Michigan to the world, and back

By Ari Smith

At an event for a book written by a world-famous journalist, you expect to hear stories about their career. Perhaps what sparked their interest in the profession, how they became leaders in their field, awards they’ve won, the celebrities and politicians they’ve interviewed.

At the May 20 event at Zingerman’s Roadhouse for Charles Eisendrath’s recently expanded memoir Downstream from Here: A Foreign Correspondent Discovers Home, there was very little mention of his 30 years as director of the University of Michigan’s Wallace House Center for Journalists, or the founding of the Livingston Awards, often referred to as the Pulitzer Prize for the young. Mr. Eisendrath instead brought guests away from the accolades and into the fullness of his life. He seemed more proud of his Master Canoeist certification from a summer camp as a teenager than any of his scoops, and disappointed that his wife Julia had discouraged him from bringing a commemorative paddle to the event.

That’s not to say that Eisendrath’s work was ignored — attendees were treated to a story describing how he was the onsite reporter for Time during the 1973 Chilean coup, and became the first person to interview the new dictator of the country, Augusto Pinochet. Even that tale, however, spent more time discussing the ways of ensuring your reports made it out of the country than it did the coup or interview. (It turns out that the best method is to bring a suitcase full of ladies’ undergarments and stockings to bribe the Telex and telephone operators.)

Instead of reading a chapter or giving a summary of his book, Eisendrath chose to use a slideshow and tell stories about each photograph, with topics ranging from Thomas Jefferson’s tariffs and the domestic maple sugar industry, the number of second homes in America (seven million, though this statistic is not broken down by usage), to Elsie, a favorite tree on his farm. A personable, engaging, and dapper speaker, Eisendrath encouraged interruptions and questions, but spun his tales so well that his audience was happy to simply see where he led them next.

All these stories may seem disparate but were woven together through the family’s second home in East Jordan, Michigan, named Overlook Farm. Purchased in 1944 by Eisendrath’s parents William and Erna in part to get away from Erna’s parents, Eisendrath and his young family traveled there following the 1973 Chilean coup. In 1975, the Eisendraths began to split their time between Overlook Farm and their home in Ann Arbor, where Eisendrath worked as a professor. Born in Chicago, Eisendrath’s affection for the Midwest and the generations of his family who have called it home shines through.

A particular highlight of the evening was the story of Eisendrath’s “ancestor room,” the playroom at the Overlook Farm where on a rainy spring day, as the family was “trapped in an envelope of moisture,” they decided to go into the attic to explore the trunks that “go back to God-knows-when.” From these trunks, they pulled photographs and heirlooms to cover the walls in a gallery of history. It includes the portrait of Eisendrath’s great-grandfather who bears a face you wouldn’t want to buy a used car from, and what Eisendrath refers to as a “trash fish,” both just as important and part of the family history. “You can’t go in [the room] without feeling different about something,” Eisendrath says.

You may be forgiven at this point for thinking that this event and indeed the book itself are about breaking away from the fame, the career, and the fast-paced nature of daily life to a slow, family-focused existence in Northern Michigan. In reality, however, it’s about the richness and depth of life and experience. Eisendrath’s journalistic experiences covering three wars, vice presidential campaigns, and the heroin trade are on equal footing with a shoe with a nail in it. They’re all memorable days in his life. There is no shunning of one experience over the other, but an embrace of the vastness of who we are and can be. Our society so often focuses on the professional, asking children what they want to be when they grow up and thinking that “so what do you do?” is the best question to get to know someone. Even when a person finds something they love, that they are skilled in, that brings them happiness and satisfaction, they often feel locked in and unable to find new avenues for joy and learning.

In a long and rich life, new paths lead to experiences without losing what has been learned. Eisendrath’s memoir is about homecoming in a literal sense, but also about coming home to yourself, and discovering and rediscovering who you are and can be.

Dorsten: An identity and family history that are inextricably linked

Excerpted from Downstream from Here: A Foreign Correspondent Discovers Home by Charles R. Eisendrath (Mission Point Press, 2024), Pages 124–126, originally published in the International Herald Tribune, June 16, 1999.

The letter came from a stranger in a German town I had never heard of. Would I please inform a local history group about my family and an ancestor who had led the Jewish community 160 years ago? It sounded like the sort of study Americans make of long-lost Indian tribes. Bemused with a new status as anthropological curiosity, I complied — and stumbled into a 10-year reconciliation with history.

My reply did not amount to much. Like most Americans, I knew three sentences-worth about where and what I came from. Anyone named Eisendrath is related because they all — 23, lore has it — came to the United States in 1848, bound for Chicago. By the 1930s, their huge numbers had inspired a sociology thesis and the Eisendrath Cousins Club, 3,000 strong, had taken a complaint directly to President Paul von Hindenburg about an upstart named Adolf Hitler. He was, said the club, giving a bad name to good Germans everywhere — Chicago included.

I did not expect much in return. But what arrived was Jews in Dorsten, a 301-page hardback with an entire chapter on “Die Eisendrath-Story” and a family tree going back to the 18th century. The progenitor couple, Samson and Julia, had borne all the children.

German records disputed the number (birth ledgers listed 18, not 23) and also the legend that all had left Europe.

That should have warned me that comfy notions about being completely American, and entirely removed from the Holocaust, were about to dissolve. But for me, denial was a natural extension of a 1940s and ’50s upbringing with Christmas instead of Hannukah, Israel as a foreign (unvisited) country, and religious training left to the family maid, a Lutheran. Yet we called ourselves Jewish.

If you happen to be a nonpracticing, “assimilated” Jew with a German background, the Holocaust tends to blot out the idea of a single point of origin, as if blood had obliterated your birth certificate. Only gradually did I realize the huge effort going into not knowing something.

Did I have Jews in Dorsten translated? No. Yet the book fascinated me. I spent hours with it — the way a child might, looking at the pictures, puzzling out bits of a language, having parts read to me. Equally oddly, I did not look up the town on a map. I had made at least 20 trips through Amsterdam airport between the day I opened the letter postmarked Dorsten 1988 and last spring. Even then, I went only because business called in Düsseldorf, a half-hour away.

At the door of the Jewish Museum of Westphalia stood an Ursuline nun who had founded it and co-authored the book. Her name was outlandish for someone in her position: Eichmann, as in Adolf.

But Sister Johanna bore no genealogical link to the “angel of death” at Auschwitz. After retiring as revered headmistress of the local convent school, she had mustered a platoon of former students and civics buffs in a cause. They would force the town to amend a planned municipal history to include the 30 or so Jewish families that had lived there.

Her personal story partially explained why. A Jewish mother. A father whose Catholicism had protected the family until 1944, when her mother was packed off to a concentration camp, and Johanna, confirmed Catholic at age 10, was nevertheless drafted into forced labor. At the end of the war, a harrowing escape from the Russians, who detained her as a blonde, blue-eyed Aryan look-alike just as the Nazis had enslaved her because she was Jewish enough.

We were sudden, kindred spirits. It forced astonished reappraisal of everything, including a face that wore 74 years with neither apology nor excuse. I had had no intention of imparting my distrust of museums of the Holocaust, slavery, and other tragedies. The belief that while they inform, they also inspire vengeance is unpopular even in America.

Yet here, in Holocaust heartland, the creator of one of the few Jewish outposts volunteered that she would not permit her center to emphasize how Germany’s Jews had been destroyed. Instead, it emphasized how they had lived. And there was something familiar about this nun, particularly the eyes. They were Eisendrath eyes.

Then it happened. Would I please add my children to the family tree? “This is where I come in,” she said, pointing. “My grandmother married an Eisendrath. I grew up thinking them special because only one family in the world had that name.”

It has taken me a year to absorb all that. Personal history no longer begins in North America. Delusional isolation from the Holocaust has been replaced by something like the angst/relief that haunts children (even some Jewish children) after learning the truth about Santa Claus.

But gone, too, is the paralysis. Out of the vapors stepped my new cousin, the nun, who inspired a sad, strong compulsion to feel more Jewish than I had imagined possible, and more German than seemed permissible.