Link to Family Tree to understand family relationships.
In yesterday’s letter, Helene referred to herself as a goose. Being a “silly goose” is something we commonly say in English, so the first time I read it I didn’t give it a thought. As I’ve delved more deeply into her letters this year, I noticed she used the word “goose” or “geese” several times. As with the literary and musical references reminding her children of their shared past, Helene was probably thinking back to her own childhood.
In the 1950s, Helene’s son Harry bought her a typewriter and encouraged her to write down her memories. Most of what she wrote was about life as a child in Bilin. She organized it into chapters and at least two different “books”. She called the first book “Child Without Childhood”. Today we have excerpts from one of the stories in the book.
Helene was born in Bilin (now Bilina), a spa town of a few thousand people in Bohemia. As we’ve seen in previous posts, her father owned a bookstore/stationery store/print shop and published a weekly local newspaper. Helene felt stifled in Bilin, both by the antisemitism she encountered and by the lack of intellectual life. She fled to Vienna at the earliest opportunity.
What I hadn’t understood until reading her stories is that much of life in Bilin in the 1890s was closer to the 18th century than to the 20th. Families, particularly those without a lot of money and with a lot of children, had to be resourceful and creative in order to survive and live at all comfortably. Several chapters in “Child Without Childhood” were devoted to the geese that coexisted on the property with the print shop and bookstore. To young Helene, they were beloved pets; to the adults, they were a valuable source of food and feathers. This realization came as a shock to Helene when her pets’ lives were cut short.
Child Without Childhood - Chapter III: Federnschleissen
Federnschleissen - to strip quilts [quills/feathers] - was a special winter occupation, hated by the female staff of the household because that work required total silence while doing it. Talking, sneezing, coughing, even taking deep breaths was prohibited in order not to stir up the fine down.
We two children, Irma and I, welcomed it. It put us in a Christmas carol mood, gave us the feeling of some importance being included in taking part in such a serious job and we felt almost grown up. Out of necessity, the strict rules which had to be observed did not produce such a festival atmosphere among the adults.
We children observed that ordained ritual minutely, partly to show that we were mature enough to perform such an important task, partly for the hope that our good behavior and usefulness could have a favorable influence on the number of ornately wrapped and labeled gifts we would receive. …
The thoughts of the housemaid (at that time the wet-nurse of my brother ruled dictatorially the household, an office my sister Ida by no means begrudged, giving her the opportunity to assist father which she did with more relish) were wandering to her lover in the nearby casern or were feasting in the foretaste of the three-days lasting holidays and trysts with frantic mass-eating which generally ended with stomachaches and hangovers, but nobody was thinking of the end of the Merry-Christmas mood. The guesswork of what Christkindl (Santa Claus) made had in store for them, conjured a happy smile on the faces of everybody who was occupied in that brain-killing occupation.
According to incontestable and unwritten Bohemian law, the ritual of federnschleissen took place as soon as dishwashing was over and we children (my older sisters excused themselves with homework) voluntarily offered our assistance.
…The sewing machine, luggage, some baskets, and anything else was covered with oilcloth. We children were advised to visit the little girls room before the work started because later there would be no opportunity. Now the sunporch, half harem, half prison, was closed up for the duration of the quilt stripping ceremony.
The wall opposite the kitchen went towards the big backyard and similar to the kitchen, instead of windows, had a glass partition and only the upper part had a contraption to open some of the window panes. There, just opposite the kitchen, was a so called Legebank. A great bench which could change into a double bed. Inside were the bedclothes, pillows, blankets and mattresses for the help. In addition to being the working and ironing room, the sun porch was their bedroom too.
… Ida taught us how to make from the feathers brushes for basting meats, cookies or baking sheets. Irma got some blue strands and I some red ones to braid together the way Ida showed us. We both liked that occupation. It made us feel so grown-up, so important. Our industry and dexterity was lauded by the quilt-stripping company and we developed a real skill in manufacturing those highly appreciated kitchen items. Mattl joined us after she finished her homework and it was impossible to leave the room. The only exemption was when mother knocked at the window-pane when father wanted Ida’s assistance. When after mother’s unerring calculation the work must soon come to an end, she started to set the table in the kitchen so that we could watch with great pleasure for our well-deserved Kaffee Klatsch. The fine aroma of coffee and cake tickled our nostrils in a more agreeable manner and the bored miens of the adult occupants changed in the opposite. Ida sealed up the pillows by tight stitches. The windows were opened, the masquerade was at an end, our costumes were put into a laundry basket and covered so that not a single feather could escape during the transport into the backyard, to be slapped with Klopfer, a tennis racket like gadget of wicker. Mattl escorted us to a little windowless closet where she brushed our hair and supervised our hand cleaning. The oilcloth covers from the furniture were cautiously folded to be later shaken in the backyard. Not even Jules Verne had imagined the convenience of vacuum cleaners.
A checkered tablecloth was spread over the long table and the sun porch appeared in its usual shape.
Mother clasped her hands: “Coffee is on the table.” Within a few minutes the Federnschleissing company was completely assembled for a feast of joy that lasted over two hours. Singing broke out with the vehemence of an eruption of a volcano. In father’s printing shop a few girls were sometimes needed to adjust printings, clean up the office and bookbinding rooms and other minor work. If they were not needed, father didn’t send them away for mother always had a use for them. One of them was the daughter of an Italian man who worked in a nearby Tagbau open pit mine. My father hired her because she was his only living child. Her mother passed away at childbirth and the widower moved to Bohemia on account of better pay! And the Italian worker found work easily at Tagbau, most of the mines had been burning for decades and the fire couldn’t be quenched, only choked up with earth. A murderous occupation and the Italian people from Sicily and Naples could stand working on the hot earth better than the people from our cold climate. That girl sang Neapolitan songs; Manko, my brother’s wet-nurse sang although she was born in middle-Bohemia where mostly the Czech language was used, sang German songs which sounded incomprehensible and we broke out in unison in hysterical laughter, which she accepted as applause. The prize-winner was of course Marischka with her ballads, and even Ida seemed amused by tunes and words, although she wouldn’t appreciate them if Max would include them in his repertoire.
My favorite ballad was the story of a crusader who said farewell to his sweetheart in the darkness of the night, resting on a bench in an arbor, hidden by wild vines, invisible to the eyes of a spy. That song had about thirty stanzas. If knight Ivan had behaved himself knightly, while sitting with his bride nightly I am not able to say, only that my sisters got a lot of fun out of it and my brother asked me secretly to write them down in a diary he gave me, to surprise our oldest sister and giver her pleasure. That masterpiece of German song Marischka always chose as her leitmotif for ironing, probably on account of its length. When through with the melodrama, a whole week’s laundry for the entire family was done. Sometimes she had to insert intermissions to change the cool of a flat iron to a red-hot one and when it was too hot, she made some rhythmically swinging movements, without interrupting the love song of knight Ivan whose feelings were just as hot as the iron. Now I think not of when she sensed when to change the iron, but of when the love of that couple had reached the same dangerous temperature.
To prevent that this masterpiece of German poetry doesn’t fall in oblivion, which would be a pity for its words as well as for the tunes were extraordinary too, I will recite only the first stanza:
In des Gartens dunkler Laube
Sassen abends Hand in Hand
Ritter Ivan mit der Ida,
In der Liera festegebannt.
Bound to fight in Holy Land
Sitting in the harbor, hand in hand,
Knight Ivan and his beloved bride Ida
At night, devoted to their love’s awe.
Had the honorable judge seen that poem for whose translation I am answerable, I never would have gotten my American citizenship. I thank God that a well-deserved death sentence isn’t applied to bad writing. But I could not forgive myself had I kept the sample of German-Bohemian kitchen poetry for myself. What a find it would be for Ann Russell. Only to her I would dare to record the crusader’s farewell to his love in thirty strophes, as everybody will understand, especially as I hinted that his love was just as red-glowing as Marischka’s iron. She could by sprinkling the laundry prevent damage, but one couldn’t apply the same method to knight Ivan’s.
When my dear father on the day of Federnschleissen had to resign to his wife’s and oldest daughter’s collaboration, he had also to regret that he had skipped the time where quilts had been the requisite of writers and that he had to spend for steel-pens, where he would have quills in abundance. But Mattl atoned for such a loss. Not that she made quills for him, but she saved a lot to clean his pipes, nobody else would have made such a sacrifice.