My inspiration for starting this blog was the discovery that my great uncle's butcher shop occupied a storefront in 19 Berggasse, the same building where Sigmund Freud lived and practiced. According to my mother, Freud's wife had bought kosher meat from one of my great uncles. I never knew which one, however, until I saw the announcement on the Freud Museum website that a
Meat
Fall from Faith: A Veal Parmigiana Epiphany
For some people, straying from the family faith is a gradual process, a long, slow falling away from religious precepts that no longer make sense. For me, it was like being struck by lightning. Or by a young cow and a hunk of Italian cheese. This is the true story of how a timid, more-or-less-kosher eater was transformed into a food rebel in a single meal. What I
From Meat to Sweets: A Family Occupation — & Preoccupation
I've alluded before to the other Siegmund Kornmehl -- the brother-in-law of Freud's butcher, who had the same name as he did -- but for a long time I didn't have much information on him. Recently it became clear that he had at least part ownership in a cafe in Vienna, the Cafe Victoria. I will write more soon about the specifics but I am too excited about this latest
Hipster Hottie Butchers
I've been preoccupied lately with the role of butchers in society, for obvious reasons. Many members of my mother's family -- including Siegmund Kornmehl, Freud's butcher -- were in the meat-buying, -cutting and -selling business in Vienna and I've been exploring their lives. In several instances, I've encountered a distinctive lack of respect for the trade. B'nai B'rith
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
10 Things I Want to Know About My Family & Freud
Focus, focus, focus. That's been my mantra ever since I realized my genealogical research was meandering in all directions. So I came up with a couple of goals: To flesh out the lives of my mother's immediate family members -- both to understand my mother better and to make the acquaintance of relatives I never met -- and to figure out the family's place in history. The
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
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
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
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