Whether those chamber-music concerts got on the nerves not only of my grandmother but also of Minka Raubitschek I am unable to say. However, she was a high-spirited girl with a strong and stubborn will, and on the occasion I have just mentioned, during a quarrel with her mother, she jumped out of the window. “Exaggerated” was my grandmother’s comment. “As those young Jewish intellectuals usually are.” Fortunately she didn’t do herself much harm. She broke a hip and was slightly lame thereafter, that was all. In later years, when I had been accepted into the circle of her friends, we used to put a mountain climber’s cord around her waist and let her down the steep stairs to the ladies’ room of the Kärntnerbar. This was necessary not only because of her lame hip but also because her sense of equilibrium was impaired by too many whiskeys. She used to thank us with bits of cultural-historical information. “Do you realize where you are, you drunken swine? This place was designed by Adolf Loos, an architect as important as Frank Lloyd Wright. It is one of the early masterpieces of modern architecture — a room that would normally not be big enough for a dozen ignoramuses of your kind shelters half a hundred. If that isn’t progress …”
As the grandson of an architect who had done his share to make Vienna’s monuments conform to the taste of the fin de siècle, I should have given particular consideration to such remarks of Minka Raubitschek’s. Her tastes were exquisite and her knowledge was profound. But at the time I was merely reminded of my grandmother. “It is disgusting,” my grandmother would say, “how very much like your father you have become. He is a perfect barbarian, with his monomaniacal passion for shooting. But when I think that I gave my daughters Renan to read in order to have them take up spiritualism …”
The two neuralgic points in my grandmother’s existence were the marriage of her eldest daughter, my mother, with my father and the “exaggerated ideas” of my unmarried aunts. My grandmother never set foot in the back rooms of her apartment, which, after the death of my grandfather, were occupied by her two spinster daughters; for there, every Wednesday evening, accompanied by the remote sounds of the Raubitschek chamber music, the meetings of the esoteric community of Mr. Malik took place. Mr. Malik was an engineer with supernatural powers that enabled him to massage the souls out of the bodies of ladies who had metaphysical talents so that the emptied vessel could be filled with some free soul of a dead person not yet reborn, who would then use the mouth of the medium to utter mystical nonsense, the theosophical interpretation of which was left to my aunts. The soul massaged out of the body remained attached to it by an astral navel cord, and when the free soul, who came like a guest into your body for the duration of the séance, had left, Mr. Malik would massage your waiting soul along that very same astral navel cord back into your body, and you would be yourself again. In later years, when we were letting Minka down to the ladies’ room of the Kärntnerbar, I had great success with what I had learned of Mr. Malik’s teachings. “It’s only her cursed materia that descends,” I would explain. “Her soul stays with us and her whiskey.”
The presumably free, not yet reborn soul of Mr. Malik will perhaps forgive me. I was only eighteen years old when I thus profaned his messages, and all during my childhood nobody had done much to make me take him very seriously. “I am sure that man is not an engineer at all but just a cheap crook,” my grandmother used to say. “Probably a Jew who has changed his name.”
The suspicion that somebody could have changed his name already made him a Jew — provided, of course, he was not an Englishman, like charming Mr. Wood, who one beautiful day became Lord Halifax. But that was quite another thing. It was typically Jewish to change your name, for Jews quite understandably did not want to be taken for what they were. Since their names usually made it quite clear what they were, they had to change them, for camouflage. Had we been Jews, we should certainly have done the same, because it must be painful to be a Jew. Even well-bred people would make you feel it — either by their reserve or by an exaggerated politeness and coy friendliness. But fortunately we were not Jews, so, though we could see their point, we considered it a piece of insolence when they changed their names and pretended to be like us. Part of the certain esteem my grandmother had for the Raubitscheks came from the fact that they had not changed their name. Jews who changed their names, like Mr. Malik, were crooks and swindlers. Their camouflage was but a falsehood to which they were driven by their disgusting greed for profit and their repulsive social climbing. This was particularly the case with the so-called Polish Jews — the prototype of the greedy, pushing little Jew one met so often in the Bukovina. There were crowds of them; you could not take a step without running into swarms. The elder ones and very old ones, particularly the very poor, were humbly what they were — submissive men in black caftans and large-brimmed hats, with curls at their temples, and in their eyes a sort of melting look which the sadness of many thousands of years seemed to have bestowed. Their eyes were like dark ponds. Some of them were even beautiful in their melancholy. They had spun-silver prophets’ heads, with which the butcher’s face of Mr. Malik would have compared very unfavorably, and when they looked at you, humbly stepping aside to let you pass, it was like a sigh for not only themselves but all the burden of human existence which they knew so well. But the young ones, and especially the ones who were better off, or even rich, showed an embarrassing self-confidence. They wore elegant clothes and drove dandified roadsters, and their girls smelled of scent and sparkled with jewelry. Some of them even had dogs and walked them on leashes, just as my aunts did. When they spoke to one another, it was in a pushing, impatient way, even when they had just met. They asked direct personal questions and looked around for someone more worth knowing. They were not humble at all.
My father likewise hated Jews, all of them, even the old and humble ones. It was an ancient, traditional, and deep-rooted hatred, which he did not need to explain; any motivation, no matter how absurd, would justify it. Of course, nobody seriously believed that the Jews wanted to rule the world merely because their prophets had promised it to them (even though they were supposedly getting richer and more powerful, especially in America). But, of course, other stories were considered humbug: for instance an evil conspiracy, such as was described in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or their stealing communion wafers or committing ritual murders of innocent children (despite the still unexplained disappearance of little Esther Solymossian). Those were fairy tales that you told to a chambermaid when she said she couldn’t stand it here anymore and would much rather go and work for a Jewish family, where she would be better treated and better paid. Then, of course, you casually reminded her that the Jews had, after all, crucified our Savior. But our kind of people, the educated kind, did not require such heavy arguments to look upon Jews as second-class people. We just didn’t like them, or at least liked them less than other fellow human beings. This was as natural as liking cats less than dogs or bedbugs less than bees; and we amused ourselves by offering the most absurd justifications.