ABSTRACT
I have been thinking about World War II and the bomb my entire life. When we visited my grandparents, we always talked about the war. Both my parents were born Germans first, Jews second. But as the decade of the 1930s wore inexorably on, they all began to realize that this was no longer allowed. In both families, it was the women who organized, cajoled, and insisted on the move. My Swiss grandmother—Ilse, my father’s mother—enticed my grandfather out of his Freiburg home and his legendary garden. I have never seen that garden, but I know of its roses trellised along a wall, its grape arbor shading a picnic table, and the sweet-smelling fruit trees because I have seen the shadow gardens—first in Binghamton, where my grandparents lived; then in my father’s two gardens in Massachusetts; and then, the palest ghost of all, in my own Chicago backyard.
