SHE HAD been known as Die Amerikanerin during the
years of her youth in Germany, because of her indepen-
dence and refusal to conform. She was not actually a radical
in her thought or in the way she lived; the nickname de-
scribed her personality. Her mother had died as the result of
a ruptured appendix when Adele was eight, and her father
had moved her family some years later from Frankfurt to
Berlin, where he continued to deal in real estate with more
gusto than luck. He went through a considerable amount of
family funds, with only an occasional good year among
many bad ones. He bought heavily on the outskirts of Berlin,
convinced that the capital would expand. It did expand, but
in the opposite direction. But business did not circumscribe
his life. He was a devout Jew with a deep love for Israel, and
worked hard on behalf of the poor.

At one point after World War I, my father put up several
thousand dollars of his modest savings to protect the family
investment, but the only result was that after World War II
a small part of the total was recovered from the West Ger-
man Government. The land was in East Berlin, and the set-
tlement was only a fraction of what the Katzenstein family
had invested in this real estate.

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