American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest (3 page)

Julia Schuster Staab as a young bride.

Family collection.

J
ulia wore black at her wedding—German brides did then. She married on Christmas Day, and a day or two later, she left her home forever.

In a photo of Julia from around the time she married, she wears a black satin dress with a subtle floral pattern on the arms. Lace cascades down her chest, and a large brooch holds a bow around her neck.
Perhaps this is a bridal photo: she is young, barely a woman, and she sits uncomfortably and looks away from the camera. Her expression is somber, the way people were in early photographs—to be photographed was a serious occasion meant to capture one’s image for eternity. Her nose is aquiline and a bit severe. A dark coil of thick, twisted hair is piled high on her head, a frothy fringe of curls circling her forehead.

I first saw that photo when I visited the home of my aunt Betsy, in a winding, rock-and-cactus-littered adobe subdivision thrust up against the Sandia Mountains in Albuquerque, the city in which my father and his siblings grew up. Betsy and her French husband had returned to New Mexico after twenty-five years of living in Europe. She had moved to France after she married—the reverse journey that Julia had taken. Betsy found it difficult to live as a stranger in France and equally difficult to return home after living away for so long. Like Julia, she felt she no longer belonged in either place.

Perhaps that was why our family history had become so important to Betsy: she focused instead on where she came from. She was the archivist of her generation—deeply organized, brusque and businesslike, a tenacious seeker and keeper of photos and stories and newspaper clippings, with no-fuss short hair, a Cleopatra profile, and a thunderous voice. The road to Julia, I was quite certain, traveled through Betsy, who took me in with a big hug and set me up with a pile of files in her spare room, a south-facing rectangle with a trundle bed and a desk. “THERE YOU GO!” she boomed, and she whisked off to wipe the counters, drink her coffee, skype with her children abroad. I leafed through a blizzard of paper: maps and photographs—diminutive strangers in old-fashioned clothing—memos, photocopies, faxes.

It was in that pile that I uncovered a family tree of Julia’s kin, the Schusters—nine sisters, two brothers—a large Jewish family. The tree consisted of four pages stapled together to accommodate all the marriages
and far-flung offspring, full of odd German names—Emilie, Amalie, Regine, Sofie, Bernhard. Julia was third from the left—“Julie,” the German spelling, pronounced
Yul-ya
, born in 1844. Betsy had received the tree from a distant relative she had found on the Internet, a great-nephew of Julia’s from Germany. With that many siblings, Julia would have had many great-nieces and -nephews, and until this moment I hadn’t realized that I cared to know about them. Betsy gave me copies of the emails she had exchanged with these relatives whose names I had never heard before, whose stories I’d never contemplated as part of my own.

From these exchanges, I learned that Julia’s family had come from a village named Lügde—
Luuech-da
—which was then a quiet, compact town of some three thousand people on the Emmer River, in the forested hills of Westphalia in northwestern Germany. The floodplain on which Lügde perches—a set of parallel meadows—offered a clearing in the forest, an interlude of light for those floating downriver toward the Weser and the North Sea. The village was named for that light:
Licht
,
luuech-da
, Lügde. It was tucked in the bottom of a valley between two mounded hillsides, and hemmed in by green patchwork fields and conifer forests—untamed, shady places, full of wild orchids and mushrooms.

There was a roundness to the countryside around Lügde, an alluvial smoothness interrupted by stone farmhouses and solitary castles and gentle watercourses. Lügde was green in the summer. Winters were long. The rock doves, common nightingales, and
eisvögel
—kingfishers—would fall silent around Saint Hedwig’s Day on the sixteenth of October, and Julia and her neighbors wouldn’t hear the birds sing again until Easter. Saint Hedwig’s Day happens to honor a German saint who married young, bore seven children, buried a child, and rose after death—as Julia would.

Julia’s family, the Schusters, had been in Lügde for many generations. In her time, the villagers had farmed and produced linen, lace,
and cigars. Today it’s a still-small factory town best known for its
Osterrad
, a fiery oak “Easter wheel” that is stuffed with hay, set aflame, and rolled down a nearby hillside. The Easter wheel has been flaming downhill for a thousand years or so—in their own blazing moment, the Nazis embraced it as a true Teutonic ritual. The wheel burned before the Jews arrived in medieval Lügde, peddling their wares from their backs, then from wagons, then from stores. It burned each Easter when Julia was a child; it burned in 1865, the year she married.

The wedding likely took place in Lügde. Julia was twenty-one years old, Abraham twenty-six. Her father, Levi, was a wealthy local merchant, and the wedding would have been a festive affair. There was no synagogue in town—none was permitted. Instead, Lügde’s Jews worshipped in a rented house with ten rows of seats left and right of a central aisle, and a ceiling decorated with a starry sky. Perhaps Julia and Abraham made their promises there, or perhaps in her father’s large half-timbered
Fachwerk
home in the south quarter of the village, under a pitched roof on a cold Monday evening in December. There would have been feasting and dancing well into the night, the men on one side, the women on the other. In the ketubah—the marriage contract—Abraham would have vowed to provide Julia with food, clothing, and children. In those respects, at least, he kept his promises.

Here is how Abraham looks in photos from his youth: clean-faced and compact, with a tightly trimmed beard, a light spray of freckles, deep-set eyes, and a stubby nose. He looks alert and attractive; there’s a potency to him. This is the man who took Julia away from Lügde.

Abraham must have known Julia before the marriage, because he had grown up in Lügde, too. His father, Moses, was a merchant there as well—though not, like Julia’s father, a particularly wealthy one. In a history of Lügde’s Jews sent to me by a historian from the area, I
found the Schuster name scattered throughout the document; the family’s presence in the village dates back at least to the eighteenth century. But I could find no mention of Abraham’s father until 1868, when he served on the village’s Jewish council. It seemed the Staabs were relative newcomers to Lügde.

Nor did Abraham stay there long. Born in 1839, he departed in 1854 at the age of fifteen—Julia would have been ten, still a girl. He left in a great wave of migration that swept Germany in the middle of the nineteenth century. The emigrants were young men, mostly, running from the general woes of being a German at that moment in the country’s history—famine, conscription, political disillusionment—and the more specific insults that came with being a Jewish German at almost any time: laws and taxes and tolls and proscriptions, reminders at every turn that Jews didn’t and couldn’t belong.

There was no good reason to stay in Germany, so Abraham left. He would have traveled the Weser River down through the cities of Hameln and Bremen and north on to Bremerhaven, where the Weser emptied into the North Sea and the ships sailed to America. The young emigrants from Lügde went by steamboat if they could afford it. If they couldn’t, they drifted downstream for two weeks on floating trees strapped together and sold as wood for shipbuilding at the North Sea ports. From Bremerhaven, Abraham sailed to New York. There’s no record of his arrival or of how long he stayed there—according to Aunt Lizzie’s family history, he found a position at a merchant house in Norfolk, Virginia, where he stayed for two years, learning bookkeeping and the ancient art of buying low and selling higher. Then he joined his older brother Zadoc in Santa Fe.

They went to work for a cousin, Solomon Spiegelberg, who had come to Santa Fe in 1846 as a sutler, a civilian merchant selling supplies to the US Army, traveling with a column of a thousand poorly trained Missouri volunteers when they invaded Mexico and claimed Santa Fe
for the United States. Spiegelberg stayed on afterward, bringing his brothers, five of them, as well as his cousins Abraham and Zadoc. The Staab brothers worked for the Spiegelbergs for two years, learning Spanish and traveling the length and breadth of the territory. In 1859, they opened their own dry goods store and began hauling supplies and capital from east to west over the Santa Fe Trail—brides, too, eventually.

This was Abraham’s story—and thus Julia’s. By the time he married, he was a rags-to-riches success, a man of business and the world, and his public doings provide one of the few windows through which we can peer into Julia’s life. The company he founded with his brother Zadoc, Z. Staab & Bro., was a prominent one in Santa Fe. Wherever I searched in newspapers of the territorial era, I found the house of Staab: multiple ads in each issue advertising new shipments from the “States,” lists of wares in full columns and colossal typefaces.

The Staabs sold “stuff,” anything a Southwest-bound settler could want or imagine. “Hats Boots & Shoes, Hardware, Groceries &c. &c., all of which will be found as well as sorted, carefully selected and compiled, at the lowest rates.” Fur, wool, corn, coffee, sugar, butter, lard, “Common whiskey,” “splendid whiskey,” beer (Schlitz, exclusively), pianos, razors, saddles. They sold castor oil, calico, “fine custom made clothing,” the latest ladies’ fashions—though the wagon train across the prairie took so long that the fashions might have changed several times before the clothes arrived—linen cambric, mohair, and garden seeds “at Eastern prices.” They sold it all, from first one, then two, then four large storefronts on the Santa Fe Plaza.

Within a few years, Z. Staab & Bro. was the largest wholesale company in the Southwest. The brothers booked hundreds of thousands of dollars—1860s dollars—of revenue each year. Their safes overflowed with silver; what wouldn’t fit in the safes they kept in empty ax crates in
their office. They made loans, dispensed promissory notes, even issued their own currency.

When the Confederate army invaded Santa Fe in 1862, the Staabs and their Spiegelberg cousins sided with the Union. I could find no evidence that Abraham served in the Union army during the Civil War, though people sometimes called him “Colonel.” His campaign was commercial, keeping the Union forts stocked with grain and uniforms. A Confederate soldier who took part in the occupation of Santa Fe wrote of “smooth-faced Jews, that are our bitter enemies and will not open their stores or sell on confederate paper,” and suggested that “they ought to be run off from town themselves.” Perhaps the Jewish merchants sided with the North because of an antipathy to slavery—or perhaps they simply knew how to pick a winner.

The Confederates didn’t hold Santa Fe long. In late March 1862, they fought the Union troops to a bloody draw at Glorieta Pass, twenty miles southeast of Santa Fe. Technically, the Confederates won the battle. But while they were fighting, a battalion of Colorado soldiers happened upon the Confederates’ lightly guarded supply train. The Union soldiers looted and torched sixty Confederate wagons, blew up ammunition, spiked a cannon, and slaughtered or drove off five hundred horses and mules. Soon after, the Confederates, lacking ammunition, shelter, blankets, and food—and without smooth-faced Jews willing to supply them with more—straggled back to Texas.

After the Civil War’s last shot was fired, Abraham decided to become a US citizen. I found this information in the New Mexico state archives, which are hidden in an industrial cul-de-sac off Santa Fe’s busiest thoroughfare. I had driven down from Colorado, following a long stretch of highway that paralleled the route of Julia’s own voyage to New Mexico. It was an uncannily hot day. The birds and the flowers were confused, the crocuses lured out of the ground and returned to stalk, the tulips soon to follow. It was painful to go inside and install
myself in the archives—a stale, windowless place, as many public archives are. But I hoped that those lightless shelves might shed some light on Abraham, who left Lügde an inconsequential teenager and returned triumphant to claim his bride.