This is my first Rosh Hashanah blogging as a Jew. It's not that I avoided the topic of Judaism when I blogged about dogs; I discussed it on several occasions. I was even considering having a Bark Mitzvah for my dog, Frankie, when he turned 13 earlier this year, but he objected to the yarmulke and having to learn the long arf-torah and I respected that. Generally, however,
Why Genealogy is Like Jeopardy!
I'm in a scary place. Anyone who has embarked on a large project, especially one that involves a lot of research, knows the place I mean. It's the terra incognita where you wander, trying to find your bearings. Figuring out how to navigate this land, determining the best tools to use and where to find them, can be paralyzing. I've already learned more than I could have
Meaty Musings About Foie Gras
It's a good thing I'm not a vegetarian. Exploring the history of a family of butchers would be tough. I'm planning to look into the background of the Kornmehl family profession, to see how it was regarded in Freud's Vienna, but my research has also spurred me to contemplate contemporary issues surrounding the ingestion of flesh. Aiming for moderation Although I was never a
Freud & Dogs, III: Princesses, Pups & Playwrights
In Part I of this series, I discussed Freud's late life arrival at puppy love, including how my great uncle's butcher shop provided meat for Yofi, Freud's culturally Jewish -- if not observant -- chow. In Part II, I talked about the role the family dogs played in Anna and Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic practice. Here I explore Freud's final months in Vienna and the final
A Labor Day Tribute to My Mother
I often think of my mother, who died more than 20 years ago, sometimes in ways I didn't anticipate. I was always irritated at having to call her on Sunday at 10am, no matter where I was and with whom. Now I'd love to check in with her. No one is as interested as she was in the boring, mundane details of my life (granted, I withheld a lot of the good stuff from her, so she had
Freud & Dogs, II: A Dangerous Method (If You Fear Dogs)
In Part I of this series, I explored Freud's late life case of puppy love, inspired by his daughter Anna's first dog. Here I discuss the impact his bond with dogs had on his treatment sessions -- and on Anna's. Oddly, Freud's pre-eminent biographer, Peter Gay, minimized the role dogs played in his subject's life and his practice. In the sole page devoted to the topic in
Freud & Dogs, I: A Case of Late Life Puppy Love
In December 2011, when I learned that the butcher shop of my great uncle shared an address with the home and offices of Sigmund Freud, I was blogging regularly about pets at Will My Dog Hate Me. Not surprisingly, I became interested in the question of how Freud felt about canine companions. I discovered a wealth of information on the topic, which I incorporated into a
The Last of the Kornmehl Butchers (Maybe)
I’m excited to welcome as my first guest poster one of my newly discovered relatives. Jill Leibman Kornmehl is the daughter-in-law of Nathan Kornmehl, at 96 years old the patriarch of the Kornmehl family. At least as far as I know. New branches of the family keep cropping up. I'm not ready to say anything definitive -- thus the title I gave this post. The more genealogical
My Mother and the Governator
My mother couldn't stand Arnold Schwarzenegger. She wasn't a spitter but if she had been the type to expectorate over her shoulder, peasant style, she would have spat at Arnold. If she hadn't been Jewish she would have made the sign of the cross whenever she heard his voice or saw his image. She was appalled to see her fellow Austrian become an American hero, a movie
A Family Goat Farm
I recently discovered a slew of relatives I didn't know I had, members of the extended -- and far-flung -- Kornmehl clan. That my newfound family includes doctors, bankers and even a retired butcher is no huge surprise. But the goat farmers in Israel... them, I didn't expect. According to the Kornmehl Goat Farm website:* Anat and Daniel Kornmehl, both graduates of the
Freud’s Butcher, the Poem
As I mentioned in my introduction to the Genealogy section, I've trotted out the fact that I am the grand-niece of Sigmund Freud's butcher for a long time, especially to people I thought might be interested. Two of those people were Charles Bernstein and Susan Bee, who wrote and illustrated a poem about the topic that appears in a small volume called The Nude Formalism
Genealogy: I See Live People
I'm new to genealogy. I'd always thought it was a discipline that dealt strictly with dead people, with the goal of bringing them back to life. I knew that my particular quest, exploring the lives of the members of a Jewish family in pre-World World II Vienna, would be filled with emotional land mines: the unnatural (to put it mildly) disruption of those lives that would be
Psychoanalysis, the Comic Book
Throughout his lifetime, Sigmund Freud was far better known and respected abroad than he was in Vienna, where he lived and practiced for most of his years. He was especially celebrated in America, where he was welcomed enthusiastically as early as 1909. His theories became a mass phenomenon in the U.S. after World War II. According to a Newsweek retrospective of Freud on his
Did Freud Eat Kosher?
My mother didn't talk much about her early life in Vienna, but one of the things she told me was that Sigmund Freud's wife used to buy kosher meat from one of her uncles. I recently learned the identity of this uncle: It was Siegmund Kornmehl, who had a kosher butcher shop on the ground floor of 19 Berggasse,* where Freud's home and offices were located. (It's now the Sigmund