.
"We moved to New Jersey a few years later, where the schools were said to be better: tuition payments were growing with each grade, and there were many grades to go. Now they took a small house with a garden patch, an hour's commuting by train and tube and subway from the office. It wasn't satisfactory. My father never spent as much on style of living as friends of similar income did, although he very much enjoyed such pleasantnesses, and my mother followed suit. Perhaps he didn't trust the future, and in this case he may have felt the rumblings of the Great Depression. But a garden was their recreation and love, a house only less so. They started spending weekends on the search for a house, but after months bought a lot on a hillside in newly divided farmlands still further out. It had the remains of an orchard, rich earth and an ancient stone wall, and behind the open fields were woods and a stream.
"My father and mother designed the house every evening, with one improvement after another, splendid ideas, practical revisions – there was to be quality rather than quantity – and happy expectations. They and conscript offspring started work on the garden long before the house was done, as grubbing deep roots and stones and rich groves of poison ivy, turning the earth, raking and smoothing for a lawn, pruning the old orchard trees and adding grafts – in general putting in loving hard labor, mostly in the hot months.
"When the house was ready, not on a single day but as furniture and utensils were brought in and set about, there was that much more time for the garden – only the commuting took half as much time again for my father. Perhaps this wasn't very important, though when my sister and I later took to it the grimy long journey with shuttling between car, train, tube and subway and the grey dozing faces of our fellows were the wearing part of the day. Still, home was that much farther into the countryside.
"The house was safely my father's when the Depression broke over everyone's hopes and plans. My father's firm, already handicapped by the turmoil in China and looking for ways to cut back, recommended paring the New York staff. My father made a considerable cut in his own salary to avoid some of this, but I can remember his coming home from the office one Saturday, drawn and silent, having to let a colleague go. In the course of years life became more secure, but there was no more confident zeal. We children, who had been our parents' great care, were growing up and becoming strangers.
"One great and lasting pleasure came with the introduction by friends to a summer colony in the wooded hills up the Hudson which had been organized at the turn of the century by members of a German club [the Elka Park* Association]. Each has built a solid house encircled by verandas, planted specimen trees, and set about establishing an easy, friendly way of life which lasted for generations. It must have reminded Vati of the hills near Hanover and he loved it, as did my mother. It helped him when the Germany of his memories became Nazi and took to war.
"The office was doing well again – my father was an astute business man and they had arranged new trade in new materials from Canada and Argentina besides the familiar commerce with the East. He had a good many friends downtown who met for roundtable lunches at Gusto's across the street. Life at home was good in spite of the afflictions of adolescence, and he and my mother, usually with one or two of us along, spent as many weekends as they could in the hills [of the Catskills]. After a long business tour of old familiar places in China he came home with no longing for the old days.
"A young relative of the firm's owners who had been sent to Argentina to learn this new side of the business now joined the New York office, and after a while, desiring my father's position, he went to work on ousting him. This couldn't be formally arranged, but daily unpleasantness, hampering and frustration and a fog of sleaziness brought my father, who customarily overworked, close to a nervous breakdown. The trouble passed after a long strain, but Vati was tired and without resilience, and the war [World War II] overshadowed his thoughts.
"He did arrange one coup I heard about as I worked in a shipping office nearby which must have given him some of the old pleasure in the game and made local trade history. Vessels under neutral flags had been noisily loading scrap iron at the Jersey docks across the river for months, and a number of these had got beyond the twelve-mile coastal limit on their way to Japan when Pearl Harbor was attacked; by invoking an arcane Admiralty law Vati petitioned the seizure of his firm's cargos on the open seas, which the navy was happy to do; the other consigners followed suit and a massive tonnage was redeemed.
"The war dragged on for long years, and my father grew older and more tired. The children had all left home and the house, too large and empty now, had lost the fields and woods behind and become part of a suburb. They sold it to buy one of the old houses in the hills of the Hudson, a modest, splendidly solid one with a large garden needing every sort of attention, through which a brook slithered down and sometimes over its dry-walled channel. There was almost disappointingly little to be done to put the house in order, though Vati painted all the darkly paneled interior into light. He took vacations now – there had been no regular or longer ones since Peitaiho – and they went to Europe some summers, but this had become home, their longest and perhaps best.
"My father put off retiring as long as possible, until he had to, and then found nothing pleasant in such leisure. The winter months were apartment-bound, and they both looked forward to spring more than most people do. They'd go back to the hills at its first sign and have them to themselves before the summer brought their friends; afterwards they'd stay until the frosts had undeniably come. It was a sunlit time.
"Our father died there one summer, and rests with his wife under trees in the hills, his pilgrimage done, carrying more for others than for himself."
* = El Ka is the German sounding of L K, the initials of the Liederkrantz Club centered in NY. Liederkrantz = 'songs-coronet', singing (and drinking) being original central activities of the social organization.
EDWARD CARL FERDINAND LÜDERS
(An undated biography transcribed from handwritten notes by his daughter,
Gerda Lüders Zander):
"My father, Edward Carl Ferdinand Lüders – Vati for us – was born in 1881 in Hanover, to a comfortably settled family whose roots and branches spread through the countryside. The town, half circled by woods of fir and larch – his favorites later – lay at the meeting of two small rivers between the emptiness of the Lŭneburger heath and the uplands of the Harg.
"I remember his father as a gentle, friendly, small man; he was choral director at the Opera House, pleasingly "a classic, the most beautiful and large in Germany" said an old Encyclopedia Brittanica. This was in the new part of town; the family lived in the old, in a house Vati's mother's mother had come to as a bride. She lived with them, in a room whose walls were covered with enormous violets, a completely charming person, gay and witty. It must have been a very old house indeed, as the windows leaned out over the street; the youngest added to its legends when he once slipped a disliked pudding out of an open casement and onto the hat of an approaching visitor. This brother was my father's close friend through life, and his double except that Vati was a longer, narrower version – the army found him too narrow for military duty. Both had their mother's thoughtful, observant eyes. They were handsome boys and men, though the strain was given to a regrettably early baldness.
"There had been a sadness over his mother's and grandmother's lives before he was born, when his grandfather, during a depression in which his factory failed, hanged himself so that his young family would have the use of insurance money, and this must have influenced the grandchildren. But now life was assured and cheerful. There were large family visitations in the country, vacations in the hills, and a friendly exchange of entertainment in town centering on an affectionate, happy family at a fairly happy time, a sunlit homeland for my father's memories.
"He finished a classical education with a sound grasp of Latin and Greek, and then pragmatically apprenticed himself to a woolen mill run by cousins. From this he went to Manchester, the center of the woolen trade at that time, to learn the im- and export side of it, and then to Hongkong in 1903, a few years after the Boxer Rebellion had provided an opening for the expansion of European influence and trade.
"There's an album of photographs my father kept, off and on, of his early years in China. They begin with a rather quiet, reserved young man on free-day outings with other newcomers of his age, swimming from empty rough beaches or boating among the islands (he had a very small silver cup from the Royal Hongkong Yacht Club as a crew member) – and of riding parties in the Kowloon hills. Later the photographs show older couples and their unattached young friends, and now he's at ease and almost debonair, a part of the colony's social life. Indeed, he was assured enough to wear light Chinese tunics, elegant garments, in the heat when tie, waistcoat, and jacket were uniform. Behind this was the work week, long, concentrated and dominant. He meant to get ahead, and Business was a game and a hobby as well as a livelihood. He seemed to know the country and the treaty parts well, and acquired Chinese in formal and dialect forms, with a familiarity with attitudes and habits of thought; the Chinese liked and respected him.
"After some years Vati's photographs focus increasingly on a visitor, a young Irish woman, so that one expects the happy wedding scenes which follow. About the same time he was given a controlling position in his [Arnhold, Karberg & Co.] firm's Tientsin [now Tianjin, China] office with a residence to match, perhaps not without his planning it so. They were both new in town, and became a much liked and invited couple. There was a small daughter [Erna], and life was happy; but his wife died, and the photographs stop for a while.
"I wish I had details to fill in such a faint outline. My father never talked much about himself, although he was not a taciturn man and could be greatly interesting on politics or international dealings or history. In business he was much in demand as arbitrator or judge, and his opinion had weight. He liked and was good company, more of men than of ladies, although it was pleasant to be gallant.
"With this he had an underlying seriousness of mind, and deep attachments without any sort of demonstration – (but I can remember, when the daughter who had been his first were married, how the feeling of his prayer held the space around him).
"He marries our mother [Phyllis], a quiet, shy young woman, when his daughter [Erna] was about five years old. She was a nurse at the British hospital to whom he had arranged an introduction, having observed her when they were walking their respective dogs mornings. It gave him a companion who was a strength to him all his life. They went on a long honeymoon/sabbatical year around the world with their young daughter, meeting each other's families and friends, and seeing the best of the Europe they knew.
"The 1914 war [World War I] broke a few months after they had gotten back to Tientsin, blowing over the ways of their world. My father's British principals remained friends and somehow arranged that he keep on with the firm; when this became untenable he took his growing family to a house he had designed and almost completed at Peitaiho, a summer resort on the China Sea.
"What must be my first memory was of a happy Christmas Ever about a warm great fireplace in the central hall, which ended when my father carried us children upstairs, festooned about his arms and shoulders. This staircase would up around the hall to a balcony of bedrooms – a hall in the old sense for everything people did together; when the weather warmed they moved out to the deep veranda surrounding it. The house had something of the look of a pagoda. Around it lay the gardens to be, and then a lower slope of hill to the beautiful sea; behind a steeper slope rose to stony hills and pine woods. It was one of the loves of my parents' lives, and this must have been an almost serene time in spite of the lack of news from home and the uncertainty of the future.
"With the end of the war all Germans were ordered deported with belongings limited to one suitcase. People Vati had worked with, English and Chinese, did what they could to help, but there wasn't much to be done, though an old comprador ["A person who acts as an agent for foreign organizations engaged in investment, trade, or economic or political exploitation"] lightened Vati's spirit by finding shelter for his family in the native quarter while they were waiting for embarkation, my father staying in a camp. They were reunited when an old cargo ship whose hold was being arranged for use was ready. The heterogeneous line struggled aboard past the confiscating inspectors, Mutti [her mother] letting one of us carry Vati's banking and business papers sewn up in a golliwog [doll], for the long lot journey to Europe.
" 'All the Germans in China' – or this shipload – turned out a very mixed lot which clearly needed regulations in the close quarters provided, and my father and some friends set up a temporary civic organization with a patrol, work he later carried on in the demoralized shambles his homeland had become.
"They arrived at Hamburg [Germany] in the fall – I can remember a dark, high-ceilinged hotel room, very cold, and the youngest baby sick and miserable. It must have been the bleak beginning of a grim time for my parents. They kept us children unworried.
"They were better off than most Germans with the help of the golliwog assets. Vati found a comfortable house outside of town with a long garden down to the river, and sisters from one of the farming villages to help my mother; these also made it easier to find food. The eldest was [a] cook, and kept a wonderful pot of goose fat – schmaltz – behind the kitchen door, to be rationed out at meal times, but she was kind about an occasional swiping finger. It was a pleasant life for children who didn't know life beyond home, but my father did patrol duty at night in a time of violence and arson when people stayed at home after dark while my silent mother waited.
"He took the train to an office in Hamburg in the mornings, and came home with the evening commuters, but there was no work to be done and no foreseeable stability. In the end, after troubled talks with my mother, he left to go back to China again. Germans were still interdicted, but he knew the back ways, and reached Tientsin informally one evening. Happily and totally inexplicably one of his former compradors was on hand to welcome him. Other old connections held good, and Vati had reestablished himself enough to send for his family after a year. There was a joyful reunion at Singapore, and he escorted his people home again – one he had got ready with the help of much of their old household staff. When summer came they went back to their Peitaiho again.
"But the world didn't give serenity or security to their generation, as it seemed to have to their parents'. The Chinese were restive, no longer taking European power for granted among other unsettling thoughts, and the Japanese, who'd known better for some time, were advancing down the continent – and it was time the children be given a better schooling than could be got locally.
"At about this time his old firm suggested the need of new management in its New York office, a happy solution for my father if it hadn't been for the prerequisite ousting of the current head, who was suspected of embezzlement. The good was greater than the onerous, and he took the offer. My mother was gaily happy and my father soberly so. America was the land of promise, and they would become its citizens.
"Leaving China this time was more complicated, with affairs to wind up and a large household to move – an army friend said moving a regiment was easier. Our parents must for a while have liked the long laziness of crossing the Pacific, remembering the time they had done this before when they had just married and life seemed easier.
"Now they arrived in New York with a golden autumn and settled in a hilltop house with enough of a garden, from which Vati could walk the mile or so to the bay ferry for town, and then two blocks to the office overlooking the water.
"Here there was more trouble than had been foreseen, the incumbent having embezzled for investment with a set of gangsters. He understood the purpose of my father's arrival and tried to have him deported as an enemy alien, not very reasonably six years after the war, and as an alternative mentioned help from his friends. My mother was more fearful than she had been before, but it was kept from us children. I don't know how this was resolved, excepting that people in the office came to my father's help at some danger to themselves.
"Life [at] home was happier: my father joined a German Verein [Society] and my mother a British one, and they had a considerable social life between the two, old China friends, new acquaintances and pleasant neighbors; on weekends they took the children for long picnic drives into the countryside. The public schools turned out to be less than they had imagined, and they took on the burden of private schooling for their horde, but things were good, and it was a new beginning. One day the youngest child [Peter], a small friend to the world, died in pain of burns and left the house desolate.
"We moved to New Jersey a few years later, where the schools were said to be better: tuition payments were growing with each grade, and there were many grades to go. Now they took a small house with a garden patch, an hour's commuting by train and tube and subway from the office. It wasn't satisfactory. My father never spent as much on style of living as friends of similar income did, although he very much enjoyed such pleasantnesses, and my mother followed suit. Perhaps he didn't trust the future, and in this case he may have felt the rumblings of the Great Depression. But a garden was their recreation and love, a house only less so. They started spending weekends on the search for a house, but after months bought a lot on a hillside in newly divided farmlands still further out. It had the remains of an orchard, rich earth and an ancient stone wall, and behind the open fields were woods and a stream.
"My father and mother designed the house every evening, with one improvement after another, splendid ideas, practical revisions – there was to be quality rather than quantity – and happy expectations. They and conscript offspring started work on the garden long before the house was done, as grubbing deep roots and stones and rich groves of poison ivy, turning the earth, raking and smoothing for a lawn, pruning the old orchard trees and adding grafts – in general putting in loving hard labor, mostly in the hot months.
"When the house was ready, not on a single day but as furniture and utensils were brought in and set about, there was that much more time for the garden – only the commuting took half as much time again for my father. Perhaps this wasn't very important, though when my sister and I later took to it the grimy long journey with shuttling between car, train, tube and subway and the grey dozing faces of our fellows were the wearing part of the day. Still, home was that much farther into the countryside.
"The house was safely my father's when the Depression broke over everyone's hopes and plans. My father's firm, already handicapped by the turmoil in China and looking for ways to cut back, recommended paring the New York staff. My father made a considerable cut in his own salary to avoid some of this, but I can remember his coming home from the office one Saturday, drawn and silent, having to let a colleague go. In the course of years life became more secure, but there was no more confident zeal. We children, who had been our parents' great care, were growing up and becoming strangers.
"One great and lasting pleasure came with the introduction by friends to a summer colony in the wooded hills up the Hudson which had been organized at the turn of the century by members of a German club [the Elka Park* Association]. Each has built a solid house encircled by verandas, planted specimen trees, and set about establishing an easy, friendly way of life which lasted for generations. It must have reminded Vati of the hills near Hanover and he loved it, as did my mother. It helped him when the Germany of his memories became Nazi and took to war.
"The office was doing well again – my father was an astute business man and they had arranged new trade in new materials from Canada and Argentina besides the familiar commerce with the East. He had a good many friends downtown who met for roundtable lunches at Gusto's across the street. Life at home was good in spite of the afflictions of adolescence, and he and my mother, usually with one or two of us along, spent as many weekends as they could in the hills [of the Catskills]. After a long business tour of old familiar places in China he came home with no longing for the old days.
"A young relative of the firm's owners who had been sent to Argentina to learn this new side of the business now joined the New York office, and after a while, desiring my father's position, he went to work on ousting him. This couldn't be formally arranged, but daily unpleasantness, hampering and frustration and a fog of sleaziness brought my father, who customarily overworked, close to a nervous breakdown. The trouble passed after a long strain, but Vati was tired and without resilience, and the war [World War II] overshadowed his thoughts.
"He did arrange one coup I heard about as I worked in a shipping office nearby which must have given him some of the old pleasure in the game and made local trade history. Vessels under neutral flags had been noisily loading scrap iron at the Jersey docks across the river for months, and a number of these had got beyond the twelve-mile coastal limit on their way to Japan when Pearl Harbor was attacked; by invoking an arcane Admiralty law Vati petitioned the seizure of his firm's cargos on the open seas, which the navy was happy to do; the other consigners followed suit and a massive tonnage was redeemed.
"The war dragged on for long years, and my father grew older and more tired. The children had all left home and the house, too large and empty now, had lost the fields and woods behind and become part of a suburb. They sold it to buy one of the old houses in the hills of the Hudson, a modest, splendidly solid one with a large garden needing every sort of attention, through which a brook slithered down and sometimes over its dry-walled channel. There was almost disappointingly little to be done to put the house in order, though Vati painted all the darkly paneled interior into light. He took vacations now – there had been no regular or longer ones since Peitaiho – and they went to Europe some summers, but this had become home, their longest and perhaps best.
"My father put off retiring as long as possible, until he had to, and then found nothing pleasant in such leisure. The winter months were apartment-bound, and they both looked forward to spring more than most people do. They'd go back to the hills at its first sign and have them to themselves before the summer brought their friends; afterwards they'd stay until the frosts had undeniably come. It was a sunlit time.
"Our father died there one summer, and rests with his wife under trees in the hills, his pilgrimage done, carrying more for others than for himself."
* = El Ka is the German sounding of L K, the initials of the Liederkrantz Club centered in NY. Liederkrantz = 'songs-coronet', singing (and drinking) being original central activities of the social organization.
