failure of pride

I am curious why I have, of late, preferenced the poverty and lowliness of my ancestry. On my mother's side, my people weren't so poor. Some sense of this lingered in her sometimes exaggerated sense of status - exacerbated by delusional mental illness, but not founded on nothing. Her father lost the bulk of his inherited wealth in the financial crash that came before 1926, the year in which my mother was born. 1926 would not have been a good year for my Swiss grandparents: already poor, with one child, they had twin girls. My mother's fate, as unwelcome number 3, was sealed; she got the leftovers of everything, so grew up with a sense of being worth less than everyone else. No wonder she left when she could.
She often spoke with pride of her own great aunt. Mädi, I think she was known as; she was featured in a national magazine as Kanton Bern's only woman pig farmer. And she was wealthy, as was the rest of that generation of family. My grandfather was given a sizeable chunk of land on the Rheinbank in Neuhausen-am-Rheinfall as his wedding gift. It was this land that allowed him to survive the financial ruin of the '20's. Initially farmed, it was gradually sold off, eventually leaving only the plot of number 10 Flurlingerweg which had on it two houses, my grandparents' house and one they rented to a couple. In 1974 when I worked in Switzerland the couple were still there and welcoming and remembered my mother. Both houses are gone now.
I have random memories all the time, some aspect of wandering brain activity that comes with age. I remember standing with my mother, must have been in the early '70's, on the street in front of the beautiful shaded house, and my mother asking for some plums from the trees planted there. Her father had planted the trees. Now years later I can feel her pain.

unattached

This is the time when I am trying to make work from my own initiative; this is proving difficult. It is no longer work suggested by anyone else, it is not in response to anyone's impulse, it is not to deadline,it is not part of a group agenda ... it is difficult.

Komarom

Komarom is a border town in NorthWest Hungary. It's in that indistinct corner where the country might be Austria or Czechoslovakia as was.
I've been reading "The Hare with the Amber Eyes"; I tripped over the name Komarom in the summary of what happened to the writer's relations from this place, an entrainment point for Auschwitz, and, as ever, I felt that sickening rush of heat and quickened heartbeat, that feeling of fearing to read on or turn the page in case I see the personal name of my father in conjunction with some atrocity. It is an absurd and exaggerated reaction, yet I can't help wondering ... Komarom was at least one place where he served as a Royal Hungarian Gendarme.
I have read de Waal's book with mixed feelings, feelings I've had in relation to other similar books as well. This excellent piece of scholarship unpeels event by event the dismantling of a Jewish family through the twists of the early twentieth century, the chapters on the consequences of Anschluss make grim reading. But here's my problem: it's difficult, even impossible, to give substance to the diasporic experience of ordinary people. De Waal's family were sufficiently grand to leave behind records of visits to the opera. Who recorded my grandparents' visits to the cowshed? Or that of the millions displaced and traumatised? And I'm not Jewish. My parents' experience and my experience of them, my post-memory, has no easy slot, precisely because it is a history of ordinary people. And even worse, my father was on the "wrong" side in so many different ways: Czechoslovak born Hungarian siding with Nazi Germany in the hope of retrieving lost land, a Royal Hungarian Gendarme signed up in the last months of immiment defeat but at the very time when deportations to the gas chambers escalated; no tale of the Shoah does not single out the Hungarian Gendarmes for ruthless brutality.
So de Waal's book is one I can read and pity the lot of his disposessed baronial family but ultimately it is not my story. Who wants to read that the pain of ordinary people, even those on the losing side is as great as that of princes?

tulips

My mother sometimes drew or painted.
It was a random activity, some creative impulse that needed an outlet; she was generally too crazy in later years to really concentrate on anything sustained, though she still knitted socks, thick woollen bedsocks in garish colours.
She was excellent at handwork, stitching and knitting shen she was young.

anniversary

7th May is the anniversary of my mother's death. Remembering this is not a symptom of morbidity but an acknowledgement that she lived, and dying is the last thing we do. Only a year after her death my father forgot; on that occasion we dragged him out for a meal but never again in subsequent years. It meant nothing to him. It means nothing to me in itself but yet it is a marker for the years that have followed. The more time passes since my parents' deaths the more real they become; for a while they were gone and I mourned them. Now, sometimes, I trip myself up thinking I might just run over to Slough. I can hear the click and echo of particular doors and smell the food frying in the kitchen; it is part day-dream, part hallucination. I can hear the fighting and sense the fear, different fears for all of us: my own fear of violence, my mother's fear of the empty nights, my father's fear of survival. We stowed these fears away privately, harboring them; sometimes they still escape as irrational behaviour even now, many years later. My daughter doesn't fear being alone in our house at night; I'm not very good at this, it's the time when old fears surface.

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