things were getting worse by the day, the rent and phone bill were unpaid, and ‘I usually don’t even have a Schilling in the house’ and she still had no idea where the family would live when the notice to quit expired. Such was the situation when my father went out for the last time. And now he was dead. He was buried a few days later in the Jewish section of the Central Cemetery of Vienna. All I can remember of his death was a dark night when my sister and I were moved, half asleep, from our room to our parents’ bedroom to be vaguely told that something terrible had happened, and the icy wind sweeping over us at the open grave.
Perhaps this is the moment for a son to confront the difficult task of writing about his father.
The task is unusually difficult, because I have virtually no memories of him, that is to say I have clearly chosen to forget most of what I might have remembered. I know what he looked like, a medium-size sinewy man in rimless pince-nez, black hair parted in the middle, with a horizontally lined forehead, but even this impression may owe more to the camera than to my own memory. In my mental family photo album of childhood he is preserved in no more than a half-dozen or so images, all, I think, from the years at Ober St Veit: Daddy wearing a tweed suit – unusual in Vienna; Daddy taking me to an amateur football match; acting as his ball-boy at mixed-doubles tennis games somewhere on the road between our house and the Lainzer Tiergarten, the old imperial hunting ground; Daddy singing English music-hall songs; one short but radiant memory of going for a walk with Daddy on the nearby hills. Then one or two less agreeable images: Daddy trying – and evidently failing – to teach me boxing (he did not persist); and one much more specific image of Daddy in a towering rage in the garden of the Einsiedeleigasse. I must then have been in the last years of primary school, aged nine or ten. He had asked me to fetch a hammer to knock in some nail, possibly something that had come loose from a deck-chair. I was at that time passionately into prehistory, possibly because I was in the middle of reading the first volume of the trilogy Die Hohlenkinder (The Cave Children) by one Sonnleitner, in which a couple of (unrelated) Robinson Crusoe orphan children in an inaccessible alpine valley grow up to reproduce the stages of human prehistory, from palaeolithic to something like recognizable Austrian peasant life. As they were reliving the stone age, I had constructed a stone-age hammer, carefully lashed to its wooden handle in the proper manner. I brought it to him and was amazed at his furious reaction. I have since been told that he was often short-tempered with me, but if, as is likely, this was so, I have blotted it out. I have only one image of him in work. One day he brought home a device he was (as so often) unsuccessfully trying to sell, a shop-sign in which a luminous word – it might have been the name of a product or retailer – was visible on the street as reflected in a mirror. Perhaps he wanted to discuss its prospects with a visitor, which almost certainly meant his brother; for if he had any Viennese friends of his own, I cannot recall them.
Nor can I remember him by the memory of others. There were anecdotes about him in his London youth, and in Egypt, mostly to do with his physical prowess and his attraction for women (although I have never heard the faintest suggestion that he had been unfaithful to his wife). Every East End Jewish family needed at least one brother who could, as they used to say, ‘handle himself’ and stand up to the local Irish. In the Hobsbaum family this was my father’s role; and, since the ring was an accepted option for poor young East Enders, including young Jews with good muscles and quick reflexes, he became a more than useful boxer. He remained an amateur, but the visible record of his success was the two cups which he won as amateur lightweight champion of Egypt in 1907 and 1908 or thereabouts, presumably mainly against competitors from the British occupying forces. They stood on a shelf in our home – Austrian rooms, lacking fireplaces also lacked mantelpieces – and my sister, who remembered him fondly even though she was only just eight when he died, later kept them in her house. He is said on one occasion to have saved his brother Ernest, who had got into trouble swimming. My mother’s novel, which is about a young woman in pre-1914 Egypt, contains a portrait of an all-round athlete demi-god in action, which is almost certainly based on him.
However, he does not come into family anecdotes or jokes in the Vienna years. It seems clear that he did not get on well with his parents-in-law, certainly not with Grandmother Grun. Beyond this, there is very little indeed about him in my mother’s very full letters to her sister – much less than about Sidney, her brother-in-law. Nothing about his plans, his activities, his failures. Nothing about what they did or where they went together. After our parents’ death, he, or more precisely his Vienna years, were hardly talked about in Sidney and Gretl’s household. He seems to disappear from sight.
The truth is that for him the years in Vienna were a disaster. In my mother’s words: ‘So much worry, so much misery, so many disappointments, and then for it to end like that.’ With a regular salary from a regular, not too demanding, job he would have been a happy man, a charming companion, an asset in any milieu that appreciated sport, a little music and fun. Such things were available to men without means or professional qualifications in the formal or informal outposts of the British Empire but not in postwar Vienna. Perhaps, in the distant, irrecoverable world before 1914, he would have been found some job in or through the then prosperous network of the grandparents’ families. After all, one has to do something for one’s daughter’s husband, even if he is a bit of a
He did not leave much behind except his boxing cups, his season ticket, with photo ID, for the Vienna transport system and a substantial collection of English books, mostly the paperbacks produced by the German firm of Tauchnitz for sale exclusively outside Britain, and therefore, I assume, acquired in Egypt. I cannot recall any new Tauchnitzes coming into the house in Vienna, but perhaps that was because there was no money for them. As I recall, they were mostly late Victorian and Edwardian titles, a lot of Kipling stories (but not
However, I still have one of the few surviving documents of his life. It is a 1921 entry in one of his sister-in- law’s confessional albums, those sets of answers to questions about oneself which were still popular, at least in central Europe. I reprint the questions and answers. They may serve as his epitaph.
