Today we hear again from soldier Paul Zerzawy:

January 15, 1918

My dear ones!

I have been ordered back to my old company and my address is therefore Ldst TR9/7, Feldcomp. Feldpost 211. If Käthl is not in Brüx anymore, because your last report from 2nd January does not mention it, in that case please greet her from me. I am dying to see the next post.

I am not able to write long letters when I receive yours; you will understand and forgive me, won’t you?

Paul

Since the letter doesn’t have much new to tell us, I wanted to muse a bit on the art of letter writing. First off, isn’t it amazing to see this letter that is over 100 years old? Despite a few stains, it’s in great condition. Many of the others from that time are far more pristine, while this shows some wear and tear. Over the years, this letter traveled from somewhere in Romania to Bohemia to Vienna and Prague and ultimately settled in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I am old enough to have written a lot of letters. I lived abroad at a time when making a phone call wasn’t easy or cheap and it could take weeks to receive a reply to a letter. Every day I would wait eagerly for the mail to arrive, hoping to hear from friends and family at home. I would read each letter several times, hungrily devouring each and every word in order to feel connected to those I missed, trying to hear their voices in the words on the page. Sometimes the replies to my letters seemed disconnected because they were responding to words and feelings I had expressed weeks earlier and subsequently forgot.

People of my grandmother’s generation had learned how to stay in touch and informed. They often kept copies of their own letters so they would know whether their questions had been answered. Keep in mind that keeping a copy wasn’t such an easy thing at that time. Fortunately there was carbon paper (I just checked – carbon paper was patented in 1806). I am grateful for its invention because a number of letters in my archive were copies of letters sent from Paul Zerzawy to Helene while they were trying to bring Helene and Vitali to America in 1940-41. As we’ve seen, during times of censorship, they often numbered their letters so they would know whether the mail was getting through.

In addition to keeping copies of letters, they shared these precious missives with each other, often enclosing letters from relatives with letters of their own – probably another reason my archive is so rich. We will see at a future date an example of postcards where the picture on the card was a photo of the sender – a great way of keeping in touch while giving a valuable keepsake to the recipient.

I appreciate the convenience and immediacy of email and texting and such, but miss the joy of eagerly checking the mail each day. Without all this correspondence, I would not know the story of my relatives or have such a clear sense of their personalities and the world they lived in.