When it comes to my mother's family, the topic of military service is fraught. I've written before about the fact that my grandfather Herman Rosenbaum served in World War I but was not rewarded for his service by such basic decency as not being deported from Austria and sent to his death. I've also written about how I disliked the idea of my family members as victims. It
Austrian history
Jewish Immigration, Part 2: Sponsorship & Family Rifts
This is Day 9 of the Family History Writing Challenge, 2018. In yesterday's post, I described the restrictions against immigrants, especially Jews, coming to the U.S. from Nazi Austria (an accurate term, I decided, for a country that welcomed Hitler and that was instrumental to putting his Final Solution into place--claims of being occupied notwithstanding). Adolph
Jewish Immigration, Part 1: Quotas & Suspicion
This is Day 8 of the Family History Writing Challenge, 2018 One of the key sources of information I have about Bertha and Adolph Schweitzer is the form they filled out in an attempt to leave Vienna. While I gather information on and interpret this document in the search for the identities of my great aunt and uncle, I'm going to take a brief digression into the general
Samuel Singer’s Military Service
This is Day 6 in the Family History Writing Challenge. I tend to be irreverent in my family history discussions -- both because I tend to be irreverent about everything and if I didn't laugh about certain topics, I would cry. This last was the case with the discussion of Samuel Singer's military service (or potential therefore) in the last post. Other Members of My Family
Dueling Desserts, Plaster Poets, & Sigmund Freud: Vienna’s Cafe Culture
I've touched on the fact that my family members dabbled in sweets as well as meats in my last two posts, which involved my cousin Curt Allina, who lived across the street from Sigmund Freud and who later put the heads on PEZ. But the Kornmehl family also had a direct connection with a quintessentially Viennese concern: Coffeehouses. (For some background, see From Meat to
The Harmonie Vienna: Seven Reasons It’s My Dream Hotel
I just got word of where I'll be bunking during my upcoming trip to Austria, thanks to the Vienna Tourist Board: The Harmonie Vienna. As a travel writer, I've been fortunate enough to stay in some of the world's top hotels and resorts. But I can't recall a place that was a better fit for me, personally, since...well, ever. Here's why. 1. Location, Location,
Vienna’s Famous Foreskins
Last week I visited Manhattan's Leo Baeck Institute, known for its excellent collections of materials relating to Europe's German-speaking Jewish communities. I was hoping to shed some light on the everyday lives of the Kornmehl family in Vienna. I had a limited amount of time and, unsure where to start looking, I browsed the listings of microfiche documents that weren't
Auf Wiedersehen, Pt. 3: A Lost — and Found — Holocaust Archive
I was planning to write a simple, one-post response to the film Auf Wiedersehen: 'Til We Meet Again, the story of a visit to Austria of three generations of a family with Viennese roots. But the more I wrote, the more I had to say. Since I viewed the film three times, I suppose there's a certain symmetry to a three-post response. In Part 1, I detailed my initial emotional
Unhappy 75th: The Anschluss & The Vienna Philharmonic
Yesterday I posted about how the film "The Sound of Music" gave a distorted image of Austrian complicity in Nazi policies, suggesting the Austrians were victims rather than enthusiastic participants. Apparently show music isn't the only type of music that gives a distorted picture of Austria's role in the war. Today, to mark the 75th anniversary of the Anschluss, the full
“Inheritance”: Revisiting the Victim vs. Villain Debate
A few weeks ago I posed the question of whether it's preferable to have villainous or victimized ancestors. I came down clearly on the side of the villains, based on my own family's fit into the victim category. Several people commented about dastardly relatives in their distant past, including my friend Clare, who had an Indian hunter on her family tree. My friend Lydia had
Butcher Power! The Vienna Meat Clique
I've been trying to imagine what the life of a butcher was like in Vienna in the late 1800s and early 1900s, when my mother's uncles, the Kornmehl brothers, were in the meat business. On the one hand, it seems that being a butcher was not a respectable enough profession to allow a Jewish member of the trade into the Vienna lodge of the B'nai B'rith. But here's another
Freud to Gestapo: Drop Dead!
Almost everything Sigmund Freud did has been analyzed endlessly -- and why wouldn't the Analyzer-in-Chief be subjected to such scrutiny? But the diverging opinions on Freud's behavior say as much about the analyzer as they do about analysand. I was particularly intrigued by the different responses to one incident: Freud's metaphorical finger to the Gestapo upon his departure
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