Vienna was the destination for my first European holiday in 2001. I was so excited to go back, but mostly to see Steffi. To my surprise, Vienna was way more interesting and exciting than I remember. The city has definitely changed and has a bit of an edge to it now. It was also wintertime when I was last there. Steffi agreed, however, that the city is more colorful now. It was wonderful be able to enjoy feeling like I lived in the city so that I didn't have to take time to visit tourist attractions.
I was lucky enough to be in Vienna for their yearly Pride Parade. 15 years ago there was only one gay bar. Now there is a gay district and a parade!
Going back to Vienna after my treacherous experience in Laos and my disappointing and depressing five days in Bangkok was sublime. One of the first things I did was go back to Schwedenplatz, around where Steffi lives, to try the bratwurst again. It had been a very long time. The stores have been consolidated into a single ownership structure and serves all sorts of foods including pizza and noodles. Steffi told me the owners were now Israeli, which I found particularly interesting because they sell bratwurst and also because it’s not like there are so many Jewish people in Austria. I also had my favorite Austrian beverage: apfelschorle. This is simply an apple juice spritzer and I could drink them forever.
My favorite moment was visiting the Gaenselhaufl public pool. In Vienna, they call this a pool but in the States, we call this a resort. For 4 EUR, you can spend a day in paradise. Three pools, a swimmable river, a nudist area, lockers and showers, restaurants and cafes. All available to the general public about 30 minutes north of the center of Vienna. There's nothing like this in New York.
I also met my friend Gilbert in Vienna. Gilbert was taking Hebrew language classes through the local community college. I went to a class with him. I felt like my time in Vienna was being spent with people who have a deeper understanding on history and are intellectually curious. It made me feel closer to Vienna. I took a trip with Gilbert to his friend’s house out in the countryside where the backyard faced a natural spring and we got to go swimming in it. I felt like I was being let into a network of really authentic and friendly people. I was able to speak broken German with them even though they all spoke fluent English. It was fun and we had many language-based laughs. They asked me, surprisingly, how I was able to speak German with an Austrian accent. To me, I wasn’t speaking German with an Austrian accent. This was actually one of the first times I decided to speak German “without putting on” an accent and just speak it the way it would naturally come out of my mouth. This was actually a Yiddish accent. I found this to be another opportunity to teach my new friends about what Yiddish is, for they unfortunately do not learn this in school in Germany or Austria even though Yiddish is a Germanic language.
Steffi invited me to her boyfriend’s parents house for a big, traditional Sunday meal. There was chicken soup and boiled meat and homemade ice cream pastry dessert. Something was happening during this meal that seemed like all of my previous thoughts on Austria, stated above, were coalescing. The chicken soup was served with these special homemade noodles that Steffi described as sliced pancakes. Well, not only did the chicken broth taste exactly like my grandmothers, but this style of noodle is also served with traditional Jewish chicken soup. We just have a different word for it, I think we call it “egg noodles” and we serve it during Passover. The boiled meat was eerily reminiscent and were served with fried onions and horseradish. All of these foods tasted incredibly similar to my grandmother’s. My grandmother is not from Austrian Galicia, but maybe that does not matter. The pre-WWI border between Austrian Galicia and Congress Poland-Russia were next to each other. I know my grandmother got all of her recipes from her mother. As I was speaking broken German with Steffi’s boyfriend’s parents and they noted that my German accent sounds Austrian to them and I explained to them that my German comes from my foundation in Yiddish. There were quite a few Austrian-German words that are pronounced differently than German from Germany and some of those are language cognates with Yiddish and, of course, are pronounced the same.
You may see where I’m going with this. For as much as Ashkenazi Jews are a separate ethnic group and religious group, our food and language is heavily influenced by our environment. The early written traces of Ashkenaz go back at least 500-600 years. We know through oral tradition that it goes back much longer. I am not denying that Yiddish is its own language. It’s just that while I was in Austria, I was consistently experiencing moments where people were telling me I sounded Austrian and I was eating food that tasted like home so I came to the natural conclusion that we Jews are not so different from our gentile neighbors. Through a combination of us wanting to be different to distinguish ourselves as a sense of pride against historically consistent antisemitism and maintaining cultural/religious identity and gentiles viewing Jews as radically different (and weird) to justify the antisemitism preached throughout the religious and political world, we are left with a hateful Europe that views Jews as interlopers and Protestants and Catholics as “indigenous”. I believe we are not so different from one another. In the most extreme example of my beliefs: a Hassidic Jewish person is wearing quite the costume, but the language and food of their culture resembles quite a bit of what a traditional Austrian experiences (minus the pork and cheese).
Speaking of pork and cheese, I tried a traditional Austrian meat product in sandwich form that I had never heard of before. It is kind of like spam and comes in a version with melted cheese in side. It is called Leberkäse. The cheesy version is comically called Käse-leberkäse It was not my favorite of the Austrian meat dishes but with my new acceptance of my Austrian-Jewishness-samethingness I decided I should try it all.
I spent a day doing traditional tourist stuff like taking a walking tour, seeing an orchestral performance of Mozart classics, going to the Palmenhouse and taking photos of the beautiful architecuture, seeing the Keith Haring exhibit at the museum, and visiting the two Jewish museums.
My visit to the Jewish museums contrasted sharply with my updated understanding of the “differences” between “us” and “them”. The tragedy of WWII needs no further explanation; this much I’ve felt since hearing the stories of my grandparents as a young child. However, this time around, I started feeling the ultimate tragedy of neighbor turning against neighbor, seeing the rise of Austrian Fascism and open antisemitism in the Viennese streets, the press and in politics during the 1930s as the truest betrayal of what it means to live in a world-class city. These events are thoroughly documented in the first floor of the Jewish museum. I knew I would be quite upset after reading all of the details. I was looking for a docent. I was hoping the person at the information desk would want to have a conversation after. Unfortunately, this moment in Vienna, I was alone. When I reached the top floor of the museum, it seems that they decided to make this room a glass enclosed storage space for all of the pieces of collected Judaica from Vienna and perhaps all of Austria. This is, after all, the only Jewish museum in all of Austria. While I believe the intention was to showcase the collection, to me it was a ghastly display of a completely lost culture. Without explanations into how any of the items were obtained or why they are here and not donated to actual Jewish communities (we are not all dead), I did not see what purpose this display served. I thought that if the intention would have been to make a statement about the large size of the lost Jewish community, the display could have been redirected to focus on the sheer number of items collected and how the items represent the lost homes, community buildings and synagogues. However, there was no direction here. This was just a bunch of glass case with Shabbat candles, menorahs, Torah yads, Torah ornaments… all of the things you would see in a Jewish home or synagogue. Without more of purpose behind this collection, I believe these items should be donated to synagogues around the world for usage. We are not dead, they do not need to be in an air-conditioned display case. Let the survivors bring these objects back to life.
After this tragic visit, I made my way to the second Jewish museum of Vienna, which is more of a small art gallery on top of the excavated remains of the synagogue from the middle ages. This space is around a square that is dedicated to the Jews of Austria who died in the Holocaust. The plaza is called Judenplatz. The memorial there is stark. Today, people use it as a bench. The square is filled with actual benches, by the way. I thought this was terribly disrespectful behavior of the citizens of Vienna. I do not expect Viennese people to walk around being sad all the time or to constantly feel guilt for the War or anything like that. However, at a memorial site, respect the memorial. Sit somewhere else. It should be a way of showing that you don’t agree with what happened and that the memorial represents something sacred. To modern day Viennese people, I don’t think they want to even consider it that much. I think it is wrong to use a Holocaust memorial as a bench to take phone calls, especially in Vienna.
I'll leave you with this happy photo of me and Steffi.
I would leave Vienna with a sense of pride of my refined identity as an Ashkenazi. After all, “Ashkenazi” is sometimes translated as “German Jew”. In Spain, months later, a security guard would ask me for my passport and in an attempt to guess where I’m from before handing him the actual passport, he would say in Spanish, “Alleman?”, asking me matter-of-factly “You, German?” I saw how good life can be in the summertime in Vienna. The affordability of college education, the reliability of the public transport, the quality of the friends I made all seemed to make me feel so much stronger about the sad state of Austrian-Jewish reconciliation in Vienna. I kind of felt like that if I lived there for a while, maybe I could help make it better.
I would leave Vienna to begin a two week long trip to Croatia where I would be meeting two (now ex-) friends from New York. Stay tuned to read a story about a starkly different experience of meeting “friends from home” while backpacking.