MY GRANDFATHER’S PAPERS

Hansi doesn’t write much about his childhood. He mainly describes his youthful transgressions since school hardly interested him. In 1931, barely six years old, he went to the elementary school on Kleine Sperlgasse in Vienna’s second district. He got bad grades from the very start. It wasn’t for lack of intelligence, teachers lamented, but rather his defiance and refusal to bow to authority. When he felt attacked, he quickly became angry. He wanted freedom—to play soccer, clamber over fences, and explore the narrow side streets, hidden courtyards, and nearby park, the Viennese Prater. On one foray he ended up at the children’s outdoor pool at Franz-Josefs-Kai, but only after it had closed for the day. He was sent to juvenile court and got away without punishment. Another time he was caught playing soccer in a park where it wasn’t allowed and his parents had to pick him up at the police station.

Hansi insists he wasn’t rebelling against his parents; he just liked testing limits. He knew the family would never deprive him of its close affection and love: “They scolded and thundered at us, but we could always count on them, and always knew the family had a safety net ready to catch us.”

Hansi’s parents, Rosa and Moritz Bustin, ran a furniture shop on Margaretenstrasse in the fifth district. It was Rosa’s dowry. Moritz—who came from a German-speaking family in Uherský Brod, Moravia, and then moved to Vienna after serving on the front during World War I—oversaw the daily operations. Hansi’s papers don’t say how his parents met. On October 18, 1925, the day he was born, Rosa and Moritz had already been married for two years. And in January 1928 they had a second child, Herbert.

Hansi and his parents, Moritz and Rosa Bustin, circa 1930.

Hansi describes his father as charming, poised, and cheerful. He always had a well-groomed mustache. Hansi inherited not only Moritz’s narrow face, black hair and eyes, and Mediterranean-looking olive skin, but also a love of good craftsmanship. My great-grandfather enjoyed working in the shop—he was handy and did many repairs himself. His hobbies included soccer and photography. He documented family trips to the Vienna Woods, their summer vacations in Bad Vöslau, their two sons playing in the courtyard. Sometimes he took Hansi to international soccer tournaments.

My great-grandmother Rosa was intelligent and engaged, read books, and went to concerts. There were times she hardly spoke, grew introspective, reflective, and a little sad. “My mother had the brains in the family,” Hansi writes. “She could always see things clearly.” Was it a happy marriage? Hansi notes that his father often wasn’t there during summer vacation. Under the pretense of having to tend to the family business, he supposedly had a few affairs. Hansi only heard this many years later, from distant relatives. Was it true? We can’t be certain.

Things felt harmonious on the home front, in any case, says Hansi, and his parents didn’t argue in front of the children. He suspects his mother never knew of her husband’s philandering, but can’t be sure: “As a child, you can’t really know your parents,” he surmises.

The furniture business was brisk enough that the family could afford a large apartment in the second district, near the city center. Wandering in search of the address on a short, oneway lane called Schöllerhofgasse, I get a bit lost. It parallels Taborstrasse, and I’m amazed how close it is to places I know well. It’s right near the subway station at Schwedenplatz, a spot bustling with people at all hours. It’s also close to the Danube Canal and the waterfront promenade where I often take walks and go jogging. At one end of the lane lies a residential complex built in the 1960s; before that, it had housed the two-story Biedermeier apartment building where my grandfather grew up.

This reminds me of a story my aunt once told me: in 1966, when she was a teenager, she drove to the airport with her father—my grandfather, Hansi—to pick up a friend. My aunt was sitting in the back seat of the car, with a cast on her leg and crutches at her side. Another driver cut them off on the highway, whereupon Hansi followed him to the airport, got out, grabbed one of the crutches, and held it like a baseball bat as he threateningly went over to the other vehicle. The driver was so intimidated that Hansi’s anger disappeared as quickly as it had come. I look at the place he grew up, in a building long since demolished, and try to reconcile this anecdote with the kind grandfather I remember from my childhood. I wonder whether I even knew my grandfather in the slightest—or will ever be able to understand who he was.

In the apartment in the building that doesn’t exist anymore, there was a bathroom with running water and a tall copper boiler—both rare novelties for the twenties. Hansi and his brother, Herbert, played soccer in the spacious anteroom—because the floor below housed a grain company warehouse, nobody complained about noise. The family had a cook as well as a nanny to look after Hansi and Herbert. The division of labor wasn’t without conflict. It seems the cook had a soft spot for the two boys, or she just wanted to make life difficult for the nanny: “There was constant bickering over the scope of their duties, which we kids really enjoyed,” Hansi writes.

The family stayed in close contact with Rosa’s two sisters. Rosa, Hansi’s mother, was born in Vienna and had lost her mother when she and Frieda, her identical twin sister, were thirteen. Their eighteen-year-old sister, Sophie, then the oldest woman in the house, felt responsible for her siblings. Their father—who had left Poland for Vienna as a teenager, spoke German with a Viennese dialect, and had achieved a middle-class lifestyle through the furniture business—soon remarried. The three sisters’ aversion to their stepmother brought them even closer together.

Just like Rosa’s, Sophie and Frieda’s dowries also included one of their father’s furniture shops. Both were located on side streets off Landstrasser Hauptstrasse, the main commercial thoroughfare in the third district, near the city center. The sisters bore children in short order: Frieda’s daughter was three years older, Sophie’s son two years older, and her daughter nine months younger than Hansi. Five children in all, and they grew up like siblings.

Every Sunday the whole family gathered at Aunt Sophie’s—naturally, as the eldest of the three sisters, she served as the hostess. They ate lunch, and then the men played rummy, sometimes in the living room, sometimes in one of the nearby coffeehouses. The sisters talked, the children played. If it was nice out, they’d go on day trips. Even during school vacations, most of the family went away together.

As I read Hansi’s memories of his childhood, I was struck by how similar they were to my own. I was nearly always with my cousins, and often went home only to sleep. In all, there are eleven of us grandchildren, eight of whom grew up in Vienna. Over time the rest of the family also moved into apartments in the nineteenth-century building where my grandparents had settled in the sixties. My parents and I lived one block away. I even had my own room in my grandparents’ place, where I did my homework when my parents were at work. Every evening at half past six, we had dinner. Rarely were there fewer than eight people seated around my aunt’s dining table. The house was almost never quiet.

Of course it’s no coincidence there are so many parallels between Hansi’s childhood and mine. Close-knit family life was important to him, and he seldom missed being home for dinner. He always sat at the same head of the table. After each meal he’d push the tablecloth to one side and open a small drawer built into the table. It held his heartburn pills. As my grandmother gave him a stern stare and explained that, yet again, he’d eaten too much, too fast, he’d put a capsule in his mouth and wash it down with water.

When I got to New York, I realized I wasn’t used to eating alone. At first I found it liberating. I was always on the go anyway, so I ate bagels on the subway, sushi on park benches, and ready-made salads from the supermarket while typing on my laptop in my university’s lobby. It was pretty different from sitting at a family dinner in Vienna and listening to my relatives’ daily banter. But the novelty soon wore off. No, I didn’t want to go back to Vienna, but I missed our family dinners. Why wasn’t there some high-tech way to beam me to the family dinner table for a few hours, and then spit me back out onto the streets of Manhattan?

Hansi (left) and Herbert