He did not realize even this modest ambition.
My father’s death left the family temporarily destitute. There seems to have been no insurance of substance. When, a few days later, I needed new footwear, because my existing shoes let in the icy cold of that terrible winter – I remember crying with the pain of it on the Ringstrasse – my mother had to get new ones for me from a Jewish charity. The family did what they could to help, but there was no money to spare. In any case, the only money she would accept as a cash gift was the ?10 which Uncle Harry sent from London. This was a far from negligible sum. Together with what was left of a publisher’s advance and a few book reviews she reckoned it would keep us for about two months.
In spite of my mother’s justified apprehensions, we had to move into the grandparents’ flat. There was nowhere else to go. The three of us slept in the small side room of the three-room apartment, and my mother had to set about earning her living. In the meantime some of her more prosperous friends saved her self-respect by disguising their help as payment for English lessons. (I am fairly sure that the first money I ever earned, which was during these months for lessons to help the daughter of one of her best friends through the entry exam for secondary school, was a tactful way of saving her the cost of my pocket money.) I do remember at least one genuine paying pupil who contributed to our income, a Miss Papazian, the daughter of an Armenian businessman.
Fortunately my mother had already built up her literary connections. Since 1924 she had relations with Rikola- Verlag (later Speidelsche Verlagsbuchhandlung), a small Viennese publishing house, which had already published what proved to be her only novel. The publisher, a Mr Scheuermann, did what he could to help. In any case he valued her as a translator. She had already translated one novel by a now forgotten mid-western Scandinavian- American writer and Scheuermann gave her a contract for another and offered to put her relations with his firm on a more permanent basis. I vaguely remember him as a tallish man with a stoop. She had also been selling short stories in the periodical market, her own or translated English ones, both in Britain and in Germany. They brought in something, though pretty certainly not a living income. (After her death my aunt Mimi, in one of her many spells of financial embarrassment, returned to trying to market my mother’s material.)
In the end she had to take a job with the firm of Alexander Rosenberg, Vienna and Budapest, representing British textile producers, presumably on the strength of her knowledge of English. She enjoyed office life, after years of solitary labour at home – she got on well with people – and besides, it gave her the chance to get away from the constant nervous tension of living at close quarters with her mother in an overcrowded flat. Until then she would escape by going to the cafe for an hour, simply to have some time of her own. I remember being taken to the office and shown off to her colleagues.
Then, at the end of 1929, she began to spit blood. By early April the doctors had collapsed one lung. For the last year and a half of her life she died slowly in a succession of hospitals and sanatoria. The exact nature of her lung disease is not clear, for I understand that it does not entirely fit the diagnosis of tuberculosis, which in those days was both common and potentially lethal. Whatever it was, medical help could not do much to slow it down. As it happened, regular paid employment had put her into the social insurance system of ‘Red Vienna’, the benefits of which she now discovered. It is impossible to imagine how her medical care could otherwise have been paid for.
Her illness transformed our situation. There was no way in which she could henceforth look after a boy of twelve and a girl of nine. Fortunately for both her children, in the spring of 1929 Sidney had finally managed to strike it rich – at least by the undemanding standards of the Hobsbaum and Grun families in the 1920s. He landed a job, insecure, imprecise but with pay and scope, in Berlin with Universal Films. This not only satisfied his lifelong ambition to be associated with the world of artistic creation, but gave him and Gretl the means to take responsibility for the half-orphaned children of his brother and her sister. We thus owe the shape of our future lives to Carl Laemmle, founder of the Hollywood star system and Universal Films. We were now split. Nancy went to Berlin immediately. I stayed in Vienna until my mother’s death in July 1931.
I do not know why. Perhaps Sidney and Gretl felt that they could not immediately cope with two additional children, or with the problem of finding at a moment’s notice a Berlin school that would suit a boy halfway through his third year at a secondary school in Vienna. It is true that my mother was patently more attached to me than to my sister, but she had got used to the thought that, as it was unlikely that she would be able to cope permanently with two children, she would have to lose them. In any case her idea had long been that, if possible, I should eventually go to England to be educated there, and to make a career as a real Englishman. Most central European middle-class Jews tended to idealize Britain, so stable, strong, boring and lacking in neuroses, not least, evidently, the Grun girls all of whom had married Englishmen. Even so, leaving marriage aside, my mother was an exceptionally passionate Anglophile. As she wrote to her sister, the mere thought that the letter she drafted for Mr Rosenberg was going to Huddersfield made her feel sentimental about England. It was she who insisted that in our house only English should be spoken, not just with my father but with her. She corrected my English and tried to expand it from the basic vocabulary of domestic communication. She dreamed that I might one day find myself in the Indian Civil Service – or rather, since I was so obviously interested in birds, in the Indian Forestry Service, which would bring me (and her) even closer to the world of her admired
Until my father’s death, these were dreams for a remote future. Now a chance to send me to England arose immediately, for her sister Mimi offered to invite me to the boarding house she and her husband had just opened in
