As unexpected gifts go, a grave ranks fairly high, in my estimation. And not just any old grave, but a spot at Westchester Hills Cemetery, just north of New York City, the resting place of Gershwins, Guggenheims and other major figures of the Jewish establishment. This, amazingly, I learned was mine for the taking four years ago, the last present I would receive from a man I scarcely knew yet idolised, my uncle Richard Lindner who died in 1978 and was buried there.
Richard was a famous artist whose paintings hang in major galleries around the world. I met him only once, when he visited my family in Stoke-on-Trent in 1967, a landmark year of international success for him and when his face appeared amongst the famous throng, including Marx, Einstein and Marilyn Monroe, on the cover of the Beatles’ groundbreaking new album Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
This man - short, skinny, balding, clad in fine denim and suede - was the older brother of Arthur Lindner, my father, and his opposite in many ways. The brothers, born in 1901 and 1904, had grown up in Nuremberg, Germany, had suffered separate horrible events before and during World War II, had survived to re-establish themselves in different lands, but still, I discovered in 1967, were willing to argue about their parents. Arthur had loved them; Richard despised them. Some discords never die.
It was the gift of the grave that spurred me to begin working on a biography of the Lindner brothers, Richard in particular, who had lived in Manhattan and rubbed shoulders with the great and the good. But my book, The Meeting, is Arthur’s story too, and to a degree mine, seeking to assemble and accept the patchy, scrappy history of my family, semi-obliterated by fascism yet reconstituted, with scars, elsewhere, the pain and silences inadvertently passed down to a second generation.
Like many children of Holocaust survivors, I grew up with almost no roots or relatives, little family history and no sense of belonging. There was some family mythology, and some scraps of paper – Red Cross letters from concentration camps, Nazi passports, photographs of strangers in peculiar clothes. How, then, to reconstitute a narrative encompassing these people?
The Lindner family at the start of the 20th century
Although UK born and bred, I had emigrated to America in 2013 where it seemed easier to delve into Richard’s past, perhaps talk to some members of his circle, and do research at places he knew. I found myself traveling to unfamiliar corners of New York City, to interview students whom he had taught at the Pratt Institute, and visiting the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which had granted him an award and still had on file his mixed response.
I went to Washington, where the curator’s preparations for a major show of Richard’s work in the late 1990s at the Hirshhorn Museum filled endless box files with a rich brew of fact, cuttings, comment and gossip from scholars, friends and peers. And I hit pay dirt twice, with caches of previously unseen letters, one pertaining to Richard’s first wife, Elsbeth; and another from my uncle himself, at a crucial point in 1950, when he had stepped outside his Manhattan life and gone to Paris alone, to jumpstart his career. These conveyed the voice of the man – not the hero of my youth but a vulnerable, questing and oddly judgmental figure on an important journey.
With Arthur, it was easier to draw on family memories, but there was research too, especially into the two periods he had spent in concentration camps – and never discussed - and also his experience after arriving in England in late 1939, first at the Kitchener Camp for Jewish refugees, in Sandwich, Kent; and later on the notorious ship the Dunera, which transported enemy aliens from the UK to Australia in 1940, brutalizing them en route.
The Meeting assembles these figures and others I scarcely knew, while I did my best to give them form and presence, to love and understand them. Did I do it well and accurately? I don’t know the answer just yet, but perhaps, when we lie side by side in Westchester Hills, I will have eternity to ask Richard about this, and so much more.
Elsbeth Lindner is speaking about The Meeting at Jewish Book Week on March 5. The Meeting is published by Harbour
