Today we have a postcard from Vienna sent on June 22, 1958 to Helene in San Francisco.
We think of you often, not least in Vienna, on the Ring. Why don’t you write.
Love,
Judith & Alfred
I thought this would be a very brief post, given how short a greeting there was on the card. But as often has been the case on this project, more puzzle pieces came together and suddenly this seemingly random postcard from an unknown friend leads us to something much richer.
When I first saw the postcard a few years ago, I read the signature as being from someone named Judith Alfred. I’d never seen her name before and was surprised that my grandmother had kept the card. Perhaps because the picture on the card was of the Vienna opera house? In the March 13 post, we saw what Helene wrote about the rebuilt opera house in 1955 after it had been destroyed during the war.
As I was preparing today’s post, I looked again at the signature. I realized it might say Judith & Alfred. Which made me recall the name of someone whose writing takes up a lot of space in the papers my grandmother kept. In addition to several binders of her own stories, Helene kept two binders with magazine articles, German language cartoons, newspaper clippings, etc. Included in the binders were several articles by a man named Alfred Werner. I found that, like my grandmother, he too had lived in Vienna until being deported to Dachau. He came to New York in 1940 and became an art historian and journalist. His first wife died in the 1940s and he married Judith in 1953. You can learn all about him at the Center for Jewish History and can look at and download his entire archive.
Since they had been in Vienna at the same time, I assumed that my grandmother was interested in Werner’s writing because she’d read work by him in Viennese newspapers and because he often wrote about her beloved pre-war Vienna in US publications. As I looked more closely at the articles my grandmother kept, I noticed that he had signed two of the reprints for her. He signed a reprint of a 1949 article entitled “Vienna Paradise Lost” that first appeared in The Chicago Jewish Forum (Volume 7, Number 4, Summer, 1949), when he was in San Francisco in 1955: "To the muse of twelve generations of Austrian writers and artists, honored by one of her many sons of the muse - Alfred, SF 1955." Presumably he is likening Helene to her namesake Helen of Troy. The signatures on the article and on the card look like they came from the same hand. Although there was an age difference of almost 25 years — Alfred was born in 1911 — Helene and Alfred shared a love of literature and music. I imagine them meeting at the Café Central in the 1930s and chatting for hours.
We have already seen a bit of his writing in the May 22 post, showing the testimonials to Vitali’s work in Vienna. Alfred Werner’s quote does not appear in Vitali’s “business card”, but it was in the translated document created when Vitali and Helene were preparing to come to the U.S. I do not have the original German.
Sub specie aeternitatis
The deeper I am looking into thee, blue sky,
The nearer dost thou still appear to me;
The stronger, God, I think Thee to the end,
The pitifuller do I fall before Thee….
From my volume of poems
To Mr. Cohen, with grateful admiration.
Alfred Werner.
As I have found so many times before on this journey, my grandmother kept everything for a reason. Even people who at first seem like strangers or mere acquaintances end up playing a much more important role in my grandmother’s life and story than I could have imagined.