{"id":2471,"date":"2022-06-09T14:20:15","date_gmt":"2022-06-09T14:20:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/?page_id=2471"},"modified":"2022-06-09T14:20:15","modified_gmt":"2022-06-09T14:20:15","slug":"bringing-holzermanns-back","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/?page_id=2471","title":{"rendered":"Bringing Holzermann’s Back"},"content":{"rendered":"
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My childhood memories come back as images — still scenes, usually, with a flavor, a particular feeling or mood.\u00a0 But I need a word to get to them.\u00a0 Once you have a word, of course, you can see what\u2019s on the net.\u00a0 On a rare occasion of actually dusting in the house one day, a little doll I keep on the dresser caught my attention for a moment.\u00a0 It gave me a nice feeling \u2013 the \u201clooking back\u201d feeling.\u00a0 Joy, I think. \u201cHoltzermann\u2019s.\u201d I put the name into the search box, just out of curiosity.\u00a0 I really wanted images, but the search engine kept finding tiresome texts, such as \u201cHoltzermann\u2019s was a German toy store at 517 Cedar Avenue, Minneapolis, Minnesota\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Well of course<\/i> it was German, I thought. That didn\u2019t even need saying, did it?\u00a0 I want to see<\/i> it again, that place filled with the most magical, sparkling, delicate, fuzzy, chugging, clicking, jumping, fascinating objects in the world.\u00a0 I want to see what a child of 7 or 8 saw in the mid-1950s: proof that the adult world could look through the eyes of a child\u2014and smile.\u00a0 Show me the wall of dolls and dollhouses and another of miniature trains \u2013 cars and engines with crossings and signs and bridges, attendants and passengers.\u00a0 Show me the nutcrackers and skis, fairy-tale figures and jumping animals, fragile glass decorations and strong wooden blocks.\u00a0 I want the evidence that grown-ups put grown up energy into making tiny clothes and sofas and pots and pans, little turtles and tigers, dolls\u2019 clothes in sumptuous fabric, miniature animals that could run and sing.\u00a0 Show me! <\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Maybe Mom took me twice, maybe more.\u00a0 I remember going in the winter, anyway, when the lights from the store made the wide sidewalk shine, and fat, fluffy snowflakes were falling slowly, making Cedar Avenue look like a story was about to begin. I still think the German part is obvious, though.\u00a0 What probably does need saying is that we lived in a small town in southern Minnesota, that Minneapolis is a city\u2014the biggest between Chicago and the West Coast, and that at the time, my mother was developing rather particular\u2014it\u2019s fair to say urban tastes.\u00a0 Her attraction to the city may have been fundamentally mercantile, but it was heartfelt — and contagious. And another thing–our family, although it was thoroughly American and had been for several generations, thought of itself as German.\u00a0 I suspect it was not unusual in Minnesota.\u00a0 For although the state makes much of its Scandinavian heritage, there are more than twice as many people of German descent as there are of all the Scandinavian groups combined. That made coming from a German family absolutely unremarkable. <\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The search engine did find some images eventually, almost all of an unexceptional brick storefront on Cedar Avenue in broad daylight \u2013 except for one.\u00a0 One photograph showed toys.\u00a0 It is black and white, low contrast, staged.\u00a0 Everything looks hasty, improvised — a bed sheet as a backdrop, the objects in a bright, flat light.\u00a0 There\u2019s a dollhouse full of small, complex things, and it draws me in, as such things always do.\u00a0 But it didn\u2019t touch my memory of Holzermann\u2019s. The photo seemed to cut the wrong direction.\u00a0 It\u2019s a tissue-thin slice across<\/i> time instead of an echo back into it.\u00a0 There\u2019s too much distance and texture in my memory to fit in a camera, too many angles to flatten over a surface.\u00a0 Do photographs really store memories?\u00a0 This one seems to blunt the edges of mine, flatten and bleach them out.\u00a0 I\u2019m staying with the sound, the rhythm of a name that resonates now as it did then, a pitch and a beat that brings all the delicious chugging and ringing together, holds them above a low hum of voices, laughter, mother\u2019s voice, and snowflakes moving in the light.\u00a0 Somewhere, somehow, words are still sounds, and sounds have their own ways with time. <\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My childhood memories come back as images — still scenes, usually, with a flavor, a particular feeling or mood.\u00a0 But I need a word to get to them.\u00a0 Once you have a word, of...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"parent":1065,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"bgseo_title":"Bringing Holzermann's Back to Life","bgseo_description":"A very short memoir, Holzermann's proposes that the sound of words works better than photographs to recall a cherished memory of a wonderful toy store. ","bgseo_robots_index":"index","bgseo_robots_follow":"follow","_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2471","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2471"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2471\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2472,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2471\/revisions\/2472"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}