My family’s library and soundtrack  

Going through my family papers, I am struck by how often my grandmother and her children refer to music and literature, and intersperse their letters with phrases and quotations in multiple languages. As we translated material, I tried to keep a log of the various composers and authors mentioned, realizing that I had the makings of a wonderful education. Goethe, Schiller, Dickens, Bach, Mozart, Mahler, Wagner, mythology, the list goes on and on. I love the idea of creating a family “soundtrack” as part of the archive.

My grandmother passed on her love of music to her children. She named my mother Eva after the heroine in her favorite opera - Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. She raised her children to enjoy music of all kinds, particularly classical. When Eva and Harry were young, during bath time they would play “name that tune” games where Helene would sing song snippets and the children would guess the opera.

My mother loved going to the opera and symphony. Harry enjoyed listening to music, but he loved making it even more. He played piano by ear. When he wasn’t playing music, he was inevitably humming a tune to himself.

My mother told me that Helene did not name her son after the Meistersinger’s hero Walther because she did not want him to be saddled with the initials “WC” which even in German stood for Water Closet. According to Harry, he was named after a character in a book entitled Helen’s Babies. It was very popular, first published in 1876 and republished many times in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The book is full of humor and mischief-making children. Many versions can be found online. It was made into a movie in 1924, starring Edward Everett Horton as Uncle Harry. A few years ago I found a copy of the book on reserve at the SF Public Library: