Mom’s European Cocoon

Buenos Aires, the 1950s.

In the box of photos that I brought with me from Buenos Aires in 1968 I found, when I at last rummaged through it years later, a yellowing envelope containing a lock of silky reddish hair. The envelope is marked, Atención de Harrods Peluquería de Niños, Courtesy of the Kids' Barber Shop at Harrods. Mom, in what I recognize to be her beautiful cursive, has inserted my childhood name, Schorschi. This was a European nickname evoking for her the Vienna of her dreams. Inside the envelope was my first lock, cut on April 21, 1952, when I was not yet three.

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When Mom and Dad died, with I still in my teens, they left me alone in Buenos Aires with many unfinished stories and lots of unanswered questions. Since then—well, after some initial reluctance—completing the stories became for me a life-long passion. Yet even though I have chosen to tell you of my pursuits as though I first looked for Dad and then for Mom, that’s not how it went. My searches were and have always been intermixed. A bit about Dad, a bit about Mom; a trip to Samos, another to Vienna. The order of my telling, while not chronological, reflects the very different journeys I took to solve the puzzles they left behind: Who were they? And what was the history that made them into the parents I knew during our too few years together?    

You may recall that the turning point of getting to know Dad and his early years came during an afternoon in Trieste when I was twenty-two. It was while sitting in my Aunt Carola’s rose garden that I first learned of Dad’s large unknown Levantine family, and of aunts, uncles, and cousins I had never heard of. That is where I found out about the burning of Smyrna and the murders at Auschwitz; of the twenty years in Samos and the Goldstein & Galanis wine company; and of a family suicide and other secrets. After that initial shock, Dad’s road was well-marked. Sure, it was scattered with stones. But it was just a matter of lifting one stone at a time and learning one more story.

The pursuit for Mom was harder. The trips I took to find Dad were simple when compared to the ones I took to find Mom, especially to comprehend what her sudden death had wrought upon me. However cryptic Dad was and however long it took to uncover some of the secrets he had taken to his grave, his road was pretty straightforward. The journeys I made looking for Mom were not. They were as much psychological as geographic. Sure, I went to Vienna and flew back several times to Buenos Aires. The main pursuit for Mom, however, was a ten-year journey on the couch of my Freudian shrink in downtown Washington, DC. There I traveled—sometimes daily—into my own psyche. That is one of several journeys that I will tell you about.

Let me start with my sheltered European childhood. The Buenos Aires into which I was born in 1949 was a concoction of communities from around the world, mostly Italian and Spanish. Sitting by its harbor on the Río de la Plata, BA was a sprawling middle-class city of immigrants. They had come, to use their local idiom, para hacerse la America, meaning "to make one’s America." In this case the word America denoted wealth, as in "making one’s fortune." This describes nicely the sense that BA was not just paved in golden cobblestones, but that they would be there for the taking when you got off the boat. For reasons that I believe had to do with a rift between him and Grandpa, Dad had left the Levant and arrived in Argentina in 1924. He was likely enticed by wondrous tales of a country promising to become one of the world’s great economic powers. He did not know that the Argentine Belle Époque was about to end in the 1930s, and he never quite found gold among the cobblestones. Twenty years later, he met Mom there, a Viennese Jew who in 1938, in the wake of the Anschluss, the German annexation of Austria, had run to wherever she could.

We lived in a small third story walkup in Barrio Coghlan, a sleepy Buenos Aires neighborhood at the city’s edge. Like the rest of BA, Coghlan had a distinct British makeup. What the tourist guides miss when they call Buenos Aires “the Paris of South America” is that BA is more English than French. In the 19th century, the English had turned the whole country into their supplier of meat and grain, and BA into their export harbor. The Brits built the national railroads to converge on BA, where they put up a bunch of enormous glass-and-iron train terminals, meatpacking warehouses, and harbor docks. They added touches of their old country: There was in downtown BA a clock tower known during my childhood as la Torre de los Ingleses, the Tower of the English. And it sure looked like Big Ben. The only Harrods store outside of London was in BA, and that’s where I had my first haircut in 1952.

Our barrio Coghlan was no exception to this Britishness. Its  train station, Estación Coghlan, was named in honor of John Coghlan, an Irish engineer who (with all that immigrant labor) helped build Argentina’s railroads. The red and yellow station with its Victorian gingerbread awnings and narrow steel pedestrian overpass in crisscrossed, red-painted steel, still looks like it might have come from suburban Dublin. Every block of barrio Coghlan had a dozen London Plane trees with branches that were three or four stories high. They had the habit of growing into our windows and spewed so much pollen in the spring that my bedroom was seasonally covered with a yellow film. Adding to the Anglo-Saxon image, the barrio was full of street names out of a US history book. The main thoroughfare was calle Monroe and we lived a block from calle Washington. My bilingual elementary school,  the Urquiza Day School, about which I told you in my previous blog, “My Stylish Old Man,” was on calle Roosevelt.

All of this British and American patina was layered on top of the remains of old Spanish culture. The street merchants are a good example. It was the custom in the 1950s, in the quiet neighborhoods of BA, for traders to come by every day, many of them driving a horse and cart, calling out their wares and services in distinctive singsongs. If you closed your eyes you could imagine being in the middle of an 18th century colonial scene. “Lecheeeero. . . Lecheeeero!” (milkman), “Canaaastas. . .plumeeeros. . .cepiiillos!” (baskets’n brushes), “Bolsas. . .trapos. . .cosas vieeejas. . .” (bags’n rags’n old stuff). Coghlan came alive like a music box when the peddlers arrived. The live-in maids would come down from the apartments to flirt and haggle. My favorite trader was the knife sharpener and locksmith. If I had missed his call, “Cuchilleeero. . .Cerrajeeeroo.!” I could identify him from the screeches of the cutlery. The man would stop his cart and get on a contraption that looked like a modified bike, which, while pedaled, turned a sharpening stone. He would sit there sometimes for an hour or more, sweating like Lance Armstrong climbing the Alps in the Tour de France. He would go through dozens of dull knives, first on one side of the blade, then, after a quick dip in an oilcan, the other. I remember vividly the sound of the sparks.

My upbringing was as European as Mom could make it. Not just Anglo-Saxon or colonial Spanish, but as Viennese as possible. She taught me to dance on her toes to the three-quarter rhythm of her favorite Strauss and Lehar waltzes. Her most beloved melody was Wien Wien nur du allein; Vienna, Vienna, only you. She sang it with a joy so contagious that her face reappears every time I hear it. I learned the names of every Austro-Hungarian sweet she could buy at Steinhauser, her favorite European bakery in downtown BA. Sacher and Linzer Torten, Apfel Strudels, and Marillen Knödeln, apricot dumplings with sugary crumbs, were our common desserts. My birthday parties were elaborate affairs filled with balloons, magicians, and cartoons played out of a flickering 8 mm movie projector. Mom, as well as other homesick émigrés in her circle, had enrolled several of us kids in accordion classes with a blond Fräulein straight out of Wagner’s The Valkyries. With her long braid in tow, the Fräulein came home once a week to teach me waltzes and polkas.

Our European cocoon extended to a line of small rental cottages on stilts at the narrow Rama Negra river, out on the delta of the Río Paraná. The cottages were about two hours away on a river bus, which departed several times a day from its fluvial terminal north of BA. I spent many a summer weekend in our cottage by the river, surrounded by Austro-Hungarian expats and mosquitoes. Only the isleños, the islanders, or us native kids spoke Spanish there. You could walk up and down a mile of bungalows and all you heard was German in different accents—Berlin, Bavaria, Vienna—or Czech, or Yiddish. The place lacked the most basic necessities, such as electricity and running water. Dad had a Radius kerosene stove made in Sweden. It had a tiny but powerful burner, and he used it to boil water for the mates, the bitter tea he liked to slurp out of a gourd with a metal straw. By the mid 1950s Dad had been in Argentina close to thirty years and he was one of the few out on the island who had adopted local customs, like drinking mate.

Mom’s motherly embrace, however, went beyond Austro-Hungary. It was universal. Our Coghlan apartment did not have central heating and it would become quite cold on winter nights. So, she developed an established wake-up routine during my school years. She would get up ahead of everyone and warm up the bathroom with a space heater. She would then rouse me from bed, lead me into the heated room, and help me awaken in a warm hug.

Childhood with Mom was wrapped in a loving bubble with a distinct Viennese accent.  Inside the bubble lived two more women who played a central role in my upbringing. One was my maternal Grandma Rachel, Omi, as we called her and the other was our live-in maid Nilda. I will tell you more about the relation between those two in my next blog.

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The lock of hair from my first haircut at Harrods brings back the very English personality of my then Buenos Aires. It also brings back memories of Mom’s fixation with my curly hair. She used to comb it into a single long tube reaching from the back to the front of my head. My hairdo looked like a sort of pipe you could peer into and see the other side. I hated it since it made me look like a girl, but my hair pipe was her pride and joy. She played with it, showed it off to her girlfriends, and tousled it so she could then tidy it up. When I touch the lock and close my eyes, I can still feel Mom’s hands messing up my cylindrical curl, as was her habit seventy years ago.