Beyond Berggasse

Joe Reich

Description

Beyond Berggasse is a story that takes the reader deep into the heady world of war, Zionism, salons, writers, artists, sexual awakening and the randomness of tragedy and redemption that follow.

In late nineteenth century Vienna, Moritz, a young man from a well-to-do Jewish family, lives in the shadow of his older brother. Afflicted by a birthmark which in ancient times would have seen him left out for the wolves, he tries to retreat into a world of reading and writing. But unable to escape the ‘target on his face’, as his father calls it, Moritz is forced by his impatient nation into war.

Beyond Berggasse has a dual structure. It starts in 1898 in Vienna and continues until the end of the First World War before jumping to the modern day, when we meet the grandchildren of the brothers from Vienna.

Full of rich details about a time of profound change and upheaval in Vienna’s cultural life, we meet such luminaries as Klimt, Mahler, Zweig, Herzl, Schiele and many more in a blend of historical fact and imaginative recreation.

Sujets

• Historical
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Hybrid Publishers
• Date de parution: 01 juillet 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781925736960
• Langue: English

Extrait

BEYOND BERGGASSE
Joe Reich is a practising ophthalmologist in Melbourne whose writing was encouraged by being a finalist in the Womens Weekly Short Story competition. He has been involved in writing university and hospital revues and comedy debates.
He was awarded the Member of the Order of Australia for his services to ophthalmology.
Also by Joe Reich
I Know Precious Little
Book of the Weak
Building Bridges
My Sack Full of Memories (with Zwi Lewin)
Ein Stein

Published by Hybrid Publishers
Melbourne Victoria Australia
Joe Reich 2023
This publication is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests and inquiries concerning reproduction should be addressed to the Publisher, Hybrid Publishers, PO Box 52, Ormond, Victoria, Australia 3204.
www.hybridpublishers.com.au
First published 2023

ISBN: 9781925736953 (p) 9781925736960 (e)
Cover design: Gittus Graphics Typeset in Minion Pro
Front cover image: The Family ( Die Familie ), oil painting by Egon Schiele, 1918
Dedicated to
Debra Shulkes
1976-2022

1
In a home where the loudest sound was the strangled coo of the cuckoo clock, a cry had Anna run from her bedroom, school dress unbuttoned, hair unkempt. Looking like the wild-eyed child she never was.
Aaaah
The boy was sitting against the corridor wall, hand to his chest.
Scheisse, Scheisse . I ll kill Emil. He trembled as he lowered his fist. Anna, look Scheisse .
Moritz, Moritz, what has happened?
Moritz was also partly dressed. Untucked long-tailed shirt, calf-length shorts, yet no stockings. Unlike Anna, the boys never seemed to feel the chill. With his back to the wall, he appeared to have been flung from his room and was groaning deeply like an injured dog.
Anna knelt beside him, a thirteen-year old ministering to the brother more than two years her senior. He was wincing as he unwound his fingers.
Marie! she called. His hand is so burnt. What should we do?
Marie s head poked out of a door at the end of the corridor, and she appeared in the hall in her freshly starched apron.
No ice today, just cold water.
Anna scurried to the kitchen herself and promptly returned with a sloshing enamel pot into which she guided his hand. She smiled to herself, tempted to say how his splayed fingers looked like a paralysed octopus under the water. Instead, she asked again, Moritz, what has happened?
Our idiot brother electrified my door handle. Listen! You can hear him laughing. Moritz paused and then yelled in the direction of Emil s door, You may think it s funny You you are a
Before Moritz could find a suitable insult, Anna leapt up and banged on the door.
Emil, what have you done to Moritz? You could have killed him with your silly electricity.
Nonsense, came the muffled reply. It s only hand-cranked. Moritz once more is being a baby. Wait until he s in the army.
Moritz had experienced pain before. The lancing of a boil, the searing stab in his neck while pinned under the doctor s knee. The dentist s twisting pliers followed by the nauseating taste of blood. But the electricity had been even worse, being unexpected. The spasm had made him grasp the door handle even tighter while all that time his mind was begging him to let go, the smell of burning flesh preceding the pain. Hand-cranked , Emil had said but Moritz knew enough to understand that his return barefoot from the bathroom with damp hands might have contributed to his injury.
No, he thought. This time he would not excuse Emil.
Katya the cook ventured out, her apron already food spattered.
Burnt, hey? My mother swore by her cures I reckons it was mostly linseed oil a dash of vinegar.
Moritz looked up.
Katya. Please you re not making a salad.
Anna gently took his hand from the water. The blisters were ballooning. Shall I call Dr Feingold?
Moritz felt the start of a cold sweat at the mention of the family doctor, who offered only two treatments: cupping or the lance.
He clambered to his feet. Anna, he said sternly. Get me a knife. I m going to make Emil pay for this.
No, no, you mustn t! Anna shrieked. We cannot lose another one of us. And it s you who ll have to live with it forever.
Moritz noted that though his cries had summoned Anna, his father, at the other end of the long corridor, had continued with his morning preening. His face was lit by the gas lamp and doubled by his mirrored reflection. A disapproving shake of the head confirmed he was not deaf - just not one to break from his routine for something as trivial as his son s pain.
Moritz followed Anna to the kitchen, wiping the tears from his face with his uninjured hand.
2
Moritz was not surprised at his father s response. Any noise from his children and Father would lift his head and look at the ceiling, staring as if he had the powers to see through the plaster, the laths, the horsehair, beyond the beams supporting the floor into the home above, even beyond their polished floors.
Steinbach, is all he would say. A reverence mixed with jealousy, as Steinbach had been a minor government minister, the conversion to Catholicism absolving his Jewish origins. The man really was above them, not even tipping his hat to Father.
Their two homes were the only whole floor dwellings in the building, a doppelg nger of each other. The Steinbachs let all know that theirs was superior.
Father would say to whoever would listen, Of course ours is the better, we only have the single flight of stairs to our door, we have steps to the rear garden and our own coal cellar.
Moritz would agree, but then the next level up had an inviting balcony, a spiral wrought-iron staircase to the shared garden, windows further from the noise and smells of the street, and didn t they both have their own coal chute?
Neither had been to the other s apartment so sight unseen, Father was gradually buying the sort of furniture a Steinbach might own. However, neither denied that the upper floors with their multiple smaller dwellings were simply not their sort of people .
Moritz had ventured up the stairs and once glimpsed into the Steinbach s door. How strange it was to see the unfamiliar as familiar. As a boy he had often sat inside his front door, reading and listening. The trudging of the postman who cursed at each step, the heaving and banging of walls by men carting furniture, the giggle and gossip of the servants.
The upperer , the higher neighbours, as Father called them, those familiar strangers, knew their place for they were like Trappist monks, silent as they passed their door.
Whenever his father rolled his eyes, Moritz wanted to say, You should complain about his noise, for old man Steinbach used a brass-tipped walking stick, the ghostly tap, tap, tapping enough to make one scream in frustration.
This day there was no sound from above. Moritz could hear the clipping of his father s high boots down the wooden hallway. They stopped well short of the kitchen. His brother, voice deep and slow, spoke first.
Father, you don t understand what it s like at the Academy. The other boys are cruel about any kind of difference. Any kind. It s bad enough we re known to be Jews and our family is still new to Vienna, our father a tailor. With Moritz, of course, it s his affliction.
Emil, I m not a tailor but the proprietor of an emporium on the Mariahilfer Strasse. I have been honoured by the Emperor himself.
Apologies, Father, but I believe we need to toughen Moritz up I played a practical joke.
The joke, Emil, what is the joke? Tell me. Would I laugh?
This box is a dynamo. I made it myself. I turn this handle and out comes electricity. I simply attached this wire to the door handle and
Electricity! You could have killed your brother.
Hardly Just a little shock.
Emil, enough of your tomfoolery! I was working at your age. Stick to your studies. I must get on with my day.
Moritz guessed that his father, who was in awe of Emil, had simply shrugged then to indicate all was forgiven. Naturally the first son was favoured over the disfigured one.
His father was more offended by being called a tailor, he thought, than by the tormenting of his younger son. Still, in Moritz s mind, these priorities were correct; all of Vienna knew about Wenzel von Ofner s emporium, located midway between the massive Herzmansky and Gerngross department stores. The emporium itself had two glossy brass-framed front-facing windows, one of which displayed men s suits and the other officers uniforms. Gilded letters the same height as those at the department stores proclaimed Wenzel in one window and von Ofner in the other to direct customers to either display.
I m going to Wenzel s and I m off to von Ofner s were the pleasing refrains Moritz s father reported hearing on the city streets.
He created and sold fashionable garb worn by the fl neurs who strolled the nearby Ring Strasse on fine evenings. The emporium s stock was so up-to-date that its displays reflected what the actors were wearing in the latest premiere at the Hofburgtheater. Moritz knew his father found little pleasure in the plays themselves, but instead delighted in the width or height of a collar, the splash of colour in a cravat, the cut of a trouser leg. Moritz had given up asking about the plays after his father had responded one last time: It was excellent. The lead actor was wearing a square-cut jacket.
The store also made military uniforms. Army reservists had to supply their own uniform to a prescribed pattern. Wenzel was already making Emil a new uniform.
Why bother? Moritz had asked. Emil has hardly creased his old uniform and he certainly hasn t grown in the last year.
It s a way of showing the improvements our tailors can offer. The fabric is finer yet stronger. We use real gold thread as the braid. Here, he said, opening a small leather pouch he extracted from his fob pocket, is on