Background on For Services Rendered

I began writing For Services Rendered in the winter of 2002-03, just about a year after my paternal grandmother passed away. By the end of spring 2003, the story seemed strong enough for me to present an excerpt at my MFA graduating reading, after which one of the faculty writers complimented what I had read. He added, “I bet that story took a lot of research.”

I’m not sure why his comment startled me. But it did.

Of course, the story had required a lot of research. And with a PhD in history, I had embraced the challenge. When I suspected that my original understanding of the circumstances of German-Jewish physicians in the 1930s was incomplete, I consulted Michael H. Katner’s Doctors Under Hitler (University of North Carolina Press, 1989). Locating Emmy Göring’s account of her life with her husband (in English translation) proved to be invaluable as I crafted the story’s plot and character development. Rechecking the specifics of historical events, from the Kristallnacht to the postwar Nuremberg trial, also made a significant difference.

But at its core, this was not a story that came from research. It came from listening: to my grandmother.

My father’s parents, German Jews, met as young adults in the United States. My grandfather left his village in 1937; my grandmother came from her native city, Mannheim, in 1938. Upon arriving in New York, my Abitur-credentialed Grandma found a job as a nanny for a Jewish-American family.

That family’s pediatrician – who later became my father’s pediatrician, too – was also a German Jew. And back in Germany, the pediatrician had cared for the offspring of someone my grandmother routinely identified in her storytelling as “a high-level Nazi.” This official, my grandmother said, had told the good doctor “to get out of Germany” before it was too late.

My grandmother’s anecdotes and stories had inspired my fiction before, but in the months after her death I found myself thinking back to this particular piece of combined family and world history. It seemed incomprehensible that the same eyes and hands that had treated my father’s childhood tonsillitis and penicillin allergy had also seen and touched the child of a Nazi leader. And given my lifelong awareness of what it meant to be a Nazi leader, it seemed equally hard to digest the idea that such a person had committed an act of such kindness, most likely saving the lives of this pediatrician and his own family.

My father—always proud of that PhD I’d earned and, though loyal and supportive, somewhat less enthralled by my post-PhD pursuit of the creative writing MFA in fiction—encouraged me to pursue the story as a nonfiction account. He remembered the doctor’s name and was convinced that with my research skills I’d be able to track down the man, if he were still alive, or his family.

But for me, this story presented the ideal material for fiction. In fiction, I would be allowed to speculate on the motivations and conflicts and, within certain limits (like the history of legal restrictions against Jewish physicians in Nazi Germany, and the Görings’ own chronology of marriage and parenthood and postwar punishment), I’d be able to uncover other “truths.” And that was the route I chose.

I hope that I succeeded. My only regret is that I wrote this story too late for my grandmother, my last surviving grandparent, to read it. I like to think that had I been able to share a copy with her, she would have responded as she did when, a short time before she died, I mailed her a large-print version of another piece inspired by her years of storytelling. She’d read it and instantly picked up the phone: “You’ve been listening to me all these years!” she said, with some wonder in her voice. Oh, yes, Grandma. I have.

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