Jüdisches Wien [antikvár]

My Vienna Robert Schindel 1. My Vienna is a bleeding joke, a wound that won't heal. No city is funnier than Vienna, not even Tel Aviv. This city's chuckle climbs up the spiral staircase found in Vienna's very core, which leads down to the dim and distant past, winding around a non-existent spine; up the staircase out of the trap into the day in the form of a melodious belch, to be immediately consumed again in the ear canals of the Viennese. Monstrosities pile up and accumulate in minute joke-particles, embedding themselves forever in the flesh of the inhabitants. Since I was four months old, I have lived in this city on the Danube and the River Wien and I have learned this laughter from the very depths. The first fit of laughter that shot my way carried the story of the little Jewish boy who the clever nurses hid from the clutches of the Gestapo in the midst of the National Socialist public weal. There lay the black-haired, not really button-nosed infant among the blonde angels in the nursery and was called simply Franzos, whose parents, forced into hard labor, had died in a bomb attack (while his real, Jewish, communist parents were taken to Auschwitz). There he lay, next to the little Viennese sweethearts and like them, feared the iron scraps that every so often rained from the sky. And where did he lie? Not just in any old NSV nursery in Vienna was he carried, like all the others, into the bomb shelters each night, but in Leopoldstadt. Here, in what had been the heart of the Jewish quarter before the war, in the center of the Matzo island that the Viennese now christened glass-shard island, the infant, unnoticed by Hider, howled onwards to liberation. Leopoldstadt had already been an area of Jewish setdement in the dim and distant past. Back then the suburb was called "Im Werd" {island). But the extremely easygoing Emperor Leopold I threw all sixteen hundred seventy Jews out of the city and named the area henceforth Leopoldstadt, in his honor; just to open up and keep the joke bleeding. The Jews proceeded to go precisely there, right back where, astonishingly, they had been permitted to return, until they comprised seventy percent of the district. But in 1944/1945, it was just me and a few dozen other clandestine Jews that hadn't been discovered. I still live there today, in Leopoldstadt. Forty-nine times the guest was thrown out the door of the pub; the fiftieth time he came back in through the ceiling. Thus describes Jaroslav Hasek's "Schwejk."