Tante Jolesch or the Decline of the West in Anecdotes

"This book is popular in Austria, but not so well known outside. It’s melancholy and nostalgic but also very funny. It evokes Jewish café life before the Anschluss. You had these eccentric characters who were often highly knowledgeable on all sorts of esoteric subjects. They spent their lives in the cafés because many lived in cramped, cold housing, so the café was their living room where they’d spend hours talking and arguing. They made their appointments there, took phone calls and received their mail. Torberg writes a string of anecdotes about these men, bringing to life sometimes famous, other times unknown figures. He said the fall of Austria was one of the most catastrophic incidents of humourlessness in world history. She is the aunt of one of Torberg’s Moravian friends but she is also the archetypal Jewish Austro-Hungarian matron whose statements are remembered down generations because they are both naïve and wise. Torberg describes this figure as the missing link between the Talmudic tradition of the ghetto and the emancipation culture of the coffee house. Torberg was born in 1908 in Vienna but then went to Prague and became Czech after the First World War. He was a water polo champion, and as well as café life he tells the reader about the Jewish sports clubs. The idea of the ‘muscular’ Jew was that you don’t want emaciated, intellectual Jews, but Jews who excel at sports. In fact, there were Jewish sports clubs all over the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Jewish athletes who excelled at fencing, swimming, water polo, and most other sports. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter He writes about Tarock, the card game which was once played in Vienna and across the empire. He also delves into the warring origins of sachertorte. There’s sachertorte with jam in the middle and sachertorte with jam under the chocolate icing. He tells you all these stories, including one when he—or a friend—returns to Vienna after the war and goes back to Demel, one of the city’s best coffee shops. The waiter, who used to serve him before the Anschluss, shows him to a table and says, ‘The same as usual?’ That typifies Austria—the formality, the tact, and not acknowledging what happened during the war. Torberg ended up in America, among the émigrés hired by Hollywood studios to write scripts, and one of quite a few Austrian Jews who became these $100-a-month scriptwriters. But he hated Hollywood so he went to New York and worked for Time magazine, which was starting a German edition. He disliked American materialism, and greatly missed Austria. After the war, he sent many letters to friends to find out how things were vis à vis anti-Semitism. His friends assured him that the atmosphere had completely changed, and to come back. Six years after the war had ended, he did return and was received with some honour. He was as fervently anti-communist as he’d already become in America. He is among many Jews—including my grandfather and my great-uncle—who returned to Vienna after the war because they couldn’t live anywhere else. I don’t know if a book has been written about this, but it’s a really interesting subject, these people whose lives in Vienna had been destroyed but who came back. My great-uncle Richard wrote in his memoir that he would never return to Austria because, he said, ‘When I shake somebody’s hand I’ll never know what they did.’ But he did return, and to some acclaim as a translator. They published his complete works of Shakespeare, an ambition that had been interrupted by the Anschluss. There are remnants, although much is no more. When Torberg returned from the US he found only one café he felt still maintained the uninterrupted tradition of the cake shop. He said all the others were fakes, no more than a nostalgia for a Vienna that no longer existed. To my mind, though, Vienna still has many beautiful cafés, like my grandfather’s favourite, Landtmann , with the same leather seats, the same drapery, or there’s the Hawelka, the Schwarzenberg and the Central, where you can drink a mélange , or coffee topped with steamed milk. The Jewish section of the vast central cemetery is also well worth a visit, with deer and hare streaking past the tombs of the famous and the unknown, grand family crypts and sunken, lichen-covered old stones. Vienna is a well-run, agreeable city. The metro and the trains are great. You eat well. It’s clean. There are wonderful museums, the Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Leopold Museum. The Lubavitch Hassidic community has reintroduced Orthodox Jews and kosher supermarkets, but Vienna doesn’t feel like a Jewish city anymore. That atmosphere is completely gone. During the interwar years Vienna was very poor. There were constant demonstrations, street violence, beggars going through dustbins. Jews were scapegoated for the anger, the frustration of a defeated population. Austrian anti-Semitism was said to have been particularly virulent, worse than in Germany. But what Jews represented to the Viennese is very confusing. They were socialists and they were capitalists, they were this and they were that. It wasn’t simply that they were rich, they were also peddlers and beggars. Many Jews, like my grandfather, felt little, if any, kinship with the Eastern European Jews dressed in kaftans and wearing side locks. For him they came from another world. But in the eyes of the Viennese, they were one and the same. Integrated Viennese Jews could feel empathy towards the poor Galician Jew in the street, and yet great distance as well."