survived recalled that during the forced showers, when the tens of thousands of children, women, and men were suffocated by gas, the loudspeakers in the camp would play Bach. And Beethoven. When the next trains arrived, they would play Mozart.
Mendelsohn was nearly overwhelmed by the human disaster he encountered everywhere, the cruel consequences of the Master Race mythology, the unspeakable barbarism it had unleashed. Dazed and shattered remnants of the Jews, Gypsies, and liberals who miraculously had escaped the fires of Dachau, Treblinka, Auschwitz, and Buchenwald filled every by-way and turgid refugee camp in the heart of Europe. It was a desolate and desperate journey into the dark heart of racism, and he wanted to capture that reality in his “Kilroy Was Here” columns that now had begun to appear in Newsweek. The heartbreaking powerlessness of the skeletal survivors seeded a fierce resolution. Mendelsohn knew he would resist the horror of racism whenever and wherever he found it.
On his last week on the continent, Max Miller had sent him a cable.
Teddy,
Soon as you can shake the clan after your visit home, there’s a chair for you at Newsweek. Folks here are eager to meet Kilroy because your stuff has been so alive and on-target. We got a lot to do, pal. Come.
Max
When he returned to Atlanta at the end of the year, Ted Mendelsohn was nearly a stranger to his family. Although they ravenously reclaimed him, he found the norms of Atlanta life stultifying and surprisingly difficult. He had changed, and Atlanta was changing. The city was racing into a buoyant postwar prosperity, reaching out to new suburbs and greenery. But beneath the euphoria, he could detect the old truisms of caste and race that he remembered from his childhood.
It was soon apparent that the subject of racism in any form was a source of irritation to his parents.
“Let the schwartze get the laundry, Teddy darling. You ought to rest.”
He reacted abruptly and loudly, startling his mother. “Christ, Mom, stop that! Clementine is not a schwartze. She’s an American who happens to be Negro!”
His mother’s eyes widened; she was clearly wounded by the sharpness in his rebuke. “All right, darling. I understand. I won’t use that word. I won’t say schwartze again.” She cocked her head, seeking to find the boy who had gone off to war, then smiled. “I should have my mouth washed out with soap.”
Ted looked tenderly at his mother. “When is the last time you told me that, mom? Probably when I called Paddy McElroy a lousy harp when he called me a kike after Boy Scout camp!”
She kissed him then and walked briskly to the door. “Get washed up, Teddy. We’re going to the club for dinner.”
Relieved and grateful to have him home safe, she brought her young veteran into the social swim of the synagogue and the country club, eager to have him meet the young men and women who could relaunch him into the community. “He’s very high-strung,” she confided to her husband that night as they were retiring. “He’s been through a lot.” But fatigued by the daily struggle to keep Eli Dairy running through the long war when all the young men had been gone, his father was ailing now. Ted watched with distress as proud Irving Mendelsohn’s strength seemed to be betraying him. “Help me, Teddy.” The words were so needy that Ted became more and more involved with Eli Dairy. In his first letter to Max Miller after returning stateside, he wrote of his dilemma.
Max,
The wandering Jew has returned to the family and to the South that still won’t hire Teddy Wilson. I’m trying to pass the buck of Eli Dairy to a younger cousin who likes it here, but my old man is a hard case who believes in tradition, responsibility, loyalty, early bedtime, and the separation of the races. Not sharing much of that, I’m not getting much traction. As to the separation of the races, that’s now a no-man’s-land where conversation dies. So keep my seat warm, but I won’t be able to use it until something changes.
Teddy
Irving Mendelsohn died late in December, and Max received another letter from Ted.
Max
Life gets in the way of life. So much to tell you when we get together. Arriving with my sweetheart, Julia, and will call you from Grand Central. Dust off the chair.
Ted
In the Spring of 1951, Julia Berg and Ted Mendelsohn were married in the living room of Max and Maggie Miller. “Your wedding present is a year’s subscription to Newsweek,” toasted Max with great ceremony. “Oh, and something I almost forgot to mention. Kilroy here is getting the Washington beat, no shabby beginning.” He grinned at the wide-eyed couple. “Newsweek thinks you and Washington will be a great fit, Teddy. We’re planning on keeping you real busy. And that should keep your bridegroom close enough, Julia honey, so he can pick up the groceries on the way home!”
For four years the Mendelsohns reveled in the excitement and glamour of the postwar capitol, only retreating to the quieter Maryland suburbs to replant their burgeoning family in a greener soil. The Kilroy of Yank magazine became the now bylined Ted Mendelsohn of Newsweek, leading the frantic bifurcated life of the commuter. Dogged and determined to create the nest that Julia had dreamed of since leaving Atlanta, he seemed to be constantly racing home for picnics, birthday parties, parents’ nights, and Little League games, all the demanding small-town happenings that seemed to overspill from the family calendar. Julia was radiant, intimately involved with the warp and woof of her kids’ lives. But the world of the newsroom was beginning to tremble with a new urgency of a “cold war” abroad and a roiling civil liberties conflict where charges of “Communist sympathizers” were erupting from Senator Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. When Ted found the names of friends and colleagues on “black lists” that made them unhireable, his eagerness to get actively back on the scene and in the field became ever more at odds with his insulated life in the suburbs.
Max was nervously alive to the tremors, goading his reporters to “dig harder, dig deeper, and dig faster. You’re getting paid to keep us in front of the news, not sucking hind tit!” Max’s demands became the frantic focus of Mendelsohn’s life, and Mendelsohn’s idyll on the outskirts of the world skidded to an end. As segregation was being challenged in the schools and in the public accommodations of the South, as pray-ins and sit-ins exploded, and as the right of blacks to vote in elections were being asserted and denied, Mendelsohn’s bylines ricocheted from the Carolinas, Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia, and back to Washington, where the Senate was still debating whether to pass anti-lynching legislation.
Briefly back at home, he found Laurie to be shy in his presence and Richard unfamiliarly cool. Julia tried to be welcoming, but her exasperation at the changes in the normal routines he had forced on their lives could not be hidden.
“What has happened to you, Ted? What is happening to us? You missed Richard’s father-son banquet at the temple. Again. Last time it was sit-ins in Tennessee. This time it was Little Rock. Where the hell will you be when Laurie graduates? Damn it. It’s not fair!” She sat, desolate, on the edge of the bed, next to his half-empty Valpack. “It’s not what we planned, sweetheart.”
He nodded. “I know that, Julia. I feel like I’m tied to a runaway train. I’m on the cusp of something that I feel I’ve got to cover, to understand. It’s why I do what I do, darling. Why I’m not peddling milk. Why I’m a journalist. History is not waiting for me, and I find myself running like mad.” His voice broke. “Looking like a stranger to my daughter and missing father-son suppers with my kid, whom I adore. Feeling guilty. And not knowing what to do about it.”
Julia
