for Sophie

My sister says that she was “magnetic”.

At our mother’s funeral twenty-two years ago, my sister’s two-year-old daughter, Sophie, cried and said, “My grandmother died, and I didn’t even know her.” 

When I remember her, my throat tightens and my heart opens.

Alice Grün was born on March 20, 1928, according to the birth certificate we still have, issued by the Israelitischen Kultusgemeinde, that is the Jewish Community in Vienna.  She was her father’s third child and her mother’s first.  Her father, a widower, had remarried.  Alice was the youngest, the only girl, the only biological child of her mother, and she had two protective older brothers.

As a grown woman, Alice was beautiful, not in an expected or predictable way, but with a strong nose, light skin, auburn, later blond, hair, and blue green eyes that changed with the light.  She carried herself with style and a little mystery.    

Alice wasn’t tall, but she had a strong presence, engaging and direct, at other times reserved.  Maybe she let her guard down with her friends; otherwise she only showed her vulnerability at home.  She was aware, fashionable, more so than most women around her, more visually sophisticated, a bit more noticeable.  She carried herself differently, perhaps like some of the women I have met in Vienna, and she dressed in an informal, careful, California style: slacks, simple dresses, very little make up.  As a young mother, she had her eye on sales at I. Magnin, the fashionable Bay Area department store.  In India she wore saris; in Singapore she had dresses made. In her later years, she went to small, interesting shops in Los Gatos or Santa Cruz.  She was not afraid of color, occasionally pushing the edges of convention, and she tried to encourage her daughter to dress with a little more daring.  

Although not always disciplined in her emotions—Alice certainly did not hold back at home—she was strict in her personal habits.  She was up early on weekday mornings.  Her house was orderly and clean.  She took care of herself and her children. 

During their first year in California, in the early 1950s, George and Alice rented a house on the east side of San Jose then moved west to Los Gatos, an older 19^th century town at the foot of the Santa Cruz mountains. They bought a new, three bedroom tract house on Azalea Way for $17,000, and lived there with their children for about twenty years.  Yesterday, walking on Glenridge Avenue, in an older section of town, I remembered coming with them to look at a larger house for sale, overlooking the downtown, but they decided that paying for our college educations was more important. 

Alice’s parents had owned a restaurant in Vienna, and Alice began cooking as a teenager in New Jersey, after school while her mother was at work.  She was good at it, occasionally making a few dishes from her childhood, schnitzel, risibisi (rice and peas), red cabbage with apples.  Her food was as she was, something from someplace else, mostly American. 

Alice spent a lot of time talking to her friends, over coffee at home, and very frequently on the phone.  She talked while sitting on her bed, her back against the headboard and her legs straight in front of her.  These conversations were lengthy. Calls east to her father or her brothers were briefer and rarer.  Cross-country telephone connections were more complex; distance was more significant.    

Alice was attentive, considerate, courteous. There were visitors to the house, a varied circle over time: friends for coffee, dinners, parties, lots of conversation.  Alice talked and listened; we could hear her laugh across the house.  Our friends were welcomed, asked questions, invited to speak.  The men were doctors, lawyers, professors, business owners, engineers, military officers (in India).  Many of the women were educated but most no longer worked.  There were exceptions.  Helen Monday  was a successful interior decorator;  Miriam Resnick co-authored several books.  In California, most friends lived nearby, in Los Gatos, Saratoga, Willow Glen; later my parents had friends in Santa Cruz, Soquel, Aptos.  Alice was one of the few women working full time (beginning in her forties), cleaning teeth to educate her children. Yet her work never seemed to affect her confidence, her stature, her social sense, her manner, although it affected her outlook.  She was nearly always the most glamorous woman in the room.  

George and Alice processed people differently; my father liked everyone and enjoyed information exchange; Alice was discerning and more personally engaged.  Living abroad, or when we were guests, she told us to watch and follow. Watching taught me when and where I could have elbows on the table, which cutlery to use, where to lean when served, when and how to talk to different types of people and to people I had never met, how to listen.  Alice cared how people treated each other, about appearance, about aesthetics, but she did not care about formality.  It was the intent, the discipline, the ability to adapt; she expected us to pay attention.

Guests were greeted, listened to, answered.  Adults were not called by their first names until we were well into our twenties.  As children, we were asked to join guests at dinner parties in the living room, for a few minutes before bed, to say hello, to answer questions.  It was not acceptable to speak disrespectfully. At times, Alice was intense, angry, but at home and generally with her husband.  I don’t remember angry or rude behavior outside the house.

My mother enjoyed attention; she knew how to draw people in, but her great social skill was her ability to come out of herself, to show her interest, to encourage people to talk, to really listen.  She had extremely close friends, and these friendships with other women were very important.  

I never saw her encourage a man or flirt.  She danced with her husband occasionally in public, and they kissed sometimes, but it was affectionate and hardly suggestive.  Neither of my parents spent time alone with friends of the opposite sex.  That was their generation; they were not alone in this.

Alice was well liked, and she liked others.  That didn’t stop her from being critical; she enjoyed analyzing human behavior. As an older child and teenager, I talked with her often.  She had a way of looking at things that commanded my attention, and I identified with her point of view.  It took me years to see its weaknesses. Without remembering them precisely these conversations were often while she was sitting in her phone-call position in the bedroom.  We talked about people and circumstances, about why people were the way they were and how to handle them.  What I learned from her was the enjoyment of understanding what makes people tick.

Occasionally someone found Alice to be “too much”, too inquiring, too many questions, perhaps too insistent, that is, occasionally, insecure.  This was particularly true of my sister’s men.

Alice Grün was loved, but history did not give her a protected childhood.  Her father, Max, was from Dembitz, a town east of Krakow in Austrian Galicia, a progressive rabbi and midwife’s son.  Her mother, Klara (née Landau), came from further east, somewhere near Lviv, the daughter of a wealthy farmer.  They were among the many Orthodox Jews that moved to Vienna from the eastern provinces.  Neither of  her parents was formally educated but they had the training and skills to start businesses and to earn.  Max went to work early, moved to Vienna sometime before World War I, and purchased a small apartment building in his father’s name in the Ottakring district.  He then served in the Austrian army during the war.  Klara moved to Vienna with her family at the beginning of the war, trained as a wig maker (for orthodox women) and started a successful business in Leopoldstadt, Vienna’s largely Jewish 2^nd district.

After they married, Klara joined Max in the Ottakring,  his two small boys, George and Jack, then baby Alice (1928), Klara’s parents and her sister, Dora.  They started a small restaurant on the ground floor, then bought a second building and opened a larger one.  My grandmother closed her wig business.  Her very long blond hair was gathered up but uncovered.  A younger sister married; Dora divorced. Max stopped wearing a yarmulke in the restaurant.  The sisters lost their mother in 1934, then their father in 1938.  

When the Nazis annexed Austria in early 1938, that life ended.  As described by her brother, George, the Gestapo came to the house, while the three children and Dora hid on the floor under the table. The Nazis knocked and tested the lock, until a neighbor told them that no one was at home.  Alice was shoved down a flight of stairs at school; a childhood friend was forbidden to see her.   

Max was arrested.  Klara dressed herself up, walked to the police station and talked her husband out of prison. Didn’t they want the Jews to leave?, she asked.  They had visas pending she argued (since most of the family was already in the US).  Affidavits and visas were eventually obtained, and in January 1939, the Grüns left in the middle of the night, by train to Bremen, and then on the Hamburg-Amerika line to New York.  Their property was seized.  Aunt Dora disappeared.  Research by our Vienna lawyers in 2021 indicated that she was deported to Minsk in November 1941. 

The rest of Alice’s life is an American story.  She assimilated, discarded her Austrian clothes and the German language, and spoke English with an American accent. As an eighth-grade graduate she was given the DAR award. Her brothers joined the American army and the invasion of Europe. 

Alice, a young immigrant

with her parents in Austria or the Catskills, late 1930’s, early 1940s

According to her high school yearbook, Alice wanted to study psychology.  She was admitted to Rutgers University in New Jersey, but her parents did not support a four-year college education.  They were practical and wanted her to be independent, and for them that was learning a skill to make a living.  Alice enrolled in a two year dental hygiene program at Columbia University in Manhattan.  Much later, in her 50’s, after we had finished college, she went back to school and finished her own liberal arts degree at the University of San Francisco.

Alice did not hide her refugee status, but she didn’t discuss it much. It was in the background, a sometimes badge of honor, witness to centuries of victimhood, a trauma that was not readily visible, something in the past, not in our present.  She was an articulate and capable mother, clear in what she expected, adaptable, able to handle nearly everything.  She knew how to fit-in without being inconspicuous.  She conveyed pride, confidence, control.  She could be reserved, but often she was friendly and outgoing, warm to those she liked or trusted.

Alice was not always composed at home.  On a rainy evening, when we were very young, and George was over an hour late, she was “sure” he’d had an accident or was dead.  She was hysterical when he showed up, enraged.  Years later, when her daughter was in graduate school, and couldn’t be reached at a late hour, she insisted that George call the New Haven police. (My sister had a boyfriend.)  When I told her that I was gay, she was afraid that something terrible would happen, although, to her credit, she worked that out with her therapist.  In those years, I did not relate any of this to her history.  To her, terrible things could happen, to us they never did.

Alice met George through Max’s sister Ida, who was a close friend of George’s mother. Ida had saved her niece for George and invited her to Queens to meet him after the war.  George could not refuse Ida, and he was smitten with Alice, even after a visit the next morning, and seeing her as he said “in the cold grey light of dawn”.  He proposed a week later—Alice agreed, though not immediately.  

George’s parents were poor; his father was an immigrant from Odessa and a drinker. Alice’s parents were not sure, but Ida vouched for him.  She saw something in this one; there were three other brothers she might have chosen.  George was a Cooper Union graduate, an engineer, perhaps already working on a graduate degree at Columbia.  Several in his family were educated, ambitious, successful, with some idea of their place in the world and their obligations to it.  My father carried these values forward, bringing Alice with him. 

George and Alice were married in 1948.  The photo album shows a large, traditional wedding, with a white dress and bridesmaids, the American kind, but Alice was not the kind of woman who talked about weddings.  She was interested in femininity, but her focus was not on baby showers or pregnancies.  She wasn’t satisfied with the constraints of traditional marriage.  She wanted to create something else for herself and for her daughter, and that is what she did.

There was a housing shortage after the war, and Max and Klara bought a four-unit building in Belleville, New Jersey to house the newly married couple. They offered to give the building to my parents, but George declined, preferring to support his family himself.  When her mother died in the late 1950s, Alice received a significant inheritance, but her father asked her to return it, to start a new business.  The men managed these things in the earlier years, but over time, George and Alice managed their work and their money together, and they were good at it.  In the 1960s, there were arguments at the dinner table about why George hadn’t finished his Phd.  Maybe it was the increased salary, or the status, or simply his professional success, but in later years Alice focused more on what she was doing, and on the money she was making.

Newly married Alice, the daughter of affluent parents, went into New York and spent two weeks’ salary on a suit at B. Altman’s;  George poured a bucket of water on the floor to scrub the floor army-style. These were (among) their first disagreements.  For years, Alice wore the pink and grey tweed suit for air-travel.  Dad did the painting or the outside work (until he could afford to pay someone else); mopping floors was no longer his responsibility.

The couple wanted children, and Alice had three or four miscarriages.  George reached out to his aunt, Adele, a physician in Manhattan, who referred them to a doctor on West End Avenue, not far from where I live now.  Pregnant again with me in 1953, Alice was told to rest in bed for three months.  (Her daughter came much more easily.) 

My mother loved me intensely, no less. By that I do not mean that she was easy on me; she wasn’t.  It is more that she wanted me, felt for me, was concerned for me, saw and appreciated me, believed in me, fundamentally, as I was.  My father believed in what his children could accomplish and did what he could to prepare us.  My mother understood.  By chance or design we were somewhat similar, so she sensed my feelings.  This had consequences.  It was hard to differentiate from her, but it was reinforcing. 

George and Alice moved to northern California in 1954, where George took a teaching position at San Jose State, and their lives changed completely.  They created a new existence, independent of their families and their histories, relying instead on each other.  They focused on their children, eventually on their friends, their desires and their values.  Their first home, a tract house on the east side of San Jose, was likely chosen because it was near campus.  There are photos at this house of Terry, their daughter, who was born in San Jose, of us, two children, with Alice’s parents and with George’s mother.  

In San Jose, they had pork chops, a freedom they didn’t have near Alice’s family and her rabbi grandfather.  For some years, Alice baked them in a white and green ceramic casserole, thoroughly, and with rice that had absorbed the flavorful juices.  The chops were always white and dry as cardboard; pork had to be well done.  My father didn’t like seafood, so shrimp was a treat when he wasn’t at home.  Generally, Alice and George loved good food and encouraged their children to try everything.  When we were out, and their food was good, they encouraged us to try it, but I reacted by wanting to protect my plate. 

In 1955, my parents bought a new house in a subdivision in Los Gatos.  It was a typical ranch house, on one floor, with three bedrooms and an open plan around a fireplace core, vaguely influenced by Japanese design, with huge windows to the back yard and garden.  Los Gatos was a nice older town, with good schools and a beautiful location at the foot of the Santa Cruz mountains.

Alice and George in the Sierras, an American couple

Now, Alice and George were no longer immigrants or the children of immigrants.  They had simply stepped into the American professional class, like other young couples around them.  California, the suburban Bay Area where they lived, was an ahistorical place.  Nearly everyone had moved there from someplace else. Their pasts were not secrets, but they did not matter.  George was a serious reader of European history, but Europe and the War were far away.  Alice did not identify with Austria or with Europe, quite the opposite; she rejected those identities. She did not speak German and banned books about the concentration camps from the house.  Judaism was what she kept; it was her history; it underlay her outlook, her value system, and her view of family, although she did not study it until years later.  She fused it into her American and California identities, and into her liberalism, and she assimilated. 

Alice on Azalea Way in Los Gatos

Alice was always busy, up early, cleaning, running errands, cooking, taking classes, lots of exercise classes.  She dieted frequently and made healthy meals; she was discerning.  She knew what was good and what wasn’t, and she was very clear about it.  There was nearly always meat or fish and always a salad, dressed and tossed in a large, oiled, wooden bowl.  She often added chopped green onion and made the dressing herself, a blend of oil and vinegar, salt, pepper, and herbs.  There were no bottled dressings; there were no processed foods.  Some desserts were too sweet, she said.

My parents liked to eat outdoors, so when the weather was good, we often sat on the back patio. George had built a large wooden trellis.  He never added a roof, but Alice planted a wisteria that eventually covered it entirely and with long purple flowers in the spring. 

My parents ate out frequently, often driven by Alice’s sense of adventure or work schedule.  When we were very young, this was limited and too expensive, but in Singapore in the late 1960s, it was at least weekly, on the cook’s night off.  We were at Chinese banquets, food stalls in the car park on Orchard Road, a fancy Russian restaurant for George’s favorite,  “shashlick”.  In later years, when Alice worked, we ate out during visits home, at any of  a number of local restaurants in Los Gatos.  There was a very good dessert soufflé, at a French restaurant on Santa Cruz Avenue, the kind of pleasure my father encouraged.  When Alice and George moved to La Selva Beach, south of the city of Santa Cruz, in the late 1980s, the habit continued: lunches in Monterey or downtown Santa Cruz, coffee in Aptos. I loved one place in particular, India Joze, modernist, facing a garden, wonderful, now closed.

In the early years in Los Gatos, Alice joined the League of Women Voters, where she made close friends, some of whom we knew years later.  But we were her focus.  She spent endless hours talking with us, driving us to school, to the library, to her friends, to her mother-in-law’s nursing home, nursery school, music lessons, swim practice (for me), baton twirling or horseback riding (for my sister), religious school, Hebrew school, food and clothes shopping, my Bar Mitzvah. She made sure we did our homework, read my papers and told me where to clarify them. Yet by today’s standards, we had a fair amount of independence. I walked or biked to school and friends’ houses, and stayed occasionally for dinner (if I called).  She never interfered with my friendships, even later when they merged with attractions, which she noticed. 

with her children, perhaps at Fallen Leaf Lake, late 50s, early 60s

In the 1950s and early 60s, George and Alice were tennis players.  They were early members of the Los Gatos Swim and Racquet Club, a utilitarian place with tennis courts where we spent summers by the pool.  Alice gave up tennis before we were teenagers, but George was hooked well into his 80s.  For Alice, diet, health and appearance were important.  She exercised regularly and dressed carefully, mostly informally as I have written, but also in hats, gloves, nylons in the earlier years, lipstick, face creams, and some make up.  There was a dressing table with a mirror in her bedroom.  Almost the entire bedroom closet was reserved for her.  George’s overflow was relegated to my room, or later—perhaps after she noticed my resistance—to a redone hallway closet.   

Alice wanted and enjoyed a nice house, and Helen Monday, a close friend, was a talented interior decorator.  Furniture, drapes, and carpets were selected and custom ordered.  In the early years, everything was new; nothing came from the past.  The house was modest, but the presentation pulled together. It was modern, what we now call mid-century. There were no western antiques, no family photos or inherited things; actually they were somewhere, but not displayed until later in her life.  Alice enjoyed finding art and objects when we were in Asia.  To prepare for a trip to Bali, she read about the artists, and we visited one or two studios where she chose portraits, one of a young man and the other of a young woman.  These are now in my upstate library and living room.

Alice at Gail Maddux’s wedding, 1960s

Azalea Way, Los Gatos, 1960s

A party in George and Alice’s  backyard, Los Gatos 1960s: from left, Bill Lorell, Evie Lorell, Lilian Nerenberg, Doris Maddux, Edie Mae Stutzman with “Stutz”

Eventually, Alice began to look backwards.  After paying for our educations, in the 1970s, she and George bought an old craftsman house on Peralta Avenue, not far from the Glenridge house they had previously declined, a house that reminded her of her parents’ house in Caldwell, New Jersey. In the pantry, she displayed blue onion Czech dishes that her parents had brought from Europe.  Photographs and family portraits were retrieved and framed.  

At the far end of the kitchen, there was a breakfast table in a windowed bay overlooking  the back garden and the pool.  It was a square English table, probably bought with Helen, and it was usually covered with a batik cloth, placed at an angle exposing the table’s edges.  We had breakfast there in the morning, young adult children visiting.  Dad offered eggs, if we wanted them, sunny side up or scrambled. There was coffee, fruit, toast, often bagels, cheese.  Sometimes, depending who was there, we’d talk, the two, three or four of us, for half an hour, for an hour or more, sometimes until eleven.  Usually it was sunny; it was California; it was intimate, warm, secure, and in those years I did not realize that it wouldn’t last forever.  

Our calm, somewhat typical, suburban childhood had ended in the early 1960s, not due to any misfortune but to my father’s choices.  He accepted a teaching position in India, through the Agency for International Development (AID), the agency that is now being dissolved by the Trump administration.   

As was often the case in the earlier years of their marriage, George came up with the big professionally-related changes.  My mother controlled the house, social life, our upbringing. 

Yet, as with the move to California, there must have been a sense of adventure.  There was no indication that she objected to the India posting, nor to a later two-year position in Singapore.  She put a lot of energy and work into them, packing, shipping, vaccinations, a house to empty and rent out, new households to set up.  In Asia, there were new schools, uniforms, friends, entertaining . . .  entirely new places. 

In India, at eight years old, I was enrolled at the Woodstock School, an American missionary boarding school in the Himalaya mountains. My father chose it after reading that the colonial elite had sent their sons away to school.  Surprisingly my mother did not object, although she deftly managed my transfer to a local Catholic school after five or six months.

Alice adapted to household servants and guests, made friends, and entertained frequently.  In India people stopped by in the early evening, unannounced, for appetizers and drinks; she had to be ready, and we sometimes ate alone while my parents were with friends on the front veranda.   

In Singapore social life was more predictable, although our Indian cook, James,  complained one evening when asked to delay serving dinner for late-arriving guests.  Alice was used to controlling her house and kitchen, but she adjusted to her 60-something year old cook, staying mostly out of his way.  He knew how to read, and she gave him recipes.  The servants worked for her and for my father, she said.  For us, they were adults. 

“Your country is judged by your behavior”, she told us.  Alice was talented, friendly, articulate, attractive, able to adapt without hiding.  In India, she socialized with Indian couples and military officer’s wives, westernized and likely to speak English, in Singapore with Chinese friends, other American women, some Israelis.  We travelled regionally, in India and in southeast Asia, later through Europe.  Much of this was organized by my mother.  In the 1960s the family of an American academic travelled fairly well.  The hotels and restaurants were a bit better than those I frequent now.  Alice was organized, composed.  Only in Austria was she displeased.  At a hotel in the Austrian Alps, the owner became friendlier after she saw George’s signature stamp, on a letter, and addressed her as Frau Professor.  This did not flatter Alice.

with George and his students at their house in Adam Park, Singapore, 1967-1969

She was an immigrant and her husband the son of immigrants. Despite these outside influences in their childhoods, they were in the background of their adult lives.  We were Americans at home or when traveling abroad, but with a talent for adapting.  This was a playbook that we children learned well: how to blend in without hiding; how to attract some, but not too much, attention and respect.  How to join in while retaining our separate identities. Where or how did Alice learn to do this?  Perhaps her mother, or she might have said that this was necessary for a young newly-arrived Jewish woman adapting to American non-Jewish society. 

Yet for many Jews, this is not the focus. In New York, we assimilate less;  perhaps it isn’t necessary to a sense of belonging, but in places where Jews are a tiny minority, blending-in is common.  This was Alice’s experience through most of her life, and it was mine until I moved to New York. 

Alice (center), with her father, Max, his third wife, Hannah, George and me, (bar mitzvah), October 1967

Just once, a young American teacher in India, with training in linguistics, asked my mother if she was foreign-born.  Otherwise it was not visible, and there were relatively few foreigners in my parents’ California life. There was Bill Lorell, an Austrian, my father’s friend, teaching colleague, and business partner.  He taught with George at the City College of New York and again at San Jose State, and he lived not far away in a house in the mountains above Los Gatos.

Bill was handsome, sophisticated, Viennese, ¼ Jewish, enough to flee the Nazis.  Alice was friendly but did not identify with him. Their common language was English; she was not an admirer; she did not like the way he went through women—four wives as I remember it.  There was Ralph Parkman and his wife, Yetty, a refugee from Holland.  Ralph was another colleague of Dad’s, a low key kind of guy, and they lived in our neighborhood.  Alice liked the Parkmans but was not close to them.    

Alice did not seek others who shared her experience, but her circle of close friends always included American-born Jewish women.  In in the 50s and early 60s, she was very close to Rebecca Carter,  the wife of another close colleague of my father’s.  Alice loved Rebecca, she said, and we were close to her children. Other close friends were Miriam Resnick and Peggy Hall, educated, interesting, informed, open-minded, women whom we knew and loved.  In later years, in Santa Cruz, there was Judith Berman, a younger woman, different from the others, but I cannot say how.  Many of Alice’s friends were not Jewish,  Doris Maddux, Helen Monday, and in earlier years Edie Mae Stutzman, who died fairly young.  These friendships lasted for years, for most of her lifetime, all except Rebecca.  These women were sophisticated, articulate, friendly, some very attractive.  It took a lot of traveling and living in supposedly grander places to realize it; at the time, I had no basis for comparison.

Education and ethics were George and Alice’s stated priorities; we were expected to behave according to their standards and to study seriously, which we did.  They wanted us to go to the best colleges possible, but George’s academic salary and consulting earnings were insufficient to pay for the educations they planned.  So following perhaps several conversations in their bedroom, after we had returned from Singapore (1969), Alice went back to school and updated her credentials in dental hygiene.  She then worked for a number of years, using her salary to pay tuitions and room and board at Princeton and Pomona College.  I was then helped with living expenses for business school at Columbia; my sister may have gotten some help in graduate school at Michigan and Yale.  My mother was proud of her contribution to what was also a family accomplishment.   

Alice knew how to focus her energy, and she was flexible.  She moved willingly from the role of young mother/housewife to running houses with servants, and then to cleaning teeth in Los Gatos.  All and none of these roles defined her.  What did affect her, early, was Betty Friedan’s, The Feminine Mystique, which was published in the early 1960s.  Alice saw herself in that book.  She went back to work and changed.  She valued her ability to earn and shifted the balance of power at home.  She asked  Dad  to take on more household chores.  Generally, he  supported what she wanted, and the changes were significant, but they were limited.  Things at home were still to her standards; once we were out of school, she quit and changed jobs as she wished, a freedom that George never allowed himself.  Alice had a strong, reliable husband, and she knew it.  In her 60’s, in her Bat Mitzvah speech, she called him her protector, but for some years she resented that she needed him.

Alice had some very interesting work, but she lacked her husband’s education and the years invested.  She started late and did not have the skills or confidence to gain seniority or income at his level.  At some point in her 60s, she was hired as a consultant.  She wrote a report on the computer in the early days of word processing but lost the entire document.  George encouraged her to reconstruct it, but she couldn’t.  She simply said that she was unable to complete the assignment.  This would have been impossible for my father or for her children.  Alice was capable, but she wanted more for us than she felt able to achieve.

So she focused on my sister.  While Alice’s relationship with Terry was occasionally combative, my sister’s independence was very important to her.  In this, she was somewhat like her parents, but without the limitations they had placed.  Her daughter earned a doctorate in economics at Yale and became a professor, eventually teaching at Stanford, Harvard, and the University of Western Ontario.  My mother said  “You can have sex and not get married.” and “You can have a man and not need one.”  These my sister did.

Alice’s daughter Terry, Los Gatos, 1970s

Alice was always attractive and social, but in later years her priorities shifted.  She was somewhat less interested in assimilation, “fitting in”, beauty, social mobility.  These had already been achieved.  She became an activist, challenging the authority of the physicians she had previously admired.  She was involved in the dental hygiene association, with an eye to increasing professional autonomy.  She was appointed to a county health planning board whose mandate was to spread resources among hospitals and avoid expensive duplication.  She got involved in health care policy through her job as the health care representative of the chair of the County Board of Supervisors.  She and George became pro-gay activists on my behalf (or as an antidote to her fear).  She had become more economically independent, as she evolved into the activist wife of her long-time activist husband.  In her 50s and 60s, Alice was outspoken in her own right, a phenomenon. 

Alice loved the beach, and in the mid 1980s she and George bought a new townhouse near La Selva Beach, south of Santa Cruz.  They sold their last place near Los Gatos, and after a few years of driving back and forth over the Santa Cruz mountains, made the beach place their primary residence.

Alice retired from her county job and then made another significant shift.  She embraced Judaism seriously and systematically, more than she had previously, focusing on her own religious education and spiritual life.  She was active in the reform synagogue in Aptos; she encouraged the synagogue to sponsor gay commitment ceremonies; she ran the adult education program;  she studied and, in her 60s, she became a Bat Mitzvah.  There was a service and a luncheon; she invited her family and many of her old friends.  It was a public event, with a speech, and she described herself as no longer afraid to be a Jew. 

Alice loved Santa Cruz.  She said that that her years there were the best in her life. She kept her old friends, made new ones, loved walking on the beach and the open-minded culture.  When visiting our long talks continued, with her, with her and my father, but always somehow, I felt closer to her.  We were rarely four.  Terry and I had our own schedules and our own trips. We were together for major events, George’s 70^th   in San Jose,  Alice’s Bat  Mitzvah in Aptos, later Dad’s 80^th in Palm Desert, and at the end, their funerals.  Speeches were part of what was expected ; we knew how to write and how to give them.

Alice at La Selva Beach, Santa Cruz County, California, late 1980s or early 90s

Alice with her brothers, George (l) and Jack (r) Greene

When I was in Santa Cruz,  I joined my parents at the synagogue.  We walked on the beach, went out to lunch or to dinner, and they cooked.  We drove downtown and occasionally to Monterey.  My visits were brief;  Alice and George could be a bit much for me.  I’d break up my trips, drive up to the city for a few days to see friends, then back again before returning to New York. The visits were warm and close, filled with conversation and fairly frequent, perhaps twice a year.  George and Alice also visited: my sister in London, Ontario, with her difficult first husband, later with Kim, the wonderful second one.  In New York, they sometimes stayed with me, but my apartment is small, and they usually rented somewhere when they came together.  Alice and George had family and old friends in New York and New Jersey, so visits with me merged into visits with them. 

Alice had setbacks in her 50s and 60s, but she found trusted women therapists to help her.  She told me this, presumably she told both of us as was my parents’ practice, but I was not yet mature enough to ask questions.  At some point, she said that she had been taking medication, that things had improved, and that she was taking herself off of the pills.  Now in her late 60s, Alice was in physical pain, from fibromyalgia, which was hard to treat.  She slipped and started to get worse without getting better.  Something more was happening, and it was not just physical, but I was in my forties, living in New York, dealing with my own issues. 

Mom loved the rabbi in Aptos; he was inspiring, and George was on the synagogue board, but there was disagreement about the low salaries of the synagogue staff.  Some members are bragging about their expensive cars and their trips to Europe, my father said.  The rabbi would not speak up, a disappointment and contrary to my parents’ values.  For Alice it contributed to her internal crisis, and she quit her part-time job at the synagogue. 

For a time the fibromyalgia was under control.  Alice found a doctor in San Francisco who was helpful, but his methods were novel and his practice was shut down by a California state medical board.  Alice felt crushed, abandoned, consumed by pain, anxious, depressed, desperate. Her doctor had advised a move away from the humid coastal climate, from the place that she loved, and she insisted. 

She and George looked inland at Scott’s Valley in the Santa Cruz mountains, further south towards Monterey but none of this worked. Los Gatos was now expensive and no longer interesting.  So they moved much further south, to Palm Desert, in the late 1990s.

George adapted well, but moving did not help Alice.  She weakened further, her strengths receded.  “I am just an old woman here” she said.  “Nobody knows me or what I did.”  She withdrew, stayed indoors, stopped caring for herself—the opposite of whom she had been—and avoided even her closest friends.  She told a doctor that she was feeling suicidal, a doctor who didn’t know her, and she was committed for a few days to a psychiatric institution.  I was in Los Angeles, and my father asked me to come immediately.  I came to the psychiatric ward,  touched her feet, and the pain disappeared, but it came back the next day.  With the help of a college friend, George organized a stay at the Mayo Clinic pain center, in Minnesota, but that did not help.  

Alice had fantasized about marrying her children at the old house in Los Gatos; she had hoped that we would raise families nearby. Eventually, she realized that this was never going to happen. So she had let go of the fantasy, put the house on the market and negotiated its sale while George was recovering from heart surgery.  She no longer wanted it and no longer expected the weddings, but she still wanted a grandchild.

There was no chance of my having one.  Gay men couldn’t marry; gay marriages with children were not thinkable; we didn’t even want them.  My sister’s men were not Jewish; but that wasn’t the issue. Alice would bring the child to visit; she would Judaize her; she would take her clothes shopping.  Instead, my sister was a late bloomer, like me, busy with her studies and career, then divorced, so it looked like there might never be grandchildren. By the time Terry was with Kim and pregnant, Alice was sinking.  She was leaving, so I knew for sure that the child would come.  

Alice has a glamorous granddaughter, but when Sophie was born, it was too late for her to see the glamour or to know her.  Sometimes, I feel that I am raising my mother, my sister has said.  For some years, when I visited, I took Sophie clothes shopping. 

From Minnesota, George flew Alice to Los Gatos, to sessions with a trusted therapist, Bee Olender, but after several weeks, Alice was too much even for B, a survivor of the Japanese internment camps in Indonesia.  I joined them in Los Gatos, and we had a family session, a meeting where B encouraged Alice to step through her fear, but Alice said that she couldn’t. B met with me alone, to explain what was happening.  This wasn’t unusual for children who had survived the war, she said.  There are chemical changes in women as they age, she said;  as older survivors, they no longer had the will or the resilience that carried them earlier.

At Peggy and Bob Hall’s house, where we were staying, there were intense conversations, the two and three of us, and then a break, a separation between my mother and me. I cannot remember exactly what was said, but I remember detaching, perhaps to protect myself, something I have never really accepted or forgotten.  I had always been close to my mother, had always understood her thinking, but I didn’t want to go “there” with her, not to where she had gone.  Facing the loss of the person who had loved me the most,  I felt heartless.  I wanted her to let go, to take the risk, even of falling into the void she feared, but Alice could not, and I couldn’t bring her back. 

My father asked me to help him drive her back to Palm Desert.  I declined.  They stopped at my uncle’s in Los Gatos, on their way out of town, and Alice apologized to her sister-in-law, Frances, for the years she had not understood her depression and withdrawal.  She asked my uncle to drop by and check on me, which he did.

From beginning to end,  Alice’s illness lasted six or seven years. George took care of her, occasionally calling for support or help talking with her, but mostly, he handled everything.  He wouldn’t put her in a nursing facility; he’d had many good years with her, he said. 

Alice had withdrawn, from me, from everyone I think.  We no longer had conversations; she asked only a few questions.  Was I seeing anyone, she once asked, her constant worry.   For months, she phoned us, starting in the morning, to hear our voices, and the calls followed us throughout the day.  She wanted to hear her children, but she wouldn’t speak when we answered.  Frustrated for both of us, I told my father that I would not talk to her at all if she didn’t stop.  But she needs this he said, then he turned from the phone, “Alice . . . ” and told her what I had said;  the calls stopped.

The Nazis are outside she told her brother; she rarely left the house.  One night she came into the bedroom, wet from the swimming pool, and asked my father to kill her.  Eventually George took her to a psychiatrist;  she was medicated and calmed down.  The pain subsided, and she lived behind a veil, standing to eat, lying in bed.  (Yet she pushed herself to dress for George’s 80^th and to briefly greet old friends.)

My mother died at 76, while Dad and I were in New Jersey at a party for her brother’s 50^th wedding anniversary.  The call came as we left.  I was sure that she had timed it.  At the funeral in Santa Cruz, she returned to me and said,  “You and I have done everything we were meant to do together, and I have done what I was supposed to do for you. This is not about you and me.  It is about your father, and I want you to support him.” 

In leaving she was my mother again, reminding me of what I failed to realize, of what she expected, of what really mattered.   

February 2025

I love cities and buildings and walking around and exploring. My friends are often interested in theatre, art or music, and that makes sense, but for me walking is usually enough. It’s both the seeing and the anticipation that come from it that are engaging, even if I don’t look into anything too deeply.

Wandering aimlessly can limit me to a city center or the same places that everyone else visits. Or it can lead to wandering in uninteresting places, because it is great to walk without a plan, but sometimes it is to nothing worthwhile.  The usual solution is guide books, but I have had guidebook vacations and would prefer to reach for something more.

Following are some of my walks in Vienna, those that I have planned, the places I have stopped and references to what I have read. This is a post in progress. If you have opened it early, there may be only one. But come back; there will be more. I am spending some time here.

Piarist Square, Josefstadt district, April 2023

For Vienna  I have the internet and two books: Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-Siecle Vienna–we read it in his class at Princeton in the 1970’s–and Vienna Art and Architecture, an edited volume by several authors published in 2008. 

For architecture, Schorske focuses on Vienna’s late 19^th century redevelopment, specifically the Ringstrasse, a wide boulevard that surrounds old Vienna, and on its contemporary critics, Camillo Sitte and Otto Wagner.  According to Schorske, Sitte was a theorist who admired craftsmanship but disliked the traffic-oriented Ring and its free floating buildings, which lacked human scale.  He preferred the intimacy and the community of the older city, specifically the square,  and his favorite, the Piarist Square, whose church façade was renovated by his father, and where he attended the gymnasium.

So on a Saturday afternoon I decided to have a look at the square and the church.  Getting there began with a ride on the U6 metro line, an elevated stretch of the old Stadtbahn, which runs in the center of Vienna’s highly-trafficked Gürtel, or Beltway. The Gürtel encloses the Innere Stadt (the Inner City), the Ring and much, but not all pre-World War I Vienna.  Like the Ring, the Gürtel replaced a line of outer fortifications in the late 19^th century.  Here is a map:   https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wiener_G%C3%BCrtel_Stra%C3%9Fe_Karte.png

The Stadtbahn was designed by the Otto Wagner, the antithesis of Sitte, a modernist, but my focus was on getting to the Piarist Square.  I have been on this metro line many times, typically to go to the Stadthallenbad swimming pool and frequently I notice the beauty of its viaduct structure and stations, and in particular the emphasis on glass and light. Whatever Wagner’s modernist and functionalist theory, he was also creative in the use of ornament, fusing and simplifying traditional detail in service of something that was entirely new.   

After leaving the station,  I crossed the Gürtel, to Josefstadter Strasse, which initially looked like a plain city street, and then I hopped on a streetcar that was heading in the wrong direction, but for just one stop. I got off and walked to Piarist Square, through a neighborhood of handsome 19^th century buildings and attractive shops and restaurants. 

The Piarist church has an appealing baroque façade, but the square surprised me.  It was raining when I arrived, and it was almost silent; perhaps due to the weather or the season it was not the gathering place I had imagined.  The square is formed by the church façade, framed by two lower buildings with plain façades, acting as wings on either side.  Over one ornamented doorway, the term “Gymnasium” signals the teaching vocation of the Piarists and a much more active square on weekdays.  The two wings or arms reach to a relatively narrow street, where more conventional 19^th century buildings form the square’s fourth side. 

This was not at all what I had expected.  I had thought instead of a busier place, of the kind I see frequently in Europe, with more traffic and shops. Of course,  I had not seen the square on a school day, or on a clear day when the café is open, nor do I know what it looked like in the late 19^th century, but my vision of Sitte’s ideal was now one of quiet removal, rather than of a square that is at the center of things. 

I turned again towards Josefstadter Strasse, passing the stage entrance of the Josefstadt Theater, where Beethoven and Wagner conducted and which is now the oldest theater in continual use in Vienna.  (I’ve checked its website and see that the current performances are theater, not music. They include the German language premiere of Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt.)  On Josefstadter Strasse there were other visual treats, including an old apothecary shop and a “Living Art” store, Wohn-Art-Wien, displaying furnishings from the early 20th century.

I noted also the sober,  handsome “Institute for Advanced Studies”, a social and economic research center founded in the early 1960’s by émigré Austrian academics, with the support of the Ford Foundation and the Austrian government.  From the street  a 19^th century addition is visible, to what was originally an 18^th century palace.  And like the Piarist square it thas three sides facing the street, but narrower and closed off by a gate. 

I noticed this extraordinary modernist facade, walking to the square and then again on my way back. Around the corner from another extraordinary facade, on the Handlesakademie II der Wiener Kaufmannschaft (Commercial Academy II of Vienna’s Merchant) which has its origins in 1857. This is one of several locations of is now called the Vienna Business School, since 1997.

The school faces Hamerling Park, built on the site of the Josefstadt barracks, which were demolished in 1910. Robert Hamerling was an Austrian poet.

We associate the French with beauty, refinement, elegance, grandeur. These are visible everywhere in Paris, as is occasional disorder and chaos, but underlying them is a discipline that is harder to discern. This year I was in Paris for more than two months: the first at the end of January to visit and see friends, and then again from mid-March to late April, for surgery.  Much of what I read and hear about France does not parallel my experience . . .so I’ve compiled a few short essays here.

Paris for the tourist

There is a lot of traffic in Paris; it is heavily visited and it can be exhaustingly crowded.  Many of the stores and restaurants are formulaic, although less so than in New York where I have lived for many years. The metro is often packed, the accordion-playing street musicians predictable. Public toilets are self-cleaning but spoiled by vagrants.  

Much of the city is a theme park to French history.  Last year I re-visited the Musée du Quai d’Orsay and the state rooms at Versailles, but the crowding was unbearable.  There are other things to see.  Years ago, a student, I walked into the medieval Sainte Chapelle, sat down and enjoyed the tall stained glass windows.  I remembered this as I passed by yesterday on the Isle de la Cité.   However, there are now tickets, a line, and a security screening.  I didn’t want to spoil the memory, so  I kept on walking.

My German teacher says that European tourism changed when the iron curtain fell in the 1990’s, opening up travel from eastern Europe. Later there were large numbers of visitors from Asia.  Visitors spend money; there is a lot to do, and the business is welcomed.  Yet many European cities are theme parks, pushing out real life, open air museums, where crowds of visitors look at each other.  There is more than a bit of this in Paris. The complaint is not only mine. The Louvre Museum is limiting visitors to 30,000 per day, a proposal which will be tested this summer.

According to its director, Laurence des Cars, people want to return to museums and rediscover the pleasure of contemplating art, directly, not through a screen, to share this experience, across generations and in families. Doing so should be as comfortable as possible and should offer exceptional moments in overcharged lives. If the Louvre, a magnificent place, with extraordinary spaces, is saturated with visitors, a part of that pleasure is lost. (See Financial Times interview, April 21, and FranceInter interview on You-tube 2023, copy the link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYJmTNH-G6s)

I have seen the great sites. I now prefer the view of Notre Dame at a distance while its roof is being rebuilt.  I want to talk to people, focus on old friends, visit quieter places or those that hold my memories.  (I’ll revisit the Louvre, when its new program is in place. . . )

January 27, on the rue de Vaugirard

In Paris since Friday after five weeks of traveling, I am tired and happy in friends’ comfortable one bedroom apartment on the rue de Vaugirard.  It  is at the rear of the building, quiet, accessible with a tiny elevator—the kind that was added years after the building’s construction.  It has a small windowed modern kitchen, a dining table that seats four, a fold-out couch in the living room, enough room for dinner and sleepover guests.  I am in the 15^th arrondissement, across from the Hôpital Necker for sick children, which is very convenient, near three metro stops and within easy walking distance of shopping, the Montparnasse train station and the 7^th and 6^th arrondissements.  

Tonight, I am having dinner guests, an old friend, and her brother and sister-in-law.  My friend told me that the others eat simply, without sauces, so my plan for a boeuf bourgignon is for another time.  Shopping on this section of the rue de Vaugirard is limited, so yesterday I walked across the Boulevard Pasteur to rue Lecourbe, where the stores are more varied and interesting.  I stopped first at a butcher and had him slice two chicken breasts into cutlets.  I also asked for two herb sausages, presumably pork, for another day.  Then I shopped at a Franprix, a chain market, for rice, mustard, breakfast food, and dried prunes for a dessert I had tried on Sunday, when friends invited me to at a restaurant in the 7^th.  I also bought two soft cheeses, one goat, as these are cheaper in the the Franprix and will add one or two more  at the adjacent cheese store later today.  On my way back, I stopped at a nearby wine store, Nicolas, for Armagnac and wine. 

Armagnac, which I used to stew the prunes, is a brandy of various white wines, cellared in oak barrels.  My bottle was from Chateau de Laubade, in lower  or “bas” Armagnac in southwest France.  It was cellared for 12 years and cost 45 euros.  To serve with the chicken, the wine merchant recommended a 2021 pinot noir, from the Domaine de l’Aigle, also in the south of France, about 15 euros.  It was very good, indeed the wine merchant made two very good recommendations while I was on Vaugirard; the chicken was also very good, less so my version of the prunes, which were more delicate in the restaurant. 

February 6, the Marais

Yesterday, an old friend invited me to lunch in the Marais with her daughter and two grandchildren. Her daughter recently found a studio apartment near the Place des Vosges, in a walk-up building, overlooking a garden courtyard at the rear and a street on the front.  It has a sleeping loft, with 17^th or 18^th century half-timbered walls and high ceilings.  A 19-year-old grandson lives there, preparing for his concours, the competitive entrance exams for France’s grandes écoles.  France has a very competitive system, where students spend over a year preparing for examinations that determine acceptance at some of its most prestigious universities. Classes and study take up nearly all of his time, and there are no guarantees. (I worked hard in school, but competition was more varied, subjective, and not based on a single test.)

Downstairs is a small, classic, restaurant, where my friend invited us all to lunch.  I had confit de canard with potatoes and was full for the rest of the day.

Afterwards we went to the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature,  which has an extraordinary collection of animal trophies and guns.  Man’s long relationship to beautiful animals, that is killing them, is not at all hidden, and the museum is beautiful, with careful attention to detail.   The renovated buildings, two old, aristocratic hôtels, are as wonderful as the collection.  The staircase rails are bronze branches, some light fixtures a combination of bronze antlers, bronze branches and organic glass bulbs; the walls are painted in deep rich colors, the exhibits are in 19^th century display cases. The effect is that of a private, almost over-furnished residence, intimate and exquisite. 

At the end of the afternoon, we went shopping for a replacement for my shabby winter coat.  My friend reminded me that men dislike shopping. She was right; I am intimidated in stores, but she is twice widowed, a mother and a grandmother, and like my own mother a lifetime ago, an effective shopper. 

Affluent American women often enjoy, exquisite, unique and expensive purchases.  Less so in the French bourgeoisie, where elegant women often take pride in careful expenditure, suitable or chic, but reasonably priced.  Under her direction, I found a new coat, with a hood, in dark blue, on sale, and marked down from 250 euros to 98.   I invited my friend for a cappuccino afterwards.  (Another friend in London has now given me a possum and marino-wool red cap to wear with it.)

February 17

Food was again my destination yesterday, this time at the Marché Couvert des Enfants Rouges (Covered Market of Red Children) in the Marais district, introduced to me by my friend Alexandre, and which dates to the early 17^th century.  There is generally more choice and activity in the morning, but I walked there in the early afternoon, after some hours reading and exercising at home.

Walking itself is part of a destination.  When I look at people and stores, I indulge my attractions, but also frequently imagine that I am furnishing an apartment, equipping a kitchen, buying food, or stopping in a café or restaurant.   

My walk was east on the rue de Vaugirard, to the rue du Cherche-Midi, across the Boulevard Montparnasse and into the 6^th arrondissement.  On narrow old Cherche-Midi, the stores are rich and interesting, carefully put together: a cheese shop, a kitchenware place, a dessert bakery/café that I eventually visited, an 18th century hôtel with a closed museum.  As I approached the Seine, and crossed the Boulevard St. Germain, the streets were more crowded, the cafés less interesting.

I crossed the river, the Isle de la Cité,  and again the Seine, looking at grand 19^th century theaters on the Place du Châtelet, the medieval tower of St. Jacques behind them, and then I walked into the Marais, which dates to the Renaissance.  I stopped again at the large BHS department store, for no better reason than to use the toilets.  These are on the top floor, on my way out, I stopped at the Figaret boutique.  Figaret’s dress shirts were my ideal of elegance thirty years ago.  Here they were on sale at 40 or 50% off.   I enjoyed looking, and the saleswoman warned me that the fin des soldes was an opportunity, but now, looking was for the memory of buying in Paris, at another time, when I worked in an office in New York and took my shirts to the laundry.  Now I wash and iron them myself.

I continued north, past the hôtel that houses the national archives.  There was a sign for an exhibit on the last, deposed, royal family’s years at the Tuileries (1789-92), but the opening was in March.  The Marché couvert des Enfants Rouges is a bit further up, on the rue de Bretagne, near the Square du Temple, where the royal family was emprisoned prior to the executions of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in 1793.  North of the square and adjacent to the market entrance, the rue de Bretagne is a paradise of food and cafés.  A Maison du Chocolat, a cookie shop, a smoked salmon place, a small tourist hotel. . . I entered the market, which is quiet in the late afternoon.  The vendors were in meeting–things are organized and done the right way in France–which is not always the same thing as being constantly available. So I waited for help at the cheese counter. 

A young woman, a niece of the owner, came to help me; I chose a goat cheese covered in ash, a buffalo camembert, and a third cheese, that I am trying now.  I don’t know its name, but tastes like raw milk with herbs.  I picked up two apples, for the cheese, but relented and later picked up a baguette tradition on the rue de Vaugirard.  After dropping my purchases at the apartment, I walked again to the Nicolas wine shop on the Avenue Pasteur.  The same salesman gave me another great red wine recommendation, for goat cheese, a 2021 Valencay blend, from the Loire Valley, at 8 or 9 euros. 

February 18

My primary preoccupation is apparently food, but there is also swimming . . I took the metro yesterday to the Sablons station in Neuilly-sur-Seine and walked to the Centre Aquatique, a covered complex of three pools, including  a 25 meter lap pool, which is not usually overcrowded.  The staff at the door is friendly, the changing rooms individual and very clean; the code-controlled lockers secure and easy to use.  Swimming in Paris can be a nightmare;  the public pools are very busy and there are few rules for sharing lanes, if there are lanes.  But in Neuilly, I’m able to swim in reasonable peace with courteous fellow-swimmers. The pool is closing next summer for an estimated 18-month renovation—unfortunately for my visit here next year.  For now, it is conveniently located, a five minute walk to my close and oldest friends in France, F and C, who had invited me to dinner. 

Near them, on the rue de Chézy, is another small, recently-opened cheese shop, owned by the green grocer a few doors away.  It has an attractive glass front, display cases on the sides and a counter at the back.  Looking in from the street, I eyed some jams and asked the young salesman whether these were the best in existence.  He assured me that they were and suggested, that given my culture, I might prefer the bitter orange alternative.  I asked what he thought my culture was; English, he said.  This is common in France, where some assume we are English if not the type of American they expect.  Still, this young man was not just a salesman but also a trained specialist. His work was preceded by specialized schooling in cheeses; his knowledge is detailed.

February 20, a day in the suburbs

Yesterday, Sunday, I took a train to Issou-Porcheville, 16 stops and an hour northwest of  Paris, along the Seine river,  where friends had scheduled to pick me for lunch at their place.  I was early at the Gare de St. Lazare, and so took an earlier train than we had agreed, assuming that I would have a coffee while waiting,  at the Issou-Porcheville station.

Isn’t there a village and café at every train station in France?  Not here, Issou-Porcheville is merely a commuter stop between two villages.  A local told me that the village was a long walk, about a kilometer.  Still not having absorbed that a kilometer is only about .62 miles, I turned back and waited at the train stop.  The man I spoke to was black, as were a lot of the people at the station.  It is remarkable how multicultural Paris is, multi-accented and French speaking.  I spoke briefly with a woman from the Ivory Coast, who was waiting for the bus and listening to what sounded like a political rally on her phone.  I asked another man coming out the station whether there was a bathroom or a café nearby.  Nothing, he said and recommended the bushes in good humor. We had a conversation a bit later.  He is not local, and not black, but the employee of a charter bus company handling alternative transportation, while repairs are made to one of the RER regional transportation lines.  Other weekends he is at other locations; the public would not tolerate closures during the week, he said.

My friends own a pleasant house close to the Seine river.  When I arrived, their daughter-in-law introduced herself, and brought her three children to the back terrace to meet me.  She told each of them to say hello, allowing the middle one to hide behind her legs.  Her husband, an engineer in his 30’s, greeted me in an open and friendly manner.  I asked if we had met previously; we could not remember, and if so it was many years ago.  This family is not formal, but there is traditional discipline.  Aperitif was in the living room, with a very interesting conversation about the preservation of archival documents, followed by lunch at a large table in the dining room. This was a lamb stew, red or white wine, a cheese course with bread, a homemade apple cake, and the excellent remains of the prior day’s chocolate cake.  

After lunch we all took a walk on a public trail along the Seine, below the house. We passed a number of house boats—there are also many in Paris–and we saw an old, deteriorated and modest yacht, Winston Churchill’s Amazone, built in England in the 1930’s.  It is forlorn, seemingly forgotten, although there is a article in French, with good pictures,  posted on-line at:  https://www.bateaux.com/article/22238/amazone-yacht-de-winston-churchill-vente

After lunch, I joined the children on another train back to Paris, not a commuter line, but a regional express, leaving from a larger town nearby.  It was overcrowded with people and luggage in the aisles, not at the standard of other train lines I have seen.  Most of the passengers were young, returning home from the weekend.  The trip into the Gare de St. Lazare was about 45 minutes. 

February 20, a detour to Nîmes

Last week I traveled with my very good friend Catherine to Nîmes on the high speed Train à Grande Vitesse (TGV) leaving from the Gare de Lyon.  We booked rooms at a cheap Ibis Budget hotel near the Nîmes train station, very basic and clean, at only 50 euros a night. 

Nîmes is quiet, not dead but a little tired in places, a ville de province.  History has passed it by, and yet it hasn’t.   It has some of the best Roman monuments in Europe: a perfectly formed temple set on a tall pedestal, with tall fluted, Corinthian columns, and a sculpturally beautiful coliseum.  Both are beautifully emphasized by 19^th century urban planning, a large square for the temple and a surrounding street for the stadium.  A Roman museum, facing the coliseum, is a modern wonder of superb objects and accessible, sophisticated audio-visual displays.  There are beautiful parks, a canal and esplanades.  Nîmes appears to be doing everything right.  There is a food market in the mornings where we had bread and cheese with coffee, and many shops on the streets, although many are not terribly interesting.  I saw two supermarkets and visited one.  It had everything, but its interior was tired.  The property prices are low, the many 19^th century buildings handsome.  The weather is cold in February, but it is sunny and bright.  (The air quality, unfortunately, was low during my visit.)  Not a bad place I think; perhaps I should spend more time here. But I am deterred by a sense of isolation—there are no memories for me, no connection, and I know no one in Nîmes.

February 21

Yesterday, I was invited to a luncheon in Marnes la Coquette.  My friends have told me that more and more Parisians are leaving the crowded center of the old city, settling in the suburban and smaller towns outside its periphery. 

I have visited our hostess a few times before, but I was again taken with the beauty of the town and of her apartment, in a large 19^th century bourgeois mansion.  The ceilings are very tall as are the double French windows, set off from the garden by handsome ornamented rails.  The dining table was elegant and the food simple and delicate,  a soufflé quiche, salmon and vegetables baked in foil, a tasty white wine, and then crêpes, served with jam, or lemon juice or a chestnut cream.

Hers is a wonderful family that I have known for fifty years.  A younger sister is a Catholic nun, who administers an international network of schools for adults and children. With her was a sister from Vietnam, a teacher who lived through difficult circumstances after the communist takeover.  Monitoring schools and programs in differing countries and legal systems is astonishingly complex, yet the order seems to be run with simplicity and modesty.  I am not a Catholic, not even Christian, but these sisters were a window into a practical world that emphasizes faith.

February 22

Today I had some errands.  One of them was getting buttons re-sewn on my new winter coat.  I found a small retoucherie on the Avenue Pasteur, owned by a friendly Pakistani couple who said they could take care of it right away.   While I was waiting, I decided to get something to eat at a nearby café,  forgetting eating in France at one or two o-clock is lunch.  I wasn’t particularly hungry, but I decided to go with the flow and ordered a fish casserole.   It was baked and served hot with cream and potato in an earthenware ramekin.  There were no chunks —the fish had been worked into the mixture—but it was tasty.  A small leafy salad was served on the side, with a very good vinaigrette dressing.  

At the retoucherie, the owner spoke an accented but very good French.  He has lived most of his life in Paris, and he and his wife moved fairly recently to this 15^th arrondissement neighborhood.  The clients are friendly and courteous, and loyal, he said. Unlike the many overweight women he has seen while visiting friends in England, French women keep themselves well, even older women.  They limit how much they eat.  They dress carefully and want their tailoring to be well done; they know and are observant to detail.  35 euros for a small alteration is not an issue,  but the work has to be done just right.  

February 25, pickpockets, etcetera

Thursday, on my way back to the apartment, on metro line 6, the doors opened at Trocadéro.  A woman started screaming, and a small crowd went to help her or leaned out of the train to look.  I could not see and decided not to join them, but I talked with those around me, a friendly black woman, across from me, who had just boarded, and a small Asian woman sitting on my right.  The friendly woman seemed to know something about what was going on, so I asked, and she said that she had heard it was a pickpocket and thought the screaming might be from the victim who wasn’t screaming in French.  She explained that this was a frequent problem on this train line, so she is always very protective of her purse.  There are groups of young girls who move together in the trains looking for victims. If they’re caught, they claim that they are underage, and they don’t carry documents, so the police let them go.  I asked why the police don’t hold them until their parents pick them up.  And she said, that it takes too much time, and the girls aren’t deterred because this is how they make their living.  She works in a store, she said, and deals with this problem all the time.  I thanked her and thought– the police simply haven’t devoted the resources or the will to solving the problem.  The small woman to my left, told me that this never happens in Japan.  In Japan she explained, you can leave your wallet somewhere and it will be returned to you, or will be left untouched.  The punishment for stealing is severe, so no one steals.  I asked her if she was Japanese; Cambodian she said.  Later someone else explained that the pickpockets are gypsies.  They are most frequently on the #1 line, which runs through central Paris, looking for tourists. 

I got off the metro one stop early to do some shopping.  The butcher and traiteur were both closed for school holidays, so I walked a bit further on the rue Lecourbe, looking for other stores, but many were closed, and I decided to simply make a large salad for guests in the evening.  But I did stop at a local branch of the famous patisserie, Le Nôtre,  where for 7 or 8 euros each, I bought a mille-feuilles, an éclair, and a flan.  The salesman was solicitous and the pastries and packaging gorgeous.  When I served them that evening, I put them on a plate in the kitchen and removed the identifying labels on each piece.  A guest asked if I had bought them at local pastry shop; I nodded.  We each tasted all three of them; they were rich but heavy, a disappointment, and a lesson against attraction to the obvious. 

February 26, la nouvelle Athènes

On Friday afternoon, I again met Anne at the Musée Gustave Moreau, the romantic painter of mythical and religious subjects.  Her sister-in-law Claude who paints, admires the skill of his art, but for me the mythical and religious themes were less penetrating than some of the impressionist landscapes.  (The exception was a copy of Botticelli’s Venus on an a colorful abstract canvas.)  The museum is in Moreau’s 19^th century  house, with originally furnished rooms on the second floor, and two, tall, windowed, atelier floors, added by Moreau to display his work.

Anne then guided me through Moreau’s 19^th century neighborhood, the 9^th arrondissement quarter known as la nouvelle Athènes, after the writers and artists who lived there.  Also new to me were the wonderful houses on the rue de la Tour des Dames and the early-19^th century courtyard buildings around the Square Orléans.  I was attracted to many, plain, shuttered facades and small shops, to impressions of intimacy and removal, and then to the opening and grandeur of the nevertheless fairly small Place St. Georges.

February 27

Yesterday, after my German lesson, I hopped on the metro to have lunch with F and C in Neuilly-sur-Seine.  The #6 line rides partly on elevated tracks and stations, above the roadway and through the 15^th arrondissement.  The glorious part of the ride is crossing the Seine, looking  directly at the Eiffel Tower, but I also enjoy the elevated stop at Passy, which offers a quick glimpse of the discreet Square d’Alboni behind it, where I have friends. 

At the Etoile station, I changed to the #1 line in the direction of La Défense, and exited the train at Les Sablons.  I am very familiar with the walk north from the station, on the rue Louis Philippe, and on the way back, I noticed again the plain façade of the street’s remaining 19^th century house.  The street tends to be shadowed, with a fair amount of traffic; nevertheless this house speaks to a lost dream or fantasy.  I peeked through the windows as always, from across the street, and then noticed for the first time an adjacent wall and gate.   Among taller, and more recent buildings around it, this house has a private side garden and a garden façade, longer and grander than the one facing the street.

I have written previously about F and C’s apartment on the rue Perronet which pre-dates World War I, as does my own apartment in New York, but theirs is more ornate and refined.  Lunch was served in the dining room, under ornate plaster ceilings, facing a row of French doors and an ornate wrought-iron balcony.  It was an avocado and grapefruit salad, a small roast beef with a sauce, roasted sliced potatoes, and baked apples with cream and caramel sauce.  I cannot cook with the same delicacy and taste as does C, nor with the same plates and elegant service.

Medical care

Americans generally believe that our medical care is the best in the world, at least for those who have good insurance.  But my personal experience questions this assumption.

In France, patients choose their doctors and hospitals.  Their basic medical care is reimbursed by the public system, but they often carry supplementary insurance, as do many Medicare beneficiaries in the United States.  While in Paris, in February, I saw two specialists, a cardiologist in private practice, and a urologist/surgeon in a private clinic.  I was pleasantly surprised.  Both spent a lot of time with me, asking and answering questions.  Both did their own testing, including an EKG, and a neck artery scan.  Both discussed and handled their own billing, like most professionals, but unlike doctors in America.  I have scheduled a surgical procedure with the urologist.  He answers his e-mails.  There was an appointment with the anesthesiologist, including a conversation, a review of my meds, and a physical exam.  In New York, it is hard to reach these people directly.  Most of the tests are delegated to technicians; the consultations are abbreviated. 

Since I am not in the French medical system, I am paying for my care, out of pocket.  Visits with specialists were typically 90 euros. 

March 25, 2023, St. Jean de Dieu

I am sitting at an open window at a small hospital or clinic, St. Jean de Dieu in Paris, looking through French windows at a 19^th century courtyard, a large, bare tree and over one, in Latin, “Salus Infirmorum Ora Pro Nobis”,  Salvation for the Sick, Pray for Us. 

I’m here for prostate surgery, an old man’s procedure.  It’s not cancer, but it was discomfort, until C suggested that I deal with it. 

“Tu pisses trop souvent, Larry.  Vas voir le médecin.“

And so I did. 

This photo is from my private room which cost 210 euros per day.  The whole  procedure and related lab and doctors’ appointments will likely cost 7,000 to 8,000 euros,  probably much less than in the United States, although I am not yet sure of how much Medicare will reimburse. 

The doctors and staff are efficient and friendly.  My surgeon is a friend of old friends and speaks very good medical English, which was very helpful to me in this context. Otherwise this is a French speaking institution, part of a network of hospitals and clinics owned by a Catholic healing order, founded in Spain in the 16^th century. 

Everyone here is careful and meticulous.  Some of the nurses and orderlies are bossy, but it hasn’t been difficult to comply or simply ask someone else.  The food, excepting the bread, is not up to French standards, but that is not why I am here. 

March 25

I am back in an apartment in Neuilly-sur-Seine, after a second release from the clinic, due to a complication following surgery.  It was painful, but I was taken care of.  The surgeon guided me, showed up, took care of me, and calmed me with his sympathy and clarity. The nurses took charge and moved me through some difficult procedures—thank you S!  From Neuilly, F had rushed me to the clinic, on an emergency basis,  and now F and C are keeping an eye on me.  I was a difficult and frightened patient, and now a lucky one, who learned that my fear was worse than the pain, and that pain was more tolerable than I realized. 

Breakfast at the clinic, Tuesday morning, was coffee, bread, butter and jam, with orange juice. It felt like the best breakfast I had ever had.  It was normal and intense, and I am grateful.

March 2023, The Protests in France

I am no expert on the finances of the French social security system, but like our own budget, it is threatened by a growing number of longer-living retirees and a slowing number of earners/contributors.  My reading indicates that the present deficit is projected to balloon in the coming decade and that benefits, while less than in the US in absolute terms, are more generous as a percentage of pre-retirement income. 

The present reform will increase the retirement age from 62 to 64 and has been approved by the French president without the National Assembly’s approval, in accordance with a provision in the constitution of the 5^th Republic.  However, it is still subject to the approval of the Conseil Constitutionnel (later granted).

Both the implementation and the intense negative reaction have been somewhat theatrical, the president’s clear but insistent and top-down attitude a holdover from the ancien régime.  The proud and insistent reaction of the unions, the demonstrators and extremist elements, is in the tradition of old revolutionary France, this with a colorful complement of burning and uncollected trash, Molotov cocktails and cobblestones.  Strikes are on pre-scheduled days, a kind of contained chaos.  Symbols of capitalism, that is international chain restaurants, an interesting choice, have been vandalized, and there have been injuries, of both protestors and the police, some serious. 

April 20, 2023 Neuilly-sur-Seine

Recuperating from surgery takes time, more so at 69 than when I was younger, but I was well cared for by my old friends, F and C who invited me to both lunch and dinner daily. No one could have been more supportive or attentive, while leaving me plenty of space to be alone. This couple is like a well oiled machine, looking after the needs of children and grandchildren, art classes, volunteer work, house maintenance, and cooking for frequent dinner guests. Their son and daughter-in-law pitched in, housing me for a week prior to the surgery in their apartment on the rue d’Aligre, after my early arrival for tests.

In the weeks following the hospitalization, I limited my movements to short walks in Neuilly, where I was staying, and later to some errands in central Paris. On one of my walks, I ran into a friend who was coming out of her front door; she and her husband invited me for coffee and a visit of their apartment and its superb garden. He reads history, including the 17th and 18th century journals of the Duc de St. Simon, which I found and downloaded on Kindle for $4 or $5. Another afternoon, I walked to the American Hospital, which caters to foreigners and the affluent. A friend had ankle surgery there a few years ago and described the food as superb.  So I was expecting a grand establishment.  Not at all.  The hospital is large but the buildings are low key and modernist. 

On another Sunday, a young friend visited, whom I knew when she and her boyfriend (now husband) were living in New York. I made her a salad and a pizza, frozen and heated in the oven, from Picard. She is now mother to a six-month old, a role that she has taken-on with calm, efficient love. She brought her baby with her, in a stroller, on the metro, and we chatted about parenting, careers, moving to Marseille, her parents, my medical issues and my writing.

Neuilly-sur-Seine was an early suburb, developed in the 19^th century, with large, private villas.  Now it is better described as a small town or city, at the edge of Paris, with its own city government. It is mostly five and six story apartment houses, now far outnumbering the remaining single family houses. There is a lot of planting and well-maintained municipal  flower beds and trees, with in addition, private gardens surrounded by 19^th century fences and walls. 

Neuilly also has dense mixed-use commercial streets, nearer to the subway line and the very wide and trafficked Avenue Charles de Gaulle, which links Paris with highways and the modern office district at La Défense.  Three times weekly, there is an open air market along the Avenue at Les Sablons.   One day, C and I went to pick up a roast chicken, a head of lettuce, cheeses and salmon. 

Mostly I shopped a few steps from the apartment, at the intersection of the rue Perronet and the rue de Chézy.  There are a butcher, green grocer, café, bank, grocer, bakery and a traiteur.  F and C are only a few doors away. I have lived here with them or visited for fifty years, and so in some sense I am at home.

Yesterday I returned to Vienna by train from Znojmo, in the Czech Republic.  Znojmo was the terminus of my trip,  suggesting old links with Austria; however, the train was almost empty when it reached the town on Tuesday morning, and there were relatively few passengers at the beginning of my return.  The train is much more crowded as it nears or leaves Vienna. Otherwise it makes a number of stops at smaller country-side stations, on a trip of about an hour and three quarters. 

I am living some months this year in Vienna, to better understand my past and its present.  Under new legislation (much delayed), the Austrian government gave us citizenship in September 2020, and a city of limited interest (to me), became intriguing.  My mother was born in Vienna in 1928 and escaped to the United States in 1939. 

My visit to Znojmo was suggested and organized by a cousin, Lilian W. S., also born in Vienna, in 1933, and whose family lived in Znojmo before escaping to Switzerland at the end of 1938 and to United States in 1941. Lilian then grew up in New York  and married a cousin of my father.  But she has kept contact with her home town.  She reached out to a friend and asked him to organize a visit to her family’s former house, and to her maternal family’s factory. 

Znojmo is in Moravia, and Moravia and Bohemia were governed by the Austrian Hapsburgs, from the 16^th century until 1918.  The population was a mixture of Czechs and Austrian Germans, although the border areas were more heavily German, the eventual basis for Nazi claims.  Znojmo (Znaim in German) is in this border area, then known as the Sudetenland, and annexed by Germany following the infamous Munich agreement of September 1938.   At the end of the Second World War, the German population was pushed out.  

Jews also lived in Znojmo beginning in at least the 14^th century.  The community was probably the largest in Moravia in the early 1400’s, but was then expelled in 1454 and not permitted to return until 1851.  (In Vienna, we were expelled in 1670, but there were exceptions.  Austrian emancipation was granted following the Revolution of 1848.)  An impressive Moorish revival synagogue was built in Znojmo in 1878.  It burned on Kristallnacht, in November 1938, and was eventually torn down.

Lilian’s family, Weinbergers on her father’s side and Lichtensterns on her mother’s, were successful industrialists.  Her paternal grandfather, Alfred Weinberger (1860-1955) was born near Brno and owned a leather tannery in Znojmo.  Her maternal grandfather, Oskar Lichtenstern, was born in Vienna in 1878 and moved to Znojmo following the Lichtenstern family purchase of the existing Rudolf Ditmar ceramics factory in 1912.  The Lichtensterns later added a second Czech concern, creating Ditmar Urbach, to their original factory in Wilhelmsburg, west of Vienna.  They shifted to the production of sanitary ceramics and opened subsidiaries in central Europe, Switzerland, Milan and Bombay.  The businesses were expropriated by the Nazi’s in 1938 and 1939.  

Before the War, Lilian’s family was oriented to Vienna; both sides of her family had property there;  some eventually returned to Austria, but not to Czechoslovakia.  Lilian grew up speaking German, and in her occasional strict reserve, she is still, subtly, a refugee and Viennese.

Beyond the outskirts of Vienna, the train rode through a relatively flat landscape, but it undulates a bit, and the fields are very beautiful.  As we crossed the Czech border, a new conductor scanned my ticket for a second time. Approaching Znojmo there is more forest, and the landscape is more mountainous, although the elevations are modest.  The town is on a rise, overlooking the Dyje River.  

Lilian’s friend, David G., met me at the station. We walked into town, past the outer Ring (in the Viennese style), past the greenbelt that replaced the city’s fortifications, past a late-19^th century apartment house that had belonged to his grandparents, and into the old town center, organized around two public squares.  Znojmo is not large, at about 33,000 residents, but it is concentrated, with an attractive and well-maintained historic core, a mixture of medieval, baroque and 19^th century buildings, some courageously modernist 1930’s structures, and some very nice cafés. My hotel was small, some steps down from a medieval/baroque church, and from my room there was a view over the town’s outer districts, to the river, reservoir, and forested mountains.  The weather was cool and the leaves were changing color. 

David showed me around, and we had lunch before a 2:00 PM appointment at Lilian’s childhood house at 19 Rudoleckého Street.  In the 1920’s three houses were built for Alfred Weinberger and his two sons, Hans and Fritz. They were side-by-side, in a newer neighborhood, outside the former city walls. In the years after World War I, Rudoleckého Street was known as Wilson Street.

Lilian’s house, that is her father Hans’ house, was designed by the Jewish/Czech architect Norbert Troller, with the interiors done by a Viennese architect and designer, Armand Weiser.  The houses are still standing, but only the Hans Weinberger house is accessible; it is a nursery school. 

The staff member who met us had copies of interior photographs from a 1928 article in Innen-Dekoration, a German design magazine published in Darmstadt. She helpfully matched the rooms to the photographs as she showed us the house.  Here is the link to the full article:  https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/innendekoration1928/0435/image,info

The interior is largely intact, not so much upstairs, but on the main floor, where the entrance and main public rooms have been well preserved.  The house blends clean-lined early 20^th century modernism with more traditionally grounded arts-and-crafts elements.  Its relatively small main entrance, on the side of the house, contrasts with a large cloak room and an enormous paneled “living hall”, still complete with built-in benches and a fireplace. 

A formal French salon, with original fabric panels, is also at the front of the house, and it opens to a mahogany paneled dining room, kitchen areas and a gentleman’s room at the rear.  Large paned windows face an enormous walled garden, now a worn play area, that must have given a beautiful view when it was fully planted. 

The house is large, not huge; a breakfast room and a stove were at one time located adjacent to the bedrooms upstairs.  The taste was sophisticated and up-to-date, reflecting the preferences of many affluent Jewish families. The simplicity of the house’s outer form and its clean lines are forward looking. The richly detailed arts-and-craft interiors are more traditional, but through the lens of late 19^th and early 20^th century design. 

This is a comfortable place, almost understated; it is not modestly middle class, and it does not mimic the aristocratic.  The house certainly depended on some level of staffing to operate. The school is evidently proud of the house; its interiors were protected by a former director; the local preservation office came in to give advice; and the woodwork is cleaned and treated once a year; clearly the memory of the house has some importance. Note the front windows, shaped like the tablets of the law, or like the round-arched windows on Moorish Revival synagogues; this subtle reference likely belongs to Norbert Troller.   

The Weinberger tannery no longer exists, but following the visit to the house, we crossed the railroad tracks and visited a large factory complex that was formerly owned by the Lilian’s maternal family, the Lichtensterns. The old buildings are still there; although they have been extensively remodeled.  And the factory still makes sanitary ceramics, toilets, sinks and shower basins, under the company name Laufen, which I see everywhere in Austria, now owned by the Barcelona-based Roca group.  The Lichtenstern grandparents’ house was on the factory grounds, apparently with a well-tended garden.  It is visible on an old print which hangs on the general manager’s office wall, but it no longer exists.    

At the factory, I was welcomed to an interesting visit and short-course on sanitary ceramics production, by the smart, energetic general manager, Gabriel Mašek.  The earthenware is produced in molds that have a limited life span; the glaze is sprayed-on by hand, although there is also robotics equipment.   Earthenware is a natural material, occasionally inconsistent even under controlled conditions.  So there is a small loss factor, as not all of the imperfections can be repaired.  The Znojmo factory is not the largest in the group, but it produces some of the most specialized work.  This is an old place, still forward looking and modern.

At the end of the day, David invited me to an unusual wine bar, with about 85 wines, in an old brewery, not far from my hotel.  Tasting is automated. He chose wines from a printed menu, locating each in refrigerator cases by number.  We then selected tasting, half glass or full glass portions, and tried a number of them, with a plate of sausage and cheese.

Phylloxera, two world wars, and communism were hard on this old Moravian wine region, although production had become increasingly sophisticated in the late 19^th century.  Since the fall of communism in 1989, there has again been an increase in education and new vineyards.  I am not an expert, but at least two of the 6-7 wines I tasted were extremely good.  Here is an article on Moravian wine production that is posted on-line:  https://www.europenowjournal.org/2020/11/09/bottle-revolution-the-emerging-importance-of-the-wine-industry-in-south-moravia/

On the second day of my visit, David drove me to the Jewish cemetery a few minutes out of town—that is the “new” one that was founded in the 19^th century.  The medieval cemetery in town has mostly disappeared.  The new cemetery is owned by the Brno Jewish community, as there is no longer a Jewish community in Znojmo.  Most of the older stones are missing—sold during the communist era; they may now be paving stones in Prague and other cities. 

David G. met Lilian at the cemetery in 2001 and then at a luncheon given for her a few years later, an event honoring the placement of brass stumbling stones or Stolpersteine, for her young cousin (pictured above with his grandfather) and an aunt who lived in the Weinberger house next door and disappeared during the War. 

David’s family, like Lilian’s, got out, just before the outbreak of the War, but returned to Znojmo, where he now lives with his wife and two children. His family was also very accomplished. His great-grandfather, a physician, moved to Znojmo from Bohemia and purchased the 19^th century house he had shown me on the town’s outer Ring.  His grandfather was also a doctor, largely serving the Czech community; his father and his mother were physicians.  The family assimilated; neither David’s mother nor his wife are Jewish, but his father, grandparents and great-grandparents were, and they are buried in this cemetery. 

David and his family now live in the family house, the fourth generation, but as far has he knows, he is now the only self-identified Jew in the town. 

October 2022

Last week, I took the train south from Klagenfurt (in south Austria) to Trieste.  Reviewing Google maps, I had assumed that the train headed directly south through Slovenia.  But history or geography planned a route that skirts Slovenia completely.  The first train, running long distance to Venice,  entered Italy at approximately Tarvisio.  I changed to a local train in Udine that runs southeast to Gorizia, at the Slovenian border, before turning directly south, to the narrow spit of Italian coastal territory along the Adriatic that includes Trieste. 

My sister asks if our parents brought us to Trieste in the 1960’s, but I do not remember it, and if she is right, we likely drove through it, on our way to Opatija on the Yugoslav coast.   My present interest in Trieste comes from its relatively low profile.  It is a port, a coffee port, polyglot, with a mixture of Italians and Slovenes and other Balkans.  In this region Venice is the big draw for Americans, or sometimes the Croatian coast.  Unlike the Austrians who ruled it for centuries, we don’t know much about it, and despite many trips to Europe, I too knew nothing.   

And so my visit and observation has been in small increments, focusing on what I see and quickly reference on the internet, and now more broadly on my reading.  For this, I read an interesting and informative memoir by the Welsh writer, Jan Morris, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, published in 2001. 

My arrival in Trieste was at the main train station, where I walked through a modern addition with an impeccable marble and stainless steel bathroom, and then through an impressive, tall,  waiting room from the Austrian period.  I walked further, all the way to my hotel,  in order to see the city.  This was difficult, because of my heavy suitcase and the heat, but more so because the first streets were shabby and the handsome buildings ill-kept.  But then the walk took me to the impressive Canale Grande, an old docking port that was built into the center of town, and then just a few blocks further to my small hotel.    

What is it about Trieste that gives it an air of old time romance?  Its buildings are not among the most historic in Europe,  nor has it been a political capital, although it does have a Roman forum and amphitheatre.  

Instead it is the 19^th century that dominates Trieste, its past more bourgeois than aristocratic, and that may be the source of its intrigue.  19^th century Trieste,  that is Austrian Trieste–a port city, with its 4-6 story buildings and original, intact, facades–has been almost entirely preserved.  They are colorful and classical, modestly grand, with style and ornament that reference ancient Rome, or Vienna,  or occasionally Venice.  And the buildings, while not old by European standards, feel old, a bit frozen in time, still useable without having ceded to the present.  Collectively they say that Trieste is an active city, but that formerly it was a grand one.  Indeed its relative importance, as the main port for the Austrian Empire, declined after it was ceded to Italy at the end of the First World War.  And yet, Trieste is an active place, a commercial port, and a gateway city to the Balkans. 

My hotel, Residenza le 6A, is in an old apartment building.  It is really a pensione with just six rented rooms and a few short term rental units, on a stone-paved pedestrian street that terminates with a shopping street at one end and a white marble side of the classical church Sant’Antonio Nuovo, at the other.  In the pavement, in front of the large double entrance door, are four brass plaques, or “stumbling stones” for members of the Goldschmied family who were deported from here in the early 1940’s.  I was struck how this history had followed me from Vienna, where a few months ago, I stood at the doorway through which my grandmother’s older sister had also been deported. 

Behind the doors, the entry hall is mammoth, with a tiled floor, huge glass and wrought iron doors at the rear, faded switches that add a few minutes of light, and a substantial stone staircase and tiny elevator to a large entry landing with two large pedimented double-doors and more switches.  And then inside the pensione, dim, quiet, music, comfortable furniture, a breakfast area, and a reception desk, occupied in the morning by a very helpful Andrea.  My room faces over the street, also quiet, with two new sets of windows, tall ceilings, an armoire, a side chair, a built in desk, air-conditioning, and a modern bathroom.  And this is where I am writing.    

On my second full day here, I took a public bus (6 or 36, across from the main train station)  to Castello Miramare,  perhaps the most visited site in Trieste.  Like the city, it was built in the mid-19^th century by Maximilian, a younger brother of the Austrian emperor, who was briefly the emperor of Mexico before his execution by “rebels”.  It is pure gothic revival on the outside, more like an important English country house than a castle.  Inside it is opulent and eclectic reflecting both its time and its attachment to the further past.  It is grand, with an enfilade of gorgeous but not terribly private rooms, endless portraits of kings and Hapsburg family members and ancestors; there is even a grand bed of state—all a reminder of the authority and importance of the owner.  The placement of the house at the edge of the Adriatic, the marble walk around it, the terraced garden, the bathing steps into the sea; these are the real inspirations and the beauty of this place. 

Walking back to the bus, along a more plebian but living ocean front, I had lunch at a private beach club in its café overlooking the sea, then walked further along the shoreline, past sunbathers and some swimmers.   A younger man, muscled and wet from the water, climbed on a bicycle in front of me, wearing only a small bathing suit and backpack, and pedaled barefoot a bit further down the shore to a public shower.  A young woman, also shirtless and with smallish breasts,  lay back on a towel along the walk.  Everyone seemed at ease, their movement effortless and un-self-conscious. 

On my way to the bus station, I had seen a small pastry and chocolate shop.  So I stopped at  Bomboniera on the way back to the hotel.  The shop dates to the early 19^th century, ornate, and high-ceilinged, with tall, carved display cases and a crystal chandelier.  My strudel was a rolled nut cake with apricot jam, served on a “silver” tray with the coffee and a small glass of hot chocolate.  The cake was better than what I find at most of the shops in Vienna.  There are a few indoor seats, and then outside, tables in the middle of the pedestrian street.  I saw this everywhere—pedestrian streets centered by café and restaurant tables.  Frequently these places are busy, and while there are many visitors, most of the patrons sound local.

The hills in Trieste are older and quieter than the commercial city.   The original city, the forum, the Roman amphitheater, the old city walls and the city’s cathedral are on a hill.   So too are many 19^th century buildings, and more meandering and some narrower streets, a contrast to the rational grid below, and some small café’s and restaurants.   Also high up are some modern buildings, often depressing due to their lesser quality and maintenance, and some old 19^th century mansions, indicating perhaps that portions of these hills were formerly bucolic and more desirable.  As it is they are residential, quieter, and greener, with some flights of steps and small parks. 

What may be the grandest mansion in Trieste is in a 19^th century enclave near the port.  Now the Museo Revoltella (Via Armando Diaz 27), the house was built for Pasquale Revoltella, a self-made importer, investor, and a significant backer of the construction of the Suez Canal.  He was enobled by the Austrian emperor and left his wealth and the house to the city. The house, designed by a German-Jewish-to-Lutheran architect, George Hitzig, was converted into a museum in 1872,   with its art collection and furniture intact.  It is opulent, huge in scale, even larger due to its combination with an adjacent house.  The permanent art collection and the furniture are impressive but arguably not extremely significant.  However, the temporary exhibition was extraordinary, a collection of Impressionist paintings of Normandy, including two Monets.  (Here is the link, https://museorevoltella.it/monet-e-gli-impressionisti-in-normandia/ ).  I am rarely able to look at art of this quality without looking past or through other people.  Here I was almost alone in the exhibition rooms and in the main house, a rare pleasure while traveling.   

There were even fewer visitors at the Museum of Antiquity, J.J. Winckelmann (via della Cattredrale, 15) , named after a well-known German art historian and archeologist, who was murdered in Trieste in 1768, likely in a fit of anti-homosexual rage.  The museum is also in a 19^th century house. It and its institutional improvements are gently aging, but it has a large walled garden,  sprinkled with antiquities,  and inside,  an excellent and accessible collection of ancient stone heads, busts and pottery.   In the garden, and on the steps leading up the hill to the Cathedral, is a small temple, with inside, a monument to the archeologist.

I have eaten in various restaurants and cafés in Trieste, and generally, the food is more Italian than Viennese, and it is good.  Eataly has a very attractive building on the port, much less crowded than the one in New York, and its restaurant has a gorgeous view, but it was closed for dinner when I went.  Instead, anticipating a splurge, I stopped at Harry’s, which sits prominently on the Piazza dell’Unita d’Italia, linked with the five star Grand Hotel Duchi D’Aosta.  I typically avoid places like this, but I was in a mood, and I’m writing, so I stopped first for a local white wine served with chips, nuts and olives and then moved across the terrace for a second glass of wine, pasta, and coffee.  The service was friendly and elegant.  Some, not all of the patrons, were very privileged Americans.  The pasta was filling and very good; the bill was 40 euros. 

On the morning before I left Trieste, I visited the Museum of the Jewish Community of Trieste at via del Monte 5/7, just a few blocks from my hotel. The museum is in a building that it shares with apartments (like my hotel), but it was formerly a Jewish hospital and later a refugee center and way-station for Jews fleeing central Europe for Palestine, the United States, or elsewhere.  During the 1930’s the Jewish community helped others fleeing the Nazis, unaware that its members would also, eventually, need to be saved.

I was the only visitor, as the main synagogue is the more frequent draw, and learned that the Jewish community in Trieste now numbers only about 300 in a regional Jewish population of about 500.  This small group is much reduced from its pre-World War II numbers (about 6,000 in 1938 per Wikipedia),  but it nevertheless maintains a cemetery, the museum and a large neo-Moorish synagogue that was opened in 1912.  The detailed and extensive exhibition focuses on the history of the community and its cultural contribution.   Afterwards, I downloaded and am now reading  Zeno’s Conscience by Italo Svevo.  I was told that he is required reading in Italian literature classes, although his fame was initially due to the support of James Joyce and French literary circles. 

It has been very hot in Trieste the past couple of days.  It is a late June afternoon, at 5 o’clock, at 91 degrees Fahrenheit (32.8 degrees Celsius), and I am hiding in my hotel room.  I have seen enough on this trip and need to write down my admiration for this city’s manageable scale and frequent beauty. Next time, I’ll combine a visit with a ferry to the Croatian coast. Tomorrow, I am on nine-hour train back to Vienna.  The first class ticket was for a small premium—well worth it for a long, but hopefully relaxing trip. 

Trieste, June 27, 2022