City of Life, City of Death: Memories of Riga

8 My Aunts and Uncles

48 GROWING UP JEWISH IN PREWAR LATVIA Of my aunts and uncles I knew my father’s sisters and brothers best. Aunts Clara and Thea and Uncle Leo visited Riga nearly every year, and Uncle Eduard lived and shared his meals with us. I knew them all well and considered them members of the immediate family. CLARA Aunt Clara, Emma and Max’s second child and oldest daughter, was a tiny woman who never married. My grandmother told me she was sure Clara’s growth had been stunted because as a little girl she had a dark room. After World War II I heard that when she was young she had fallen in love with an uncle, her father’s younger half-brother Eduard (not to be confused with Clara’s brother, my uncle Eduard). This uncle was just nine years older than Clara. It was thought that because Clara could not marry him, she chose to remain single. I know little about Clara’s formal education. She must have finished a German high school for girls in Riga. Clara, like all the Michelson siblings, was fluent in German, Russian, and French. In the early 1900s Clara took courses in sociology and philosophy with Georg Simmel, a well-known professor at the University of Berlin. Clara also attended lectures by Sigmund Freud in Vienna. Freud’s explicit emphasis on human sexuality may have been uncomfortable for her, and she found Adlerian psychology more congenial . She took courses and was thoroughly conversant with Alfred Adler’s Individual Psychology, which she discussed with me. Clara was also interested and well versed in graphology. Her article “The Symbol in Signature” was published in La Graphologie Scientifique in 1936 in Paris. The start of World War I caught Clara in Germany. She was able to return to Russia, probably by way of Stockholm, in 1916. By that time the family had already escaped Riga and gone to Moscow. In early 1917 Clara 8 My Aunts and Uncles
MY AUNTS AND UNCLES 49 went with her mother to the Caucasus and stayed there after Emma returned to Moscow. After the start of the revolution, fighting between the Bolsheviks and Allied interventionist forces trapped Clara in the south. She managed to get to Yalta in the Crimea, where she spent almost two years. Leo was instrumental in obtaining permission for her to come to Germany. Traveling by way of Constantinople and Italy, Clara was finally able to join him in Berlin in 1920. She eventually settled in Paris and worked as a writer. Except for occasional visits, she never returned to Riga. In the early 1930s she moved to Berlin, but like her brother Leo, she was soon back in Paris. Clara supported herself with income from her share of the family business, which Dietrich and Eduard sent her regularly. She occasionally helped by making contacts with our agents in Western Europe. On her visits to Riga, particularly while my grandmother was alive, Clara spent extended periods with us. She took great interest in me and devoted much time to playing and talking with me. She had a calm, thoughtful manner and often expressed her psychological insights in her talks with me. She always treated me like a reasonable, responsible person. Clara had an effective way of dealing with my occasional temper tantrums. She would engage me in quiet conversations aimed at exploring my frustrations and would help me find more constructive ways of understanding and expressing them. She was also interested in dream interpretation. I told her my dreams, which she recorded, and we discussed possible interpretations. I loved her dearly. Clara wrote in both German and French, and some of her early stories were in Russian. From 1910 to 1913 she was a regular contributor to Die Wage, a Viennese weekly that published several of her short stories, as well as her essays “The Legacy of Tolstoy” and “Ibsen’s Brand and Kant’s Categorical Imperative.” In 1936 in Berlin, Philo Verlag, a well-known Jewish publisher, printed a small volume of Clara’s short stories in German, Jüdisches Kind aus dem Osten (A Jewish Child from the East), which Clara dedicated to the memory of her niece Sylvia. The book was widely reviewed in Jewish newspapers, including the New York Forverts, and a Yiddish translation appeared in Riga in 1937 under the title Di Yidishe Neshome (The Jewish Soul). Clara also prepared a French translation but was apparently unable to find a...