The World of Yesterday Read Online Free Page A

the mere thought of asking someone a favour is enough—even if my request were to be made through a third party—to make my mouth dry up before uttering thefirst word. I know that such inhibitions are out of tune with the times, in a world where we can remain free only through cunning and evasion, and where, as Goethe wisely said, “in the general throng, many a fool receives decorations and titles.” But my father in me, with his secret pride, makes me hold back, and I cannot resist him. After all, it is my father I have to thank for what I feel is, perhaps, my one secure possession: my sense of inner freedom.
     
    My mother, whose maiden name was Brettauer, was not of the same origin. Hers was an international family. She was born in Ancona in Italy, and Italian and German had both been the languages of her childhood. When she was discussing something with her mother, my grandmother or her sister, and they did not want the servants to know what they were saying, they would switch to Italian. From my earliest youth I was familiar with risotto, artichokes (still a rarity in Vienna at the time) and the other specialities of Mediterranean cookery, and whenever I visited Italy later I immediately felt at home. But my mother’s family was not by any means Italian, and saw itself as more cosmopolitan than anything else. The Brettauers, who had originally owned a bank, came from Hohenems, a small town on the Swiss border, and spread all over the world at an early date on the model of the great Jewish banking families, although of course on a much smaller scale. Some went to St Gallen, others to Vienna and Paris. My grandfather went to Italy, an uncle to New York, and these international contacts gave the family more sophistication, a wider outlook, and a certain arrogance. There were no small tradesmen in the family, no brokers, they were all bankers, company directors, professors, lawyers and medical doctors; everyone spoke several languages, and I remember how naturally the conversation around my aunt’s table in Paris moved from one language toanother. It was a family that thought well of itself, and when a girl from one of its poorer branches reached marriageable age, everyone contributed to providing her with a good dowry so that she need not marry ‘beneath herself’. As a leading industrialist, my father was respected, but my mother, although theirs was the happiest of marriages, would never have allowed his relations to consider themselves the equals of hers. It was impossible to root out the pride of their descent from a ‘good family’ from the Brettauers, and in later years, if one of them wanted to show me particular goodwill, he would condescend to say, “You’re more of a Brettauer really”, as if stating approvingly that I took after the right side of my family.
    This kind of distinction, claimed for themselves by many Jewish families, sometimes amused and sometimes annoyed my brother and me, even as children. We were always hearing that certain persons were ‘refined’, while others were less so. Enquiries were made about any new friends of ours—were they from a ‘good family’?—and every ramification of their origins in respect of both family and fortune was investigated. This constant classification, which was in fact the main subject of all family and social conversations, seemed to us at the time ridiculous and snobbish, since after all, the only difference between one Jewish family and another was whether it had left the ghetto fifty or a hundred years ago. Only much later did I realise that this idea of the ‘good family’, which seemed to us boys the farcical parody of an artificial pseudo-aristocracy, expresses one of the most mysterious but deeply felt tendencies in the Jewish nature. It is generally assumed that getting rich is a Jew’s true and typical aim in life. Nothing could be further from the truth. Getting rich, to a Jew, is only an interim stage, a means to his real end, by