Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [20]
FAVOURITE SPORT: Boxing
FAVOURITE GAME: Bridge
HOW DO YOU LIVE? Quietly
YOUR TEMPERAMENT AND CHIEF CHARACTERISTIC: False idealist. Tendency to dream.
MOTTO: Sufficient for the day and perhaps a little over.
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 café 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