Free Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind by Sarah Wildman Page A

grandfather. I missed him, terribly.

    That hollow sense of loss follows me to Vienna. Even as I fall in love with the obvious bits of this imperial city, the lush cliché of the Belvedere’s collection of Klimts, the Leopold’s Schieles (all those contested pieces of art that were exposed as former Jewish property), the exacting perfection of the café culture, the smart academics with whom I break bread, I am also, paradoxically, often lonelier than I have ever been, an intense, solitary aloneness, which creeps up on me, unexpectedly, nearly drowning me at night in my strange, empty room, a mattress on the floor, a board over two wood horses as a desk; with enormous double-paned windows that look out upon the electric wires of the tram and the turn-of-the-last-century spire of a building that advertises an ancient pharmacy— APOTHEKE —in gold block letters. A Jewish filmmaker, Mirjam Unger, born and raised at the edge of the tiny postwar Jewish community of the city, flatly sums up the problem: “Everyone is missing here.” She is right. It is a city of ghosts.
    The truth is, as my new friends at the Institute admit to me, sometime late into our third enormous beer, or walking along the city’s inner Ring late at night, or in some deep conversation screamed over the beat of electronic music, Vienna, my grandfather’s rosy hagiography aside, had a long history of anti-Semitism, one that had been embodied by its mayor, Dr. Karl Lueger, at the turn of the century. Lueger—whose tenure ran from 1897 to 1910 and whose name, until 2012, graced the Ring itself, much to the shame of my liberal Austrian(young) friends—ran on a platform of political, populist, purposeful anti-Semitism, a new institutionalization of Jew hatred, a political ethnic stirring that had not yet been directed in such a way before he assumed power.
    His policies didn’t stop Jews from flooding the city. The Jewish population grew exponentially from the middle of the nineteenth century onward; by 1923, Jews numbered some 200,000 out of 2 million. More than half the city’s doctors were Jews (a fact that decimated the city’s hospitals after Hitler made ethnicity a prerequisite for remaining in the medical profession). By the early 1930s, Jewish lawyers outnumbered their Christian counterparts; Jews also numbered among many artists and journalists of the city, though the majority of them were small shop and business owners.
    There were two conflicting impressions of Jews in the prewar period: both come, as do all stereotypes, with some degree of veracity and some degree of falsity: that Jews were penniless scroungers off the welfare state (that image came from the influx of Ostjuden—Eastern Jews—who fed into the city out of Galicia during and after World War I and were often impoverished)—and that Jews controlled large amounts of money, likethe Ephrussi banking family, whose palace on the Ringstrasse, the city’s grand circular boulevard with glorious statues and figurines on the tops of buildings, where trams run back and forth clicking and sighing on electronic tracks, was immortalized in Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes . But while Jews had entered into parts of Austrian society after Emancipation (the extension of citizenship and rights and freedom of movement to Jews, which took place in Austria-Hungary in the mid–nineteenth century, with the benevolence of Franz Joseph I, who didn’t hate Jews), anti-Semitism from the turn of the last century until the Anschluss had kept my brethren separate enough, had hardened these conflicting stereotypes, that it obscured the reality—most Jews weren’t terribly well off or terribly poor, but were middle- or lower-income, smallbusiness owners, or shunted, often, into the professions that were accessible and acceptable for Jews to enter.
    One night, early on in my fellowship, Herwig, a Holocaust historian and a Fellow at my Institute, and his Polish girlfriend, Camilla, also an