Invisible Baggage in a Refuge from Nazism

Diaspora 2:3 1993 Invisible Baggage in a Refuge from Nazism Leo Spitzer Dartmouth College 1. Inherited Relics After my mother died in New York in 1988, I became the keeper of memorabilia that she and my father had brought to the United States from their nearly 12 years of what she used to call "our time" in Bolivia.1 Among the items I inherited is a framed, hand-colored, artist-signed lithograph ofVienna's St. Stephen's Cathedral and the Stephansplatz in dusky, late afternoon light—an early twentiethcentury print that my father particularly loved, and which he displayed as a central icon on the wall of our family room in La Paz. It seemingly never occurred to my father and mother, and certainly not to me until recently, that there was something incongruous for Jews like us to have a Catholic cathedral occupy a shrinelike space in our home—a position the picture continued to fill even after my family came to this country and my parents became United States citizens. I don't precisely know when the lithograph was acquired by them—apparently my father had received it in payment for some work he did for another Austrian refugee not very long after arriving in Bolivia—but I remember the picture from very early childhood , its identification with "beautiful old Vienna," my father's estimation of its potential value as a signed artist's proof, and the sense of wonder it inspired in my imagination about a city which I had never seen, in which I was almost born, and about which my parents , my relatives, and their friends spoke so often, and with immense nostalgia. Sifting through the items left behind, I also found five ofmy childhood books. One is in Spanish, in large print on wartime paper now yellowed by time, and is entitled Beethoven, El Sacrificio de Un Niño (Beethoven: A Child's Sacrifice). It is an illustrated biography of the young Beethoven, who, together with Mozart, Schubert, and Johann Strauss the Younger, had been in my father's small pantheon of composers "worth hearing," and whose prodigious talents as child pianist I secretly fantasized to have somewhere within me as well, dormant, awaiting only discovery and a piano which we did not possess . Two other books, an illustrated German children's edition of Diaspora 2:3 1993 Grimm's Fairy Tales and Frida Schanz's Schulkindergeschichten, both in Gothic script, were read to me over a period of many months by my grandmother Lina during late afternoons and evenings in our apartment on the Calle Mexico—moments which I can still recall with tremendous affection and pleasure. These two volumes and the Beethoven biography were undoubtedly books I had been given after I had already learned to read. But two others, Wilhelm Busch's Max und Moritz: eine Bubengeschichte in sieben Streichen (Max and Moritz : A Boy's Tale in Seven Episodes), published in Santiago de Chile by refugees, using Busch's original illustrations and text, and Heinrich Hoffmann's Der Struwwelpeter (Slovenly Peter), were, according to my mother, brought to Bolivia as gifts for the newly born me. I associate these two cautionary tales with my youngest formative years: they literally were my first books. Tattered, mended with tape, fragile with age and use, Max und Moritz contains what is probably the earliest existent example ofmy own handwriting—my nickname, Poldi, printed in capital letters in pencil. I don't know when I wrote this, but next to my name, in smaller letters, I had also attempted to write "Y Puppi" (in Spanish blended with German) to indicate that this book also belonged to my sister ElIy, who was born in 1944 and affectionately referred to as "Puppe"—"Doll." The Struwwelpeter is, perhaps, in even worse shape from repeated handling and intensive examination, having emerged after its numerous "readings" detached from its spine binding , with its title page missing, and with my preliterate, spider-weblike scribblings in pencil spread over the illustrations on its cover and first page. Its status as a scarred veteran is unmistakable. Like its contemporary survivor, Max und Moritz, it practically demands gentle retirement and kind treatment...