Do you have any German heritage?

My Teutonic roots: there were Germans on both sides of my family. The Jews who fled in the late 1930s. The paternal Catholic grandmother from Hamburg who died in 1939 at the age of forty of an embolism. My father, then just thirteen, found her dead on the floor of their tenement kitchen in Brooklyn. I won a Goethe Institute fellowship early on in my writing career. I spent three months in Der Vaterland and came back reasonably fluent in the language, forgetting much of it over the ensuing decades picking it up again now. I grew up with two great aunts – Minnie and Amelia – and Minnie’s husband Joe… all of whom fled Germany in 1938 after Kristalnacht (when the Nazis burned all synagogues and Jewish businesses). I will one day write about this trio of refugees who made it out of Germany on a train to Lisbon and whose family in the US (my grandmother’s family, The Hymans) worked with a Jewish charity to get them on a boat to New York. Amelia was the first person I knew who died. She was ninety-three at the time of her death in 1961. I was just six. Amelia would squeeze my cheek and say ‘my Amerikanische boy”. Joe died in 1965 in his mid-nineties. Minnie went in 1968. She was ninety-eight – eighty-five years my senior. The thought sometimes strikes me: I knew many people who were born in the 1870s. How I wish I had been a bit older and asked so many of the questions I would like to ask now – especially how this trio in late middle age fled with a small suitcase each and without a word of English… and built a new life for themselves in the Flatbush area of Brooklyn. There is a reason why my daughter Amelia is named after my great aunt. And I will one day turn all this into fiction.