Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

I was likewise moved by a story of another England, one that reassured me as I thought of those who had perished because they had nowhere to go. Our next-door neighbors, Erika Urbach and her mother, Mrs. Offenbacher, were Czech Jews who had secured English entry visas as the Nazis closed in. But their transit visas for crossing Europe did not materialize until after their English papers had expired. They nonetheless boarded the train in Prague. In the Netherlands, an officer tried to eject them, arguing that they would not be admitted in England, but Mrs. Offenbacher insisted that they could not be removed because their transit visas were valid. When their ferry landed in Dover, they disembarked and Mrs. Offenbacher stood for a full hour watching people proceed through border control, trying to decide which official seemed kindest. Finally, Mrs. Offenbacher (who was a beautiful woman, as Erika was a beautiful child) carefully selected a queue. The customs officer noted, “Your entry permit for the United Kingdom has expired.” Mrs. Offenbacher calmly replied, “Yes. But if you send us back, we will be killed.” There was a long pause while they looked each other in the eye, and then he stamped both passports and said, “Welcome to England.”

My preoccupation with discovering a foreign refuge was matched by an intense curiosity about the same world I found so threatening. Although England lay at the forefront of my imaginings, I also wanted to know what Chinese people ate for breakfast, how Africans styled their hair, why people played so much polo in Argentina. I read voraciously, immersing myself in Indian fairy tales, Russian folk stories, and Tales of a Korean Grandmother. My mother brought home a Kleenex box illustrated with people in their native costumes. Believing that everyone in Holland clunked around in wooden shoes and all Peruvians wore jaunty bowler hats, I imagined meeting them all and kept the box after the tissues had been used up. I wanted to visit every country in the world at least once—as though having set foot in China or India met the same checklist parameters as touching down in Gambia or Monaco or connecting through the Bahamas.

Fortunately for me, my mother loved travel. She first went to Europe immediately after the Second World War, when she was twenty-two, when visiting the ravaged continent was considered enough of a novelty that her hometown paper chronicled her departure. Our first significant family trip abroad—to England, France, and Switzerland—came when I was eleven, and in the years that followed, we often tagged along on my father’s European business trips. He was never particularly interested in new places, but tourism brought out the best in my mother. Before we went anyplace, she would teach us about it. We’d read relevant books, learn local history, find out about the food we were going to eat and the sights we would see. My mother was a scheduler; she would have worked out an itinerary for each day, down to when we’d get up and when we’d return to the hotel. Such precision may sound alarming, but it was actually relaxing, because it meant that we were surprised only by the places themselves. We never rushed. My mother said you should always travel as if you would return; if you thought you were making your sole visit anywhere, you would try to see everything and therefore wouldn’t really see anything. “Always leave something for next time, something to tempt you back,” she said.

Not until high school, though, did I begin to connect these geographical adventures to a sweeping narrative. Mr. Donadio, my ninth-grade history teacher, was fond of the orotund phrase: he described various important figures (Ramses II, Pontius Pilate, Catherine the Great, Napoléon, Thomas Jefferson) as standing at “the crossroads of history.” I envisioned them as brave men and women who disregarded traffic lights, turning sharply left or right where everyone else had planned on proceeding straight ahead. I came to recognize that while such men and women had made choices that reshaped the world, they were, equally, making those choices because of their circumstances. Another teacher insisted that it was impossible to determine whether such leaders were consciously making history or merely fulfilling its demands. I remember thinking in ninth grade that I would like to behold the crossroads of history, with some grandiose adolescent hope that if I could describe what happened at the intersection, I might even affect its course.