The Farm in the Green Mountains Read online

  ALICE HERDAN-ZUCKMAYER (1901–1991) was born Alice Henriette Alberta Herdan-Harris von Valbonne und Belmont in Vienna shortly after her parents’ divorce. As a girl, she was a pupil of the radical education reformist Eugenie Schwarzwald and Alice met her first husband, the psychologist and future anti-Nazi leader Karl Frank, through Schwarzwald. Her marriage to Frank was short lived and Alice, now living in Berlin with their daughter Michaela, supported herself by acting and with secretarial work, though she hoped to become a doctor. She met the writer Carl Zuckmayer at a party of actors and artists, and the two married in 1925, the same year Zuckmayer was awarded the Kleist Prize for his play The Merry Vineyard. The next year she gave birth to a second daughter, Maria Winnetou. By 1933 Zuckmayer’s works had been banned and the family moved, first to Austria, and then, in 1938, to Switzerland. They emigrated to the United States with the help of the journalist Dorothy Thompson in 1939. After the success of The Farm in the Green Mountains, Herdan-Zuckmayer published two more memoirs, Das Kästchen (The Box), about her childhood, and Das Scheusal (The Monster), about a dog.

  ELISA ALBERT is the author of the novels After Birth and The Book of Dahlia; a short-story collection, How This Night is Different; and the editor of the anthology Freud’s Blind Spot. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in various publications, including The New York Times, Tin House, The Guardian, and on NPR.

  IDA H. WASHINGTON taught German literature for many years and, along with her husband, Larry Washington, helped found the German-language program at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. She is the author of Dorothy Canfield Fisher: A Biography and collaborated with her daughter CAROL E . WASHINGTON on the translation of The Farm in the Green Mountains.

  Carl Zuckmayer and Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer at the pond at Backwoods Farm, 1941.

  THE FARM IN THE GREEN MOUNTAINS

  ALICE HERDAN-ZUCKMAYER

  Translated from the German by

  IDA H. WASHINGTON and

  CAROL E. WASHINGTON

  Introduction by

  ELISA ALBERT

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1968 by Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer

  Translation copyright © 1987 by Ida H. Washington and Carol E. Washington

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art: Wolf Kahn, Dark on the Right, 2009; © Wolf Kahn / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  First published as Die Farm in den Grünen Bergen in 1949. Published here by arrangement with S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main.

  All photographs © Archiv S. Fischer Verlag

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Herdan-Zuckmayer, Alice.

  Title: The farm in the green mountains / Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer ; introduction by Elisa Albert ; translated by Ida H. Washington and Carol E. Washington.

  Other titles: Farm in den grünen Bergen. English.

  Description: New York : New York Review of Books, 2017. | Series: NYRB classics | Translation of: Die Farm in den Grünen Bergen.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016058214| ISBN 9781681370743 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681370750 (epub)

  Subjects: LCSH: Herdan-Zuckmayer, Alice—Exile—Vermont. | Authors, Austrian—20th century—Biography. | Zuckmayer, Carl, 1896–1977—Exile— Vermont. | Authors, German—20th century—Biography. | Vermont— Description and travel. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Women. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / General.

  Classification: LCC PT2617.E653 Z46313 2017 | DDC 838/.91409 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016058214

  ISBN 978-1-68137-075-0

  v1.0

  For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  The Farm in the Green Mountains

  About This Book

  The Journey to America

  Backwoods Farm

  Immigration

  The Christmases

  The Telephone

  The Pet Animals

  The Beginning

  The Farm Animals

  Confusion in the Chicken Yard

  The Rats

  Bulletin 1652

  Life with the USDA

  Marie

  The Standard

  Drude

  The Way to the Library

  The Library

  Vox Clamantis in Deserto

  The Journey to America

  Epilogue

  Translators’ Acknowledgments

  INTRODUCTION

  When i first read this wise refuge of a book, a blustering butthead had just been elected president of the United States, and everyone was freaking out. Via any number of platforms on any number of screens, there was a cacophony of anxiety and grandstanding and myopia and rage and despair such as I have never seen, or maybe the sheer number of platforms and screens were the never-before-seen entity. Regardless, things seemed to be turning faster and faster in some widening gyre. So it came to pass that I found great comfort in the voice of Auntie Al, as I came to think of the indomitable Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer (I can’t imagine she’d mind). It was, in other words, just the right book at just the right time.

  Exiled from Germany at the start of World War II when the murderous fascist dictator of the hour didn’t take kindly to her famous playwright husband’s satirical critiques, and left cold by stints in New York (“We saw everything, we went everywhere, but never found ourselves”) and Los Angeles (Zuck didn’t want to write tripe for the movies), Alice and Zuck found their way to the titular 193-acre farm in the Green Mountains of Vermont.

  These were urbane sophisticates, mind you. These were celebrated artistic intellectuals with connections, good clothes. Alice had been an actor and then hoped to become a doctor. She had begun medical school. Her birth name was Alice Henriette Alberta Herdan-Harris von Valbonne und Belmont, for goodness’ sake. These were not people who knew from farming. They had no clue if or when they might ever return home. The very idea of “home” had become impossibly muddled, if not permanently eradicated. They were emigrants. They were immigrants. They had no choice. They had to find themselves a new home, and they had to get to work. They chose the farm in Vermont. They got to work.

  “It was the usual course,” Alice says, “one had no right to be an exception.”

  She refuses to be exceptional; this is one of the things that makes her exceptional. There’s no grandstanding here, no hand-wringing, no self-pity. The nineteen vignettes that became Die Farm in den Grünen Bergen started out as letters to her in-laws. Updates, explanations, that’s all. Practical, sensible, and “without illusion.” How refreshing. Erich Kästner (the author of The Parent Trap, among other books, and a writer with the distinction of having watched while his own books were burned by the Nazis) published some of these dispatches in the postwar Munich newspaper he edited, and the rest is history.

  The Zuckmayers learn by necessity. They learn by doing. They acquire domestic animals (cats, dogs) and farm animals (chickens, geese, ducks, pigs, goats). They figure out animal feed and disease and shelter and care. They chop wood, they tend fire. They navigate dense woods and icy, snowy, muddy dirt roads. They obey the rules set forth by the seasons, the we
ather, the landscape, the rural community, the animals, and the land itself. They plant crops for sale and vegetables for their own sustenance. They harvest and slaughter and cook and clean. They bake and sew. They fight a harrowing infestation of rats. They take instruction from USDA pamphlets and from friendly neighbors. There is a hilariously cranky, bossy old woman on their party line. There is a transgender house cat, an infertile chicken, an antisocial duck, and a naughty dog. There are misadventures and horror stories and always, always there is more work to be done. The intricacies of their days, the ins and outs of life on the farm as it is learned and lived by these unlikely inhabitants, this is superficially what The Farm in the Green Mountains is about. On a deeper level, it’s a story of perseverance, protection, everyday heroism, and joy.

  Farm life turns out to be a never-ending cascade of chores. Back-breaking, spirit-bending labor. But “making the best of a difficult situation” is what New Englanders do, apparently, and Auntie Al fits right in. She does the very best she can with what she has, learning as she goes. She gets by on a sense of wonder and curiosity. These are old-fashioned ideals, by which I mean essential and revolutionary. She’s what my Yiddish grandmother would’ve called a shtarker. A hippie before there was any such thing. Open-minded and up for anything. DIY before DIY was a marketing ploy.

  I fell hard for her spirit, hence the audacity of a nickname. She has a real lot to teach us. Such as: The hardest times in life are often tangled up with the happiest. What is most difficult can be most rewarding. Progress is never simple or wholly positive. Sometimes when we lose, we gain, and when we gain, we lose. Our fears and joys are bound up inextricably, pleasure in pain and pain in pleasure. Our efforts to untangle and isolate human experience can leave us confused and depressed. Happiness means choosing to be productive and optimistic, recognizing despair for the ancient parasite that it is and outsmarting it.

  Alice never mentions the name of that insane murderous fascist dictator back in Germany, by the way. She barely discusses the cultural framework that enabled said murderous fascist dictator and set her own exile in motion. “The situation,” she calls it. “Current circumstances.” Some might find this irritating, to say the least: Call it what it is, lady! Millions upon millions of people in Europe are being systematically murdered while you wax on about the pigs and the poultry and the party line and the road conditions in Vermont! But we have a lot of literature already, don’t we, about the millions upon millions, about the systematic murder. What we have less of, what we never have enough of, actually, is literature like this: literature about embodying the alternative, creating something from nothing. From blood and sweat and tears and toil, a livable, sustainable, eminently sane life.

  Resistance can take many forms. Sometimes resistance means simply turning away and busying oneself elsewhere. I think of stressed insomniac Internet addicts “discovering” the Danish tradition called hygge, wherein it’s reportedly nice to sit around the fire with loved ones, eat home-cooked meals, and talk to each other.

  “A change for the better can happen,” Alice remarks, “a change that won’t come from common sources, like the government, nor from indefinite sources, like historical developments, but can and will proceed from individuals.” If there is a comforting thought to be had in these dark times (and all times are dark, are they not?— some admittedly darker than others, but I’m not in the business of relativism), surely it’s this. As the sages of Pirkei Avot tell us: “It is not your responsibility to finish the work of perfecting the world, but neither are you free to desist from it.”

  The wood always needs chopping. The furnace always needs tending. The stove always needs feeding. The goats always need milking. The floor always needs washing. Things always, always need doing with hands, with bodies, in the physical realm.

  “This endlessly repetitive, primitive process of accomplishment was a greater protection against care, anxiety, and fear for one’s life than the application of all manner of understanding, reason, and religion,” Auntie tells us. An idea whose time has come yet again, as we slowly tire of staring at never-ending streams of ads and personal PR campaigns, liking, liking, loving, favoriting, liking, buying, not liking, liking, liking, liking some more, and wondering halfheartedly why everything seems at once so trite and so dire.

  But as we squirm in our own dystopia, squint at dystopias past, and tremble in uncertainty at the dystopias that lie in wait, let us not get carried away by romantic notions of the pastoral (adj.: having the simplicity, charm, serenity, or other characteristics generally attributed to rural areas).

  “We took care of the pipes like babies, the animals like children, and the stoves like temperamental animals. Wood was sacred. We stood at the center of everything, and to survive we had to be watchman, caretaker, and protector, constantly blocking a return to chaos,” Alice recalls. Nature’s no warm blankie. So how was it that she managed to find in every hardship an opportunity, in every setback a gift, in every unforeseen problem an adventure, in every new obstacle a good story to tell later? Could nothing get this woman down?

  Refuge is the heart of this impossibly rich book. The Farm in the Green Mountains is Alice’s refuge, and Alice’s recounting of it became my own. Never mind that she’s on the run from murderous fascist apes amidst a world war while I’m on the run from Facebook. And never mind the fact that behind the façade of the pastoral is the wild brutality of Nature. (Which we’ve worked so long and hard to dominate! So that we may now bemoan its decline! Ha.)

  Meanwhile, Alice carries on a surprising love affair with the early Middle Ages, undertaking grueling but giddy weekly journeys to and from the Dartmouth College library so she can sit and study undisturbed by farm animals and endless chores. The ordeal of traveling to the library gets its very own chapter. It’s endearing for what it reveals about so many of us who belong to the raggedy, time-traveling tribe of book lovers (book worshippers, more like it). Her ode to the library is an unexpected rapture, a sweet reprieve from farm life: “The meaning is in the books, stored up as latent energy, and the important thing is to carry this energy over into life and make it useful to living people.”

  So lovingly does she speak about the library that I feel it as yet another refuge, having never set foot in it. I’d love to hear from librarians and students at Dartmouth about how her rendering holds up. (Regarding the college’s founding ethos, however, I respectfully submit that the “wild” Native Americans were never in need of “taming” or conversion to Christianity, but we’ll leave that be for now.)

  For a biblical seven years, the Zuckmayers live and work in the United States. Then the war is over and it’s time to see what remains of the cities, friends, and relatives back “home” in Germany. They return to find unimaginable destruction, the aftermath like “the tender skin that begins to grow over infected wounds.” It is not any recognizable home to them at all. And Alice isn’t foolish enough to imagine that life will ever be the same again anywhere. The murderous fascist elements of society “are just waiting for a new era of insanity, when crimes will again be legally permitted and the mentally ill will again achieve power and honor.”

  Still, the sun will rise and set, winter follows fall follows summer follows spring follows winter, death and decay spare no living thing. Creation and destruction exist in perpetual cycles. Folksy wisdom, sure, but don’t tell me it isn’t resonant when the dystopias are scratching and slobbering at the door.

  “In America nothing is very long ago,” Alice observes at one point, and it’s not hard to see why the Zuckmayers hold fast to living here. Immigrants, we’re told, often describe their acclimation as a kind of second childhood. Within what is projected as the “simplicity and independence” of their adopted homeland, the Zuckmayers seem to have had a particularly happy one: “We have suffered no real disappointments, for if you accept people and things as they are you cannot be disappointed.” Truth bomb, Auntie Al.

  The farm is both a literal refuge and a metaphori
c refuge, where the madness and brutality of a deranged world can’t touch us because we are so removed, so utterly reliant upon ourselves, and so thoroughly beholden to our work, our responsibilities. Our toil is our treasure; the landscape is our home. The best can be made of literally anything, at any time.

  So when Alice reports in her epilogue of a new massive highway built in the 1950s, when America was on its postwar progress progress progress kick, it’s a shock. A knife in the heart.

  “The farm is now easy to reach,” Alice tells us sadly. But it wasn’t supposed to be easy! It was supposed to be hard. Intensely, gloriously, redemptively, all-consumingly hard. Who came up with the idea that anything’s supposed to be easy? Refuge is a full-time job. Whatever are we to do with ourselves now? Wherever will we go?

  —Elisa Albert

  THE FARM IN THE GREEN MOUNTAINS

  ABOUT THIS BOOK

  This book was not supposed to turn into a book at all. It grew out of a series of letters that I wrote after the end of the war to my husband’s parents. They had survived the destruction of their house by fire bombs and were waiting in their old age for our return. Since that kept being delayed, I began to write to them about what had been happening to us in America during the long years of separation. Our existence in these years had, in many ways, taken a quite different form from the circumstances one would imagine for an emigrated writer. Just this life, however, in its primitive, rural setting, had given us a knowledge of and respect for everyday America which many immigrants never get. The more I remembered, the longer my letters grew. After Erich Kästner, then editor of the Munich Neue Zeitung, happened to see some of these letters during a visit to the Zuckmayer parents, I was amazed to see them suddenly appear in his magazine section. Encouraged by this and spurred on by many questions, I put together the present account.