The Abyss of Silence
When Gretel Timan first stepped onto American soil, she carried with her more than just a suitcase; she carried the heavy, suffocating silence of a life lived under a dictatorship. In East Germany, words were dangerous. In West Germany, she was often labeled simply as “that refugee.” But in America, she encountered something she hadn’t expected: a seat at the table.
The transition was not overnight. It was a grueling, daily battle fought with a heavy dictionary and a stubborn will. Gretel recalls one of her first major decisions, to learn English not just to survive, but to master it. She chose a formidable teacher: Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. Having seen the movie dubbed in German, she was determined to read the original text.
The process was agonizing. “Except for articles, pronouns, and prepositions, I had to look up every word,” she recalls. “By the time I looked up the last word of the sentence, I had forgotten the first word.” Most would have quit. But Gretel found a magic formula that would define her American life: make a reasonable choice and keep going. Mistakes would happen, but momentum was the only way out of the abyss.
The Sweet Smell of Success
Soon, the dictionary was accompanied by a job. Gretel found work at a perfume company in midtown Manhattan. To her, it was a “dream job”, sweet-smelling, clean, and accessible by the pulse of the city, the subway. However, the language barrier remained a wall. The telephone was a particular source of dread. When her boss, Art, would step out, the ringing phone felt like an alarm she wasn’t equipped to handle.
Her initial solution was simple: “Art is not in.” It was a phrase that backfired when Art returned to find his clients believed he had skipped work entirely. With patience, Art taught her a new phrase: “Art has stepped out of the room.” It was a small linguistic shift, but it represented a larger growth. Eventually, Art took her dictionary away entirely. “Try without it,” he told her. “You can do it.” And she did.
The Power of the Lunchroom
The most profound lesson in Americanization, however, didn’t come from a book or a boss. It came from the office girls in the lunchroom. In the beginning, the speed of their conversation was overwhelming. “They talked with machine speed,” Gretel says. “I could not understand one word. I felt dumb, absolutely stupid to the point where it became painful.”
Feeling defeated, Gretel began retreating to her lab to eat her sandwich alone in the dark. She chose isolation over the pain of not belonging. But the American spirit of her colleagues wouldn’t allow it. On the third day, eight women marched into her lab. They refused to leave until she joined them. They didn’t just share their lunch; they shared their lives. They took her to parties and showed her New York City on the weekends. They moved her from the status of “refugee” to the status of “friend.” They showed her that in this new world, she belonged.
