News of the Past

In May, my husband and I visited Prague and Vienna. I am still processing all I saw and learned. Over the next few months I’ll write a few posts about the experience.

We hired a Czech genealogist, Julius Müller, to take us to the area my grandmother lived as a girl in the late 19th Century, and about which she wrote when she lived in San Francisco in the 1950s. She wrote stories about the 1889 influenza epidemic, local events and festivals, and mentioned that she had written a few articles for her father Adolf Löwy’s weekly newspaper, the Biela-Zeitung.

Although I don’t speak German, over the past few years I have spent hours poring over online issues of the Biela-Zeitung. The Austrian National Library had digitized several years of the paper, and I had been able to look through the first 10 years of the paper since its first publication in 1874. My grandmother was born in 1886, and on our trip I wanted to look through issues from the years after her birth. I hoped to find information about family events and about things my grandmother had written. One morning, Julius took my husband and me to the Czech National Archives in Prague where he had reserved several volumes of the paper.

At the Czech National Library Archives in the outskirts of Prague.

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Julius showed us how to identify death notices – they looked like advertisements, but were surrounded by a plain black border. One of the first things he found in the 1902 edition of the paper was a notice of Helene’s sister Ida’s death in 1902:

From supplement to Biela-Zeitung 1 January 1902 issue. From the Czech National Library Archives

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As publisher of the paper, Adolf probably didn’t have to worry about the cost of taking out a notice other than lost advertising revenue. He printed a full-page notice, which seemed to emphasize what a tragedy it was for the family.

The notice translates:

Anyone who has suffered a similar fate in their life as we have will understand our deep and justified pain over the unexpected and unfortunately all too early passing of our beloved good wife, mother, daughter and sister, Mrs

Ida Zrzawy, née Löwy
Engineer’s wife in Brüx

and will feel and understand the pain and sorrow that comes, along with the inability to adequately thank everyone for the expressions of heartfelt sympathy from so many through verbal and written condolences and accompaniment to the grave….

Many thanks
The deeply grieving Zrzawy-Löwy family

My grandmother wrote a story called “Dandelions in May 1902” where she told the story of the upheaval Ida’s death caused the family. Everything changed from that moment. Helene’s mother Rosa moved in with Ida’s husband and their 4 children, all under the age of 8. Her sister Mathilde also moved there to help with the family, ultimately marrying the widower a year later. Helene was the only family member still home with Adolf. In addition to his grief, he was left managing the business side of his printing and publishing enterprise (which Rosa had done) as well as continuing writing and publishing of the paper. Helene wrote that her father seemed to age overnight.  

Reading Ida’s obituary, printed evidence of my family’s trauma, confirmed what I knew in an intimate, immediate, and personal way.

During our day at the Czech archive, we were not able to look through all the volumes Julius had reserved, but I knew we could do the same at the Austrian National Library in Vienna the following week. I wrote to make arrangements to visit the library and reserve the volumes I still wanted to review. To my delight, the librarian told me that more volumes of the Biela-Zeitung had been digitized up to 1898 so I only needed to look at a few later volumes, knowing I could look online at home.

I enjoy being able to look at digital editions because the technology is so good that I can search for a word or name and get results. However, there was something special about seeing and touching the paper that my great-grandfather published and my grandmother read.

The first thing I did when I got home from our trip was to download the additional volumes that had been digitized. I then searched for “Helene” in the 1886 volume, even though I didn’t recall seeing birth announcements when I had looked through the newspaper before (not that I would know what to look for). Imagine my delight when I found the following in the November 27, 1886 edition, 4 days after my grandmother was born:

From the Austrian National Library digital archives of the Biela-Zeitung.

Church News:
Born:
…Helene, daughter of Adolf Löwy, Bookseller

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And so the story begins!

Deciphering Old Photos

Link to family tree

Last year I took a class on writing about photographs from Barbara Krasner. I have hundreds of old photos of people and places I don’t know. The class helped me understand that there is a lot to be learned by looking long and carefully at a photograph.

One photo I have is this portrait of my grandmother’s family from the late 1800s. As a child, I’d glanced at it once in a while but my mother Eva never told me about the people in the picture. I don’t know whether she could identify everyone. She knew that her own mother, my grandmother Helene, was the youngest child of a large family, so she must be the girl seated front and center, wrapped in a boa. Her parents, Adolf and Rosa Löwy, are seated in the middle row and most of the rest are her siblings. By the time my mother would have seen this photo, only her uncle Max was still alive – her grandfather and aunts died before 1920 and her grandmother died before she was two years old.

Recently, I spent time studying the photo, trying to figure out everyone’s identity. I have a photo of my grandmother’s brother Max probably from around 1890 that looks like the young man on the right, but without a mustache. Since there was only one son, I realized that the man standing at left must be my grandmother’s brother-in-law, Julius Zerzawy. It had to be Julius because not only did my mother have a copy of this photo, but her cousin Paul Zerzawy did too – this was as much his family portrait as hers, showing his parents, grandparents, aunts and uncle. Looking on the back of the photo, I saw it was taken in my grandmother’s hometown – on back is stamped: "Photografisches Atelier Gustav Laube, Bilin."

Julius and Ida married in Bilin in August 1894 when my grandmother was 7 years old. I believe that this photo may have been taken to commemorate that event. Everyone is dressed in their finest clothes. My grandmother Helene and her sister Irma were schoolgirls and wear matching plaid dresses. A dog is trying to nose its way into the photo. Paul Zerzawy was born in 1895 – since he isn’t in the photo it must have been taken before that date. 

Ida died in 1902 due to complications from childbirth after having 4 children. The following year Julius married Ida’s sister Mattl, or Matilda. I am not sure which woman in the portrait is Ida and which is Mattl. If it’s a wedding portrait, perhaps Ida is in the center. The other two adult sisters are on the sides and appear to be wearing matching gowns. The woman in the center wears something a bit different. Her parents are dressed formally. Her mother appears to be wearing a black gown.

Recently, I decided to contact Sherlock Cohn, a woman who deciphers old photographs. One of my questions for her is to help me identify Ida and Mattl with more certainty, using other photos I have of these women.

As I was preparing my questions for Sherlock, I tried to provide as much information I could about the people in the photo – names, ages, dates of death, etc. As I gathered all I the details I knew about the siblings, I realized that one of them, Clara, had died in May 1894, a few months before the wedding. Perhaps this wasn’t a wedding photo at all? That’s when I realized that a sibling was missing from the photo. Until 1894, my grandmother had six siblings, one brother and five sisters.  However, in the photo there are only five sisters including my grandmother (Ida, Matilda, Flora, Irma, and Helene). That may explain Ida’s mother’s black dress. Although the photo may in fact have been taken for the happy occasion of her eldest daughter’s wedding, the loss of one child was still fresh for all of them.

I felt the loss myself when I realized that I don’t have a photo of my grandmother’s entire family. Perhaps that’s one reason they took this photo – to have a record of the entire family before anyone else died.

Despite the sense of lost history, I felt a thrill at figuring out on my own that this photo was likely taken in 1894 – the year one sister was lost and a brother-in-law gained.

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I was amazed at how much I could learn by truly looking at the photo – spending time examining every detail. Do you have photos of your own that have secrets to reveal?

March 7, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

I had a lovely time this afternoon. I went around the corner to visit Grandma Uri. She is Grandmother’s best friend. She is very old and she always wears a bonnet in the house. She can’t hear very well so she holds a funny trumpet to her ear and when you talk to her you sort of blow into it. She always sits in a big chair by the window in her bedroom and tells us stories about the people she sees through it who are walking on the street. She has a basket of sewing next to her. The basket is made of little pockets and the pockets are full of lovely things she has sewn and other surprises. Sometimes little cookies shaped like hearts or little jelly beans or cinnamon candies that burn just a bit. Grandma Uri always asks, “Were you a good girl this week, Hilda?”, and when I blow “Yes” into her horn, she says, “I know you were. Look into the pockets of my basket and maybe you will find a surprise.” On Christmas and birthdays there are wonderful surprises. Once I found a pearl bracelet and once there was a five dollar gold piece and once the lovelies pink and gold thimble. This afternoon she let me go downstairs and help Louie bake cookies. He gave me a piece of dough all for myself and showed me how to cut out a man and make him handsome with little raisins for eyes and tiny pieces of walnuts for buttons on his coat. I love Louie. I don’t know why I am so frightened of the picture of the Chinese men as Louis is Chinese. I have always known him and loved him. Grandfather says that I must learn that all people are the same inside their skin. That all people love their own children and their own friends and all they want is to be happy and peaceful in their own homes. And then he said that all people are very unhappy when their children lose their tempers and stamp their feet and yell.

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Reading of Hilda’s grandfather reminds me of my grandmother’s stories about her own father who was Hilda’s grandfather’s brother. Both men sound incredibly kind and believed in the best in people. They taught their children tolerance and respect for others. Helene’s father published a newspaper in their small town in order to expose corruption and give voice to the voiceless, teaching his daughter values that she carried with her throughout her life.

If only the world had progressed further in the last 110 years!

March 6, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

When Sancha called for me after school today, we didn’t go to the park or the beach, we went to a butcher shop. I thought that perhaps Grandmother had sent us there to buy something but we didn’t buy anything at all. There was a young man there who talked to her for a long time and then he asked me if I wouldn’t like to go out and have some ice cream. I didn’t like this man’s face but I thought that while I was eating the ice cream I wouldn’t have to look at it so I said, “Yes thank you.” So then we went to a little ice cream shop on the corner and the man let me order any flavor I wanted. I took strawberry, because I’m not supposed to eat strawberries and things always taste much better when you aren’t supposed to have them. When we left the place we could see a park just a block away and Sancha said, “Now we are going to the park for a little while, and when your Grandmother asks you if you have been to the park, you can say yes! You must not tell her about the butcher shop, or the ice cream.” When we got home, Grandmother did ask me if we had been to the park and I said yes but I didn’t tell her anything else but I felt funny, as if I should have.

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In the stories my grandmother wrote about her childhood in a small town in Bohemia in the 1890’s, she told of similar experiences to those of Hilda. The family maid took Helene out for errands and excursions, which often included their running into her boyfriend. Taking the child under your care for an outing was always a good cover for romantic liaisons!

It was far more obvious where one’s meat came from in Hilda’s day. Below is a photo of Palace Market from around 1900. The source of one’s food was direct and obvious into at least the early 1960s: when I was very young, there was a poultry shop across the street from our house (and from the Surf Theatre) in the Sunset district — the only distinct memory I have of it was the feathers all over the floor. After the shop closed, the space was used for a nursery school.

OpenSFHistory / wnp37.00180

January 20, 1912

Link to Family Tree to understand family relationships.

From 8-year old Hilda Firestone’s diary:

This morning was terrible. Uncle Harold, he is my youngest uncle and he still lives here, all the others are married and have their own homes. Well, Uncle Harold came into my room and pointed a dagger at me. I screamed so loud that everyone in the room came running, and even after Uncle Harold showed me that it wasn’t a real dagger but a rubber one. I couldn’t stop screaming. After that, I threw up all over the bed and then everyone began screaming at Uncle Harold. I hate him. He is always doing things like that. I always try and remember not to be alone with him. Once he came into my room wearing his pajamas. He opened the pants of his pajamas and showed me something on his body. It looked like a piece of rope, only it was pink like his skin. Then he made me put my hand on it, and then he made me promise not to tell anyone. I wanted to tell Alma, because I wanted to ask her if all the boys had them, but I was afraid to tell her. When I think of it, it frightens me, and my heart beats so fast, I don’t know why. I didn’t have to go to school today because I was sick from the dagger, so I had breakfast in bed, only I couldn’t eat, and Aunt Tillie brought me my crayons and a new fashion book to color.

Uncle Harold would have been in his early 20s years old in 1912. At the least, he delighted in torturing his sensitive niece, at worst, he was a sexual predator. I imagine that Alma was the only person Hilda felt safe enough to talk to, and even that was impossible. Alma was probably closest to Hilda in age in that household, and someone she could identify with and trust. I found a help wanted ad in the July 10, 1911 edition of the San Francisco Examiner:

“GIRL for general housework and cooking. Apply with reference. Mrs. J. Levy, 1328 Pierce st.”  

I imagine that this is the job Alma applied for. Earlier want ads when Hilda was a baby included childcare, but by 1912 Hilda was a schoolgirl and presumably it was felt that she needed little looking after. Looking through other listings, a “girl” could have been as young as 12.

Sadly, Hilda’s experience would not have been unusual. Girls weren’t told or taught anything about human sexuality or anatomy, or of predatory behavior. She would have had no idea how to respond to her Uncle Harold.

In a memoir about her childhood, my grandmother Helene wrote about being 15 years old in Bohemia in 1902 and being flashed on the street by a strange man: “where I before thought that the difference in sexes consisted mainly in the garments and that men have beards and mustaches and women busts”. She came home quite upset and feeling awful. Overnight, she found she had been bleeding. She came to the conclusion that somehow the man had made her pregnant. She was sure she had had a miscarriage (although she didn’t have a word for it), like the one that caused her eldest sister Ida’s death a few months earlier, and believed she would die soon too. Helene’s mother had too been preoccupied with Ida’s death and caring for the Zerzawy children to pay attention to her youngest child: “‘You could read everything at four years old and do not know anything about the facts of life.’” Like Hilda, Helene couldn’t tell her mother the story of the flasher, just of the other events of the day: “My mother explained to me how senseless my fear was, but I didn’t tell her that horrible encounter with that devil and that I still was afraid that my shock had something to do with my menstruation on the same day.”

How sad to carry such fears and self-blame for years. And that this was (and is) true for innocent girls everywhere.

December 24

Link to Family Tree to understand family relationships.

Today we have a letter from Helene in Istanbul to her nephew Robert Zerzawy in England. Yesterday, we saw a letter from Robert written a day earlier to her children in San Francisco. In it, he recalls their childhood in Vienna. Today, Helene does the same today and remembers happy times she had with Robert and Paul in Bohemia.

“There is no greater sadness than to remember
the happy times amid the misery.” 

Istanbul, 24 December 1945

My dear Robert!

When I received your letter filled with love, the first family letter in my exile, I cried for the first time since I’ve come under the radar. Today is almost predestined to hold my lost Paradise before my eyes. Do I not in spirit tear off a calendar page every day, and every day, every minute, every second, which I spend here without purpose, useless, and unhappy, did I not know that today is the day that I have chosen as the eve of a family week? Outside the sun shines as if it were May, only the sadly short days remind me that we are still deep in winter. The long nights are horrible, I fear them more than the Gestapo, blessed memories.

Robert, when I was ordered by the Command in Ravensbrück, along with 31 other respectable women on the 28th of February, to go to Turkey, none of us thought nor believed that we had been given freedom. I dared to ask what will happen with our men in Buchenwald and the “Political Superintendent” replied that he could give me no precise answer to this, but that he believed that we might meet them in Lübeck or in Sweden.

Our group waited five days for Turkish students living in various German university cities. On the fifth day came transport with about 150 persons, consisting of women, men, and children, Spanish Jews who lived all over the world, but who had been housed en famille in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. My courage and hope to be reunited with Vitali grew. We were transported via Flensburg-Copenhagen to Elsinore, from there to Sweden and Helsingborg where a reporter from a Stockholm newspaper promised to notify Eva. Through him it became known that I was in Sweden. From Helsingborg we were taken to Gothenborg, where we waited for diplomatic transport.

The general consuls of Vienna, Berlin, and Hamburg comforted me by saying that those form Buchenwald took another route and perhaps would be taken to Turkey via Marseille. My courage began to sink. Via Skagerak and Kattegat we went to Norway, then the Faroe Islands where we picked up internees from  England, and from there to Liverpool (how close I was to you), Lisbon, Gibraltar, along the north African coast to Port Said then via the Dodekanese through the Dardenelles to Istanbul.

Vitali’s sisters, who had read my name in the newspaper immediately looked me up and overwhelmed me with questions. “Where is Vitali?” Why didn’t you bring him with you?” “How could you go away without him?” It was not meant as badly as it sounded. The people had, and have, no idea about what and how it was in Europe. When I finally managed to convince them that I was not responsible for world affairs they became nice and friendly with me. A feeling of friendship (hostility?) towards them, and also they towards me, has not been overcome. It is strange that I seem to not only have more rapport with the younger generation, but that I understand them better. 

The difference between East and West is too enormous. Yesterday I received an answer to my inquiry to: Foreign Relations Department, British Red Cross & Order of St. John, Wimborne House Arlington 35 London SW 1. A MmeY. St. Martin Watts requested still more data that should help to make the finding of Vitali easier. For two months my completed and signed papers have been ready at the consulate; in the meantime, two ships have left without me; because of fatal circumstances my departure was prevented. Perhaps it is better so, perhaps before the departure of my ship I’ll hear some news of Vitali and I can answer the unspoken question: “Helen, where is Vitali? – Read: Cain, where is your brother Abel?” – I can give a joyful answer: He lives!

Robert, my dear dear boy, I have read your letter so often, and again, or more correctly, I’ve discovered a kind of “dislocation” of the heart and mind. You ask yourself, how all of you, who did not have to go through my suffering, can understand this through my eyes? I am so happy that each of you was spared this.

Love is a kind of Hydra, that for every head that you cut off grows nine new ones. Had I ten children and fifty nephews, my supply of love would not diminish, on the contrary it would overflow. (Pardon my pathetic style it is not intentional. I am no longer accustomed to writing letters and when I go from one extreme to another, I beg for your complete pardon.)

Robert, everything in this world has its price. I have paid the highest price for my good fortune. When I built a nice home for my children it was not just my thought, as it is with all mothers, that her children would have a better life than she herself had, but a vow that I made when I came back from “relaxing vacation” in Brüx. It took weeks before I recovered from my recuperation trip. To see you freeze, I mean mentally, in the comfortable warm rooms, always cuts into my heart. Paul’s moody nature and your caring disposition are the results of an apparently brilliant, but joyless and loveless youth.

Your little mother did what and how she could. Robert how often have I longed in the last two years for that love, which, when I was still young and immature I scorned, because I believed I was being crushed by love. I also yearn for Vitali’s care, tutelage, and his desire to think of me.

Robert, perhaps it seems to you that I see my past life through rose-colored glasses. No Robert, believe me I was lucky that I could build myself up and that I did not fall into depression but was always mentally fully conscious. Paul can verify this for you; I talked with him about it once. I did not lead a Polykrates existence which an Egyptian king would have envied. On the contrary, I always said that I lived the purest life of the treasure seeker: “daily work, evening guests, unhappy times, joyful celebrations.”  The joyful celebration is what I lived for: celebrations of all beliefs, birthdays, all were celebrated joyfully; my children should see only happy faces around them, enjoy music and happiness, eat well and much, “My fiery writing on the wall: Brüx.”

Robert, dear, as you have written me this dear and sweet letter, I believe that you were thinking of the same outing that Paul, you and I made from Brüx up to the Sauerbrunnen. As we passed a particular part of the marvelous row of chestnut trees, where a construction site was for sale at the time, one of us thought that we should build our family castle in the air at this place. We spun our wishful daydream further, until we came to the coffee house and lying there on a nice birch bench, we imagined everything down to the smallest detail. I remember this as clearly as if it were yesterday, and that an oncoming freight train brought us out of our day dream and forced us to think about our return trip. I glanced once more to the right to my beloved Borschen, one of them straight ahead at the church tower, whose song, “Enene, Enene” still rings in my ears today. When I take the next boat, I’ll be at the Aja Sofia in about 30 minutes and will think of the simple village church of Bilin and hear the bells chiming like the music of the spheres. Just as Wagner’s gods dreamed of their Walhalla, I dream with you of our home. The price that Vitali and I have paid does not seem too high to me. When the children left home, I did away with all birthdays and holidays, that is, I postponed them and said inwardly that we will celebrate them later. There are now so many to catch up on and with the new ones that must be celebrated, then our reunion will be one joyful celebration after another, as the magic word, my magic word rings.

I have apologized for my jumping around, but I’m not quite as crazy as I seem after this letter, but it is impossible to keep one’s thoughts straight when one shares a single room with 8 strangers and one sleeps in the same room with them, and each of the 8 receives visitors and they converse in a motley of strange languages. 

Do you know that I only found out by pure chance that Eva is married and that only just now after months at the consulate I was told the name of my son-in-law? Everl wrote a short letter to her cousin Lisette De Sevillja in May in which announced that she married on the 13th of January (Harry’s birthday), that she thinks I’m in Sweden and that Harry is still in the South Pacific. Robert that is all I know about my children. Wasn’t old Galotti right when he said, “He who does not lose his sanity in these circumstances has nothing to lose.” In my whole life I have never heard so much talking as here, and have spoken so little myself. I find it merciful to live in this Babel. I’m in the greatest company. A young Greek woman was reading her Shakespeare, a fine Oxford edition, next to her Glossary. At night I give myself concerts, I hum my Beethoven, my Mozart, my Schubert. I only here learned to understand the Wanderer Symphony: where you are not, there is happiness. Beethoven never let his audience go home in a gloomy mood; therefore, let us both sing with a different note: joy, beautiful spark of the gods -- or is it still too early. Since I’ve been here, I’ve heard no word more often than “patience,” I live with it. Robert, perhaps we will see each other before this letter reaches you.

Please greet and thank Otto and Kamillo for me, I myself kiss you with unbroken love.

Helen 

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Helene begins her letter with a quotation from Dante’s Inferno, which prepares us for the sad and nostalgic tone that follows. Robert is the most emotional of her relatives, and, along with his brother Paul, they are the only people left with a connection to and memory of their childhood in Bohemia – she and her nephews’ mother grew up in Bilin, and the boys grew up in Brüx (now Most), about 8 miles away. Here, she writes of a day she spent with her nephews in Bilin, where they saw the Sauerbrunn – the mineral spring, and the Borschen – the mountain looming over the town which we read about in the April 22nd post. She hears the church bells calling her childhood nickname, Enene. However, when Helene wrote about her childhood memories in the 1950s, she had very little nostalgia for Bilin – she made it clear that she was thrilled to leave it far behind when she moved to Vienna in 1902.

We hear echoes from letters of written years ago: Helene invokes the legend of Polycrates which she wrote about in a letter to her children in 1939 – see December 14th post. Eva and Helene both wrote of “castles in the air” — see April 27th and September 24th posts. She recalls the things that we have seen bring her the most comfort – poetry (Goethe and Heine - see links above) and music – perhaps the same things that helped her survive the past few years.

Although the vast majority of Helene’s and the Zerzawy brothers’ correspondence was in Harry’s possession, my mother Eva had all of the letters their mother sent from Istanbul in 1945-1946. In 2006, a friend translated this letter for me. He had trouble with some of the references and I couldn’t make sense of them either. After being immersed in my grandmother’s words and life for the past few years, her stories and references now all have meaning.

Despite the sorrow and loss of the past 6 years, Helene tries to shake off her mood and end on a lighter note to lift her and Robert’s spirits, quoting Ode to Joy from Beethoven’s 9th symphony.

September 9

Link to Family Tree to understand family relationships.

Today’s letter from Helene in Vienna and to her children in San Francisco follows the ones we saw on September 5 and 6.

Clipper #50 (fifty)

Vienna, 9 September 1940

My dear Children!

I am acting as if I believe Papa when he says that your letters were among those that were seized in the Bermuda islands. He says this as if he is so sure of it that he would swear to it, but I am a doubting Thomasine.

The whole time the weather has been just as dark as my mood. The rooms have been as cold and unpleasant as it would normally be in November. I therefore took our winter clothing out of storage and when this happened, of course the sun peeked out as if gloating at me, to make fun of me in my annoyance. But as old as the sun is, she fooled me, but I just can’t let myself be bothered by something like that right now. The day we had yesterday was beautiful like in May. It was made for going outside in the fresh air and filling up your lungs with oxygen. Despite that, we decided to stay home. The green blanket played the role of the meadow and no government official and no hall supervisor could get me away from here. I lay still, but instead of dozing off like you tend to do, practically a requirement when you’re out there laying on the meadow, in my head, thoughts of you marched around. I am sure the next letter will get me a few lines from Harry.

I am looking at Everl’s last letter and I am still just amazed by the metamorphosis in her handwriting. Is this something she did on purpose or did this just happen? However that may be, it’s really wonderful and I’m really happy about it. I did work as a typographer and I am used to trying to figure out illegible handwriting, but Everl’s scribble was the hardest thing I ever had to deal with. It really tortured me, and not just me. The most unclear manuscript I ever dealt with at work was the weekly repertoire of the Teplitz City Theater and so I asked our Father to typeset that for me. That was the first thing I ever had to do with the theater; the ones that came to Bilin on occasion didn’t count. “On Sunday, whatever the date was, with a special higher priced Lohengrin in the title role Mr. Erik Schmedes as a guest performer” - that I could figure out only with great difficulty. I begged Father to get tickets for us early enough which he was glad to do, so from Thursday to Sunday I could hardly sleep in joyous anticipation. The production started two hours earlier than they usually did and the train would only be getting there shortly before. We didn’t really look at the theater handbills very carefully, otherwise we would have noticed that they had changed the program. If Mr. Schmedes or perhaps the swan had a sore throat, or whether the performance had to be postponed to the following Sunday, because they didn’t have a dove falling from the heavens, I can’t remember anymore. I just remember that my sister Mattl got upset because she found that instead of the overture from Lohengrin, she heard the music from “The Sweet Girl.” [Das süsse Mädel] Mattl became pale and paler, pale and paler. What are the Bilin people going to say when they see such a rude and vulgar play with such a young girl in attendance? When I looked at her, she seemed to be fighting with the idea - should she and I leave before this shocking operetta even started? Or should we say, well, that’s fate? On the train we agreed we didn’t want to call attention to ourselves by leaving the theater early. This excuse applied not just to the parents and to the others in Bilin who sat in the next train compartment and were passing judgment on us. Apparently, those were rather progressive people, because Mattl’s reputation did not suffer. It’s funny that I think of this right now, but thought associations are easy to explain because the same impatience and the same pounding heart which I experienced on that theater Sunday back then, that’s how I fell today when I wait for your letters. I hope the Bermuda intermezzo doesn’t cause them to change the program.

Our housemates are very pleasant people. Yesterday and today, it’s been quite lively around here. The chimney sweep came and did his best to cover my recently washed kitchen with a black patina which he did even better at in the bathroom and the entrance hall. The workers above our balcony sounded like they were trying to escape or something. They were cutting things down and with quite a bit of rumbling and a whole lot of dirt, they managed to get it into our room. But that’s not enough. The floor, which always did have the tendency to move down to the floor below, started to sink so much that I decided I should put up a sign saying: “watch the step.” There were carpenters and supervisors here today and they will fix that part of the floor in a few days. I’m looking forward to that. I think our back-to-nature idyll is over since the scaffolding has been removed from the inner courtyard side of the building. But then I thought about it, they’re probably going to put it up on the facade. So now you see what your old former house looks like.

Have you gotten used to your school environment? How was your vacation? All of these things are very, very interesting to me and I hope that you will tell me all about it in detail.

Well, I’m going to close for today with well-directed kisses and please tell everyone hello.

I wish you all the best and all that is good and beautiful,

I remain your
Helene

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As Helene continues to wait for mail from her children, her mind wanders to an early memory of her childhood in Bilin, Bohemia. She did typesetting for her father’s newspaper. Her love of music was already great and she begged her father to get tickets for a production of Wagner’s Lohengrin in the largest nearby town, Teplitz.  

She was looking forward to hearing a famous tenor of the day in the starring role, but unfortunately there was a change in schedule and instead, the theater was putting on an operetta by Heinrich Reinhardt.  

The operetta was first performed in 1901, so the event Helene describes would have taken place in 1901 or 1902 when she was 15 and her sister Mattl was 23. I hope one day to be able to see issues of the Biela-Zeitung from that time and perhaps see the advertisement she describes.

Helene’s sister’s reaction was “What will people think?” As one of the few Jewish families in an antisemitic town and with a father who did not always make himself popular with those in charge, it’s not surprising that Mattl didn’t want to call attention to themselves.

It’s nice to learn that Helene’s dread of a few days earlier about the new tenants has not turn out to be true.

August 29

Link to Family Tree to understand family relationships.

Earlier this year, I posted excerpts from a few stories and reminiscences that Helene wrote in the 1950s while living in San Francisco. The post today contains excerpts of a (slightly edited) story she wrote about the events of a sweltering August afternoon in Bilin, Bohemia. We get a sense of young Helene’s family life and her siblings’ personalities.

Helene was the youngest of seven children who survived infancy. Based on context, I would guess that this story takes place around 1891 or 1892.

The siblings:

Ida – born in 1869, married in 1894
Max – born in 1874 (see photo below)
Flora/Florly – born in 1876?, died in 1898
Mathilde/Mattl – born in 1878
Clara – born in? died in 1894
Irma/Hummel – born in 1883? died in 1904?
Helene/Enene – born in 1886

---

Young Max Löwy, date unknown

Uproar on a sultry Summer afternoon (aka Palace Revolution)

Ida, the oldest of us, came from the veranda next to the kitchen to escape for a while the merciless heat of the sultry August afternoon which was made hotter by her occupation. In general, that sun porch was one of the airiest places in the house and was the most useful space on the floor, serving as storage, sewing and ironing room, as well as the place for reading and writing in daytime. At night it was the our housemaid’s bedroom.

Tired from ironing stiff men’s shirts, collars and cuffs, she entered the drawing-room, seated herself on an easy chair for a half an hour’s rest, and used a handkerchief alternately to wipe or fan her face.

Brother Max and his sisters spent the hot August day each in their own fashion. Max, hidden and smoking behind a host of newspapers, watched Mattl’s strange behavior, sitting with a book in her lap, hands clasped over it, staring vacantly into space. It was not her custom – she normally busied herself with drawing, mending socks or the like, with good humor and humming a melody Ida or he had recently played.

Florly’s sat in her usual seat next to the sewing table before the center-window, watching what was not going on in that deserted main square. She would normally be reading a novel, but that day the unusual sultriness made her drowsy.

Clara sat with Irma and me on the floor, making new dresses for our dolls from her own designs.

A surprising silence prevailed.

Max, still studying his favorite sister’s queer mood, glancing over his paper, diagnosed: Weltschmerz. [world weariness]

“How about a little stroll, Mattl? It is cooler outside.”

“No, I can’t stand the heat either inside or outside.”

“A game of chess?”

“No, thank you.”

To cheer her up, he took his guitar from the wall next to the piano, threw himself into the easy chair again and sang in his agreeable voice:

From paradise I will tell you a new fairy tale
Of an ancient people, but my story is not stale,
Rudiral lalala, rudiral lalala, my story isn’t stale.

The Lord said “hi” to Adam, taking from him
A rib to make yards of Eva, just for his whim.
Rudiral lalala, Rudiral lalala, yards of Eva, for whim.

To Adam he said: “Feel at home, I only beg thee,
Don’t ever take an apple from that tree.
Rudiral lalala, Rudiral lalala, take never an apple from that tree.”

While the Lord with Adam had that conversation,
Eva got acquainted with a snake. What a sensation!
Rudiral lalala, Rudiral lalala, Eva got a sensation.

Pretending to know nothing about,
Took an apple and put it in her Adam’s mouth,
Rudiral lalala, Rudiral lalala, put an apple in her Adam’s mouth. ….

The Lord watching with pleasure his creation’s crown,
Witnessed with fury wicked Adam’s fall down.
Rudiral lalala, Rudiral lalala, witnessed wicked Adam’s fall down.

With rage he called: “Archangel Michael come out.
Expel from paradise Eva and her lout.”
Rudiral lalala, Rudiral lalala, from paradise expel Eva and her lout.

Crestfallen, Adam said, “Eva, that is the end,
I have to go to Halle [not hell: a university-town in Saxonia near the Bohemian border] to become a student.
Rudiral lalala, Rudiral lalala, go to Halle and become a student.”….

“Max, I think you had better not extend your academic liberty to our home. Or do you think it is a proper nursery-song for the kids?”

“Not a bad one at all and very funny, Ida. Besides Hummel is a school girl and Enene will pretty soon become one too and they have to know about religion. By the way, I really had not the intention to intrude in your domain — educational work I leave entirely to you. What I wanted was to chase away was Mattl’s mournful face.”

In order to show Ida that in his opinion the topic was exhausted, he sang another ribald student-song.

“I think,” said Mattl in a better mood, “that second song of Max’s would be a great success for gallivanting Eva.”

Now Ida was really angry. “I think that’s enough, Max: I only hope that one day you will become as outstanding a doctor as you are an unexcelled mountebank.”

Her brother ignored that remark entirely and continued his guitar concert, choosing more vulgar songs.

Florly, who until now had taken no part in that duel of words, dropped her less amusing novel and we children pricked up our ears. Max enjoyed such an appreciative audience and continued with his inexhaustible repertoire.

Ida, who had unsuccessfully tried to calm herself, said: “It is not only the words, Max, but that you corrupt their taste for good music.”

“Don’t be silly. Do you want me to entertain them with Beethoven’s “Lieder an eine ferne Geliebte” [To the Distant Beloved] or Mendelssohn’s “Auf Flügeln des Gesanges” [On the Wings of Song]? Can you not become less moralistic?”

“You can call it moralistic, prudish or spinsterish, I don’t care. It seems to me that you spend more time in the Kneipe (reserved rooms in inns where student associations spent their night singing, drinking, sometimes to the point of rioting) than at the university. I know that your grades couldn’t be better, but your behavior could be. No wonder you fight one duel after another, not considering how upset Mother always is, if by chance she hears about your rowdy exercises from some of your fellow-students who, of course didn’t know that she had no idea of her son’s ‘heroic deeds.’ Your monthly check from Uncle Jack in San Francisco liberally covers your tuition and reasonable expenses. You shouldn’t accept the money Mother gives you, worrying that you do not have enough food to eat. Instead her contributions permit you to live beyond our means. Being the only son doesn’t require you to be a first-rate playboy.” 

Money affairs were never discussed in our private rooms. Ida, who assisted Father, was up-to-date with the family’s financial situation and mother knew only too well how matters stood, but all the others, including Max, were not interested in Father’s business and were perfectly ignorant about money. We didn’t think money grew on trees, but knew that our parents had a printing and stationery store, that father published a weekly newspaper and sometimes printed some short-lived periodicals. But other than Mother and Ida, we had no idea how much work, trouble, and sometimes losses were involved in Father’s enterprises. Our allowances were given according to our ages and were by no means extravagant. Ida admired Mother’s business routine in the same way she admired her gift for running our household with very limited resources.

Because Ida knew how indifferent we all were to business matters and thinking that we all were engrossed in our activities, for once she forgot her usual circumspection.

Flora dropped her book again and became meditative. Mattl had forgotten her Weltschmerz and listened attentively to Ida’s and Max’s arguments. Clara and Irma didn’t pay any attention, but I cocked my ears. Not that I was interested in their controversy – it was pure satisfaction to me that Ida found fault with my big brother too, unlike Mother and my other sisters who thought him a fearless knight and beyond reproach.

Max felt uncomfortable and wanted to change the subject: “Let us play a sonata.”

“Not now. The air is still contaminated by your Gassenhauers (vulgar songs).”

Flora, Mattl and Clara – who hadn’t taken any part in the battle – interfered now. On that hot afternoon, they enjoyed their brother’s vaudeville humor better than Ida’s austerity.

“Ida,” Florly cut in, “it is ridiculous to make such an issue of a harmless hilarity. I imagine that Halle must be a very pleasant and fascinating place. I have the desire to become a modern Golias too.”

“Goliath, I reckon you mean,” interrupted Clara, “but I can’t guess what that giant had to do with the small university city across the border.”

“When I said Golias, I meant Golias, which is the name for medieval strolling students, Miss Smarty. Some more reading would do your beauty no harm. Maybe Max will agree with me, it is a wonderful remedy for Weltschmerz.” 

“Don’t forget to buy a harp, Florly, since your penchant for show practicing “Easter Bells” on the piano, would not sound so bad on that biblical instrument.” (That was the title of a horrible piece of music, the only one that Florly played by heart.) “But first you have to finish high school.”

Ida gave Clara an intimidating glance and got up. At the door she called, “Clara, come here for a moment, please.” Clara followed her out of the room.

“How could you say such a nasty thing to our sister? She so seldom takes part in such merriment. She caught Max’s frolicsomeness. Flora, in her gentle way, pretended not to have heard your intended-to-be-witty remark, which was not witty at all, but tactless. Don’t you know that Flora, the sweetest of our sisters, has not yet recovered from the influenza, maybe never will, and that she is too weak and sick to attend school? Father hires a private tutor whenever she feels well enough and wants to catch up on her studies. Nobody will care if she finishes high school, all that counts is that she regain her strength. Our parents do what she wants and she wants so little. I had never expected that you could be so rude, you who are always so good-natured.”

Clara, really downcast, answered: “Upon my word, Ida, I didn’t mean to be rude or to hurt her. It was just thoughtlessness. My sense of humor is not as sparkling as Father’s or Max’s. It’s just that we are all in such a strange mood. I think it’s the unbearable heat.”

“I am glad you realize that and don’t think, à la Max, that I am moralistic. I feel guilty too and was perhaps more aggressive than I intended. Please accept my apology and now go in and don’t mention anything, forget about it, and just be yourself – good, so awfully good.”

She kissed Clara who responded with a big hug and both reentered the room.

“Ida, have you changed your mind about playing a sonata with four hands or with me accompanying you on violin or cello?”

“I am not really in the mood.”

“High time to get married. You are becoming old-fashioned, spinsterish and prudish.”

Mother, who entered noiselessly in her soft slippers, said: “Ida is neither old-fashioned nor prudish. She just has better taste in music than you despite your fine technique. I don’t enjoy your vulgar songs. There are so many lovely student songs – both in tune and words. Why don’t you sing some of them for a change if Ida is not in the mood for classics?”

“They are too sentimental and your daughter Mattl needed to be cheered up. I tried to cure her very serious fit of mental sickness. But you, Mummy Rosa, disappoint me by being so touchy. You are a very bad example for Ida.”

Mother left the room as silently as she had entered it, but in a very low voice she said: “Sometimes your insolence knows no limits.”

Ida, in general so composed, lost her temper a second time that day. “Your cynicism is without equal, you brilliant, good-looking good-for-nothing. How dare you talk to our mother like that, and what is worse, in the presence of the children?”

The Flora-Mattl-Clara trio, who earlier showed that they enjoyed their brother’s monkey business better than Ida’s moral philosophy, now sided with oldest sister.

Max felt uneasy, defeated, and with regard to his mother, guilty. He left the room. Ida mastered her feelings again and even produced a faint smile. She knew that Max was looking for Mother to apologize. To find her was not so simple, since she was omnipresent: seemingly simultaneously in the kitchen, cellar, store, and print rooms. To reconcile with her was not difficult – she always made it easy for everybody.

After dinner, Mother put a great platter of apples on the table, which Father had brought from the country. Simultaneously Irma and I started: “Rudiral lalala, Rudiral lalala, never take an apple from that tree.” 

Father smiled knowingly and Mother said seriously: “Because you children are being so sassy, you will have no apples.” The Florly-Mattl-Clara trio suppressed their giggling with great effort.  

Ida, as usual, saved the situation:

“How about the Kreutzer sonata we rehearsed yesterday, Max? Father would enjoy it and he hasn’t heard us playing together in a long time.”  

“Is the air not too polluted?”

“Not anymore,” answered Ida, smiling. “The room has been thoroughly aired out while we were having dinner.”

Arm in arm, they left for the living room. After their performance, Ida said: “Nobody can help but be infatuated with you. You are just irresistible while playing music.”

“I think, if you get married, I will lose the most ideal accompanist – every virtuoso would envy me. I will have to abandon chamber music. You are so sensitive, intelligent, and so unfathomable.”

---

One theme that recurs in my family from one generation to another is the patriarch’s intelligence, charm, wide-ranging curiosity, and absolute disregard for practical things like money and providing for a family. (See February 16 and May 9 posts.) It was left to the matriarchs to tend to the mundane details of survival. This is not unlike ultra-orthodox Jews, where the men spend their lives in Torah study, while the women manage the household. Rather than Torah, my great-grandfather’s and grandfather’s studies focused on current affairs and metaphysics. We learn that their Uncle Jack (presumably their father’s brother Jacob – Tillie Zentner’s father and Hilda Firestone’s grandfather) in San Francisco supplemented their meager earnings to enable Max to go to medical school.

Ida always comes off in Helene’s stories as caring, but stern and strict, with no sense of humor. She and her mother were both very involved with helping her father’s business thrive and with the care of her younger siblings. Given their 16-year age difference, Ida was more of a parental figure than a sibling. Their brother Max was far more carefree and mischievous than his sister and he delighted in teasing her.

I had no luck finding the song that my grandmother quoted. I assume she heard it originally in German, but the translation is awfully good. I found a book of 16th-19th century German songs — presumably some of Max’s repertoire came from these.

In this story, Helene mentions that Flora was not healthy, still suffering the aftereffects of the 1889 influenza epidemic (see January 16 and January 17 posts). As we live through our second year of Covid-19, I wonder how many of our lives will be altered forever, as were the lives of so many who were fortunate enough to survive the 1889 epidemic.

May 31

Link to Family Tree to understand family relationships.

Today we have excerpts from a story Helene wrote about her childhood in Bilin during the late 1890s.

Below is the first page of 2 different drafts:

Potter and Poet to Boot

It was always a real treat to me when – on a school free day – I was invited to accompany my father on a business-trip by coach, railway or on Shank’s pony [on foot]. It was on such occasional trips that I found out what a wonderful teacher and companion my father was. Those were the opportunities where I let him into my world of thoughts and interests.

My dream, my passionate desire was to travel, see foreign people and go to lands of exotic plants and animals. I thought father would laugh at my crazy ideas when I talked to him about my day-dreams but he didn’t. On the contrary, he said very seriously: “Remember, you can realize all your wishes by sticking to them and wishing them and concentrate your thought on it intensely. Some people call that ‘prayer’. Prayers are intense wishes.”

In that sense I must have prayed a lot because many of my wishes came true. What I learned on those rare rides on Shank’s mare, I attribute to father’s unexcelled skill of making even the seemingly dullest things palatable. “Keep your eyes open, nothing is uninteresting.”

The Biela-Zeitung, named after the river which flows through the little town, was more my father’s hobby and mouthpiece to express his opinions publicly than it was a profitable enterprise to provide for a family of ten. To make up for the deficit of his weekly paper and to keep his printing presses going, he visited industrial concerns and successful business people to gather orders for printing jobs.

One day, smiling as usual but with a special strain of amusement around his sunny eyes and mouth, father invited me: “How about a short study-trip to Dux?”

This town was the center of one of the most important coal-basins of North-Bohemia, the ugliest place one could imagine. Even now, after about fifty years, I remember with disgust that smoky and stinking place, as the most depressing place, save the Kazet (Concentration camp Ravensbrück).

Father observed my hesitation and without taking offence, said:

“I can't blame you for not being overjoyed to escort me to this place, but we will not stay there long. Some other day I will show you that even Dux has interesting points. In order to be there in time, we have to take an early train. At the station there will be an Einspänner [horse-drawn wagon] to bring us to an interesting pottery-factory. I know you will get a real kick out of this trip - otherwise I wouldn’t have tried to persuade you to keep me company.”

We took a so-called “mixed-train” consisting of about forty coal cars and only two passenger cars. The long train, which had the appearance of a giant caterpillar, stopped when the two passenger cars arrived in front of the station building. The third-class contingent – mostly women with big baskets and father and me – pushed against one another to obtain a seat. The wagon was crammed full. Some people who did not have eggs in their baskets used them for seats; many were standing, sardine-like.

Outside the station building waited a worn-out coach whose lacquered wheels were once red, attached to a mare which looked just as worn out. The coachman, likewise an old veteran with a belligerent mustache and a ruddy face, was inside the railway station waiting for passengers. When he recognized my father he saluted respectfully, not hiding his pleasure to have him for a fare. Apparently, he liked the editor of the Biela-Zeitung, who would bring him cigars and a lump of sugar for the mare; both accepted the thoughtfulness with an individual neigh. The coachman lifted me like a piece of luggage into the Einspänner, throwing over my knees a horse-perfumed blanket. Father called out his destination and immediately the coachman started to give father a detailed report of the events of the past week as far as he thought they would be of interest to the newspaperman. Endowed with a retentive memory, he made only a few notes of names, time and place with his pencil on his stiff cuffs, following with interest the report of his correspondent whose insight, sense of justice, and horse-sense he highly appreciated.

Father, knowing that the driver wasn’t listening as he was only interested in the bad road and his old mare, said: “Believe it or not, his reports are more competent than that of a professional reporter. He is a very keen observer and what he told me are facts and not gossip.”

Father prepared me for what I was going to see. Three brothers had inherited the pottery factory from their father as he had from his father. The oldest of the three owners, a very ambitious and industrious fellow, opened foreign markets for their products and in those days the factory was one of the biggest in the field. The second brother was the “artistic” manager and brain of that enterprise, making all designs himself.

The latest brainchild of the “artist” was a phosphorescent chamber pot. The youngest of the brothers was the office manager and was, as father called him, “Potter and Poet to boot”, after Hans Sachs’s exquisite self-persiflage: “Schuster and Poet dazu” – Shoemaker and Poet to boot, in Richard Wagner’s unexcelled comic-opera: “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg”.

The day before our excursion to the pottery factory, father had received a request for the price for illustrated catalogues in three languages. A big job for our voracious printing enterprise. Father had not the slightest idea that the “poet” had something else up in his sleeve. While his artistic brother showed me all the vases, plates, saucers and cups and other objects of art, including a pot de chambre en miniature, the poet used the absence of his brother to tell my that he had written a book of poetry and that he wanted to have it printed: “Published by the author.” Father did not give himself away by saying: “That would be the only possibility.”

Father said to me, “Your brother Max – who usually is not over-interested in my business-affairs – will be amused this time about a private order with which the ‘poet’ honored me. I wouldn’t be surprised if my son would busy himself with composing some tunes for the poems to enlarge his guitar-repertoire.”

“What do you mean by ‘private order’? Didn’t you tell me they wanted to have catalogues printed?”

“That is correct, but while you were studying ceramics, he authorized me to print his ‘collected works’”.

“Let me see, please”, I begged.

“Sorry, editorial secret.”

“Am I not a member of the editorial staff?”

“You most certainly are, but I wish to surprise the family; besides you, only your mother and Ida belong to the staff.”

“I think it is not fair to keep me, your faithful apprentice and travelling companion, on tenterhooks.”

“I agree with you entirely and apologize. You are entitled to the first print on vellum-paper to start your own collection of classics.”

We returned home with the order. After dinner father recited at random one of the “poet’s” numerous poems.

“Ei, wie das funkelt und wie das blitzt,
Wenn Ross und reiter zu Pferde sitzt.”

“What a sight! And how exciting
To see horse and rider on horse-back riding.”

A Homeric laughter broke loose. My brother jumped to the piano just as father foresaw, wishing to have a similar brainstorm in composing a melody appropriate to the poem, the fantastic Pegasus-ride as well as the artistic pot de chambre.

---

Now that I know so much more about Helene, I appreciate many different aspects of this story. When I first read it a few years ago, I had not had her letters translated. Nor had I seen early issues of the Biela-Zeitung. In my grandmother’s letter seen in the February 6 post, we saw another example of the potter’s poetry.

Helene respected, idolized and loved her father. He encouraged her curiosity and dreams, and taught and motivated her to be a better human being.

“Die Meistersinger” was my grandmother’s favorite opera - my mother Eva was named after the heroine.

In the above story, Helene’s father invites her on a “study trip to Dux,” a town she dislikes. In at least the early editions of the Biela-Zeitung, Adolf Löwy had a regular column entitled “Walks Around Dux.” I wonder whether she was alluding to that column as she told this story. Earlier this year, I looked through several issues of the Biela-Zeitung with my friend and translator. I was surprised to find that the column was not a light-hearted look at the events and sights of Dux, but that the articles touched on the corruption and wrong-doing in the town.

“Walks Around Dux” column from June 23, 1877 edition of the Biela-Zeitung.

The article begins:

….If you should happen to believe because of the events here that we live in a civilized state, that we live in a century in which in different places they sometimes call the “Century of Intelligence,” here we cannot really claim that because what seems to be happening recently here has a rather crude and bitter aftertaste of the lovely time of rule by force. There is very little that is honorable in our city and it is a very unfortunate sign of the level of culture of a peace-loving people in the street are attacked in a dastardly fashion by hired henchmen. …

May 25

Link to Family Tree to understand family relationships.

Yesterday we read a story about the household geese. Today we learn about other livestock, ducks.

Marischka appears in many of my grandmother’s stories. She seemed to be much more than a maid, taking care of the family, house, garden, and animals. In the stories, she appears as a sort of Mary Poppins in young Helene’s eyes – someone who was always there to keep her safe and make magical things happen. While her parents and older siblings were occupied with work and school, Marischka was Helene’s primary companion. That meant too that Helene knew more of the maid’s private life than the rest of the family since Marischka seems to have taken every opportunity to meet her boyfriend Franticek, often using the children as cover.

Sometimes the names in the stories get confusing, because the girls in the family had their given name and at least one nickname, and often Helene uses them interchangeably. Ida, the eldest, apparently did not have a nickname. She was 17 when Helene was born so was more of a parental figure than a sibling. Next came Mathilde/Mattl, Clara, Flora/Florly, Irma/Hummel, and Helene/Enene. Only son Max seems to have always been known as Max.

Below is a photo of the first page of the story – Helene did not use a stapler or paper clip, instead tying the story together with red string looped through the binder holes. So resourceful! Perhaps something she learned in her father’s print shop. In the story below, we learn about how the household found uses for everything. For example, Helene’s uncle Carl’s coffee import and bags came in handy for foraging.

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Child Without Childhood (Ch V)
Life With Our Ducklings

Mother told me to gather Brennessel – nettles – as soon as Irma came home from school. She handed me two pairs of old gloves, warning me not to touch the nettles with bare hands because they cause small blisters which burn your hands as the name indicates. (Brennen means to burn).

“Are you sure, mummy, that the little ducks will not get burning blisters in their throat?”

“Quite sure. Nettles are candies to them!”

I was bursting with excitement to bring my sister Hummel the interesting news that we have pets. I couldn’t wait for her at home and excitedly I ran to her school. Together we rushed home only to deposit Irma’s school satchel into the kitchen and to ask Marischka for some paper bags or a basket. Equipped with these and our gauntlets we were off. With zeal we took over that important job to collect “candies” for our darlings, to which my sister had paid only a short visit before, ashamed to come without a gift. The little yellow spots walking on two legs were so beautiful and the thought that they belonged to both of us made us feel happy. From the window Marischka called that we didn’t need to walk far away. On the bank of the river Biela were the fattest nettles. Each morning Marischka spread fresh grass on the floor of our children’s “walking school” after she cleaned it up with fresh water. Fortunately, there was a faucet nearby, used to clean the lead type from the printer’s ink before they became “abgelegt” [filed]– terminus technicus [technical term] for returning the type to the compartments in the box where they belonged. 

To get the necessary grass for the next morning, Marischka took us out for a walk after dinner to which not even Ida objected, as it was spring. She took a big burlap bag which had still the brown stamp “Java” on it, where the coffee-beans uncle Carl sent to mother came from, and we walked, in the direction of Kutterschitz [now Chudeřice – about a mile from Bilin], for there was the highest and best grass, the spinach for our pets. While Irma and I plucked that “spinach” with zest and glowing cheeks, Marischka rested in the high grass from the task of the day. Franticek, with whom she made that appointment the night before, kept her company. My sister and I were too engrossed in our work to pay any attention to whatever was going on in our surroundings. After Marischka had rested enough, Franticek and she plucked ten times more than we had gathered in more than an hour.

Now I felt very tired and sleepy. Marischka put the burlap bag from Java over her back fastened with a cord, took me in her arms, and carried me home. Irma was tired too and wouldn’t have admitted it, but willingly she took Marischka’s hand. We must have looked a biblical picture like a stray group of mother and two children at the exodus of Egypt.

Ida reproached Marischka in her softspoken way for returning so late, but our maid lied pertly that she would have come home earlier, but the children enjoyed their occupation so much. Our glowing eyes and red cheeks proved her excuse to be true, but Ida nevertheless asked her to bring us home the latest at eight o’clock or if she wanted to stay longer, to leave us at home.

Our grown-up sisters showed their interest in the little ones once or twice a day. Once Mattl made a nice sketch with watercolors which Clara copied as a pattern and embroidered a white muslin apron for Ida, who was enraptured by it.

Pretty soon our sweet pets lost their brilliant yellow color. Although our love and care remained, we had to resign our proxy now that they were in puberty and we were declared as not competent anymore.

Our pets had outgrown their kindergarten and were transferred to that shed in which wood to kindle the fire in the stoves was stored. The floor became strewn with straw. Marischka cleaned the “walking school” from the grass, and washed the place thoroughly; all we were allowed to do for our ex-wards was to refill the vessel with fresh water and provide them with new candies, but the feeding methods changed; they got corn or barley. The door was barred with a crossbar which we were not allowed to open; we had to hand over the gathered nettles to our maid. Mother ordered that one of the apprentices cut an opening, a window so to speak, in their new apartment. Marischka found that the boys made too big a hole in the door and the little birds could become homesick for her kindergarten and nailed two small boards crosswise for security’s sake.

Hummel and I were pondering why we had been disqualified as their guardians. We thought our pets must have done something terrible to be imprisoned for life. We didn’t get a satisfactory answer what kind of crime they had committed.

Our adult ducks really led a dog’s life now. When Marischka had time in the afternoon, she drove the white birds with red shoes to the nearby bank of the Biela river and we looked with pleasure and pride at their acrobatic performances.

Gradually we lost interest in them and didn’t count the heads. We had not observed that the number of them was reduced by two after we had one Sunday roast duck. Father had refused a tender drumstick, saying that because of his new denture he would prefer potato soup. Since it was not ready, coffee would be enough because he wasn’t hungry. The rest of the family had not such sentimental stomachs and did not pay any attention. Mother put them on our menu when her husband was out of town, which happened frequently.

My sister Irma and I always handed over the candies for our pets. When we asked why we no longer took them out for a swim, Marischka said they had a cold.

May 24

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.

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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.

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Contrary to my grandmother’s prediction, the folksong has not been forgotten and examples can be heard on YouTube.

April 22

Link to Family Tree to understand family relationships.

With no letter today, we have another story by Helene, likely written in San Francisco in the 1950s.

When I sorted through my family papers, I found several stories my grandmother had written about her childhood. One was written in German and called “Der Loewe von Bilin.” Having a little knowledge of a language is sometimes less helpful than having none at all. I decided that the title referred to my grandmother’s maiden name Löwy and that the story would tell me all about her family and life in the Bohemian town of Bilin where she was born. Therefore, I asked my friend and translator Roslyn to prioritize its translation.

As I soon learned, the title of the story is “The Lion of Bilin” and refers to the name of the mountain that overlooked the town. When Roslyn translated this story in early 2018, I was really disappointed that it was mostly about people unrelated to her and I set it aside and did not read it again until recently. I wasn’t yet familiar with her writing style, and had not read enough of her childhood stories to understand that she felt completely out of place in Bilin as a child. Like “O Katherina” which we saw on March 13, in this story Helene takes us on a wonderful journey, this time from the 1890s in Bilin to 1918 in Vienna, and we learn a lot about her childhood as well as her attitudes and life before she met Vitali. As often is the case in her stories and letters, Goethe makes an important appearance. You can see drawings Goethe made of Bilin at the Goethezeitportal. Images 19-22 are of Bilin.

I have one stand-alone copy of this story which looks like a final draft. In a binder with other childhood stories, she had an earlier draft as well as images of a lion and of the mountain.

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Final draft of story

Earlier draft

The Lion of Bilin

by Helene Cohen

Borschen Mountain is located in a valley between the Erz Mountains – the natural border between the Empires of Saxony and Bohemia – and the Bohemian Uplands.  It is 538 meters above sea level.  It is the highest clinkstone rock cliff in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy.

We had learned this in the ‘90s in geography class.  We had to memorize it.  However, what was far more interesting to us pupils than the height above sea level of this unforested basalt rock were the many tales and stories about our local rock.  The northern Erz mountain chain, with its mountains more than 1000 meters high, the very old, gigantic, tall evergreen forests, the unforgiving snowstorms in the winter and the menacing storms in the summer, impressed us greatly. The moods of this climate made the wild, fantastic tales seem so much more believable to us than what we learned about the Borschen, which just stood there doing nothing, splendid in its isolation, quiet and evoking no fear.  It took in the sun and let it be reflected by its glittering white quartz.  Often enough, however, it just looked gray.  But the mountain, which in its quiet majesty looked down confidently and even arrogantly on our little medieval city, could not be trusted.  Tourists unfamiliar with the area might have had a hard time visiting this rock, even though they had heard of its very interesting flora and its rare minerals.  They might have seen our little Cinderella-esque city in the Bohemian spa region, but there was no sign that might have told them how to go up the cliff safely.  It is not generally known that Goethe, in his role as a nature researcher and artist, visited Bilin during his stay in Teplitz.  Fascinated by this odd Alpine formation, he drew a sketch, and, struck by the odd mood of nature, he called it The Lion of Bilin.  What a great wonder that Napoleon, on his way to Austerlitz, was thinking of other matters.  Otherwise, he might have had the Borschen removed and installed somewhere in France.  Whoever travels on the dusty rural road which passes by the Bohemian Sphinx could not have believed that the bushes between the rifts and chasms was actually a clever camouflage, a trap to prevent the eradication of the rare grasses found there along with the Borschen carnation.

Postcard in binder with draft of the story

Drawing in binder with draft of the story

We, the school children, knew nothing of this.  To us, the Borschen was not a lion, and was of no geological or botanical interest.  It was just a splendid place to play hide and go seek, and (cops and) robber games.  Later, much later, I deeply regretted having been such an obedient child who stayed away from the group who, even just in play, wanted to harm the Borschen region.

Two boys, the brightest but also the wildest in their class, were the ringleaders.  Their names were Ottl Kurz and Attl (Arthur) Kurz.  (The last name means “short”). They were the smallest kids around, but they were such daring rascals that older, bigger kids respected them.  The Kurz boys’ boldness seemed more important than the ten to fifteen centimeters in height that the older boys had on them.  While the other boys saw what a great place the Borschen area was for their robber and war games, the Kurz pair were absolutely bewitched by it.  They knew every nook and cranny.  If the Borschen had attracted a wider audience, they would have made fine tour guides.  But that never happened, and so the Borschen remained the favored place of these children, even as they grew older.  Later, as university students, they would hike up there with their textbooks, still feeling some kind of magnetic attraction to the place, as a criminal often feels drawn to the scene of his crime.  They always went to this place, even though it could have been disastrous for them.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

During summer vacation, Ottl and Attl Kurz left the house at 6 a.m. to go to their Borschen, which always had something new to show them, like in the Thousand and One Nights. 

These boys’ parents were used to these escapades, and did not worry when their roguish boys – whom they impersonated at times - came home a bit late from the mountain, hungry as bears.  But when it got to be 9 o’clock, and their boys still had not come home, they started to worry.  They notified the police, and tired miners and field hands who heard the rumor also joined the search.  It’s strange how popular these young rascals were.   

The search was only carried out in the immediate area of the Borschen.  Searching the forests and the nearby spa was deemed unnecessary.  After a two-hour search, aided by the full moon, the boys were found, unconscious and with several holes in their heads, in a deep chasm.  They were transported to the hospital on a hay wagon.

At that time, I was no longer in my home town; I lived in Vienna.  I heard of the tragedy that had befallen the rascals some twenty years later, when I ran into Engineer Kurz in the revolving door of a Viennese café.  We greeted each other, laughing, as if we had just seen each other recently.

“Hi there, HE.  Still the same?”  The two letters had a double meaning.  They were my nickname, but in the Bilin dialect they also meant “crazy”.  And Mr. Kurz did intend that double entendre!  He grabbed my arm.  “Are you expecting someone?  Really, you’re not?  Then we can sit at the same table.” 

“Ottl Kurz, you still haven’t grown up!”

We sat together for several hours, putting everyone down – the locals, the bigwigs.  We thought the entire population, including us, was just a bunch of characters.  For the first time, I realized that it bothered Otto that he was so short, or at least it had bothered him in his younger days.  He told me – and he was lying – that his claustrophobia, which he really did have as a result of the disaster at the Borschen, had made him unfit for military service.  He thought he could help the fatherland more by thundering on about war, complaining about the war economy, the victors, and so on.  He could disguise his claustrophobia as a mental illness.

I laughed at his humor, but also felt great sympathy due to the insights into his psyche which he had shared with me.  I decided to be nice to him and take care of him, even though he kept teasing me.  His way of making fun of his own shortcomings was the best type of gallows humor.  After the waiter interrupted us, I decided to change the subject:

“Hey, why don’t you tell me about the robber show incident?  I wasn’t living at home by then.”

“Yes, it really was quite a while ago; now, our last rascal prank is mentioned in the new editions of school books as a warning about what not to do.  Now, 20 years later, I still don’t know how we two got home.  We were running around showing off our battle scars, with our heads bandaged.  We were particularly excited about being excused from school for a whole year!  That alone was worth the whole adventure.

I can still remember, as if it had happened yesterday, what happened to me just before we fell down the chasm.  Attl, who was a year younger than I, but a centimeter taller, was the daredevil.  He stood up on a sharp pinnacle and, making a megaphone with his hands, hollered to me:  “Come on up here, Ottl, and look at all this splendor!  Not even Lobkowicz has these specimens in his botanical garden.  Come smell the fragrance!”  I suffered a crippling panic attack.  Such splendor could only be found in a dangerous steep overhang; anywhere else, all the rare flowers would already have been picked.  Before I could reach him or even warn him,  Attl disappeared without saying a word.  I called his name; no answer.  Gathering all my strength, I screamed:  Attl, I’m counting to three and then I’m coming to get you!  

The end?  I’m sitting here with HE, drinking, in pleasant company, a brown liquid.  The coffee of Saxony in the olden days seemed like nectar in comparison.  Now, I live in Vienna, the city of song and love. 

Attl lives in Germany.  He is the main chemist at a dyehouse in Wuppertal.  On a business trip before the war, he met a tall, beautiful woman, fell in love with her, and they are happily married.  They have two children who are almost as tall as he is, and he is very proud of this.  I am, as you may know, since we have acquaintances in common in Vienna, still in service to the Emperor and the King.

“Why don’t you do as Attl did?”

Well, I had more holes in my head than he did, and maybe that’s why I haven’t been able to make the decision to give up the single life.  And you?  Why are you still single?  Are you really not married yet?

“That’s not going to change.”

When you left our home town, people thought you were a little “he” {crazy].  But you didn’t even fall down the Borschen.

I know people were saying things about me, but not that I was crazy.  They were saying I had a screw loose because I went to live in Vienna to work and study.  The first worked out:  I found a job that suited me, but I didn’t have the time or the money for further studies. 

Maybe things will change for you eventually.  Sometimes our status changes. 

If that was an offer, I’d have to say, we are too similar to attract each other.

Who said anything about attraction?

Too bad there’s no more room for another hole in your head.  I’d be glad to make another one for you.  

Otto laughed out loud.  “That sounds almost encouraging.  A dressing down, the kind you almost can taste.  Maybe you’ll reconsider.”

If you really want to get married, maybe I can be of help. I have a friend. She’s an unusually charming person, and she likes “originals”.  If you come to this coffeehouse again, I’m a regular here, and she is sure to be here, too.

In Spring 1919, I received a picture postcard of Borschen, from my friends Fanny and Otto.  They were on their honeymoon.  I sent them my congratulations, asking if the Borschen didn’t make the claustrophobia act up.

A second card came:  “On a good roadway, we came quite near the place I almost lost my head.  Fanny was disappointed not to find a shrine to the famous explorer. She would have liked to marry a famous man.  I told her that if I had died and then been carted away from there, then I would have been famous.  She assured me that she is happy to be married to a man who isn’t famous; that is better than not being married.  The Borschen now has a kiosk that reminds one of the ones in Vienna, but the refreshments are better tasting.

How are you doing – until next time?  Don’t be “he”, He.  Do what we did.

March 7

Link to Family Tree to understand family relationships.

Today letter is from Helene to her nephew Robert in England. It was mostly written in English. The translated German passages are in Italic.

Istanbul, 7 March 46

Dear Robert, My Heaven sent boy! Without you I should be always waiting for letters still, and for some dear loving words. In the meantime, I received plenty of letters from Eva and her husband (he seems to be a nice fellow) and Harry enclosed four always-short letters which proved me that they innermost have not changed. Outside, of course, Harry appears nearly unrecognizable, but not to me. From the flapper Eva became a young woman, her face has not altered.

You wrote me in your last letter: “There is no going back to the past for all of us.” Yes, Robert, I am sorry because there is no road back. Then you continued: “But your children are real. They may have changed - it would be unthinkable that they hadn’t. But that doesn’t offset your relationship. They would have changed in normal times too because they are grown up, and now live their independent life. Is that not right and good so?” Yes, Robert! It is right and good so. Thousand times yes!  

Robert, I can’t remember what I have written to you, but from your letters I can see that I must have been crazy. There is a Russian proverb: Look before you leap, and then don’t leap! I will make a variation of it. Think before you write, and then, don’t write! Had I had an idea of it, that you will send my letters which seem to me now to have shown the symptoms of madness I had not sent them away. Dear Robert, don’t mistake me. It is not in the least a reproach, and I didn’t consider it as an indiscretion. I only wouldn’t worry them. Mothers in their love are sometimes egotistical. I rewarded your gentleness, your sympathy, and your affection badly by pouring out all my trouble and cares on you. This letter you can show them; they ought to have knowledge what a beastly mother they have.  

There is one excuse for my hoggish behavior. In Vienna Paul was my - I use an expression by Galsworthy - business-nurse. To play the role of a father confessor, he had seldom time for me. There were too many “brothers and sisters.” Since your last stay in Vienna I found out that we have similar related souls and I mean related not in the sense of family or relationship but more of the “elective affinities” [Die Wahlverwandtschaften – a novel by Goethe].

A little scene. You took me out with your car. You, Paul and I had coffee and cakes in a little inn. Before we reached this “Jause Station” [a cafe], you stopped your car when you have seen in a meadow primroses, the first of the year; you gathered them while Paul and I remained in the auto. I watched you and said to Paul: “Look now, Robert has just the same expression on his face as he had as a little boy with (always, please tell it to Hilda) short hair and a straw hat which was like a halo on his head! You gave me this nice looking nosegay and I was very pleased with it, more as by the thought than one from a flower shop. The innkeeper, an old, fine lady, told us how she came to this little coffeehouse, etc, etc, and when we said adieu, she said: “the lean gentleman is your husband, is he not? One can see it immediately because he is so careful.” There were no time and no reason to correct her mistake. I left this little coffeehouse (in English, I know it; but for that term there is no synonym) amused, and flattered of course.

The next day you made another trip in the Vienna Woods in another company. When you came to have dinner with us, you brought me, wrapped in a doe skin, the first violets. That was so nice Robert, so very, very nice of you. The doe skin I stored away, hoping to give it back to you. It is gone with all our things, but not the recollection of how I happened to keep your doe skin. It is unbelievable what little events are stored away in our brains and how dear those little intermezzi can be.

Before I fell in the melancholy way, I lived more in the present and in the future, and here I seek refuge in the past. On the delay of my departure I am not quite without guilt. Had I written to you about the money affair, things would have been altered. But I didn’t know in which pecuniary condition Eva and her husband are living, I know Harry a soldier. Before the Joint Association asked for the money, every delay seemed to me a new punishment, but I comforted myself saying: The only good thing in this bad job is that the children have not to pay for my passage. My wits began to turn once I knew they have to pay for it, and I stayed here so long I can say Lugsi [?] voluntarily.

Robert, you mentioned in your last letter that I told you that I am reading Shakespeare, but I hope you will not have expected letters in Shakespearean style. I am glad to receive letters in the English language. It enlarges my knowledge of it and compels me to think in this language. Reading letters is so much easier and more agreeable. I am astonished that you write German correctly still, while my children obviously have forgotten a great deal.

Enclosed is a letter to Paul. You will be astonished about that. But I will explain it to you. Today is Thursday, and generally two ladies from the Jewish society come to pay us a visit, distributing cakes and asking for letters which they mail for us. Therefore perhaps you have received some letters with an unknown sender. Apart from this I don’t know Paul’s address. By all means it would be more plain to attach this letter to one to Eva or Harry, but I sent both of the two a letter this week and I must not spoil them.

Robert, you made excuses in your last letter for your acting like a school master. No reason! After reading Harry’s letters I know I deserve much more to be told off than you. You are right if you blame me. Robert, if I am in San Francisco and I am so happy that you will come there too, I will make a thick line under the chapter Kassel - Istanbul insomuch it is concerning my person, of course not for Vitali, the only grief since I know Harry is out of danger. I am so happy about that and that Eva has found a nice husband is a great satisfaction to me.

In your last letter, you told me I will make friends in USA. I don’t believe so. I will find kindliness, compassion, that is what I fear. Did I mention it because you wrote: “I want you to understand it would be wrong to refuse kindness wherever it is given.” Robert, will you be my tutor and advise me to deal with people? I am not afraid with the children. We taught them to enjoy merriments. I am so sorry about Nathan with respect to Hilda. She is such a darling. There is a great comfort she knows how and when he died. Most of the European widows don’t know it. Perhaps you will have trouble to understand my English, the next letter I will write in German again. Please Robert now, where air mail is possible, write me very often and soon. It is so fine to receive letters in a really and mentally seclusion. One fact I must state, I endeavored to try to be balanced. I don’t know if I have been successful. However sometimes, long, long ago, I succeeded in by using a kind of gallows humor by getting myself in a better mood, but long distance, it is somewhat difficult.

I make myself reproaches, that my letters to you had a bad influence on your humor and I committed a crime to impose upon you. Please Robert, take care of you, we will cause each other as few griefs as possible.

Your Helen
Farewell and don’t be angry with me.

...loving
Yours Helen 

The sentence was not crossed out by any censorship agency, but rather I did that myself because I myself absolutely couldn’t understand what I wanted to say when I read over the letter to try to correct a few mistakes.

There is so many room to fill up with nice things to tell you and I have so much in store for you. Especially for you because you were also so many years so very alone [the mother of all German words for ‘loneliness’] Now I am thinking not on England, I thought on Brüx after the death of Kätelein. I am and I was always more thinking about you than you perhaps imagine. To be true to my principles is not to bestow anything/something to the post office, especially the Turkish. I send you so many kisses as there is room and more still

Your Helen

Airmail postage is very expensive and it is very uneconomical to leave white space. Instead of tell you off when I see you I will give you a long, big kiss on your snout. Hilda would be upset about such an unladylike expression. To her must I say: Have you expected to receive a lady? The Kazet [concentration camp] is not a girls high school. The way the female guards have spoken to us would have caused soldiers to blush.

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One thing that has become clear is how proud and independent she was. In many respects, that is a great thing. However, her letters show us she was uncomfortable asking for financial assistance from family members, which may have prevented her and Vitali’s safe passage from Vienna before it was too late. In this letter too, she is sorry she hadn’t asked for monetary assistance earlier, assuming that the bureaucracy of the Joint would provide the assistance she needed.

You can see that Helene made a point of filling every inch of space on the paper, commenting on the cost of postage and the desire not to waste a penny. She made sure to include many loving signatures and endearments, not wanting to let go of this connection to her past, present, and hopefully future.

I continue to be amazed at how much was shared across the oceans. Letters traveled from Istanbul to London to San Francisco so that everyone knew what was happening with their loved ones abroad. This turned out to be a happy practice for me, since I would not have this letter otherwise.

Despite all that Helene has been through, she still has great empathy for others. She feels that she and Robert are kindred spirits. She lovingly recalls things that Robert did as a child and young adult. She grieves with his many losses and current solitude: his half-sister Käthe died in 1918 at the age of 14 and Robert lost his own mother before he was three and his step-mother/aunt when he was 10.

March 6

Link to Family Tree to understand family relationships.

Nr 79                           Vienna, 6 March 1941

My dear, dear children! It’s a rainy day without mail. I’m done with my work for the day and I don’t know any better way to end the day than to have a conversation with you. It’s not easy because between yesterday and today nothing important has happened here and I’m not really in the mood for a chat.

Oh well, the sheet of paper must be filled no matter how much certain ill-treated types resist this. I also have to do a lot of things which I don’t like, or rather I can’t even do what I would like to do. I have often cursed the fact that I never really found time to read a book and if one was recommended to me, I was too tired to enjoy reading. Today everything is the reverse. If I take a book in my hand which was written before the war, I mean the war that we have now, I think “why how unworldly this is”. It is such a restructuring of values that has happened that you almost have to step out in order to keep pace with it. Young people of course don’t get as tired as older people, and training is paramount.

My favorite things to read are your letters. I never really read the kind of novel that appears in installments in a newspaper. I imagined my workload in advance. Now I am punished by this arrogance, because now I am waiting week by week for a continuation like the ladies who were subscribing to the Biela-Zeitung back in those days just couldn’t wait for Saturday in order to read the conclusion in the “sheet” (affectionate word for newspaper) [really, an insult]. They wanted to see if Knight Iwan and Ida sat holding hands. What are lion ballads [play on the name Löwy?] compared to this 75-stanza long murder tale which our girl would always start when there was at least six weeks worth of ironing to do? I could sit for hours in the warm kitchen with my doll in my arm and listen to them. To the credit of the Biela-Zeitung, I must say that those kinds of novels never appeared in it and just like yesterday old Ida the gossip [Helene’s older sister] who would walk with me ran after to ask to be told if the two in the story would get along or not. Did people have problems then? Was there really a time when a fruit seller really had nothing better to do than to imagine if she was going to get into a fight with her boyfriend or not?  Actually, not much has changed, just that nowadays you have to sit instead of making war [making a put with different meanings of krieg/kriegen] . When will the war end and when will the produce sales lady take an interest again in whether they are going to fight or not? Let’s hope for the best.

To thank Eva for her Boccaccio-esque hospital tales, I will tell some of my own. This is from my collection: “se non e vero, e trovato ben.” [if it’s not true, at least it’s a good story]. These are  quotes from people looking for apartments:

·      “I have been married for five months and my wife is in a blessed condition. I ask the housing office: does that have to be?”
·      “I and my wife are 12 people….”
·      “I can’t get rid of either the shed or my wife.”
·      “A man himself lives in 2 rooms along with his wife and can let her or them go.”

We will not be able to get news from Lizette about how things are until after the war ends. Do you have any mail from her? And when will Robert be with you?

These letters won’t go out until tomorrow. Maybe I can think of something else to tell you, so I’m saving a little room.

Many, many kisses
Helen

[Handwritten]
My dear cutie pies. So I didn’t save room for nothing. I can tell you that letter #5 has arrived (5 February 1941). I am glad that Everl is not in a relationship of affection with herself and she doesn’t regret when she has to work until 10:30. That’s a brave fellow, Everl! I’m glad you have the new racket. Harry-boy, is there no Dischendorfer in Frisko? If not, then I’m not coming. A pedicure is the last rudiment of a plutocratic way of life. Is that a bandage or a small ... the cause of the decoration on your toe? It may be something to take away your corns. The most unfortunate thing is your poor old Pegasus. He seems to be like an old horse-shoer (farrier). Out of love for him, you must keep a lookout for someone to replace Dischendorfer.

Kiss, that’s all
Helen

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I love how Helene can make even the lack of mail interesting. In this letter, she takes us back to her childhood in Bilin in Bohemia. She acknowledges her snobbish attitude toward popular serialized literature, telling her children that she’s now having her comeuppance as she waits with bated breath for each new missive from them. She assures us however that her father’s newspaper, the Biela-Zeitung, didn’t publish that kind of lowbrow literature.

I don’t know whether Helene refers to a specific story when she mentions Knight Iwan. If so, my guess would be that she chose that tale because his beloved had the same name as Helene’s sister – Ida. In many of her stories, Helene describes Ida as a bit of a tyrant, taking life very seriously and never letting her baby sister do what she wanted. Helene describes her revenge in a companion letter she wrote to her nephew Paul which was sent in the same envelope as today’s post. That letter is excerpted in an earlier blog post where she relates the story of how she tricked her sister into believing that she’d taught young Paul how to read.

I was unable to determine who or what Dischendorfer was. Perhaps a pharmacist or chemist? Also, I wonder whether the quotes from apartment hunters were true or quoted from a humorous article.

Despite the light tone, we learn one very disturbing piece of news — that Helene and Vitali are no longer able to communicate with Lizette and his other relatives in Istanbul.

February 6

I love today’s 1941 letter from Helene to her son Harry in San Francisco, which was written a few days before the letters we saw yesterday. The beginning and ending are wonderful – a lavish, long, loving, lighthearted salutation and signing off with endless kisses. Her children could not have doubted her love, despite the miles between them.

I was struck by how visually appealing the letter is – although she used a typewriter, it’s laid out in an interesting way. Very different from the densely-packed letters we’ve seen with no white space or paragraph breaks. Here she puts to good use the lessons she learned as the daughter of a newspaper publisher.

Helene mentions how often she rereads the letters from her children, she no doubt knew most of them by heart. They are her greatest treasure. With little news of her own, she recalls events and conversations from when they were together in Vienna and throws in literary references. Although many references are classical and “serious,” she also enjoyed silly puns and verse.  

Finally, the silly verse she quotes is something from her own childhood in Bohemia. Eichler’s factory was located in Duchov/Dux which was just 6 miles from Bilin where my grandmother’s family lived.

Vienna, 3 February 1940 [actually 1941]

My praiseworthy dear Son in the flesh!

Lacking many new letters, I kept myself happy by reading your old letters again and again and then I observed that there were some questions I had not answered. Because today as hard as I try, I have nothing to really tell you, I want to use time, paper and postage to atone for my old sins of omission. Since a certain Harry once asked me if he had spelled the word “guitar” correctly, and I didn’t know why he wanted to know it for this word in particular, I left this question unanswered back then. In your last letter, you both make excuses for your poor spelling. For me it really was not meant as a rebuke or reprimand. I really meant it seriously when I wrote “I hope that your English knowledge is gaining as much as your German is being lost.” When I have on occasion met Germans in the past who had spent a lot of time in other countries and during our conversation they were looking for German expressions, I thought it was some sort of affectation. I couldn’t believe that adults could forget their native language after some years. But it does seem to be the case.

The same Harry asked us if we had heard of an old English poet named Chaucer or read anything of his. Not in the least. The old English people also had much to say about heroes and bravery [Rather than quoting Chaucer, she includes a quote from Nibelungenlied, “The Song of the Nibelungs,” written around 1200 which was the source for Wagner’s “Ring”]. Since we now seem to have arrived at the topic of classical literature, I ask you not to be mad at me if I express my opinion that I prefer your prose to your verse. First, well perhaps I do not have sufficient “convolution of the brain” to understand, I prefer to read prose rather than poetry. Especially I am rather spoiled.

When I was a kid, I knew a “poet” who wrote the following:

“Oh how it sparkles and flashes,
When a rider is sitting on his horse.” 

You will have to admit that you could not keep up with this genius. A second poem of his was original and wouldn’t have been overtaken by any of its brothers.

I know of a letter, his name is “F”...
I know a beer, its name is “FF”
After Edward comes Josef*

The last line is incomprehensible without commentary. (You can hardly read difficult works without commentary.) My classic author was named Edward Eichler. He was not only a divinely gifted poet, which certainly these small excerpts will convince you of, but a very successful producer of pottery** [or poetry: ton = sound and clay]. His company was named Edward and Josef Eichler, Dux [Royal Dux pottery]. With these poems he wanted to make his brothers eternal I believe and he almost succeeded. Father had the pleasure and honor of publishing poems in his shining chamber pot. And other poetry as well. They sold like hot cakes. Now you will understand why your elegiac complaint - yes, the greatest geniuses only get the laurel wreath after their death - why this really doesn’t have the desired effect when I read it. Maybe it’s just that in our times instead of putting a spruce wreath on the temples of our poets and singers, I’d rather put an extra sausage.

This would be your reward if you had written those poems when you were still living here in Seidlgasse. 

That’s enough for today!

Kiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiisses…

Helene

*This poem is not just intelligent but it also has two meanings because Edward does come after Josef in the dictionary.

**Professor Freud is right about this. I thought about Tom the rhymer when I wrote the word “tom” instead of “ton”.

I looked through early editions of the Biela-Zeitung, but did not find any of Eichler’s poetry or ads for his pottery. I found an advertisement in the March 17, 1877 issue for a hotel and restaurant operated by the Eichler family. Edward Eichler’s name is mentioned in a news item in other issues. Presumably, the poetry and perhaps pottery showed up in later editions not available online. Here is the ad for Eichler’s inn, offering excellent beer, good cold cuisine, and prompt service: 

17 March 1877 issue, p.7 of Biela-Zeitung

January 17

Surviving past pandemics, part 2

In the 1950s, Harry bought a typewriter for his mother and encouraged her to put her words to paper. Helene wrote a number of stories recalling her childhood in Bilin. She was a wonderful storyteller and apparently had an amazing memory – where it has been possible to corroborate details, I find she always ends up having given an accurate account of things.

My grandmother organized her stories into binders and in chapters, presumably hoping to create a book. She often used pseudonyms of her name (“Nehoc” for Cohen, “Lenow” for Löwy). Today’s story is in the chapter entitled “Child Without Childhood.”  It was found in the same binder as yesterday’s newspaper article about the 1889 flu pandemic.

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First page of “Earliest childhood: Influenza Epidemic 1889”

Story by “Helene Nehoc” (translated and somewhat edited):

Earliest childhood: Influenza Epidemic 1889 /Helene Nehoc

The harsh weather, with snowstorms that never seem to end and howling winter storms could not have impressed this child somuch  that she would never forget such a day ever again. Little Helene Lenow didn’t find out until quite a bit later what really happened on that ugly day.

In the house, in which mostly music and laughter predominated, overnight there had arisen a frightening vacuum.

Neither her mother nor her big sisters were heard or seen. Not even Marischka, who was the long time house help, paid any attention to her. The child waited fearfully in her crib. Finally the girl came, took the little one out of her cage, and dressed her and brought her into the living room. There she told her that she had to be well-behaved and stay put, because it was icy cold and windy outside; in a few minutes she would bring breakfast in to her.  

She usually had breakfast in the comfortable kitchen and in Marischka’s company, who would make funny faces for her. She was annoyed at not being able to do so and she started to cry. Soon, Marischka came back, brought coffee, a piece of coffee cake, and a little plate of preserved fruit.

She put the tray — on which everything had been prepared bite sized — on a comfortable chair, and put a footstool in front of it and left after she had tied a bib on her beloved Helenku with her eyes all red from crying and she put her finger up to lips to show that she was to stay quiet, and then she left the room. 

Enene (which was her nickname) stayed sitting on her footstool without moving and listened carefully to even the quietest noise. Everyone who passed by the hallway went on tiptoe. Only the terrible storm was howling with a strength that did not seem to dissipate. Other than that there was a depressing silence. Even the very loud printing machines whose noise otherwise would be coming up from the basement to the top floor, were standing still, with the exception of the platen press which was used for express orders in a smaller format such as business cards, envelopes, or death announcements. On that strange day, the last of these were the only things that kept the machines going. The influence of the epidemic saw that neither man nor machine got even a short break. 

From a room in a faraway part of the house which was used for packing and storing manuals and handbooks, Enene heard the plaintive melody of the Moszkowski Serenade. Her brother, a music student, had gone back there to practice. He had no idea of the devastating catastrophe that had already happened.

The child, attracted by the magic of the music, woke up from her trance. With the instinct of a sleepwalker, she dragged the footstool over to the door in order to open it. She did not make any sound and followed the sound of the music. With her doll in her arms, she sat down on a little wooden box which was intended as a footrest for whoever was working in there. She paid attention to the melody of the music which she already knew. This time it wasn’t the power of the music that calmed her down, but the fact that it interrupted the silence which had brought her to such a panic. This fear was somewhat mollified by the presence of her big brother, but it never entirely left her. Fear of the unknown, a fear which later came back sporadically when Helene Lenow was an adult.

Before Max had finished his practice, there was a piercing scream from their parents’ bedroom. He put his violin down, grabbed his little audience member under his arm, and ran with her down the long, dark corridor which led to the living rooms. In the hallway, he put the little girl down and ran into the room where the scream had come from. Mrs Rosa Lenow had had a violent heart attack. The heavy smell of Hoffmann’s Drops (spirit of ether), which she always carried with a few pieces of sugar in her apron pocket, filled up the hall.

Enene stood on the same spot the whole time, just where her brother had left her. A miniature Lot’s wife. From there, she could see through the door that the storm had opened that someone was covered with a linen blanket and was laying on the bed. This door led to the room in which Mother’s brother Karl stayed when he was a houseguest. The hall was like an icy basement, but the child did not move from that spot.

Someone came out of the parents’ bedroom and carried the little girl into the living room, put her on the sofa, and covered her up with a blanket, kissed her and said: “Sleep child, sleep.” But the great excitement was really too much for her to fall asleep. This room seemed to be the only one that had been untouched by the mysterious events in the house.

Helene held her doll even more tightly, and was amazed that none of her big sisters came in to play with or read something to her. If someone had told her that with the exception of her, Max, and her eldest sister, everyone was very ill and that her other four sisters, following the advice of the doctor, had been brought up to an otherwise unoccupied room in the attic, she would probably have wanted to go up there to them.

After awhile, Ida dressed her for going out and carried her with her lips pressed tightly together, unable to speak even a word to friends. Enene was afraid she must have done something really bad, because Ida was really mad and didn’t want to talk to her anymore. A deep guilt made the poor little thing even sadder. She began to sob and put her arms around the neck of her big sister, who without saying a word, stroked her hair.

Enene knew nothing about who these people were, in whose house she was now supposed to live, and what they were called. Just as little did she knew why she had to leave home. Had she really been that bad? 

After a few weeks she was picked up by Ida, who wore a new black coat and a new black hat and gloves. She was very pale and looked even more serious than usual. Enene did not recognize her home.

Mother, Enene’s sisters, and Marischka all wore black clothes. Father and Max were wearing black bands on the arms of their dark suits. Everyone was unusually pale and had all gotten a lot thinner. 

Little Helene was the only one who wore a colorful dress and hardly missed Uncle Karl who had died. As a traveling salesman of an old Prague coffee and tea import company he had his own apartment in the capital city, but he took every opportunity — especially before he had a long sales trip — to spend a few days in the circle of his sister’s family, which he considered to be his own. Karl Kraus was one of the first victims of the influenza in this city. He died as a bachelor, 45 years old, and it had been his first and last illness. Helene Lenow could not know that her mother had lost the most ideal brother, her father his best friend and business advisor, her sister Ida her good genius. The rest of them would be mourning for the loss of the person they thought of as their second father.

Mrs Rosa Lenow recovered quickly from her heart attack — that is, she ignored her symptoms because she neither wanted to nor could afford the luxury of being ill. She was too important in both house and business, and she lived almost entirely on Hoffmann’s drops and strong black coffee, both with a lot of sugar.  

Adolf Lenow aged by 10 years in these weeks, and his four daughters who had been felled by the influenza won the battle of death thanks to the superhuman care and concern of the parents, of the two siblings Ida and Max, and the untiring care provided by the family doctor. But death did not give up so easily. Two of them succumbed at a later point to consequences of this evil plague.

Helene Lenow knew nothing about any of that. In her young brain, she only heard the T’ling, t’ling, of the platen printing press, which was woven together with the sad melody of the Moszkowski Serenade, which became a leitmotif — that creepy symphony of ghosts and spirits, to which the howling storm had lent its especially impressive voice.

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The memories of the influenza epidemic were replaced with later even more horrifying catastrophes — beginning with the outbreak of war in 1914 and ending with the epidemic which was then known as the Spanish flu — even by the families that were affected by it, these memories were driven away, or at least the images had became much paler over time. The narrator managed to pay her tribute to the “Spanish flu” with double pneumonia, but without it happening to her that in her feverish delirium she was scared by the Moszkowski Serenade. However, during the second world war, when she disappeared behind the concentration camp walls which were covered with barbed wire, this sentimental melody, which was mixed with the T’ling T’ling, T’long of the platen printing press which in the meantime had become long since obsolete and had been piled on an iron scrap heap and with that the horrible feeling of being completely left alone, this time in a large family of different peoples who were speaking different languages.

This music piece is for many listeners a very nice da capo, but for the author of her earliest childhood memories, it is a piece of music from Hades, which she escaped from when she had already given up all hope.

January 16

Surviving past pandemics, part 1

I don’t have any documents from January 16 or 17, so for the next two days I am dipping into undated, yet unbelievably timely, materials.

In addition to letters and official documents, my grandmother kept a few binders which contained newspaper articles, quotations, and other ephemera. As I became familiar with the contents of the archive, I realized that many of these items were kept for very personal reasons and sometimes were related to each other.

This article from an unknown German language newspaper was in one of the binders. It was likely written in the spring of 1957:

From an unknown newspaper, probably published in 1957

Is the Asian Flu Seventy Years Old?

The Asian flu is not at all so new and overwhelming/irresistible as one has thought until now. This is the claim of the Dutch Professor Mulder. In his opinion the old people who were affected by the flu epidemic in the year 1889 were immune to the virus. This hypothesis will now be tested. Not that it would do very much good to many people at this point, because there will probably not be so many veterans of the flu from that time. But the proof that the mutations of the influenza virus in cycles of 60 years repeat themselves could lead to some interesting discoveries in our fight against this disease.

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The 1957 flu pandemic killed more than 1 million people worldwide, as did the one in 1889.

For a few years, Roslyn and I had been meeting regularly to translate my family’s papers. Like everything, these in-person meetings stopped in March 2020. We restarted our translation sessions to Zoom in June after realizing it would be a long time before we’d again be able to get together. When Roslyn translated this article in August 2020, it was eerie and humbling. Here we were, trapped in our own homes, reading about previous pandemics.

Imagine my grandmother’s life. She was born in 1886, just in time for the 1889 pandemic. In the midst of wartime in 1918, yet another pandemic. And then, a world away in San Francisco in 1957, another one. Today it is easy for many of us to take good health and safety for granted. My grandmother knew that it all could disappear in an instant. We are learning that lesson ourselves.

After Roslyn translated this article, I first thought that Helene had kept it as an interesting curiosity. Here was a professor positing that people who had been exposed to the 1889 flu would probably be immune to the 1957. But there would be so few people still alive almost 70 years later, that his theory couldn’t be tested. In April 1957, my grandmother was just over 70 years old – she must have felt like a dinosaur.

It turned out that my grandmother kept this article for another reason – more on that tomorrow…

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January 6

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Since I don’t have a letter from January 6, I am posting about the issue of Biela-Zeitung from that day in 1877. In childhood stories, my grandmother wrote that her father began publishing the weekly Biela-Zeitung newspaper in 1874 because he was upset at the corrupt city government and mine owners and wanted to hold them accountable.

In late 2020 once Roslyn had translated all the letters that were legible to her, we spent a few hours looking through the first issues of the Biela-Zeitung in 1874. It was interesting to see the birth of a new publication. It was an 8-page paper published weekly. This was still true in 1877. However the contents and tone had evolved. The pages of those first few issues were filled with train schedules, comparative market prices, and local advertisements, many of them for Adolf Löwy’s own products and services. He also reprinted stories and news items he had found in newspapers across Europe. Sort of the Utne Reader of its day.

This first issue of 1877 has much more content and many more advertisements from towns in and around Bilin; gone are the train schedules and market prices. The first article of the year confirms my grandmother’s sense of why her father published this paper:

Invitation to Subscribers.

On the 1st of January 1877 the Biela-Zeitung began its new year, its fourth.

We can tell you without boasting that the Biela-Zeitung fulfills all the requirements which one might expect from a local paper, and it will be our most sincere goal to fulfill these fair and right requirements of the readers.

While we thus allow ourselves most politely to invite you to our new edition, we assume that in the future we will continue to follow our quest for truth and justice, promoting that which is good and beautiful and lending an ear to public opinion. However we will fight against arrogance, egotism, and unnecessary greed and we will put those items back into the cupboard.

This is what the Biela-Zeitung has always done and we will continue to hold firmly to this policy.

Let us just mention that the Biela-Zeitung, thanks to its large circulation is also suitable as an insert, and we put our trust in the strong support of the public.

Very truly yours

The Editor

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In addition to fighting for what was right, Adolf reported on local news and celebrations, including in this issue a description of local new years celebrations just days earlier. He ended the article with:

“So the year ’76 was buried and the new year was happily greeted. May this year see our hopes fulfilled in a better way than in the last one”

 Sentiments we all are feeling about the year 2020!

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Putting pieces of the puzzle together

I have been amazed on this journey how easily some things have come together. People have been unfailingly kind – generously giving their time, advice, assistance, and support.

By March 2017, I was beginning to understand the extent of the material I had and how much of it was in German. I was at a loss as to how to proceed. What to keep? What should ultimately happen to these documents? How would I know what was worth translating? How on earth would I get anything translated? How would I keep these documents safe? That last question seemed a bit late in the game. Somehow these documents had survived decades of being thrown haphazardly in boxes, stored in humid and non-temperature controlled environments, and the vast majority were in great condition.

Around the time of Harry’s death in January 2017, I researched local volunteer opportunities. Although I wasn’t necessarily looking to work at a Jewish agency, San Francisco’s Jewish Children & Family Services (JCFS) offered a wide range of volunteer possibilities. In March, the director of the JFCS Financial Aid Center called and told me about the financial assistance programs offered by JFCS. They sounded interesting and worthwhile, so I went for an interview. While waiting to meet the director I picked up a brochure from another JFCS program I’d never heard about – the JFCS Holocaust Center.

I contacted the Yedida Kanfer, the director of community education at the Holocaust Center, and requested her assistance helping me figure out how to approach my project – in terms of translation, organization, and archiving. I met with her at the end of March and she provided a wealth of information. By this time, I had learned the name of the newspaper Helene’s father published in Bilin – the Biela-Zeitung. The coordinator found a link to the National Library of Prague which showed that the newspaper was in the archive there. I couldn’t access it, but it was great to know it existed and that I had a good reason to visit Prague!

Later that year I contacted historian Corry Guttstadt who among other treasures sent a link to several editions of the Biela-Zeitung available at the Austrian National Library in Vienna. At about the same time, Google Books made the first 3 years available to download! I’m not sure why Google Books decided to archive this publication – had I and enough other people searched for it so they decided it was important enough? Or just serendipity? Hopefully one day, editions that were published after my grandmother was born will be available. In one of my grandmother’s stories, she mentions that her father encouraged her to write articles for the paper – I’d love to know if she ever did and whether she got a byline.

Another wonderful serendipity was the location of JFCS – across the street from the old Mt. Zion Hospital, where my mother had lived and trained to be a nurse in 1940-1943! Every time I went to volunteer, I felt like I was walking in my mother’s footsteps.

The old Mount Zion Hospital on Post Street in San Francisco.

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One of the fascinating things about doing family research is the wealth of information that is out there and how one can always make new discoveries. Sometimes it’s something that wasn’t available before, sometimes I’m finally ready to understand what I’m looking at. Today I made a discovery while writing this post. One thing I am still trying to discover is when Adolf Löwy died. Part of the confusion for me is that the Czech archive showed the Biela-Zeitung being published until 1938, which made me think he had lived at least that long. However, my grandmother’s papers made me believe that he died much closer to 1902. The citation in the Vienna library seems much more likely – it lists the paper as having been published from 1874-1904. I would guess that Adolf must have died in 1904 or before – at least the search is narrowing.

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Helene - clever from the beginning

Helene was a clever, curious, articulate child. It sounds like her older sisters were much less interested in language and wordplay. She was the youngest of a large family, so her oldest sister Ida was quite a bit older than Helene. Thus, Helene became an aunt while she was still a child herself. Ida’s first child, Paul Zerzawy, was born in 1895, when Helene was about 9 years old. Helene ended up being Paul’s and his brothers’ babysitter, and had a very maternal feeling for them throughout their lives, despite their closeness in age.

Helene’s older sister Ida

In a (translated) letter to Paul in San Francisco from Helene in Vienna on March 6, 1941, she wrote the following memory of a young Paul. As with many of her letters at the time, the main point was to ask her nephew why he didn’t write more often.

Dear Paul! Your mother [Ida, Helen’s sister] calls my entry into this veil of tears a bad joke. When my father on 23 November 18.. [would have been 1886] awakened her with the words, “Get up Ida, you now have a little sister,” she turned over on the other side and said, half asleep, “Dad, I’m used to more delicate jokes from you.” She did manage to come to terms with my appearance, but she also decided to raise me in a very strict way, in order to compensate for the errors of the other siblings who spoiled me endlessly. So, for example, she didn’t let me eat too much when there was something particularly good. Later she didn’t let me read the books that made my son [Harry] blush despite Eva’s tales of working in the hospital. Ida seemed to me to have come into the world to not let me have any fun, I often thought. But I got back at her when you appeared on the scene and were spoiled much more. The “Look Ida, look what Paul can do,” was unending, and your poor mother fought against six aunts, an uncle, and a beloved pair of grandparents to let the child be. When another one came and reported to her that the wonderboy Paul had learned something amazing, she explained to us that she wanted a healthy, normal child, not a wonder child. Ida’s “spleen” was incomprehensible to all of us, especially to me who had the ambition to teach you everything I knew even though you weren’t even school age yet, which Ida had forbidden me to do. Why should I not get back at Ida because she’d always forbidden me to do what I wanted to do? I pretended that I had taught you to read. I took a book from Father’s library. It was an example book of typefaces from the company Schelter und Giesecke in Leipzig, and in this there were samples of the most delicate “Nonparaille” [apparently a small typeface] to the thickest letters for a poster and every time there was printed the following litany: “God gave us the spirit.” I decided to go get you and say “Paul, look, here it says ‘God gave us the spirit’” and I turned to another page and I explained to you again “and here it also says ‘God gave us the spirit.’ When your mother asks you ‘what does it say here?’, what are you going to say?” And you answered bravely: “God gave us the spirit.” You got an Indian donut [apparently a pastry from the 19th century - looked like a cream puff] from me and my older siblings kept a lookout when I took you by the hand and went to see Mother. “Ida, Paul already knows how to read!” Ida, who would imagine I could do anything except anything good, practically threw a crying fit and said: “I told you not to drill the child.” I did not step out of character and I took the book and said “Paul, what does it say here?” “God gave us the spirit.” Ida took the book from my hand and opened it to a different page and asked you “what does it say here?” And you answered “It also says ‘God gave us the spirit.’” Ida was getting suspicious and then she took the Neue Freie Presse [Viennese newspaper] that was right in front of her and asked you, “what does it say here Paulchen?” and you said, “God gave us the spirit.” Ida was so happy that I had only taught you to “read” that I didn’t get punished that time. So why am I telling you that? Wouldn’t it have been better if I had taught you to write? Then maybe I would have gotten a letter from you every now and then. If that were the case, then well look I would have answered your questions succinctly and I wouldn’t have to make such long introductions to my writing. Maybe you should just write to yourself. So pull yourself together and return the favor. If it weren’t for this reading instruction, at least you could thank me for the pastry. My mouth is watering just thinking about it. Vitali wants to play Tric-Trac [a backgammon-like game] so I am delivering you from the evil, Amen.
Affectionately
Helen

From Paul Zerzawy’s photo album. Probably Bilin in the early 1900’s. Helene’s mother (and thus, Paul' Zerzawy’s grandmother, as well as the grandmother of Helene’s children Harry and Eva who will be born almost 20 years later) is the older woman on the left in the back. Helene is the young woman second from the right. Possibly Paul Zerzawy is the boy in the middle reading - which by that age he actually was able to do!

Young Helene

Helene was a precocious and voracious reader and an aspiring writer from an early age. She hung around her father’s print shop and wanted to write for his weekly newspaper, the Biela-Zeitung. After coming to the United States, Helene wrote down some of her childhood memories.

An early issue of Adolf Löwy’s weekly newspaper.

Helene was the youngest of a large family and seems to have been her father’s pet. Her sister Ida was much older and her eldest son Paul was born when Helene was 9. Although her nephews were closer to siblings in age to her, Helene thought of them throughout their lives as contemporaries of her own children (who were decades younger than their cousins!). Three of her nephews were soldiers in World War I and wrote many letters home to their family, even as prisoners of war. By then, Helene was living in Vienna.

Postcard from Helene’s nephew Erich from Russian prisoner of war camp in 1917.