{"id":19543,"date":"2016-06-10T00:32:27","date_gmt":"2016-06-10T07:32:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=19543"},"modified":"2016-06-08T14:53:32","modified_gmt":"2016-06-08T21:53:32","slug":"two-degrees-of-separation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2016\/06\/10\/two-degrees-of-separation\/","title":{"rendered":"Two degrees of separation"},"content":{"rendered":"

An old audio reel that writer Shula Klinger found in a suitcase of her late father\u2019s mementoes features a revealing interview with Viennese author Edith de Born. (photo by Shula Klinger)<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

When my father died in 2014, I was given an old suitcase containing his mementoes. There were photos, much of his early writing and an audio reel in a box. All it said on the box was, \u201cInterview with Edith de Born.\u201d I had never seen this tape before and had no idea who de Born was. I also didn\u2019t know why my father would have had the reel because, to the best of my knowledge, he had never worked in radio.<\/p>\n

A quick Google search told me that de Born was a novelist, born in Vienna when it was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. During the Second World War, she and her banker husband both worked for the Resistance. An obituary of another writer on theguardian.com mentions her as a \u201cnow-forgotten Austro-Hungarian novelist,\u201d a gauntlet of a phrase if ever I read one. The next website I visited was a bookseller with secondhand copies of de Born\u2019s books. The Price of Three C\u00e9zannes<\/em> and The House in Vienna<\/em> arrived a few weeks later.<\/p>\n

Like de Born, my father\u2019s family lived in Vienna in the early 20th century, in the final days of the Habsburg Empire. But what was behind my father\u2019s desire to interview her? I took the reel to a digital studio and had the material transferred to a CD, hoping to find some answers.<\/p>\n

The first time I listened to it, I thought I was listening to my father\u2019s voice but couldn\u2019t be sure. The recording was clean, without any extraneous noises, but still, technology distorts the human voice and it didn\u2019t really sound like my dad. This man\u2019s English was excellent and he spoke quickly, but his vowel sounds weren\u2019t quite right, weren\u2019t quite what I remember. His phrases lacked the colloquial idioms you\u2019d hear in a native speaker.<\/p>\n

A few minutes in, I was sure this was indeed my father. The recording was made not long after he had moved to England. His first language was (I think) Yiddish, followed by Arabic and Hebrew, English and French. Was my memory playing tricks or was this simply evidence of what my friends had observed in the 1970s \u2013 that my dad \u201chad an accent\u201d?<\/p>\n

I listened carefully to the rest of the interview. Mostly my father asks de Born about her writing habits, literary preferences and the authors she has met. He wants to know if she keeps notes in a little book, whether her characters are based on people she knows. She answers no, no, no again and again. He seems to be looking for tips on how to be a novelist. He gets nothing.<\/p>\n

The conversation is stilted but my father doesn\u2019t seem dissatisfied with the author\u2019s brief answers. Are these the questions of a novice reporter, just learning the tricks of his trade? Or is he working to a personal agenda, trying to glean something useful for himself?<\/p>\n

I get a partial answer when de Born speaks of the authors she has met. Evelyn Waugh, she says. And Vladimir Nabokov, whose writing she describes as \u201cdivine.\u201d Knowing that Nabokov emigrated to the United States, my father asks, \u201cDid he have an accent?\u201d An odd thing to focus on, one might think, when you\u2019re discussing a world-renowned novelist.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s my answer. I may have grown up oblivious to my father\u2019s accent, but he certainly wasn\u2019t. Like all immigrants, he was aware that it marked him out as different. In a country where one\u2019s identity is defined by the class system, this put him outside regular society. It told others that he was different, and he was just as conscious that, to fit in and be accepted into middle class, professional life in England, one had to be more than educated, more than capable \u2013 one had to sound English, to sound as though you belonged. With tanned skin, curly hair and \u2013 as he well knew \u2013 an abrasive manner, he did his best to tone down the chutzpah and mimic the mannerisms and diction of those around him. But not before he met de Born.<\/p>\n

I managed to date the recording to 1960 or 1961 by looking at the publication date of the book de Born is writing when she meets my father. At that time, my father had not seen most of his family for years. Was the conversation a way for him to maintain a connection to his own heritage? Or was he simply looking for professional guidance? De Born could have been the perfect mentor \u2013 if only she had agreed. It is clear, however, from her guarded answers that she is not looking to nurture an emerging new talent.<\/p>\n

There is, however, a short conversation about her memories of Austria. For the most part, she refuses to discuss her past, but she does talk briefly about her father, a Viennese nobleman. When the emperor Franz Josef died in 1916, her father walked in the funeral procession through the streets of Vienna. She describes her fondness for her father, and speaks warmly of his influence on her life.<\/p>\n

Fascinated to learn that there were only two degrees of separation between me and a person who had attended an emperor\u2019s funeral, I decided to look up some of the events she described. I soon found the Path\u00e9 News archive. Turns out they have thousands of files online. Here, I found a silent movie of the 1916 procession.<\/p>\n

Twenty-six seconds in, I was startled to see something that didn\u2019t fit. In the midst of all the smartly dressed adult aristocrats, prancing black horses and royal footmen, there is a tall, dignified looking man. This man is holding the hand of a little girl. She must be 4 or 5 and she\u2019s holding a teddy bear in her other hand. They turn in front of the camera for a second before they are obscured by the heads of royal guards. She reappears fleetingly, later on, and then she\u2019s gone. Could this be de Born, the woman whose voice I hear in conversation with my father when he was still a young Israeli immigrant?<\/p>\n

De Born\u2019s work is not in vogue now but this is \u2013 I believe \u2013 a tremendous shame. An astute observer of human nature, her dialogue is incisive and the inner lives of her characters richly explored. The world of Viennese aristocrats is opulent but restricted, the women stifled by their positions in society. Even as the characters cling to old traditions, singing of a Habsburg emperor whose fate will be tied to Austria\u2019s for all eternity, de Born\u2019s narrator feels that her world is an anachronism: \u201cNo waxwork exhibition could possibly reproduce the atmosphere of a vanished epoch so uncannily as did those creatures who continued to move with old-fashioned grace in their own meaningless world,\u201d she writes.<\/p>\n

Soon after, she describes a very different scene, being \u201cin the midst of people who spoke my language, but with whom I could not feel in harmony. \u2018Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein F\u00fchrer<\/em> …\u2019 chanted, yelled, screamed hysterically.\u201d Little by little, de Born introduces ever more troubling elements, gradually building on a sense of a looming catastrophe \u2013 for Austrian nobility, for Europe at large and for Jews in particular. It may be set in polite society, but The House in Vienna<\/em> is an exquisitely tense and emotional read. It is no wonder my father chose de Born as his interviewee. I have not found her described as a Jewish author, but \u2013 to me at least \u2013 her photograph on the dust jacket tells me everything I need to know.<\/p>\n

As a daughter listening to her father\u2019s voice after his death, the reel of tape is a gift and, like the work of his interviewee, it is a little eerie. It feels like eavesdropping. I don\u2019t know if my father meant me to have it \u2013 or even find it \u2013 but I loved hearing his chuckle as he talked about something that he cared about, so deeply, as the young man I didn\u2019t know. It\u2019s a great way to remember him and his accent \u2013 full of life and Israeli\/European inflections \u2013 hints at how he must have felt as a newcomer in England, all those years ago.<\/p>\n

And, of course, it\u2019s not a particularly smooth interview. At one point, the author laughs, somewhat revealingly, \u201cNow<\/em> we\u2019re getting somewhere!\u201d in her own gently accented English. Up to that point, my father\u2019s questions have mostly been dead-ends. This question, however, was different, and the pace of the conversation quickens, the tone is light, almost cheeky. Hearing him make a genuine connection with another human being \u2013 something I rarely saw myself \u2013 was pure gold. It\u2019s an infinitesimally small hunk of gold, but when you lose a complex and extremely guarded parent that you tried throughout your life \u2013 and failed \u2013 to connect with in this way, it can feel like winning the lottery.<\/p>\n

Shula Klinger<\/strong> is an author, illustrator and journalist living in North Vancouver. Find out more at niftyscissors.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An old audio reel that writer Shula Klinger found in a suitcase of her late father\u2019s mementoes features a revealing interview with Viennese author Edith de Born. (photo by Shula Klinger) When my father died in 2014, I was given an old suitcase containing his mementoes. There were photos, much of his early writing and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":19524,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[3429,3998,4242,5935],"class_list":["post-19543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-life","tag-family","tag-fathers-day","tag-history","tag-vienna"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19543"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19543\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}