Summer of My German Soldier Read Online Free PDF

green-and-white-striped awning sloping down like a circus tent. It would have been nice growing up in that house.
    Before we reached the front steps Grandpa was already at the door. He turned to shout over his shoulder, “Mamma, they’re here! Pearl and Harry.”
    Grandpa has every bit as much hair today as he did in the wedding picture that sits on his bedroom bureau. Now, forty years later, it has changed color, and so has his expression. Then it was—resolute. Yes, resolute. And now it’s just gentle.
    His freshly shaved face carried the aroma of Old Spice. “My oldest grandchild—already a young lady,” he said, hugging and kissing me.
    From the kitchen, the warm, sweet smell of cooking—of roast turkey and carrot tsimmes.
    “How are you, Boss-man?” my father asked, without shakinghands. “Tell me when you poor folks here in Hein Park are going to be able to afford some sidewalks.” It was his favorite joke.
    Grandpa said, “Soon as my rich son-in-law lends me the money,” which happened to be his favorite answer.
    Grandma came from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her flowery apron. Through the years Grandma has put on weight and now her face, while not exactly a perfect circle, is all the same quite round. Last time we were visiting, Grandpa said that he married a 90-pound girl and now he’s got a 180-pound woman. Twice what he bargained for. That was about the only time I ever saw her mad. She insisted that she didn’t weigh an ounce over 165.
    Grandma hugged and kissed us all, with the exception of my father who hurriedly brushed past her on his way to the big chair with the matching ottoman.
    Then she started worrying whether or not we were hungry. Uncle Ben and Uncle Irv weren’t coming for another hour and a half, about two o’clock. “Pearl, wouldn’t you like a nice bowl of soup now? Maybe Harry and the children would like a little something to hold them.”
    “Oh, Mother, I hope you didn’t cook one of your big starchy dinners. You know I have to watch my weight.”
    “Watch your weight at your own house. Here, when my children and grandchildren come to visit, I cook.”
    Mother agreed to a cup of coffee, and my father, after finding out that it was chicken soup with matzo balls, his favorite, relented.
    “I saw your brother, Max,” Grandpa said to my father. “He doesn’t go to many of the brotherhood meetings. He’s a nice fellow, your brother.”
    “Good as gold,” my father agreed. “And if you ever want the world to know something, just tell him. Worst blabbermouth in town.”
    Grandpa let his lips pout forward as if the thought were new and surprising. “I should worry about that? I’m too old for women. I pay my bills. I never hurt anybody. People with dark secrets should worry about Max. Me? I’m not going to worry.”
    Actually, Uncle Max wasn’t really so much of a blabbermouth as he was a rememberer. There wasn’t much that he forgot about people, especially about his family. I think that’s why my father always seems funny—a little tense—around him. Maybe he enjoys remembering what my father enjoys forgetting.
    Like the time last Yom Kippur when we were all standing around outside the Beth Zion Synagogue and one of Uncle Max’s remembrances made my father so angry that he called him, “A damn liar,” right to his face. He was telling what a hot temper my father had had when he was a boy. How he sometimes became uncontrollably mad at one of his brothers, usually Arnie. More than once, according to Uncle Max, Grandfather Bergen had to sit on his son’s bed late at night, repeating, “You will not be violent. You will not be violent!”
    Grandpa sat down next to me on the gold brocade sofa. “You been writing any more letters to the editor of the Commercial Appeal? ” he asked, patting my arm.
    “Oh, no, sir, not any more. I only wrote that one because of that stupid man who wrote that the war was all President Roosevelt’s fault.”
    “Such an