There is an old saying that when you change your life you also change your ideas. This is not necessarily so. You can very well change your life and in the meantime send your ideas, so to speak, on a holiday. My life had changed entirely, and though I kept right on disliking Jews, I lived among them — for most of Minka’s friends were Jews — from then on. One of them, a monstrously fat and ugly yet highly amusing journalist from Prague, who regularly came to Vienna as a theater critic, gave me the password. Once, after a brief encounter with a well-known actor who was not a Jew and who had treated him with special friendliness, he turned toward me and said, “My mother used to say, ‘More than of an anti-Semite, my boy, beware of people who just love Jews.’” Right she was, I thought, laughing heartily. For disliking Jews was not something you could change. It was an inborn reaction that did not hinder you from even liking them in a certain way. I liked Minka tremendously, and if she hadn’t been a Jewess, I would have fallen madly in love with her and, in spite of my eighteen years (and to her utter amusement, I presume), probably have asked her to marry me. But even when she woke up in my arms and I in hers, after an innocent night’s sleep, there was a taboo that controlled my feelings and made everything even more delightful. I felt so free and unburdened with her. As she said, she liked having me around. She could not take me seriously as a lover. I was her toy, and everything was light and nice and uncomplicated. She could summon me and send me away whenever she wanted. I asked no questions, and she could tell me everything. We would both laugh at our particular adventures and misfortunes, share our joys, our money, our problems. Her girl friends were sweet and of a charming libertinage. I can’t remember a time in my life since when I have had such pleasures. She was the queen of a little kingdom that for a while became my universe, and I served her as a page. The day began with her morning bath and toilet, and I either came up to her flat for it or was already there, ready to wait on her. She was severe and not at all patient. Very soon I learned everything a young man can be taught about a lady’s boudoir. I accompanied her to her dressmaker, her hairdresser, her shopping, her brief luncheon at the Café Rebhuhn, where the artists and intellectuals who had chosen it for their headquarters were great friends of hers. She took me to museums, to concerts, to the theater, to dinner parties, and to the Heurigen—the tasting of the new wine in the vineyards of the nearby village of Grinzing. That little kingdom of hers, which became my universe, was composed of all that was best in Vienna in the early 1930s, the most intellectual and most amusing. Her friends came to her home as birds fly in and out of the foliage of a tree. Among them was Karl Kraus, who at that time was considered merely a satirist but whose life stands as an example of moral uprightness and courage which should be put before anyone who writes, in no matter what language. Thanks to Minka, I had, at the age of eighteen, the privilege of listening to his conversation and watching his face, lit up by the pale fire of his fanatic love for the miracle of the German language and by his holy hatred for those who used it badly. There was also a young man, not a Jew, who was a gifted musician. “Come on, Herbert,” Minka would say, “play something on the piano.” Many years later, I remembered that his name was von Karajan.
What gave me the right to stand my ground among those people was a rather strange talent Minka had discovered in me. Not for nothing had I passed a great part of my childhood and adolescence amidst Polish Jews. While walking through the streets of Czernowitz and Sadagura and Lvov, I had kept my ears open, and I spoke better Yiddish and knew more of the customs and behavior of the so-called Polish Jews than most of the refined Jews of Vienna or even Prague. I was an expert in all shades of Jewish slang and the way Jews spoke when they wanted to speak select German. And when somebody told a Jewish story, which at that time, and especially among Jewish intellectuals, was cultivated as an art, and told it badly, Minka would impatiently interrupt him, saying, “Come on, don’t bore us. Tell your story in a low voice to Brommy, and he’ll tell it to us much better than you do.” If for some reason she chose not to interrupt the imperfect storyteller, she and I would exchange a short, vague, yet significant look, very much in the way that my eyes would meet those of my mother or father, my grandmother or my aunts, when somebody who was not of our kind committed some lapse of manners or language. If, on the other hand, some master told a Jewish story to perfection, then Minka would pull my sleeve and say, “Pay attention, Brommy!”
Brommy…. It was a name of quite another form of existence, which ran parallel to my existence as son, grandson, and nephew — very much as Guru Malik within the esoteric community of my aunts led a life parallel to that of brave engineer Weingruber, who lived his petit bourgeois life as an employee of the Styria Motor Company. Once, when someone called me on the telephone, one of my aunts answered, and afterward she asked me with an expression of amazement, “What do your … friends call you? ‘Brommy’? But you have such nice other Christian names. What a regrettable lack of taste.”
Furious, without knowing why, I said, “You mind your own business!”
“Now, really!” she exclaimed. “Have we come to the point where boys of your age speak to adults in such a way? Don’t forget, you’re only eighteen, after all.”
I certainly did not forget it. It weighed on me that I had lied to Minka about my age. One day I could bear it no longer. We had been talking about some of her troubles, and she said, “It’s astonishing how understanding you are for your age, my boy.”
“Minka,” I said, “there’s something I have to confess. I lied to you.”
“What about?” she said and smiled. “Oh, I see. You want to tell me that in fact there is a drop of Jewish blood in you.”
“No,” I said. “I am sorry there isn’t. But I’m not twenty-three. I am only eighteen.”
“What? But you’re not serious?”
From then on, she treated me as a sort of wonder child. “Would you believe it? He’s only eighteen!” They probably all thought I was Jewish, and were proud of my precocity.
Well, it did not go on forever, alas. Very soon I was nineteen, and at twenty I had to do my military service in Rumania, and my gay time in Vienna was over. But it was soon replaced by another fascinating experience. I now became aware that I knew almost nothing about the country I belonged to, the Rumanian people, or their language. In order to fill that gap, a young Rumanian student was hired to teach me Rumanian and something of Rumanian literature and history, and I not only formed friendships with my tutor and some other young Rumanians which have lasted till today but also learned the historical past of the three Rumanian principalities — Moldova (to which the Bukovina had once belonged), Muntenia, and Oltenia — and their struggle to unite against their Turkish oppressors and Phanariot rulers and become a nation and the kingdom of Rumania. By tracing some rather remote lineage of my pedigree until it found root in Rumania, I was able to justify my newly discovered love for that country and my claim to belong there not merely as part of a former Austrian minority but by inheritance. Then I exchanged my first name, Arnulf, for the third of my Christian names, Gregor, which also happened to be the Christian name of some half-Greek, half-Russian ancestor originating in Bessarabia and beautifully outfitted with a Turkish wife. My father watched with intense disapproval my Rumanian friendships and my attempts to tie myself genealogically to Rumania, but by that time I had — thanks to Minka Raubitschek — acquired a certain independence of mind, and when my father said that he loathed the Bukovina and if it hadn’t been for the Carpathians would long since have left it, I said boldly that, according to my taste, it was better to have a free outlook over a lovely rolling country with a vast horizon than to be always running your nose against some stone wall, as in Styria. Whereupon my father turned his back, and did not speak to me for a couple of weeks.