The turn from the 1920s to the 1930s, turbulently marked by the crash on Wall Street that led to a world economic crisis and by political events in Western Europe (among which Hitler’s seizure of power in Germany was the one with the most far-reaching importance and the one that most radically separated people), went by without diverting my mother’s attention from the immediate obligations to watch over the physical well-being of her children and her needy charges (for us wool caps for sudden cold snaps, superfluous arch supports, repeated written and verbal prohibitions against visits to the public baths where skin diseases were allegedly rampant; and for the beggars the distribution of pearl barley, bacon rinds and sausage ends — insofar as these did not contravene religious nutritional proscriptions). In this tightly woven, prosaic web of perversely conceived maternal obligations and miserly charity she lived as isolated as a spider under water, snared in her notions of duty, her worries and anxieties. And there she also experienced her greatest personal tragedy. What she had always feared with the greatest anguish — and thus expected — occurred in 1931: my sister fell sick with lymphogranulomatosis and died after a year of suffering. All the means at the disposal of medicine at the time were applied to save her life. Through the mediation of our theosophically and spiritistically active aunts (the Wiener Werkstätte and socialist ideas meanwhile had expanded into the transcendental), every kind of arcane force was also mobilized and proved equally unavailing. Death came to my poor sister as a welcome release.
My mother went about as if blinded. In arduous self-devotion, she had never left her sick child alone for a moment. All her physical and spiritual forces, but unfortunately also her intellectual powers, were exhausted. She became oddly and totally cantankerous. Each evening she held a kind of devotional service in front of a picture of my sister during which she was not to be disturbed by anyone. She was not burdened by remorse that she had made her daughter feel she was not her favorite child, for she had expiated that wrong in a year of almost medievally devoted nursing care. Instead, a kind of transfiguration of her daughter into an angel took place, and simultaneously the image of the mother-daughter relation was retouched.
From an ethical standpoint, this put me at a severe disadvantage. It was not I, the predestined problem child, who had transformed her factually into a mater dolorosa; rather, the angelic being whose picture she now caressed nightly as if this might alleviate her sufferings had sacrificed herself and taken my place. Whenever my mother glanced at me through her tears, I felt that my healthy sturdiness mocked her solicitude, was sardonic proof of the purely random efficiency of her lifelong care and all her precautionary measures for our protection. I embodied the injustice of fate and its cynical remove from influence; against this her rage was sublimated into gnawing, persistent demands of me — verbally expressed in the behest not to wreck her “ruined life” even more by my insubordination and, at a deeper level, shielding her subliminal wish that I would crown her even more definitively as Our Lady of Sorrows.
Meanwhile her second marriage fell apart. Even though Philip dealt with her most solicitously, she had begun to foster an animosity against him that burst into open ugliness at the first plausible excuse. It erupted after one of her spontaneous initiatives, which my father acknowledged only with an uncomprehending shaking of his head, even though he himself was involved, albeit involuntarily.
This had to do with someone’s scheme to establish a sanatorium in the Carpathian Mountains. My father had been approached with the suggestion that he provide the capital — a ludicrous idea, for he didn’t have any money and if he had he would have known at best how to spend but not how to invest it. There were many other reasons why he refused. Meanwhile, however, my mother also had heard of the project — possibly via me and my sister — and threw herself into it with the keen fervor that the almost irresistible spirit of the time dictated to her, she who had been so unpardonably late in her economic emancipation. At first Philip cautiously advised against the project, but soon and as usual he yielded to her will and contributed the lion’s share of her investment — which represented all the money she had. The enterprise not only ended catastrophically as a business venture but also led spectacularly to a murder. I shall tell more of it in connection with my sister, since it was one of the reasons she hated what she called “our Balkan origins,” and it contributed, if I’m not mistaken, to her early death. While alive she was tormented by the violent quarrels between my mother and Philip that were the most deplorable consequence of this wretched undertaking, and after her death the dispute continued with ever sharper acrimony, of which I am ashamed for all of us to this day.
The question at the heart of the matter was whether the Odaya could be sold to make up for the loss they had suffered. This old rattletrap, set where the Prut’s murky waters flowed most sluggishly through scruffy stands of trees, spookily denuded and whitened by the guano of thousands of herons that bred in the endless marshes, impassable because of the shoulder-high nettles — this place suddenly gained an importance, as if it were the ancestral seat of some historic dynasty. Its sale would have been complicated in any case, since consent of all members of the family would have been required, with the unforeseeably awkward discussions as to how and to what extent each would be compensated. I, as the sole male descendant at the time, was called upon to defend this common inheritance against Philip.
My efforts were lame. All my life my ties to property have been very loose, and Philip made it hard for me to develop stronger ones at this juncture. He could not have acted more generously, particularly when I found that I could not defend my mother’s cause with any true conviction, though loyalty prevented me from taking his side openly. He showed an understanding so delicate for my dilemma that I count it among the most edifying experiences of my life: the revelation of a humane, considerate magnanimity that hitherto I had not encountered or to which perhaps I had been blind. My mother was not receptive to it. I, now her only child, was no longer her ally. She regarded me as her enemy. The insidious tragedy of our alienation had begun.
In those days, however, dramatic events took place also outside the private sphere. Adolf Hitler had come to power in Germany— an occurrence that occasioned many ardent though tragically futile prayers at the Fieles Court. We ourselves did not share in these at the time. From our viewpoint, the developments in Germany were welcome: a profusion of optimistic images of youth bursting with health and energy, promising to build a sunny new future — this corresponded to our own political mood. We were irked by the disdain with which we as the German-speaking minority were treated, as if the former Austrian dominion in Romania had been one of Teutonic barbarism over the ancient and highly cultured Czechs, Serbs, Slovaks and Wallachians, as if these had freed themselves from their oppressive bondage in the name of civilizing morality. The bitterness of the defeat suffered with Germany rankled in us, and we felt good when we saw that in Germany, a new self-reliance refused to accept that a people vanquished was a people despised. At the same time, the threatening, even criminal aspects of socialism seemed to be averted; socialism confronted us at all times in the frightening mask of close-by Communism. “Reds” were the enemy per se, throughout the world, and the Germany of the valiant Brownshirts stood as our protection against them. Nor were we alarmed by the adjective socialist in the name of the National Socialist German Workers Party. The commonweal objectives of the National Socialist movement did not fade into abstract ideologies, we thought, which in international Marxism ended up in a general disintegration of values, but instead bound the nation together on behalf of the people’s welfare. This could be equated with the welfare of the individual, and instead of the disastrous leveling of materialism, varied individualities could join in a common ideal. As to the anti-Semitism of the upward-striving Third Reich, it was the generally accepted wisdom among non-Jews in the Bukovina at that time that, irrespective of all tolerance and even close personal relations with Jews, it could be only salutary if a damper were placed on the “overbearing arrogance of Jewry.” That this “damper” would bring about the murder of six million Jews no one could foresee.