c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Ernestine Bradley has been many things in her life … daughter, sister, wife, mother, grandmother, author, university professor, even a Pan American Airways flight attendant. But most of all, she is a survivor who has triumphed over severe political, medical and family obstacles.

Her recently published autobiography, “The Way Home: A German Childhood, An American Life” (Pantheon), recounts how she lived through World War II in the small town of Passau, Germany, as a young Lutheran child, and then, as an adult, became everything Adolf Hitler hated: a multilingual, cosmopolitan, world-class intellectual and ferocious anti-Nazi.

Today, Bradley is a leading critic of much of post-1945 German literature relating to the Holocaust which, she believes, does not adequately face that hideous period in history. Bradley uses literature to take the moral temperature of her native land: “I trust literature rather than the media to tell me in what direction the soul of a country is journeying. Literature shows me … blind spots, traumas. … If not literature, then what?”

Along the way, she immigrated to the United States, fell in love with New York City, cooked scrambled eggs on international flights for Pan Am passengers, earned a doctorate at Emory University and, in 1974, married New York Knicks basketball star and future U.S. Sen. Bill Bradley of New Jersey. If the senator had won the Democratic presidential nomination in 2000 and defeated George W. Bush in the general election, Ernestine Bradley would have been America’s first lady.

“The Way Home” provides a firsthand account of a rarely explored area: What was it like for a young German girl when the gangster Nazi regime collapsed and the Allies conquered her country? Bradley and her family were lucky: The U.S. Army and not the Soviet Union’s Red Army captured Passau in April 1945 when she was 10. Bradley remembers her first glimpse of the feared GIs.

“What had I expected? Goose-stepping, marching? … They were … tired, and in no hurry, and with no apparent victors’ euphoria … dusty … not hostile, not frightening … but overwhelmingly endless, powerful … of enormous magnitude.”

It was only years later that she learned the catastrophic facts of the Holocaust and the mass murder of 6 million Jews: “The burden of recent German history, of the Nazi period, descended slowly and piecemeal upon me … never to leave me again. I do not believe there are Germans of any generation … who are unaffected by the knowledge of the Holocaust, whether they deny, repress, minimize, or think the time has come to move on.”

Bradley’s life-long personal struggle centered on her tortured and ambivalent relationships with her mother, natural father and stepfather, a situation she calls a “family circus.” Added to that “circus” were her youthful marriage in Atlanta, the birth of a daughter, divorce, later finding true soulmate Bill Bradley, the birth of a second daughter and the death of her parents in Germany.

In the midst of all that, Ernestine Bradley built a superb academic teaching career in New Jersey that she developed during the 18 years her husband served in the U.S. Senate. Both Bradleys practiced the fine art of commuting between the Garden State and Washington while maintaining their marriage.

In 1992 she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and in overcoming that disease, Bradley bravely did not “deny, repress, minimize, or think the time had come to move on.”

Surprisingly, Ernestine Bradley’s book does not engage in bitter recriminations about the disappointment of the 2000 Democratic presidential primaries, nor does she engage in Washington gossip about members of Congress, their spouses and the infighting that is often the core of such memoirs. And Bradley does not play the all-too-prevalent game of getting even in print with her academic adversaries and opponents.

Instead, “The Way Home” is a compelling look inside the life of a woman who _ because she grew up in a monstrous nation state _ must always carry a burden of memory and pain. Yet she was also able to leave the land of her birth and build a new life in a new land.

It is not surprising that Bradley identifies with Franz Kafka, the Prague Jew who gained literary immortality writing about alienation, being an outsider and the desire to belong. Bradley represents the quintessential modern person who seeks independence, career, family, love, children and a sense of rootedness. Few persons get all those gifts, not even Ernestine Bradley, but she comes close.

MO/PH END RNS

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s Senior Interreligious Adviser, is Distinguished Visiting Professor at Saint Leo University.)

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