AGRCNEWS4

The Poster Across the Street--A Memoir

by Elizabeth Atly 

My mother was an only child, and her father was the only member of his family to migrate to the United States from Basel, Switzerland, in the early years of the twentieth century.  Grandpa Charlie died within months of my birth; all I ever had to know him by was my mother’s recollections of a doting papa, and a drawer full of photographs of foreign-looking people and places, and cards and letters written in German.

The year I graduated from college, 1963, my best friend talked me into going to Europe with her.  My mother gave me the only cousin’s name she could remember, and asked me to take a moment out of my busy travel schedule to see if I could find out anything about the family she’d never met.

An art student in college, I devised a tight three-month itinerary of museums, cathedrals and other points of visitation for my three-month tour of Europe.  I allowed myself one to three days in Basel to give me a chance to explore the city and any possible family connections, and also to have an easy retreat should my investigations be futile or disappointing.

My hopes of finding relatives were nearly dashed when I opened a Basel phone directory and found that the name “Abt” was as common there as “Johnson”  in my Midwestern Scandinavian home town. I did find my mother’s remembered cousin’s name and timidly placed a phone call. Somehow in spite of language barriers I ended up making a luncheon appointment with an elderly gentleman who, through a waitress/interpreter, reminisced about family connections in Philadelphia—not the Minneapolis of my grandfather’s chosen residence.

The gentleman put me on a trolley with a musty kiss on the cheek, directing me to the Bureau of Records, where I was able to locate some surprising information about my grandfather’s family (another story altogether), and some names and phone numbers to try.  After one false lead though, I was not eager to make random phone calls, and decided to leave on that evening’s train.

Walking down the street lost in thought, I spotted a poster across the street announcing an art exhibit at the Basel Kunstmuseum.  The painting on the poster intrigued me and I crossed the busy street for a closer look.  A chill went through me as I took in the signature on the painting—“Abt”.   I raced to the museum, visited the exhibit and was quite impressed with the collection of paintings by Otto Abt and his colleagues in this month-long 30-year retrospective exhibit by a group of Basel artists prominent since the 1930’s. I inquired of the very formal guard at the entry how I might locate the artist who shared my mother’s family name.  “Mr. Abt is a very busy man,” was his curt reply.

Shrugging off this second futile attempt at family contact, I headed for the train station, for a quick supper and the next train to somewhere else.  With an hour to departure time, I decided to hazard one more try.  After the clink of the coins in the pay phone, I was greeted by a voice that, thankfully, spoke French.  After my fumbling attempts to explain who I was, the man on the other end of the line said, “Lake Harriet Pavilion.”  I knew I had scored this time, as he’d just named a place that was a familiar Minneapolis landmark, a place in fact where my small town high school band had performed several years earlier.

In what seemed like minutes, a middle-aged couple with a son my age, who spoke English, materialized before me in the Ban Hoff dining room.  Hans, the father and my phone correspondent, held in his hand a postcard of Lake Harriet Pavilion, which announced on the reverse side the birth of my mother, May 29, 1913.  (The story could end here, but it doesn’t.)

In the course of our animated conversation, I inquired about the artist whose work I had seen.  A brief exchange in Basel-deutsch ensued, and someone exclaimed “Otti” and ran for the phone.  After another incredibly short interval, a bohemian-looking fellow in beret and trailing neck scarf strode in, and pulled up a chair next to me.  His face, which looked more like my mother’s than any I’d ever seen, was suddenly inches from my own as he articulated—“And Nanette, does she still do the ballet?”  (The story could end here, but it doesn’t.)

A four-day whirlwind of visits followed, with more clones of my mother and their offspring, shared photographs of her childhood and theirs--the same photos as those in the drawer at home, uncountable bottles of the best Alsatian wines (“What a family of drinkers she will say to her mother” became the catch phrase of the memorable visit), and laughter, stories too intricate to follow in the mélange of languages, a family excursion to nearby Colmar, in France, for art and sauerkraut, tearful goodbyes at the train-station.

Thirty-six years later, my heart overflows as I write this.  Needless to say, my mother and father traveled to Basel soon and often thereafter, and the door that was opened in time and space by that momentous walk across  a busy Basel street has never closed. The only remaining member of my mother’s generation is now 98, in a rest home in Basel with severe Alzheimer’s disease.  The vital woman, 40 years my senior, with whom I stayed on subsequent visits and whose physical and mental agility always challenged me, Tante Bethli (pronounced ‘tanta bately’) now remembers nothing beyond going to the theater with papa as a child.

So it remains to me to tell this story, and all the other stories that unfold backward and forward from that most precious of moments in my time on this earth.