Alice's Piano: The Life of Alice Herz-Sommer - Hardcover

ONE

Twins

“One happy, one sad...”

 
FRANTA CAME out of his employer’s office with a delivery note in his hand. A consignment of pharmaceutical scales had to be taken to the station that afternoon and put on a train for Vienna. On the way to the stables the servant paused to listen to the music coming from the drawing room of the flat in the courtyard. As she so often did after lunch, the heavily pregnant Sofie Herz was playing the piano.
Franta sat on a bench in the courtyard and looked up to the windows above. For nearly thirty years he had been employed by Herz Brothers. How many thousand times had he loaded the carriage since then, how often had he harnessed the horses and taken the consignment over the Moldau to the station? It was a part of his routine on that gray Prague morning in November 1903, like any other.
Sofie Herz was a precise interpreter of Bach. The little preludes and two-part inventions were among her favorites. In the last weeks of her confinement, however, she had often played Chopin, his poetic nocturnes and above all his sad waltzes. The melancholy melody reminded Franta of his master’s marriage in 1886. The factory director Friedrich Herz was thirty-four then, almost twice the age of his bride, Sofie.
For nights on end Sofie cried herself to sleep. Barred from marrying the man to whom she had given her heart, she dreaded her wedding day. She had fallen in love with a student her own age, who shared her love of music and literature. Finally Sofie bowed to her parents’ will. Ignatz and Fanny Schulz were prominent merchants in Iglau and now a good match needed to be found for her. According to the Ashkenazi tradition a schadchen or marriage broker had to be entrusted with the business of finding the right man. Means and possessions, social class and position, knowledge and wisdom were the basis of a reasonable marriage among schejnen leit (the right sort of people), the wealthy. It was also assumed that love would blossom soon after the wedding. Consoling her daughter, Fanny told her, “Look at those miserable people who apparently wed for love; they are fickle and their marriages frequently end up in divorce. That is the proof.”
The broker found his man 150 kilometers away from Iglau. Friedrich Herz lived in Prague, he was a well-built, good-looking man who understood responsibility. He was decent, warm-hearted, and had accumulated a modest wealth through his own industry. He was one of the most important producers of precision scales in the Habsburg Empire, from devices for goldsmiths and pharmacists to industrial scales to carry heavy weights. The only thing that the “director”—as those around him respectfully addressed him—lacked now to complete his happiness was a family. He was pleased with Sofie Schulz.
Sofie’s contrariness was clear from the start—together with her indifference to the Jewish tradition in which she had grown up. At their wedding Sofie would not listen to the badchen, the entertainer that the bridegroom and wedding guests praised and laughed with until everyone was crying their eyes out, or the Kletzmermusik. She was deaf to the proceedings and let them pass her by, as Franta now recalled. She maintained a proud and upright posture as she was solemnly enthroned in her second chair and covered with a veil. Her delicate fingers clutched the bridal stool while a cousin declaimed the rights and duties of a married woman. She looked lovely in her white lace, coldly lovely.
All eyes were on Sofie as she was led forward by her retinue under her chupe—a canopy of shining gold brocade—and handed over to her future husband, the first blessing of the rabbi and the first sip of wine: “With this ring you are sanctified by the religion of Moses and Israel,” Friedrich said as he placed the ring on her hand. She scarcely looked at her husband. Even the next seven blessings left her unaffected. The wedding guests waited in vain for the tears which would give some indication of Sofie’s emotions—all part and parcel of ancient tradition.
Another sip of wine, then the groom crushed the glass chalice underfoot to cries of “matzeltow” from the guests. Splinters bring you luck, supposedly, even when the custom recalls the expulsion of the Jews and should symbolize the smashing of their joy through banishment. Sofie looked at the smashed goblet and could only see her happiness destroyed by the man to whom she was now wed.
Franta was stirred by Sofie’s playing and respected her. She was a no-nonsense woman who spoke her mind. Sofie always had a kind word for him, perhaps because he was kind to her children, perhaps because he was the only one who recognized that behind her apparently tough facade, she knew what true beauty was. There might even have been a tacit understanding between the two of them that Franta could relax for a few minutes after his midday break and sit down on the bench in the courtyard to listen to Sofie’s playing before getting back to his job.
All of a sudden there was a smell of burning. “Fire! Fire!” shouted Franta.
Franta’s cry shattered Sofie’s concentration. She was expecting her fourth child any day. She lurched toward the window from the piano. Flames were shooting out of one of the factory buildings. Workers were rushing in all directions and gathering before the burning workshop. No one dared go in.
Friedrich Herz got up from his short siesta on the sofa when he heard cries for help. His days were as regular as clockwork. He worked from six o’clock in the morning to six o’clock at night, six days a week. At midday he interrupted his work for exactly one hour, and walked up the few steps from his office on the ground floor to his flat on the first floor where the table was laid and his family were already sitting round it waiting for him. He had remained a modest, unpretentious man, despite his rise from a meager apprentice ironmonger to a successful businessman with several dozen employees.
Little was known about his origins. His father came from the small Bohemian village of Rischkau about fifty kilometers north of Prague and was a member of its Orthodox Jewish community. Thanks to the “new liberality” permitted to the Jews after 1848, he and his family left the ghetto for the outskirts of Prague in the hope of finding work to feed his wife and seven children. He found apprenticeships for two of his sons—Friedrich and Karl—in an ironmonger’s shop. Friedrich was just twelve.
Friedrich’s success would have been unimaginable had it not been for the reforms of Emperor Joseph II. Joseph’s mother, the Empress Maria Theresa, had made the Jews the scapegoat for Austria’s poor performance in the war against Prussia and decreed that “from this moment onward no more Jews will be tolerated in the kingdom of Bohemia.”
Joseph II introduced the century of Jewish emancipation. Influenced by the European Enlightenment he issued his so-called Patent of Tolerance in 1781, first in Bohemia, and Prague in particular: the city where it is said there were more Torah rolls than in Jerusalem itself. It stipulated that “rich Jews” could lease land without interference from the guilds and they could turn their hand to trade and industry. Schools were to be established where Jews would be taught in German, for the emperor wanted to “Germanize” the elite in order to bind them politically, administratively and economically as tightly as possible to Vienna. The new Jewish upper class played a decisive part in the economic development that raised Prague from a small, provincial city to a tri-racial metropolis. By 1825, out of 550 merchants and traders 240 were of Jewish origin. Thirteen out of a total of fifty factories were in Jewish hands.
When the Jews received equal rights in 1867 their prospects once more decisively improved. Friedrich Herz had just turned fifteen and he exploited the new possibilities to the full. In the 1870s, together with his brother Karl and with the help of a private loan he created the firm Gebrüder Herz and built it up to become one of the biggest of its sort in the Empire. Karl died young, before Friedrich’s marriage.
“Fire!”
Friedrich stumbled down the stairs. Without a moment’s hesitation, he ran into the burning workshop, turned off the gas pipe, and thereby prevented the flames from consuming his life’s work.
*   *   *
A WEEK later, on 26 November 1903, Sofie went into labor. Friedrich placed great hopes on the birth of his fourth child.
Georg, the eldest son, was already fifteen and causing him concern. The child had been born with a club foot. At the beginning, Sofie had kept his disability a secret. Was it not a punishment for her frigid behavior toward her husband? Had she not threatened to throw herself out of the window shortly before the birth?
Irma was born three years later, but there was no question of a girl taking over the running of the business. The third child, Paul, was nine years younger than Irma, and his father’s favorite, but his impetuous character and his tendency to daydream led Friedrich Herz to doubt that he would ever be capable of taking over the company. Friedrich hoped that the fourth child would be a boy.
That afternoon, to the annoyance of the midwife, Friedrich Herz stuck his head through the double doors to Sofie’s bedroom again and again. It had been dark for some time, and Friedrich was pacing up and down uneasily in the flat. Finally the news of a successful birth was announced in the early evening.
“A boy?” cried Friedrich Herz, in an entreating tone.
He slumped when he heard the answer: “No, not a boy!”
With disappointment he said: “A girl...”
The midwife again said: “No.”
Not a boy and not a...