J. D. Salinger_ A Life - Kenneth Slawenski [10]
After brief stops in London and Paris, he traveled to Vienna. There he spent ten months living in the city’s Jewish quarter with a family that he quickly came to adore and with whose daughter he experienced his first serious romance. We know little of Salinger’s Austrian “family,” only that he idealized them to the extent that they would be symbols of purity and integrity for the rest of his life. Salinger would often look back upon them with increasing idealism, comparing life with his own family to the domestic bliss he encountered in Vienna. To Ernest Hemingway he later recalled memories of the innocent beauty of the family’s daughter. When gripped by despondency after the war, he returned to Austria in vain to seek her out. In 1947, he immortalized her and her family in his story “A Girl I Knew.”
While Salinger was pursuing his Austrian romance, his Polish sponsor, Oskar Robinson, died of a heart attack in a Vienna casino, reportedly while winning at the roulette table, and Salinger was sent north to the Polish town of Bydgoszcz, where he stayed in a guest apartment of Robinson’s meatpacking factory and experienced the more basic side of his father’s import business.* This included getting up before dawn and toiling with peasants in the city slaughterhouse. Each morning, Salinger would trudge off to butcher pigs destined for the American market as “canned picnic hams.” He was accompanied by the head “slaughter master,” who enjoyed shooting his gun into lightbulbs, over the heads of squealing swine, and at birds that dared cross his path. It quickly dawned on Jerry that whatever the life of a meat exporter might involve, pigs held sway over much of it. If Salinger learned anything in Poland, it was that he was not suited for his father’s line of work.
In 1944, Salinger maintained that, in an attempt to apprentice him to the family business, his parents had “dragged [him] off” to “slaughter pigs” in Poland.19 In 1951, the New Yorker editor William Maxwell concluded that although Salinger hated his father’s attempted solution to his problems, “there is no experience, agreeable or otherwise, that isn’t valuable to a writer of fiction.”20 Furthermore, it is impossible to view Salinger’s year in Europe outside the context of the times. The atmosphere of menace so pervasive in Austria and Poland while Salinger was living there certainly had a profound effect upon the aspiring young writer and would stain even his fondest memories of those places with connecting sorrows.
Salinger’s stay occurred at a crucial moment in history. In 1938, Europe was spiraling headlong toward the Second World War. During the months he lived in Vienna, Austrian Nazis were bullying their way to power and Nazi thugs released from prison regardless of their offense freely terrorized the streets of Vienna. Passersby suspected of Jewish descent were forced to scrub the gutters to the mocking jeers of spectators, while Jewish homes and businesses were ransacked by marauding gangs. Witnessing this nightmare, Salinger’s feelings of personal peril were outweighed by his fears for his adopted Vienna family. He himself could leave this dangerous place, but his hosts had nowhere to go. Before Salinger returned home to New York, German forces had entered Vienna and Austria had ceased to exist as a nation. By 1945, every member of Salinger’s Austrian family had been murdered in the Holocaust.
Arriving in Poland, Salinger entered a nation as tense as Austria had been perilous. Surrounded by enemies, Poland was cloaked in a feeling of unease that he