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Chapter 7

The Prisoner

I found them unintentionally—but have unknowingly been searching for them all along. Something found by accident is often the result of a long, subconscious search.

The Jewish youth of Vienna.

It has been difficult, during my first few hectic days in Vienna, to turn heart and mind to more serious matters. The wonders of technology, the new twelve tone chromatic music, Mimi Shorp, Max Reinhardt’s plays performed by Paula Wessely.¹ The man who can turn from all this richness and search the icy wastes to examine Viennese Jewish youth is capable of discovering the philosopher’s stone.

But a real Jew neither slumbers nor sleeps.² Someone regurgitated that neglected classic “The Jewish Pig” at me a day or two ago, while I was taking a quiet walk in the Hofburg Palace (the devil knows how he found out that I was a Jew, and a pig to boot!?). As a response, I immediately set out to visit the grave of Benjamin Ze’ev Herzl.³

I knew the Jewish youth of Vienna before the war very well: typical Jewish assimilationists, whose desire to blend in at any cost was exceeded only by their Hungarian brethren. That same Viennese Jewish youth who were privileged like no other, in that Theodor Herzl lived amongst them, but who ignored him and treated him as if he didn’t exist: Herzl, whose dream of a Jewish State continues after his death.

That same thoughtless Viennese Jewish youth known and beloved by all.

However, a couple of things have changed during the past seventeen years.

Have they influenced the Children of Israel in the glorious city of Vienna?

I go out looking.

I find—Oh, what I find!

I find a Jewish Labor Federation, Hebrew club, Zionist Federation, Keren Kayemet (Jewish National Fund) office, young men and women speaking Hebrew, organizing Hebrew gatherings, arguing and debating, giving and listening to lectures in Hebrew. I even find a Hebrew newspaper—created with great effort—but a newspaper, nevertheless, which is published and distributed.⁴

I find real Hebrew schools, with principals who speak fluent Hebrew, using beautiful modern Sephardic pronunciation

All this is true. However, it’s not Vienna’s Jewish youth who have changed or improved. All these recent changes have occurred through the influence of Galicia. Those same Galician Jews who, even now, express and retain amity, honor, and respect for His Majesty Kaiser Joseph and meticulously teach Hebrew culture in his capital city. Excellency Pilsudski shouldn’t dare turn his nose up at those Galician Jews now under his rule.⁵ Politics and culture are two completely separate things. “The Old Gentleman” was never a political issue in Galicia, was he? Who can deny that Franz Joseph knew the entire Old Testament by heart in its original Hebrew? In Galicia, every young child as well as his favorite teddy bear was aware of it. I suggest that Excellency Pilsudski grow splendid golden whiskers like Franz Joseph, to help him become Jew-friendly—something so necessary to the vigorous development of his country.⁶ In and outside the Land of Israel, for example, we are well acquainted with the significance of Herzl’s beard. . . .

Surely the whole world knows that Franz Joseph’s whiskers facilitated friendly relations between the snobbish Viennese Jews and our Galician brethren, who now smuggle the new Jewish culture into the city via Poland.⁷

If it really is true that there are currently about 4,000 Hebrew speakers in Vienna—I doubt that these include even ten indigenous Viennese Jews.

So what is really happening to the Jewish youth of Vienna? Are they really carrying on as if nothing had happened before? Have they really simply ignored the world conflagration, the Bolshevik Revolution and civil war, the Balfour Declaration, the pioneer immigration to the Land of Israel, and the rise of Adolf Hitler?⁸

This question occupies me on my way back from the cemetery to my pension. On my return, the proprietress tells me that a charming young girl (ein nettes Mädel) has been waiting for me for about fifteen minutes.

She is a young dark-haired girl of about nineteen, with thick, spiky hair, dressed in a pioneer’s blouse and sandals without socks. She has all the simplicity of a typical sabra—so much so that I address her in Hebrew. She smiles and tells me that she neither speaks nor understands a word of Hebrew. Her aunt, who travelled on the same ship as I did, has told her that I am currently in Vienna, and she wants to discuss “various things” with me.

He name is Hilda.

Her parents are extremely wealthy: her father—a builder—owns eight homes in Vienna.

Her mother is a prototypical rich Jewish European matron, spending her spare time and energy doing charitable and benevolent work. She is a strong, handsome woman with energy to spare, who spends most of her time assisting the sick and unfortunate. However, she doesn’t do this by cadging from others.

By contrast, the money comes from her own pocket, and she takes a personal interest in everything. She spends all day running, organizing and overseeing everything, because she worries that all must be done correctly, and refuses to delegate. She dresses like a queen, but wealth doesn’t spoil her good taste.

Voilà Hilda’s mother!

Hilda is her only child.

Hilda is a nineteen-year-old university student.

Hilda already has a child.

Hilda is already divorced from her young husband, who suffers from an incurable disease.

Hilda’s parents live prosperously and treat her with great generosity. All the treasures of Vienna are open to her: the latest fashions in store windows, jewelry, all the beauty of the twentieth century, regardless of price, beckons—and yet she walks around in the cheap, worn blouse of a pioneer, who has lived in Israel for a decade or more.

She wants to speak to me about “various things.”—But nothing that she has said so far makes sense.

She is astonishingly intelligent, wise beyond her years, and uncomfortably beautiful.

One thing that she says is clear—despite her rich and cultured life in Vienna, she says tearfully that she yearns for “something different.” What does this mean? She has no idea.

“How can it be possible just to live like this?”

I begin to examine the overtones of what she has said, beginning with a detailed but careful conversation about Zionism. Her penetrating knowledge of the Zionist idea and the Land of Israel is a great surprise. She knows practically everything on the subject.

This seems to approximate what she is looking for, but not exactly.

Is she a character out of a story by Berdyczewski?⁹

No—she is too healthy for that.

“Why did you marry so young? Was it out of love?”

“Not exactly. There was another motive.”

Further examination determines that this “motive” was an effort to “redirect her life” at the age of seventeen.

Quite naturally, the beautiful child born of her love union didn’t help at all.

“The child will become as lost as I am, in this disgusting place.”

“Why don’t you immigrate to Israel?”

She looks at me with sad eyes, wise beyond her years, and smiles mockingly:

“You know what is happening there. All the news from there reaches us, though not through official channels. I hope that you don’t have the same stale ideas, because it isn’t worth it. I’m looking for something else from you, because I cannot find a place for myself here.”

“I can’t suggest anything else but the kevutza.¹⁰

She looks at me with the same smile, compresses her lips, and nods her head. It takes a few moments before she says to me:

“You talk about a kevutza as if there were only one type of communal settlement in Israel. I cannot be torn between two ideals such as these, both of which not only allow, but even encourage, mutual hatred. We cannot allow war between our youth: it’s disgusting to be young and hate at the same time. Good Lord! Is there any other example of a divided youth in an occupied country?

‘“Hate’ is a luxury a nation can only afford when conditions improve. If Jews need something to hate—let it be the Hitlerites, not one another.”¹¹

Dinnertime.

We get up—the girl stands up straight, young, hale, and hearty:

“Oh, sir, if only a Jewish dictator would arise from our midst!—Someone like Moses our teacher—preaching the renewed commandment: ‘You shall love your brother as yourself!’”¹²

We leave the room. Suddenly, she bursts out:

“If ‘free love’ reigns supreme in the kevutza, why not also like one another?”

We sit down for dinner.

The Austrian maidservant Anini—a well-rounded, jolly woman of about thirty—serves the food, with a kindly smile for everyone. She has worked here for many years and is treated as family. She is like a sister to the proprietress, and a young mother to the children. Each domestic servant is treated in the same way. The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, Red Budapest, and their aftermaths, have not arrived here, at least not yet.

I enquire how things were during the revolution in Vienna that deposed the monarchy and split up the former empire. They all say the same thing, each one in their own way:

“No one can be forced into madness.”

“We agree. If the Communists come, where is it written that we will necessarily become like them? We are not simple thieves.”

“They have naturally already ‘confiscated’ everything they could. What happens now if the charity of the rich is taken away as well!?”

“Even my son or husband wouldn’t give me what I get here,”—the old (female) caretaker says.

“Behold our ‘kevutza,’” the young girl says, mouth stuffed with stewed fruit.

After dinner the girl disappears into her lair.

After a while I go in and join her there. She is sitting studying.

Her parents have arranged a special study for her in a wing of the large house—a little palace with facilities that I could only dream of.

“Look, sir, how we have given her the room of a princess,” the mother says to me.—“But, despite all, she says she is suffering and imprisoned, although she could fly away and disappear at any moment.”

I talk to her again:

“If this is the case, why are you studying?”

“Who knows where fate will take me?—More than anything, I’d like to become part of one of the equatorial African tribes. There at least I can be sure that there is no intertribal hatred—at least not hatred caused by ideals.—And there I won’t be in a country of free elections and [free] love.”

When we part, I silently shake her hand.

She looks at me for a few minutes and bursts out:

“What don’t you understand? I want to work, work and love, love! I want to love and not to hate! I spit on all the world’s ideals, if they are not founded on universal Love, Love with a capital ‘L’!! A glorious, loving dictator must come and redeem me from my prison cell!”

Sitting in the trolley car, I can still see her beautiful, limpid, loving eyes.

I carry with me a new program for our youth in Israel—Love.

Does wonderful, naïve Hilda realize that there is another kind of hatred, different from the one which flows from instinctual, primitive nature? A hate that comes as a direct result of war over the Eternal Ideal—a reciprocal hatred between optimistic intellectuals who believe in humanity and a future better than the past—and those pessimists with failed instincts, who simply adapt to existing conditions, and only believe in man’s baser “nature”?

What dictator could differentiate between the two kinds of hatreds, and determine the razor-thin red line between objective intellectual hatred that is time-oriented and central to the war for good; and the natural, subjective, hatred present but concealed in all men, not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself. Is this primitive hatred? Does idealism necessitate hate?

Is it possible to fight for a good and noble cause without hate?

Yes—a father’s war against his son’s immorality.

But how can one raise every partisan political fighter to the level of father?