Last Waltz in Vienna by George Clare Review
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Books Of The Times
See the article in its original context from
May 13, 1982
,
Section C , Folio
25Buy Reprints
TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for habitation commitment and digital subscribers.
About the Archive
This is a digitized version of an commodity from The Times's print annal, before the get-go of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles every bit they originally appeared, The Times does not change, edit or update them.
Occasionally the digitization procedure introduces transcription errors or other issues; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions.
By Christopher Lehmann-Haupt Final WALTZ IN VIENNA. The Ascension and Destruction of a Family unit, 1842-1942. By George Clare. 272 pages. Illustrated. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. $xvi.50.
You await to find terror and trauma in George Clare'southward memoir ''Last Flit in Vienna: The Rise and Destruction of a Family, 1842-1942.'' And, of class, to some extent you practice. But the foreign and slightly disturbing thing is that fifty-fifty more powerful than the terror is the poignant nostalgia the book evokes.
Y'all read information technology more or less knowing the outcome of Mr. Clare'south story -that the writer survives, having gotten out of Austria in time, joined the English army and inverse his name from Georg Klaar, only that his parents and many members of his family probably stop upwardly in the death camps.
You know how illusory is the sense of security and permanence his forebears and family got from living in the Hapsburg Empire and, later, Republic of austria. As Mr. Clare observes: ''Cipher is and then impermanent as permanence, aught so insecure as security. If Jews, equally the saying goes, are similar other people, only more so, then they are more so considering their permanence is equally impermanent every bit that of others, only more so, their security is equally insecure as that of others, just more so.''
Nevertheless even knowing the terrible outcome of Mr. Clare'southward multigenerational chronicle of Jews who thought they had at concluding found permanence and security, I for ane took bittersweet pleasure in this evocation of rooms filled with heavy Victorian furniture and lives filled with heavy Viennese fathers. Especially the heavy fathers, who, in what Mr. Clare pronounces the Age of the Male parent, thought nix of taking a midday nap with their legs resting on the shoulders of their sons (such meridian having been considered beneficial to the circulation), or inviting their children into a patisserie to watch (and merely watch) the patriarchal consumption of teatime pastry.
And the aunts and uncles; I was also entertained by the author'south aunts and uncles - Uncle Paul, the eminent and hugely fatty doc, whose thought of a nutrition was to substitute honey for jam on his wellbuttered breakfast rolls and to halve the mountains of whipped cream that commonly topped his afternoon coffee. Or Aunt Hanna, whose marvel nigh what others thought of her was such that she once had her obituary announced in a newspaper, and whose pretensions were such that she had her proper noun printed on her calling cards equally Hanna 5. Weiss, when instead of ''von'' the v. actually stood for Valerie.
Such were some of the pocket-size follies of assimilation. Simply Mr. Clare makes less small ones also seem nearly agreeable - his boyish worship of all things German; his ambition to become a Boy Scout marching smartly in parades and crying, ''Heil Dollfuss!'' at the Chancellor's mini-Nuremberg party rally, and his inability to see ''the young and handsome soldiers of the Wehrmacht'' as ''my enemies.''
How tin Mr. Clare have achieved this equanimity almost the terrible by? Partly past telling his family's story straightforwardly and unself-consciously, enjoying all there was to be enjoyed and accepting the seductive entreatment of all that turned out to be illusion. But mostly he succeeds past his brilliant interweaving of the personal and the public, with the result that we never lose sight of the historical context in which his family's destiny unfolded or of the domestic implications of the century'southward traumatic history.
Not that the narrative is by any means free of the author'south trauma. Besides despair over the fate of his family unit, Mr. Clare conveys a conscious sense of guilt over having encouraged his father to remain where the Nazis eventually caught up with him - a guilt made more than pronounced considering his advice to stay in French republic was not only a tragic mistake of judgment, merely information technology was also partly motivated by his wanting to hide his cohabitation with a woman his father profoundly disapproved of. Perhaps this guilt also explains why Mr. Clare tells united states and so little about the woman, whom, to our considerable surprise, he ends upwards marrying.
And and then there are several passages where the transitions from individual to public event are a little bit too facile, making it seem, for example, as if the author's conflicts with his father were sometimes the fault of the Nazis. Indeed, the more one thinks about the way Mr. Clare has told his story the more one sees the monsters of hidden impulse writhing beneath the placid surface.
Notwithstanding, none of this detracts from the author'due south chief accomplishment. ''What world did we think we were living in?'' a friend of his family asked on the nighttime that Austria's plummet was finally realized and Vienna'south citizens were marching through the streets ecstatically crying, ''Ju-da verr-rr ecke! Ju-da verr-rr ecke!'' (Perish Judah! ).
Along with the horror of its collapse, Mr. Clare has conveyed precisely and charmingly the world that for nearly a century Western Europe's Jews thought they were living in.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1982/05/13/books/books-of-the-times-books-of-the-times.html
0 Response to "Last Waltz in Vienna by George Clare Review"
Postar um comentário