Rebuilding in America

On 2 December 1942, Arthur Seligmann’s name was entered into an apartment lease with Wadsworth Terrace Corporation. The apartment was 3F at 82 Wadsworth Terrace, on the third floor. The term would run from 1 January to 31 December 1943, at $38 a month. These few typed particulars give the family’s New York life a concrete setting: a named home, a year’s term and a recurring household expense. The lease does not tell us their moving day or what the rent meant within their budget.

Arthur signed the lease as Seligman, with one n. Around his signature, the printed rules describe the shared spaces of apartment life: halls were to remain clear, children were not to play on the stairs or in the elevators, and music and radio were restricted at night. Such clauses belong to the landlord’s form, so they cannot tell us how this particular family lived. They do show the practical terms attached to making a home together in the city.

Inge’s later account places the reunion with her father at a 42nd Street newsstand where he was working. She remembered living with her parents in Washington Heights and spoke of their happiness at being together in the apartment. Her interview gives a personal voice to the place named in the lease. The newsstand scene and her feelings are her recollection, recorded in 1996, rather than details supplied by the tenancy papers.

Wartime ration books preserve another view of Arthur and Else in this household. Each has a separately named and signed War Ration Book No. 3 at the Wadsworth Terrace address. Arthur’s occupation is written as manager; Else’s as operator. The words are brief, but both parents appear as working people in records made for the distribution of rationed goods. No employer or industry is named, and the issue-date spaces on these covers are blank.

Siegfried’s working life has a different kind of surviving evidence. The family identifies him in a portrait wearing a tall cook’s hat, a light double-breasted jacket and a neckerchief, and remembers that he was a baker. In a second photograph he stands at the left of an elaborate, towering cake, with another person at the right. The family specifically recognized this as the large wedding-cake photograph it remembered. Neither image supplies a date or workplace, so they cannot yet be placed at a precise point in his working life.

The cake gives the photograph its striking scale, but its occasion remains unknown. There is no evidence that it was made for Kurt and Inge’s wedding, or that Siegfried himself baked this particular cake. What can be kept is the family’s identification of him and the occupational memory attached to these photographs. They preserve a form of work that the family recognized even though the employment record is incomplete.

A dated paper places Siegfried in a more specific New York setting. His Certificate of Literacy records 27 September 1943, P.S. 79 in the Bronx, and a Davidson Avenue residence. Five years later, on 27 September 1948, Else received a certificate recording an examination at P.S. 132 in Manhattan, with her Wadsworth Terrace address. Each paper says that its holder had fulfilled the literacy requirement for new voters. Each also warns that the duplicate itself is not valid for registration. These are documented civic steps, without proving naturalization, voter registration or a vote cast.

Siegfried’s name appears again on a 1963 membership card for the Hospital Division of Local 1199, the Drug and Hospital Employees Union. It records the same Davidson Avenue street address, with apartment 4E. This later card supplies a dated union connection, although it does not name his employer or job. The matching address twenty years apart gives two points in the documentary record; it cannot establish that he lived there continuously. Nor does the card place the undated baking photographs in a particular hospital.

Two school documents are preserved in the name Ruth Seligman. The first records completion of the New York elementary course on 31 January 1944; the school line reads No. 189, Borough of Man. The second is a George Washington High School diploma dated June 1947. Inge’s interview names P.S. 189 and George Washington High School, and recalls the same graduation year. She also explains that she used Ruth at school in England and America, while her family continued to call her Inge. That remembered name usage and matching school history provide the context for reading these certificates with her story.

School was part of a wider social life. Inge recalled Jewish youth organizations, tennis, bowling, table tennis, picnics and outings to Coney Island and Orchard Beach. She could no longer name all the organizations when she was interviewed, but she remembered the activities and the friends. Her account makes room for the ordinary pleasures of growing up in New York alongside the documents that marked her progress through school.

News of this life travelled across the Atlantic. An unsigned opening dated Munich, 7 March 1946, and attributed to Rosa thanks the household for letters and parcels and praises Inge for combining study with housework. In the reviewed translation, the writer calls her a great support to Mummy. The passage responds to family reports rather than describing a visit. It shows how schoolwork and help at home entered the news exchanged between generations while they were still separated.

Inge placed her first meeting with Kurt near the end of high school in 1947. In her account, a childhood friend brought her cousin to visit, and the cousin was Kurt. They began going out, and he asked her to marry him. She remembered her parents welcoming him as the son they had never had. A printed announcement supplies the next dated milestone: in July 1947, Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Seligman and Mr. and Mrs. Siegfried Elkan announced the engagement of their children, Inge Ruth and Kurt Max.

The wedding invitation is precise. It requests attendance at the marriage of Inge to Mr. Kurt M. Elkan on Sunday, 18 January 1948, at one-thirty, at the Hebrew Tabernacle of Washington Heights, 605 West 161st Street in New York City. A reception was to follow. The separate marriage-covenant certificate records the named couple’s marriage on that date at Hebrew Tabernacle. Read together, the two documents connect an announced plan with a recorded ceremony.

A six-person wedding photograph brings the two households into one frame. The family identifies Inge and Kurt in the middle, Siegfried and Louise beside Inge, and Arthur and Else beside Kurt. Another photograph shows a long reception table. The family identifies Inge and Kurt at its head and Bruno among the people on the left. These identifications make the pictures part of the family’s account of the wedding; the date comes from the separate documents, and the other guests remain unnamed.

The celebration continued in an undated letter to the honeymooning couple. The writer signing Mutti was pleased to have spoken with them that morning, hoped they would enjoy the days ahead, and described friends calling with praise for the ceremony. She had also spoken with Kurt’s mother. The letter’s stationery names Arthur Seligman, and the parental writers are probably Else and Arthur, though the signatures themselves say only Mutti and Pa. Their affection is explicit in the text.

Pa added his own short message. In the reviewed English translation: “Your ears must be ringing, we talk about you so much.” His postscript reports submitting a marriage announcement to Aufbau. The letter does not name the honeymoon destination or carry a date, but it preserves this immediate family conversation after the wedding: telephone calls, messages passed between parents, and wishes for the couple’s enjoyment.

Inge remembered that finding an apartment after the wedding was difficult and that she and Kurt lived with his parents for a short time. The account gives a practical example of Siegfried and Louise’s place in the new household’s beginning. It does not say how long the stay lasted or give its address. Inge then placed their move to an apartment in Elmhurst, Queens, in 1949, and associated that home with the arrival of their children.

Their working lives continued alongside family life. Inge described her own jobs as customer-service work, including a position as a customer-service manager. Kurt worked as a supermarket manager, she said, until retiring in 1986. The employer’s name is garbled in the surviving draft transcript, so it remains unnamed here. Her recollection emphasizes his long hours; it does not provide a complete sequence of jobs, employers or employment dates.

Saturday work shaped a regular family routine. Inge recalled that, while Kurt was working, she took the children by car to spend the day with her parents in Washington Heights, often with an aunt and uncle there too. The move to Queens had therefore changed the household’s address without ending the visits to Arthur and Else. In her telling, the weekly trip connected the children’s New York childhood with the older generation’s home.

She also remembered summers at Silver Point Beach Club in Atlantic Beach, where the family had a locker. This was one of the recurring places she chose to describe in 1996. After Kurt’s retirement, photography and travel occupied more of their time. Inge spoke about trips together and said that both she and Kurt volunteered at their local hospital. These later recollections extend the story beyond its visas, wartime papers and wedding documents into the routines they built over decades.

Rosa’s place in the American family is also preserved in Inge’s testimony. Inge remembered taking her grandmother to English classes at George Washington High School. The same school that appears in the younger woman’s educational story had a place in the older woman’s efforts to learn English. This is a remembered activity, without a surviving enrollment date in the sources used here. It adds a specific act of companionship to the larger story of reunion.

An undated thank-you card offers a closer view of care around the next generation. It opens from the “three Elkans,” thanks Mummy and Daddy for gifts for Sandra, and continues with gratitude for clothing, visits and time spent helping. The writer remembers Mummy knitting and sewing late into the night. The second photographed section calls the child a granddaughter, closes “Inge Kurt + Sandy,” and carries the printed names Mr. & Mrs. Kurt M. Elkan. The exact continuation between the two views makes them one message.

The card’s own wording is enough to show how help was given: things made, gifts chosen, time spent with the young household. It does not give a birth date or the recipients’ personal names, and a nearby dated envelope cannot supply the missing date. Sandra in the body and Sandy in the closing are preserved as written. Separately, Inge’s 1996 interview speaks of her daughter Sandy, later named as Sandra, and her son Mark, as she looks back on the family she and Kurt raised.

A memorandum dated 26 April 1965 and signed by Rabbi Max Koppel records adjacent spaces for Louise and Siegfried at Cedar Park Cemetery in New Jersey: line L, graves 17 and 18. It preserves a later connection between the couple and Congregation Emes Wozedek. The date belongs to the location memorandum, not to either person’s death or burial.

By the interview, Inge described photography, travel, volunteering and time with the family as part of their later life. The older papers survive alongside those recollections: a lease for a year in Washington Heights, certificates in the name Ruth, the engagement announcement, a wedding invitation and messages from parents. Alongside the photographs, these survivals make it possible to follow rebuilding at the scale of a household, through work, education, visits and the care passed between generations.