Nightmares

Events in The Hare with Amber Eyes (which I started to discuss yesterday) eventually come to the Nazi takeover of Vienna in 1938 as experienced by the author's great grandparents and grandmother Elizabeth. De Waal explains how a long-employed family servant named Anna hid the collection of Netsuke (center of the story) a few at a time, so that these relatively insignificant items from the large and valuable stores of family possessions were the only ones rescued.

The Holocaust victims' shock of being deprived of all dignity and human rights is agonizing to read about no matter how many stories I've read before. Why had they not sent their money out of the country and fled before the inevitable happened? They were loyal and trusting citizens, up until then with equal rights despite the growing hatred of Jews. They were highly assimilated, Jewish but with a secular lifestyle. They saw themselves as real Austrians, and valued their position in Viennese society. However, the Viennese welcomed the Nazis with huge enthusiasm.

On a trip there, I once visited the home of Sigmund Freud, whose relatively modest apartment De Waal points out was very close to his family's palatial home in Vienna -- a video tape of the German victory parade was showing as a loop on a small TV set in Freud's one-time study, with the voice of his daughter Anna describing their shock at the frenzied anti-Jewish and pro-Nazi crowds. I thought of this as I read about the same parades, the same shock, the same sense of having been betrayed.

Elizabeth had earlier earned a doctorate in law from the University of Vienna, and with extreme bravery came to Vienna to help her parents to safety away from the Nazis. With her knowledge of the law, even in its eviscerated form, she was able to extricate her parents, who were desperately trying to escape. Her parents' first escape location was at a family vacation home in Czechoslovakia -- not safe enough. Her mother died at this once-happy refuge, but Elizabeth managed to get her father to England, where she and her husband and children were living, and where her son and grandson (the author) have spent their lives.

Later, after the war, Elizabeth tried to repossess some of the family's art collections and other property, but it was futile. The Austrians were successful in preventing Jews from returning or reclaiming what had been taken from them. I felt that the net result has this conclusion: the Holocaust was a great success. Where many Jews of all social classes and levels of accomplishment once lived peacefully in Vienna (and many other places of course), there are now virtually none, and those that survived had to start their lives over from zero.

The story is told in painful detail. Vivid and unbearable, the author makes you go through the suffering and desperate times with the family members and ask yourself for the millionth time, how did this happen?

The collection of Netsuke, small and resilient, made to be used as toggles for clothing, once used as playthings by the children of the family, survived better than many of the family members, and the post-war story is happier.

Vienna

The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal describes his exploration and discovery of his forbears, the vastly rich Ephrussi family. I am enjoying this best-selling book enormously, and using it to form my picture of secular-Jewish Paris before and during the Dreyfus affair and of secular-Jewish Vienna in the early 20th century, at least of certain high social strata of the cities.

The first prominent Ephrussi escaped his Shtetl origins and made a fortune by dealing grain in Odessa in the mid-19th century. Contemplating a financial and trading network, his descendants set up businesses and palatial homes in Paris and Vienna, where they lived in a world of wealth and culture.

A tiny carving of a rabbit (left) is one of several hundred Netsuke statuettes from Japan from the was acquired first by De Waal's Parisian art-collecting great-uncle, an art patron and friend of the Impressionists. By tracing the family members who later owned the Netsuke collection and the motives for its original acquisition, De Waal has created the fascinating story of these immensely wealthy members of a certain segment of Parisian Jews and Viennese Jews in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Needless to say, the ending of the family's fortunes in 1938, when the Nazis marched into Vienna, looms over the story.

In addition, as I explore my topic of secular Jewish Vienna, I'm reading The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig. He begins with a fascinating portrait of late-19th century Vienna and its Jewish cultural atmosphere and numerous accomplished Jewish citizens, and continues with his life as an author and cultural observer. This autobiography, even more than De Waal's book, is dominated by the Nazi destruction of the world that he had known. Zweig wrote it during his last year, before he committed suicide in despair.

Thus I continue my travels in secular Jewish cities, and will write more about both Vienna and later Paris.