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Today we have a letter from Helene in Vienna to her daughter Eva in San Francisco. Helene has been apart from her children for more than a year.

Clipper #65

Vienna, 27 December 1940

My golden Eva child!

When I sent the official birthday letter to Hilda, which only included a heartfelt greeting to you, you must have been thinking to yourself: “what marvelous stuff is mom up to now?” I often ask myself that when I come home in the evening exhausted, partly because I’m so tired and partly because my brain is not getting enough healthy food, and I cannot fall asleep. So I lay awake in bed and I think about you and I am very happy that my thoughts are not rousing you out of your sleep. If our bedtime were the same, I would have to, as a loving mother, just imagine it. Sometimes (?) I’m just so afraid and I am shocked at the innate powers in us which allow us to survive this separation. We received letter #11 from November 13 on December 8 and that was the last letter from you, #9 still has not arrived.

Now I want to tell you why my days are so full. When you have two unfamiliar households in one apartment with different habits, well there’s quite an incredible need to get along and compromise and it requires a lot of tact just so everything will seem to run smoothly. I am usually the responsible party, although I really can’t complain about my tenants – they do what they can, but really, that’s all they do. When we are making breakfast, I do everything so we don’t collide. It’s not really necessary to put two tea mugs out when one person needs warm water to do the washing, they say: sorry, you can’t do it now - we don’t have an extra burner. So we have to divide up our work and our habits in the same way because we can’t do everything at the same time and so it takes longer than it normally would for that amount of work. Another thing is that the taxes are now harder to figure out than they were before because now there’s a whole different way that that is done. Just like a sick person causes more work than a healthy one, a dying business provides you with more to do than a perfectly healthy one. Besides that, I have quite an extensive correspondence, which in many cases gets no answer. If those who receive my answers would go to the trouble of considering that I am giving them everything I possibly can, in other words the little bit of free time and the last bit of energy I have, I’m sure my letters would be answered more conscientiously.

However, I haven’t changed much and I still think 2 times 2 is 5, and my sense of humor is irrepressible, only that I use it as they say in the “Mikado”:

 “I call my humor forth
in every case because the material that the court
gives me
is so cheerful and popular.
Even if such an idiot
would lose his head.” etc. etc [it rhymes in German]

Because of all the work that the post office has with the Christmas holidays and the coming new year, I can hardly expect to get mail in the next 14 days and I will have to strive to get through this time as best I can. I am imagining what a wonderful feeling it will be when I open the door to the mail carrier and he actually hands me a letter from you.

Harry-boy is not going to get his due because I don’t have time to write to him today. Please give him greetings and birthday wishes and kisses from me, because maybe the birthday letter won’t get there.

At the moment it is necessary again to pay close attention to the numbering of the letters and to tell me which letters of mine did not arrive (at least since last time). 

That’s all for today because I need to go to the dentist, because my most important Christmas surprise was a filling that fell out.

Live well my good, brave Eva-girl and do write in detail so that I can be recompensed for the letters that got lost. Please give all the dear ones my greetings and a big hug from

Helen

P.S. Don’t forget to say hello to Miss Maxine from me.

Although Helene mentions that she greeted Eva in her birthday letter to Hilda, in fact it was a postscript to the letter she wrote on the same day to Harry, which we saw in the December 20th post. I think she saved copies of all her letters, but since the P.S. was a handwritten afterthought, she probably forgot which of the letters she added it to.

Helene’s unquenchable thirst for news from her children rings out loud and clear, as it does in so many of her letters. I don’t know when Eva and Harry began numbering their letters – if they did so religiously, it means their mother has written six letters for each one they sent.

We hear a little about the hardships in Vienna, about which we learned in more detail in other letters: their failing business, living with housemates, unreliable mail – and to top it off – dental  problems whose cost they could hardly bear.

My husband grew up on Gilbert and Sullivan, and I showed him Helene’s lines in German from The Mikado. He’s pretty sure that she made up her own lyrics to the song “A More Humane Mikado (My Object All Sublime).” The cadence of her lyrics work with the chorus:

My object all sublime
I shall achieve in time —
To let the punishment fit the crime —
The punishment fit the crime;
And make each prisoner pent
Unwillingly represent
A source of innocent merriment!
Of innocent merriment!

One thing that struck me in this letter was Helene’s comment that for her 2x2=5. When I was in high school, the philosophy behind and rules for teaching math changed, with the advent of “New Math.” As we have seen this year, my grandmother loved language. She passed on her love of wordplay to her children, who in turn passed it on to their children. My mother loved writing poems in honor of special occasions and her poems for retiring colleagues were the hit of the San Francisco Public Health Department. I am in awe of my mother’s fluency – I cannot imagine writing poetry and satire in a second language, certainly not with much success. When I was introduced to and frustrated by New Math, I was inspired to write a poem myself. It began:

“New Math is fun,
New Math is great,
When 1 and 1
And 4 make 8….”

I don’t recall anything about New Math, but I remember the first lines of my poem!