Just Say “Jew” Already

My friend is well aware that I am Jewish; he just assumed I wasn’t a Zionist. I don’t blame him. He likes me, and in this past year, Zionism has become a catchall term for everything evil in the world: white colonialism, baby killing, genocide, apartheid, occupation, illegal ethnostatehood…. This is not to get into an argument about the use of those terms to apply to Israel or its supporters. The point is, many people I respect have come to believe the worst about the world’s only Jewish-majority state and its inhabitants, no matter the historic evidence to the contrary.

Finding an excuse to hate Jews is the oldest story in the book, but the enthusiasm with which this one has been deployed since 10/7, the extent of its reach, is dispiriting. My politically aligned friends and I used to share a common language. No longer.

I understand that language changes, that there’s no forcing it back into an outdated mold. In the case of Zionism, however, the linguistic shift is too swift to be organic.

I also believe that words should be defined by the people who are most invested in their meaning, not by their enemies. Take “Anasazi,” a term long used to describe the Pueblo Indians in the Four Corners area of the United States. In the Navajo language, the word means “ancient enemy.”  Once that fact became widely known through advances in understanding native languages, “Anasazi” was replaced by “ancestral Puebloans” in the literature referring to them.

In contrast, Wikipedia has literally rewritten the history of Zionism and will not allow any Jewish organizations to edit the text.

If the Jews control the media, we’re doing a really bad job at it.

So, What Is Zionism?

Here is a definition by Alisa Albert, the aforementioned Zionist writer whose panel on “Girls, Coming of Age” (NOT Israel/Palestine) was canceled because two authors refused to appear with her. It’s part of an excellent article published in Tablet:

It wasn’t a natural shift of perspective.

My first reaction to the horrific events of last October was to think, “I’m glad my Holocaust survivor parents aren’t alive to see this.” It took me a minute to realize that I am, and that a key reason to explore the past is to prevent its recurrence. I began wondering whether my relatives’ experiences might be instructive, what the similarities and differences in our circumstances were.

What Happened Then

The lead-in to the Final Solution in Europe was frog-in-boiling-water slow – so much so that, for many, the need to escape came too late.

My mother, Rita Rosenbaum, was able to flee Nazi-occupied Vienna in 1939, but had to leave her parents behind; the SS having drained their bank accounts, Ernestine and Herman Rosenbaum had just enough money to send their only daughter abroad, hoping she could scrape together sufficient funds to allow them to follow. Rita managed to get some money together, but Europe’s borders closed before she could send it. The Nazis’ meticulous transport records reveal that my grandparents were deported to Riga in Latvia, either to be shot in a forest as soon as they got off the transport train, shot in the purpose-built Riga ghetto, or sent off to die in the city’s Kaiserwald concentration camp.

My father, Paul Jarolim, was also from Vienna and the only one in his family who managed to reach the U.S., where he met my mother in Brooklyn. One of his brothers, Fritz, survived by joining the French Foreign Legion; the other, Richard, escaped to Belgium with my father but got sent back to Austria and met his death in Auschwitz. My grandmother Mathilde and Aunt Edith were left behind; Mathilde died in Vienna in 1941, spared the fate of her daughter, who was deported less than eight months later to the Łódź ghetto. Edith either died of starvation there or was sent to Chelmno, which earned the dubious distinction of being the first stationary facility where poison gas was used for the mass murder of Jews.

Several great uncles and aunts survived by fleeing Austria to Shanghai, Australia, Argentina, the Dominican Republic, Curacao, England, the U.S., and British-mandated Palestine.

One group of cousins hid in an attic on the outskirts of Amsterdam.

In brief: a lot of fleeing, mostly successful, a smidgen of hiding, one enlistment in foreign military service, and a great deal of death for those unable to manage any of the aforementioned.

What Is Happening Now

How does this compare to what’s happening today?

Unlike Hitler’s war against the Jews, which was mostly stealthy or denied and took years to be fully realized, the Hamas massacre was a shocking quick strike shared with millions online in real time. Instead of public awareness leading to the sympathy and support that many Jews expected, the GoPro’d details were downplayed and distorted, the incursion celebrated, even as bloodied hostages were being dragged off to Gaza.

Another key difference: the site of the murders was the soil of the world’s only Jewish nation.

Even before the Israeli military response, antisemitism went through the roof – up 400% in the U.S. by December, according to the ADL. Suddenly, everyone was a Middle East historian. Holocaust inversion, calling Israelis Nazis and turning the charge of genocide against the Jews, became newly in vogue.

The responses of diaspora Jews to the post-10/7 onslaught of hate, dramatically divided by generation, ranged on an emotional scale from Denial and Undercurrent of Concern to Be Afraid and Be Very Afraid. A sampling of Jews on the social media platforms that I mostly frequent these days – private Jewish Facebook groups, sympathetic Instagram accounts, X with one eye closed, and never, ever Tik Tok – reacted with solutions similar to those of my family when faced with the onset of Nazism.

Several – except, ironically, those who live in Israel — said that they felt unsafe in their home countries and were looking to relocate.

Some, bemoaning a general lack of allyship from their peers, passed around an online essay that suggested asking friends, “Would you hide me?”

Still others, vowing to go down fighting, bought firearms and started taking shooting lessons.

My Personal Take

Me? I don’t feel physically unsafe. Yes, synagogues and Jewish shops are being vandalized at an increasingly high rate in the US, and keffiyah-heavy protests, on campuses, in the streets, and at city council meetings, feel threatening, but I don’t believe there will be mass roundups and death camps in America. The two major political parties could never agree on a rationale for the arrests or on the scope and administration of the punishment. Should Jews be carted off and corralled because we are white oppressor colonialists or because we are racially impure and working with other inferior races to replace the rightful (whiteful?) Americans? Would the party opposed to the death penalty make an exception for the Jews, perhaps outsourcing the killing to Mexico, as the Germans did to Poland?

Maybe, like Hamas, members of the drug cartels would be considered revolutionaries and therefore ideal for executing Jews, er, Zionists.

Then again, my circumstances are different from those of many who are rightly concerned about their families. My parents are long gone and, after an early marriage and divorce, I have lived single and childless by choice. I am responsible only for myself. I have far more of my life behind me than I do ahead of me and I am set in my ways.

In any case, should worse come to worst, neither hiding, shooting, nor fleeing would work.

I grew up in New York City but now live in Tucson, Arizona. Heat rises, so few houses here are built with attics. That takes care of the hiding option, assuming one would not be able to safely fly or drive to attic-friendly cities to seek sanctuary.

Guns are easy enough to procure in Arizona, but I am a klutz and would be more likely to shoot myself in the foot than injure anyone who was coming to get me.

As for fleeing, where would I go?

I now have dual citizenship with Austria, but don’t imagine I would feel comfortable in the country that stripped citizenship from my family members and sent them off to be murdered. I appreciate the implicit apology that offering dual citizenship conferred and the explicit apology of Vienna’s new Holocaust memorial. Still, too little too late. Most important: I don’t speak German, though I’ve tried many times to learn. My parents’ aversion therapy to their native tongue seems to have had a permanent negative impact on my German acquisition skills.

The rest of the EU-member countries, where my Austrian citizenship also allows me to settle, are no prize either, antisemitism-wise. My French could be serviceable if I worked at it – but hello, Charlie Hebdo.

Intifada, intischmada. It’s Jew hatred that has been globalized.

Israel is tempting, and my rusty Hebrew could be resurrected but, as I’ve said, I’m set in my ways. I’ll stick to my Arizona desert, the Sonoran rather than the Negev, and show my support for Israel in other ways.

What I Have—or Haven’t—Learned

So what has my family history taught me about recent events? Nothing I didn’t already know, or would have known if I’d believed what my parents had to say over the years about the pervasiveness and intransigence of antisemitism. I now understand, viscerally, that those who want to justify their ingrained views about the Jewish people don’t care who you voted for, how observant you are, how you feel about Israel, how much you advocate for Palestinian children – or, on the other end of the political spectrum, how poor you are and how little control you actually have of the media. The intense focus on the actions of the world’s only Jewish state is just the latest excuse to indulge in an ancient hatred.

No matter how the Middle East conflict plays out, I harbor no illusions about returning to a “before” life, one where I trust that members of my political and professional cohort have my back. On the surface, and for large stretches of time, I imagine life will go on as it did before. Underneath, I will never regain my former sense of emotional safety.

What can I do differently from what my ancestors did? Probably not a damn thing. My parents and other forebears did their best under the circumstances to survive and thrive and so will I.

In the end, I believe that I have asked the wrong question. It is not the Jews that need to learn from the past, but the world. And it has failed miserably.

“I’m a child of Holocaust survivors,” one Israeli woman told reporters. “I grew up hearing stories of the camps. I thought those were the worst stories. These stories are worse. And I think that’s the hardest thing for me. I never thought I would live to see something worse than the stories I grew up with.

I didn’t grow up with the stories. I grew up with the lack of them, with silence, and only began learning about the worst of the horrors on my own, later in life. Now, unfolding events are being documented in real time, in living—or should I say dying—color and the commentariat is very loud.

I am not going to compare atrocities on a case-by-case basis; while the Nazis were known for their routinized mass murder machine, there are many, many individual examples of sadism and cruelty.  But what happened in Israel on 10/7—and, even more, the antisemitic responses that followed immediately afterwards, before there were any reprisals from Israel—are a direct gut punch since they are happening in real time.

To clarify: Criticizing the Israeli government and its actions is not antisemitic; many American analysts sympathetic to Israel, as well as most Israelis, blame Netanyahu and his right-wing government for leaving the country open to attack and for its harsh policies towards the Palestinians. But calling for the only Jewish state in the world to be destroyed (what, precisely, do people think the cries of “From the River to the Sea” mean?) far more often crosses the line because of both the hypocrisy and the blatant double standard. Where are the campus protests against Syria for its murderous regime? Against China for the plight of the Uighurs?

And the mask really drops when Nazi symbols and shouts of “gas the Jews” show up at “Free Palestine” gatherings; when an ancient synagogue in Tunisia (a country that expelled most of its Jews; talk about ethnic cleansing) is burned to the ground; and when a politician puts up a post observing the 5th anniversary of the Pittsburgh Tree of Life massacre in America and gets pilloried for it because he didn’t mention Gaza?

That’s not anti-Zionism. It’s Jew hatred.

The Sounds of Silence

Since no one sentient currently has the excuse that they didn’t know what was going on, the fallback for the Nazi era, the resounding silence from my non-Jewish friends is doubly painful.  Didn’t know what to say? A quick “are you okay?” check-in would have sufficed.

As a progressive Jew, I have felt completely betrayed—though hardly surprised—by the public stance of most organizations that claim to want equal rights for all people, but exclude one group. So I can’t help but wonder which petitions that suggested Israel deserved to be attacked by Hamas—or neglected to mention the initial attack on Israel in their statements of calls for peace—did those silent friends sign? Did they unquestioningly take the word of the BBC or the New York Times, respected news outlets that immediately and erroneously blamed Israel for a hospital bombing in Gaza which used the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry as its sole source?

An article that has made the rounds of several Jewish groups distilled these concerns to a single question: Would I trust these silent friends to hide me if it came down to that?

Call me paranoid. But that’s what they said to the Jews of Austria, too.

Memoir Without an Ending

These recent events not only shook my sense of safety in the world but also dislodged what I saw as the forward momentum of my life, forcing me to rewrite the past in light of the present. Literally.

I have been working on a memoir—well, okay, not exactly “working on” but I have had half a manuscript on my computer for several years now. The book started out by reconstructing my parents’ pasts, especially my mother’s side of the family, based on the findings I’ve posted on this blog. It slowly shifted emphasis, gradually morphing into the story of my life, starting with childhood—as impacted by my parents’ experiences—and moving into my genealogical journey to reconstruct my family history. Because all stories need resolutions, or at least narrative arcs, I planned to use my decision to get Austrian citizenship, and my accomplishment of that goal, as an end point of the book.

No longer.

How will this current conflict end? I have no idea, and it’s terrifying to contemplate. When the dust clears, maybe there’ll be a brief period where antisemitism takes a break again, as it did post-Holocaust, when the horror of what happened sinks in and a sense of shame emerges. With the tenacity of antisemitism throughout the ages being amplified by the echo chamber of social media and even of mainstream news outlets, I pretty much doubt that.

I had been contemplating taking a trip to Europe to visit the ancestral homes of my mother’s side of the family in Poland, my father’s side in the Czech Republic. But I already know how that story ends.

So now I wonder: Why revisit the past and relive the pain of my parents when there are so many fresh wounds to tend to?

Am Yisrael Chai.

Recommended reading:

I won’t even try to go into the complexities of the Middle East situation or of what is and is not antisemitism but here are three books that contextualize/explain it in a very accessible way.

Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth, by Noah Tishby.

The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace, by Adi Schwartz and Ainat Wilf

Antisemitism: Here and Now by Deborah E. Lipstadt.

When my older sister was born, our father was still uncertain about the fate of his mother and sister. He hedged his bets by choosing a truncated version of his mother’s name for her —only to find out, within a year, that both of the women in his immediate family had been murdered by the Nazis. My mother’s assertion that he had a “kind of nervous breakdown” upon learning of their fate makes sense. It’s easy to guess that my father never entirely got over the pain of being unable to save his mother and sister; I don’t recall him ever talking about either one of them.

By the time I came along, five years after my sister, my father’s guilt over his losses was less raw–and his certainty about their fate might have brought him a measure of peace.  In any case, my name wasn’t mediated: I am just plain Edith, after my only aunt.

Well, Edith Brenda actually.

And it is my middle name that suggests my father was ready to channel some of his earlier, more carefree days in Vienna. My legal documents will forever bear the mark of my father’s ardor for a minor movie star, Brenda Marshall (1915–1992). She is best known for her role in Sea Hawk, starring Errol Flynn, and her marriage to William Holden. Her acting career, such as it was, pretty much ended years before I was born.

And my cinematic middle name was no fluke or fleeting mood. More evidence of my father’s continuing interest in Hollywood stars of the 1940s lies in another memory: When I was little and my hair fell into my face, my father would teasingly call me Veronica Puddle, a play on Veronica Lake, a glamorous actress famed for her peekaboo waves. Looking back, I am touched by what a funny and lovely thing it was to say to a chubby child whose mother constantly criticized her for being overweight.

In America, my parents had no social life. They never went out to eat or to the movies; they didn’t have any friends, as far as I knew.  But it was different in Vienna, at least for my father. My favorite photograph shows him with a group of young men, all wearing wide-brimmed hats and wider grins and looking very dapper. My father is the second from the right, top row. I don’t think I ever saw him quite so happy in all the years I knew him.  Still, I saw remnants of his charm. My father had a wry sense of humor. If I complained that an event I was anticipating hadn’t come to fruition, he would say, So there you’re sitting with your clean ears. If you wondered aloud if a person was Jewish, he might say that they looked like two Jews.

Edith and Brenda are both old-fashioned names that I never particularly liked; I don’t mind Edie, but hardly a day goes by without someone deciding it should be pronounced “Eddie.” My father was a complex, often difficult man; it’s impossible to say what he would have been like had his life not been so harshly interrupted. But I adored him and now I’ve come to see that both names he bestowed on me were gifts that reflect my own complex, often difficult personality.

It hadn’t been nearly as long since I enjoyed a corned beef sandwich at a real Jewish deli—sadly, Tucson doesn’t have a single one–but my deprivation led me to find breaking rye bread together with Margo at Canter’s in Fairfax deeply satisfying.

The experience was the perfect springboard for my subsequent visit to the Skirball Cultural Center, where I explored the roots of my longing for cured meat at the “I’ll Have What She’s Having: The Jewish Deli” exhibition.

At the entryway, you are greeted by blowups of common deli items – a pickle, a jar of herring, a pastrami sandwich, a bagel, and more – with peek-a-boo cutouts for your face, à la old-time photo studios. This set the tone for the small but rich exhibition, which traces the history of the delicatessen in America with an approach that is both serious and tongue in cheek (as it were).

Rare archival footage of pushcart vendors hawking their wares on New York City’s Lower East Side and poignant artifacts such as a battered suitcase brought over by an immigrant family mingle with humorous displays like a Yiddish lexicon of deli terms, retro waitress uniforms, and a reproduction of the sign on Katz’s deli during World War II that exhorts patrons to “Send a Salami to Your Boy in the Army.” Mixing earnestness and kitsch, the exhibits explore the transition from the pushcarts and butcher shops with a few tables in New York to the brick-and-mortar establishments with cushy booths that became a requisite stop for politicians wanting to schmooze members of Jewish communities around the country.

With a self-reflection that is arguably as Jewish as its subject, the exhibition doesn’t shy away from an awareness that the deli, created by Eastern and Central European immigrants, is an almost exclusively Ashkenazi institution, and thus limited in its view of Judaism’s scope. Take, for example, the commentary on the posters featuring the famous “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s” series of rye bread ads. Considered progressive for their time because of the diversity of the models – in this case, a Chinese child, a Black child, and a Native American man — in retrospect the ads suggest that racial diversity among the Jewish community is an anomaly, which is not the case.

Similarly, there’s a suggestion that the hope for the future of the deli lies in greater inclusivity. The contemporary menus on display incorporate more Israeli and Sephardi dishes than they did in the past, and emphasize ethical (as opposed to strictly religious) practices. One bill of fare proudly notes that its pastrami and corned beef come from cows that were never administered hormones or antibiotics. Nothing is stated or implied about what a shochet may or may not have done to bring the meat to the table.

I came away from the Skirball Cultural Center steeped in nostalgia for the Platonic ideal of the deli, which resides in the past. One of the most popular features of “I’ll Have What She’s Having” is an area where visitors can write down their favorite deli recollections on what looks like an order ticket and pin them up on a simulated order line. At the end of some weeks, the staff collects more than a 100 such nostalgic notes. As attested by the title of the exhibition, an allusion to the classic line from When Harry Met Sally, as well as by clips from other films and TV shows that run in a continuous loop, the Jewish deli is as much a state of mind as a reality, Hollywood shorthand for a world where Jews congregate, have a nosh, make jokes–and create memories.

Which was why, I soon realized, my schmooze-fest with Margo at Canter’s felt so soul soothing. Giving depth to the corned beef, chopped liver, potato salad, and half-sour pickles copiously laid out on our table were the tastes and smells of childhood, liberally seasoned with laughter and reminiscences of places and people we’d known when the world was all before us.

“I’ll Have What She’s Having: The Jewish Deli” will be at the Skirball Cultural Center through September 4. After that, it can be seen at the New York Historical Society (November 11, 2022—April 2, 2023); the Holocaust Museum, Houston, TX (May 4–August 13, 2023); and the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center, Skokie, IL (October 22, 2023–April 14, 2024).

Note: A version of this story appeared in The Nosher.

These meals would have been excellent on their own, but they were particularly delicious because I was dining with my host and long-lost childhood friend Margo.

Deli delights

Almost as soon as I dropped off my bag at her place, Margo and I headed for Canter’s, which would not have been open if it were a kosher deli, because it was still Passover and you’re not supposed to eat bread on that holiday. In fact, religious Jews are not supposed to eat half the things on Canter’s menu year round, such as honey ham steak and eggs.

Never mind. The chopped liver came highly recommended, so I ordered the Bronx Special: pastrami and chopped liver served open face on rye with choice of cole slaw or potato salad. I got the cole slaw (wouldn’t want to overdo it, right), but Margo said the potato salad was excellent and ordered a side of it.

She was right. I was so enthralled by everything that I forgot to take the picture until there were leftovers.

I posted this picture on Facebook and was not shocked to learn that not everyone thinks chopped liver is delicious — or even palatable. I was not asking them to eat it.

I didn’t sample anything in the above deli case except the pickles but couldn’t resist taking a picture of a display that included both schmaltz (though spelled here with an “s”) and charoses, a dish usually restricted to Passover seders. Now I wish I had gotten some of the pickled tomatoes to go.

Note: The pastry case pictured next to the title of this post is also in Canter’s. I did not sample any of the hamentaschen (triangular pastry in the top row) but want it on the record that I disapprove of the ones in the center drizzled with chocolate.

Not-Actually-Austrian Food

Los Angeles may have an abundance of Jewish delis but the city is missing one type of cuisine, the kind I hoped to enjoy as a new citizen: Austrian. Never mind. I got recommendations for a German restaurant from a number of people in LA, one that had several crossover dishes in the schnitzel and spaetzle and cabbage family: Rasselbock.

Here is what I enjoyed:

This dinner, which was delicious, came courtesy of my friend Lydia, who bought me a Rasselbock gift certificate to help me celebrate my Austrian citizenship.

Sweets That Are Bittersweet

I have said that there were no Austrian restaurants in Los Angeles. There is, however, Vienna Pastry, a bakery that  Margo and I hightailed it to directly after I got fingerprinted at the Austrian consulate.

A bit of background. In addition to butchers, there were several Viennese sweets purveyors on my family tree. My cousin Stephen Klein brought what became Barton’s chocolate over to the U.S. from Vienna; my cousin Curt Allina put the heads on PEZ candy dispensers in this country; and my great uncle Siegmund Kornmehl (yes, he has the same name as the butcher) owned the Cafe Viktoria in Vienna.

All this to say, I come by my sweet tooth honestly–or genetically. And while I’m wouldn’t turn down a sachertorte or apfelstrudel, the confection I really craved on this occasion was marzipan, which my mother loved.

Margo served me my marzipan on a Brooklyn plate, a reproduction of the kind that used to be given away at the movies on “dish night.” There’s a strong symbolism to the image, embodying my mother’s flight from Vienna to Brooklyn and my enjoyment of her favorite dessert after getting her stolen citizenship back.

It represents a bittersweet journey, marzipan notwithstanding.

I was apprised of this fact via a phone call from the Austrian consulate in Los Angeles that I almost didn’t answer. It was a late afternoon in January and I was watching Amy Schneider rout her latest opponents on Jeopardy.  My caller ID revealed only a Los Angeles number, no name or other identifier. But I have friends in LA who might have been phoning from an unfamiliar number and Amy had an insurmountable lead in Final Jeopardy.

I took the call.

I discussed my initial reaction to the news—spoiler alert: I was surprisingly moved—in my latest contribution to Tablet magazine.

Getting Tongue Tied

Publications like Tablet are great for big picture stories that reach a wider audience. Blogs are better for odd nitpicky musings.

Following the receipt of the citizenship news, I wanted to know how to say “I am an Austrian citizen” in German. A quick online search led me to: Ich bin österreichischer Staatsbürger.

That phrase only tells part of the story of course. The fact that I had to use Google to find it and that I can’t read any of the (untranslated) documents that accompanied my citizenship approval reveals what kind of Austrian citizen I am: The kind who cannot speak the local language.

I discussed my linguistic issues in Freud’s Parrot: My Love-Hate Relationship with Austria. The gist: Although both my parents were from Vienna and spoke German at home, I knew it as a “secret” language, deployed when my mother and father didn’t want me or my sister to understand what they were saying. We were not only discouraged from learning German because they wanted to discuss not-safe-for-children topics in our small, privacy-free apartment, but because it was the language of the country that betrayed them, one that they wanted to put behind them in America. They didn’t succeed in that entirely but I had no warm-and-fuzzy feelings about the land that was mostly spoken of with vituperation, if spoken of at all. I was happy to ignore Austria. And its language. 

One might have thought that, once I made my decision to apply for Austrian citizenship, I might have also applied myself to trying to learn German, but nah. I remain passionately ambivalent.

Identity Politics

I did research a few more phrases to describe my status in relation to the old/new land of my people:

• I am Austrian: Ich bin Österreicherin

This has been more-or-less true for my entire life. A first-generation American, I was the offspring of two native Austrians who were citizens before they weren’t allowed to be. If asked about my ethnic background, I could have legitimately answered, “Austrian.”

But I almost never said that. The response had to be caveated to convey the fact that I am a particular kind of Austrian.

• I am an Austrian Jew: Ich bin ein österreichischer Jude

I later learned that this phrase is not correct when applied to me, a female Austrian Jew, so:

• Ich bin eine österreichische Jüdin (not Jude).

I also understand now why some people deemed John F. Kennedy’s declaration of “Ich bin ein Berliner” at the Rathaus Schöneberg in 1963 grammatically incorrect: “Ein” in the examples above is only used in the adjectival form: Ich bin eine österreichische Jüdin but not in Ich bin Osterreichin.

However, according to a piece by Thomas Putnam in The Atlantic:

After [the speech] it would be suggested that Kennedy had got the translation wrong—that by using the article ein before the word Berliner, he had mistakenly called himself a jelly doughnut. In fact, Kennedy was correct. To state Ich bin Berliner would have suggested being born in Berlin, whereas adding the word ein implied being a Berliner in spirit. His audience understood that he meant to show his solidarity.

Even if I were to study German assiduously for the rest of my life, I would never master those nuances. In summary: I am Austrian neither in spirit or by birth, but I am nevertheless an österreichischer Staatsbürger. 

Someday, I will probably be faced with the the dilemma of going to Austria with my Austrian passport and having someone at customs speak to me in German and being unable to respond in kind. I will cross that airport concourse when I come to it. I first have to go to Los Angeles and file the paperwork to get the passport, which I am doing next week. I do not think I will encounter any difficulties at the consulate, language wise.

National Stamps and Birds of Prey

I did know from an early age that the German name for Austria was Österreich because I collected stamps, but I never thought about how it meant Eastern “realm,” “empire,” or “kingdom,” or considered the negative connotations of the word “reich,” especially when attached to “third.” Now I learned something it never occurred to me to check into before: the fate of the First and Second reichs. 

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica:

Third Reich [is the] official Nazi designation for the regime in Germany from January 1933 to May 1945, as the presumed successor of the medieval and early modern Holy Roman Empire of 800 to 1806 (the First Reich) and the German Empire of 1871 to 1918 (the Second Reich).

Those reichs seem to be diminishing in duration, from 1,000 years to 50 to just over 10, which is nice and, I hope, instructive, though I have my doubts.

Speaking of reichs, the imperial eagle that you see in the detail of the Austrian flag at the top of this post is a version of a coat of arms that goes back to at least the 13th century; it was used through the rise and fall of various Austro-centered empires, though the broken chain on the eagle’s legs dates only to 1945, and is meant to signify the country’s freedom from Nazi Germany (a reign it heartily embraced, but hey…).

The eagle on the Great Seal of the United States is slightly less scary because it’s lighter in color and its feathers are not as spiky, but it’s not particularly pacific looking either. Why do countries adopt birds of prey as national symbols? Are its enemies considered carrion?

And why do I mention this? I got tired of language searches so, instead of trying to find out how to say “I am an Austrian-American dual citizen” in German, I decided to go for the visual representation, dual bird-of-prey iconography.

Make of that what you will.

So perhaps it’s fitting that I should end up contemplating the fate of my namesake aunt because of a typo on a deportation list.

Denial, Denial

I’ve always had a complicated relationship with memorials to Jews killed in the Holocaust. Mainly, I avoid them. I suspect I inherited a version of that attitude from my mother, who asked to be cremated when she died. Her rationale for wanting to do something that goes against the Jewish religion? “If it was good enough for my parents, it’s good enough for me.”

To my mother, ending up in an oven was shorthand for Holocaust death. In fact, she didn’t know precisely how and where Ernestine and Hermann Rosenbaum were killed and never wanted to find out. When I was in high school, my mother received a book in the mail from a death camp; I can’t recall which one, and I don’t think we ever knew why she got it. It sat on the kitchen table, unopened, for weeks, until my mother finally looked to see if her parents’ names were in it. They weren’t. (As I later learned, my maternal grandparents died in Riga.)

The Holocaust Memorial in Vienna

Along those lines, I’ve always aimed to focus on the everyday lives of my relatives in this blog, not their deaths. I’ve stuck to that goal for the most part. But on a Facebook group I joined in pursuit of reclaiming Austrian citizenship, I found a post about the upcoming dedication in Vienna of a memorial to the Austrians killed in the Shoah. I was curious to know if several of my closest relatives were included.

I found my mother’s parents and my father’s brother Richard, but not my father’s sister, Edith. I checked the DOEW database from which the monument’s names were drawn; she was not listed there.

I wrote to the DOEW with a screenshot of my aunt’s information from a reliable genealogical source, her date of birth and the date of her deportation to a place called Litzmannstadt, which I had declined to investigate. I got back the following answer within 24 hours:

Thank you for your email and making us aware of this mistake. We have looked into this and realised that the name of your aunt was included in our online database as “Edith Jarolin“. This version of the name was depicted in the transport list to Litzmannstadt as well as in another document. However, I have looked into this case closely and could verify that the version of the name in the sources was false. I have therefore changed the entry of your aunt to the correct version „Edith Jarolim“ in our database of victims.

I have also passed this information to the Shoah memorial wall.

The Shoah Memorial wall is a project initiated by private organisation. We have made the organisation aware of the fact that unfortunately this work of searching for the names of those murdered in the Shoah will never end and that there will always be names and changes to add in the future. Therefore, there will be enough space on the memorial to be able to include additional names or new corrected version of names in the future as well.

The name of your aunt will therefore also be engraved in the correct version.

The Jarolim Family

I very much appreciated this response, knowing my aunt was being commemorated—and possibly twice on the same monument, though I don’t mind if she’s only there as “Jarolin”; misspelling her name on a deportation list was the very least of the indignities to which my aunt was subjected.

But this information led me down a path I didn’t want to take: contemplating Edith’s last days.

Let me backtrack. 

My grandfather Ignatz Jarolim was one of the few members of my immediate family not uprooted or killed by the Nazis. He died in 1919 of bronchial pneumonia, no doubt a victim of the flu pandemic. That left my grandmother Mathilde/Malvina/Margarete Brown Jarolim (I’ll get to that in another post) raising four children — Edith (b. 1899), Richard (b. 1901), Paul (b. 1903) and Fritz (b. 1905) — on her own.  That’s four children who lived at home, all unmarried, until 1938, when the Nazis occupied Austria. 

The plan was to send the men ahead to find work in a country that wasn’t under Nazi control; they would wire the money for boat fare back to Vienna to save those left behind. 

My uncle Fritz joined the French Foreign Legion. My father and his brother Richard ended up in Merxplas, a Belgian refugee camp. I’m still not sure how my father was able to get to America while his brother was sent back to Austria, later to be deported to Auschwitz.

Grandmother Mathilde died in Vienna on March 29, 1941, cause unknown. She was buried next to her husband in Zentralfriedhof. I have a photo of their very impressive gravestone but by the time I got to Vienna in 2014, the large monument had disappeared among the ruins.

And then there was one: my Aunt Edith. She was deported to Litzmannstadt less than eight months later, on 10/19/1941. It was a blessing that her mother didn’t live to see it—or get taken along with her. 

My Mysterious Aunt 

So who was my Aunt Edith in life? I would love to be able to tell you but, sadly, I don’t know. 

From the forms they filled out in an attempt to exit the country legally, I learned my uncles’ professions: Fritz was a furrier/tanner. Richard was a shoemaker. My father was a dental technician.

But my grandmother and aunt did not fill out exit forms, so I have no idea what work they did outside the home, if any. My father never said; he didn’t talk about his sister at all. My mother told me that when he learned, after the war, that Edith had been killed, he had a kind of nervous breakdown. It’s easy to understand his pain. As per the plan, my father scraped together enough money to get boat fare for his mother and sister to escape, but the borders closed before it could be wired over.

I have only three pictures of Edith, one at age 39, two at age 41.

The blurry picture in the woods, above, always gave me the creeps. Perhaps because the trees are bare and I can’t explain the dark square below her feet. Maybe because the coat and hat were set aside and yet remain in the picture, which seems ominous.  I imagine it’s just tricks of the light and the (unknown) photographer being unfamiliar with focussing a camera or framing a picture. This was taken a year before Edith’s mother died, so if Mathilde is to blame, I apologize for any disrespect.

On the other hand, Edith looks nice in the picture with her family. Did she spend her days keeping house for her brothers, along with their mother—thus obviating the need for the men to marry? In any case, I know that she loved her brother Paul. The message on the final picture she sent him says so. 

The Last Picture

The handwritten translation on the top left was that of my mother; the green ink was my aunt’s. The date—a combination of Roman and Arabic numerals—was July 17, 1941. 

Edith was deported to Lintzmannstadt three months later. 

Which brings me back to the typo-ridden transport list. This time, I learned that Lintzmannstadt was better known as the Łódź ghetto. My aunt either died of starvation there or was sent to Chelmno, “the first stationary facility where poison gas was used for the mass murder of Jews”—and yet another place I didn’t want to think about.

So I decided not to.

Instead, I asked my Facebook friend Steve Hanley, aka the Psychogenealogist, if he knew how I could get the picture of Edith restored. Although it’s not the main focus of his blog anymore, he generously offered to help by calling in a favor from a friend. 

They did a wonderful job. And so I will leave you with this version of my lovely aunt, the one she wanted her younger brother to remember her by. 

Though I am not as good as I’d like to be at keeping up with this blog, many people have nevertheless managed to find my posts over the years. Most recently, I heard from my cousin Rena, whom I’d been trying to locate for years. Those marital name changes wreak havoc on genealogy. 

She commented:   

I have been tracking information on the Kornhmehl family and found your article about Curt Allina who was my cousin. I can fill you in on family information that you indicated you wondered about. I am Helena Kornmehl Neugasser’s granddaughter.

I remember your parents: Paul and Rita and that they had 2 daughters.

I was thrilled to hear from Rena and we began a regular phone correspondence, which we think is riveting but which people who are not related to us might not find especially interesting.

And then Rena sent family pictures, which changes everything, because everyone loves old photographs. 

I am therefore taking this opportunity to step back and offer an illustrated review of how various people I’ve written about are related to me and to each other.

The Tarnow Connection

Many of my maternal ancestors lived in a Polish shtetl called Tarnow;* their residence there dates back to at least to the 18th century but, to simplify things, I am going to start this story with the generation of my great grandfather, Chaim Heinrich Kornmehl. As the family tree shows, the birthdates of the nine siblings who made it to adulthood range from the 1820s to the 1860s.

These nine siblings, in turn, produced 57 grandchildren. Eight of them, including my grandmother Ernestine Kornmehl Rosenbaum, were the offspring of Chaim Heinrich and Chaya Henriette Scheindle Kornmehl.

One of Chaim’s brothers, Elias Kornmehl, is the patriarch of the Schmerling family, about whom I have written a great deal. Here he is with his wife, Doba.

Among the reasons that I have written so much about the Schmerling family is that one of Elias and Doba’s children, David Schmerling, married his first cousin, Mitzi, one of my grandmother’s sisters and thus my great aunt. 

Kornmehls, Allinas, and Neugassers

But this story focuses on the family of another of my great grandfather’s siblings, Aron Juda Kornmehl (1852-?).  The photograph below, taken ca. 1890, shows Aron with his wife, Regina/Rivka, and their daughter Helena, born 1887. Helena is the middle child of three—her brother Siegmund (b. 1875) is older, her sister Mina (b. 1894) is younger. Because of the span of the siblings’ ages, it’s likely that Helena was enjoying a rare period of having her parents all to herself.

The Oldest Child: (The Other) Siegmund Kornmehl

I have also written a good deal about the oldest child of Aron and Rivka Kornmehl, because, like David Schmerling, he married one of my great-grandfather’s offspring, in this case my great aunt Anna Kornmehl. I began calling him the Other Siegmund Kornmehl (OSK) here to distinguish him from the Siegmund Kornmehl who had a butcher shop in Sigmund Freud’s building. (Yes, this is a Tale of Three Sigmunds.) This does not do OSK’s own achievements justice—he had a very successful business, the Cafe Viktoria—but I knew virtually nothing about him when I started my research into the man for whom this blog is named.

I continue to be more amused than I probably should be by the fact that my great aunt Anna married a man with the same name as one of her brothers. It seems, well, Freudian.

Her spouse’s name and close kinship to her notwithstanding, Anna seems to have married well. I don’t know anything about Villa Olga, shown above, other than it belonged to OSK’s family and was an object of envy. Nor was I able to glean much information about the very cute dog in the picture, except that Rena’s mother was terrified of it. Fellow genealogy blogger and dog lover Vera Marie Badertscher suggested that the dog’s name was, of course, Olga. 

It took me a minute.

Before her parents moved from Tarnow to Vienna, Helena lived with her older brother Siegmund and his wife in Vienna for a few years when she was a child.

Siegmund died before the Nazi takeover of Austria, in February 1938, but Anna, Grete, and Alfons were murdered in concentration camps. Hetty and Egon made their way to America, and lived for a time in Brooklyn. More on that in a minute.

The Youngest Child: Mina Kornmehl Allina

Aaron Juda and Rivka Kornmehl’s third child, Mina, married Erwin Allina, who was from the Czech Republic. I have also written a great deal about this family, in part because one of Mina and Ervin’s children has an interesting claim to fame; see Who Put the Heads On Pez? My Cousin Curt!

The story of Mina’s family’s is perhaps the saddest of all. Erwin went to America to find work in the mid-1920s and Mina stayed behind in Vienna, where she and her four children–Gertrude (b. 1918), Hans ( b. 1919), Curt (b. 1922) and Erika (b. 1924)–lived for many years in #18 Bergasse, a building owned by Siegmund Kornmehl the butcher. Mina never made it to America, and neither did three of the four children: After Curt was liberated from Auschwitz, he went in search of his family. He discovered his mother and sister Erika had died in concentration camps and that his brother had been shot by the Nazis but learned that his sister Gertrude (pictured next to the title of this post) had survived.  When Curt went to Bergen-Belsen, her last known location, to be reunited with her, he found out that she had died of typhus—after liberation but less than a week before he could reach her.

Curt remained bitter and angry at his father for abandoning the family for the rest of his life. 

The Middle Child: Helena Kornmehl Neugasser

It was my post about Curt, in which I describe his father as a cad, that elicited the comment from my cousin Rena that started our correspondence.

She wrote:

People did stay in touch by mail in the 1930’s. Ervin didn’t just disappear. He went to work on ships crossing to America. He made several crossings. When he came to New York in about 1938, the family told him to stay. That he shouldn’t return because of the Anschluss. So, he did. He lived with our family until the early 1950’s when he remarried. They also made strong attempts to get the rest of his family out of Europe but were unsuccessful.

There is also a family rumor that Erwin returned to Vienna from one of his trips to discover that Mina had given birth to Erika, a child that couldn’t have been his.

So…there are always at least a dozen sides to every story.

To get back to Helena. She married a tailor named Isaac Neugasser and they had two children, Martha and Walter. Here is a picture of Helena with them, ca.1923-1924

Perhaps Isaac Neugasser is absent from this picture because he had already emigrated to the U.S.; he left in1923. He was joined, six years later, by his wife and children. Thus, unlike so many others in my family, including Helena’s two siblings, theirs was not a tragic Holocaust story.

Initially the family lived in the Bronx, but they later moved to Brooklyn, where Martha Neugasser married Aaron Weiss in 1935. They had two children, Marvin and Rena–she who I had been searching for. Early on, I wrote a blog post about these connections:  Rewriting My Childhood: A Tale of Mystery Relatives.

I learned a few more things about the family since I wrote that post, including the fact that Helena’s brother-in-law Erwin Allina lived with the Neugasser family for many years.

In further defense of Erwin and the rest of her own family Rena wrote: 

They tracked the refugee ships to ensure that if there were relatives on them, they were welcomed.

Both Hetty Kornmehl Sternberg and her family and Egon Kornmehl and his wife were also shoe horned into the family apartment in Brighton Beach. Until the mid-1960’s when my grandmother died, there were always cousins over for coffee and her fabulous baking.

My parents were among those cousins. I asked Rena what she recalled about them and she said not much; she recollects them as being rather quiet—but, as she pointed out, she was young and didn’t pay much attention to the adults.

My vague memories of these occasional visits include wandering off on the block where they lived and being unable to find my way back to their apartment building, which is very typical of me, but I don’t recall the baked goods, which isn’t.

The Kornmehl-Rosenbaum-Jarolims

I always have mixed feelings when I find out more about my parents’ families. I am naturally interested in learning as much as possible about my relatives but these stories always show my mother and father on the periphery of family circles—if present at all. In this case, particularly, I’m sad that my parents were not more memorable to Rena, presumably because our visits were so rare. My mother was socially awkward so I could see her being described as quiet but my father was generally a friendly guy. If we had visited often enough through the years, I imagine he would have made more of an impression. 

Just as visiting the Neugassers in Brighton Beach was intermittent, so were interactions with Hetty Kornmehl Sternberg and her husband Otto. I recall my mother going to see them on the Upper West Side when I got older,  but we never ate dinner at their house or saw them on a regular basis.

And don’t even get me started about the fact that we had a great uncle and close cousins in Queens that I never met. 

Perhaps the fact that best sums up our family’s isolation, not to mention our inner family rifts: I was the only relative at my mother’s New York funeral. 

But…another reason I’ve written a lot about the Schmerling family is that my mother was very close to her cousins Stella, Mimi, and Ditte, and to her aunt Mitzi. I like to think that if we’d lived in London or they in New York we would have seen them often. So I’ll leave you with one of the pictures on which I base that hypothesis, one that includes a dog whose name (if not gender) I do know.

So long that I forgot I had already filled out the preliminary forms and emailed them to the Austrian Consulate in Los Angeles.

So long that I let my hair go Pandemic Grey and I am now I’m obsessing: If I put those grey-tressed images on my new Austrian passport (which I do not have), am I committing myself to aging gracefully–or at least transparently?

So long that I’ve read at least four more books about the Holocaust in Austria that confirm my mother’s assertion that the country was more antisemitic in many ways than Germany.

So long that I decided that I desperately needed to get my home office painted and my ENTIRE HOUSE decluttered, which meant moving my document files to an undisclosed—or at least un-remembered—location.

So long that, now that I’ve gathered all the required preliminary documents and excuses are running thin, I forced myself to sit down in my newly painted office which has the air-conditioning vent filter in upside down (partially my fault, because the handyman who painted the office forgot to put it back and I decided I could do it myself, which I did, but upside down, and standing on a step-stool and pulling something out of a wall is entirely different, aerodynamically speaking, than standing on a step-stool and pushing something in, so my office is hotter than the rest of my house while I wait for the handyman to return) and write this post to air my ambivalence.

I figure I will be shamed into either sending out those forms or to making a public proclamation that I am abandoning this whole dual citizenship meshugas, which would also mean having to find a different ending for my memoir which, not coincidentally, I’m having a really hard time writing, what with the rise of antisemitism, spot-on critiques of the manuscript from friendly readers, and the office being too hot and all.

Finding and Filing

I started the process in September 2020, soon after the amendment to the Austrian Nationality Act that allowed for descendants of persecuted ancestors to apply for citizenship went into effect. First step: Locate the Austrian Consulate in the US that would process the documents. Neither I nor the residents of many fine states had much choice but to choose Los Angeles.

On the consulate’s website, I found an online questionnaire. Among other things, it asks for the name and date  and place of birth of my persecuted ancestor. Since I have two such ancestors, aka my parents, I could have applied based on my relationship to either one, but decided to go with the one to whose family’s persecution I devoted an entire blog and talk at Vienna’s Freud Museum.

Filling out that form was the easiest part of the whole process, which is why I had no problem doing it twice (it didn’t hurt that the information was cached).

Next, I had to confirm my relationship to my mother. This required me to get a certified and apostilled copy of my birth certificate

New York, New York

Most cities in most states have one office where you can get a certified copy of your birth certificate, which can then be sent to the state capital for an apostille.

Not New York City. The convergence of circumstances that led to my emergence into the world at Brooklyn Doctor’s Hospital meant I had to apply for the birth certificate in one office and then mail it to another office—about a block away in downtown Manhattan—to get it certified.

As it is officially described (with some omissions for the sake of length but not meaning):

Step 1: Obtaining the Record

If a person requires official proof of his or her birth in New York City with apostille or certificate of authentication, the applicant must first obtain a copy of the birth certificate with a letter of exemplification from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Vital Records Division, 125 Worth Street, New York, NY. … Applications may be made in person at the Department’s Office, by mail, or on-line. The charge is $15.00 plus $8.30 for mailing and service.

Step 2: Authentication by the County Clerk

Documents to be submitted for apostille or certificate of authentication must be authenticated by the County Clerk or a state official. A birth or death certificate must bear a letter of exemplification. A request for authentication must be presented to the County Clerk’s Notary Desk at 60 Centre Street, Room 141B. The request may also be submitted to the County Clerk by mail; if the documents are in proper order, the County Clerk will authenticate them and return them to the applicant by mail. The submission by mail must be accompanied by a certified personal check or U.S. postal order, payable to the County Clerk of New York County, in the amount of $3.00. No other form of payment will be accepted through the mails. Mail applications must include a stamped, self-addressed envelope for return of the documents by the County Clerk. The County Clerk does not have facilities to return documents by delivery service or postal express mail so the applicant should plan accordingly and submit the proper postage to ensure trouble-free return.

Of course if I still lived in or near New York and there had not been a pandemic, both these things could have been accomplished quickly. But I don’t and there was.

Here is where I confess that being forced to deal with the slow-turning wheels of New York bureaucracy could be karma. When I was in college, I had a part-time job as a file clerk at the Department of Finance, which was located just down the block from the County Clerk’s office.  This was in the days before electronic tax filing (and identity theft) and I had to put original tax documents into file folders in alphabetical order. This was not a difficult task, but let’s just say that the inhalation of (then) illegal substances was involved during breaks with my fellow college students and, perhaps, some of the file placement might have been less than accurate.

Belated apologies, dear fellow New York taxpayers, for any inconvenience this might have caused.

This is also the part of the story where the post office issue alluded to in the title of this post comes into play. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy started messing with the mail around the time of the 2020 election. Expensive sorting machines were being taken off line, mailboxes were being physically removed… and yet I dropped my original birth certificate into a possibly dead mailbox.

At the time, I rationalized that it was conveniently near the CVS, one of the few places I was chose to enter during the pandemic, on this particular day, to stock up on sanitizing wipes and to buy a new thermometer. But when I got home I started thinking about how weather-beaten and abandoned that mailbox had looked. Even though it was physically there and hours were posted (though faded!), I wondered if a human postal person ever attended it.

Looking back, my action made no sense. I had driven to the CVS. I could have driven to an actual post office which, alert readers may notice, I had to enter to get the requisite $3 U.S. Postal order. Indeed I could have gotten all of Step 2 accomplished in one fell swoop by going into the post office with my birth certificate and an envelope addressed to the County Clerk’s Notary Desk and another envelope addressed to me and enlisted one of the nice distanced and masked clerks to figure out the postage.

At the least, I could have dropped my birth certificate off in a mailbox outside of the post office where even Louis DeJoy was not brazen enough to remove mailboxes.

Turns out, the mailbox was in fact alive.  But my fear of its demise gave me something besides COVID to obsess about for about six weeks until the certification arrived.

Oh, Albany!

But wait, there’s more. I now needed to get the authenticated document even more authenticated!  You’d think it would be a lot easier for someone desperate for Austrian citizenship to just get a forged passport (like many of my ancestors did, though in hopes of going in the opposite direction) than to jump through all these hoops to pretend to be me, which, objectively and subjectively speaking, is not particularly desirable on most days. But okay.

Step 3: Issuance of Apostille or Certificate of Authentication

The third step in the process is the issuance of the apostille or certificate of authentication by the New York State Department of State. An application form must be completed. The documents in question, properly authenticated, must be attached and a fee paid. The fee is $10.00 per apostille or certificate.

Instructions regarding acceptable methods of return of documents submitted by mail are found on the application form.

I won’t go into what I did, U.S. postal system-wise, to delay receiving this item; suffice it to say, you can’t send a return envelope by certified mail and then not be home to sign for it.

And this is just the first part of the process. I haven’t even gotten to the part that involves the FBI.

To be continued…