Inside Outside by Andrew Riemer Read Free Book Online Page A

and diamonds in almost obscene abundance, used to sit in their mink or Persian lamb coats drinking
Kaffee mit Schlag,
consuming lethal quantities of saturated fats, while they lamented the world they had lost, loud in their complaint that they were obliged to live in a cultural desert. Where was the music? Where was the art? Ach, where was the culture? And besides all this, why couldn’t you find decent plumbing in this benighted city?
    They were ridiculous and risible. London’s cultural life was, at the time, probably the finest in Europe—more varied and of a higher standard than that of Vienna, Budapest, Prague or even Berlin before the war. But these sad and grotesque old ladies, reciting litanies which had probably lost all but their incantatory significance, were giving expression to their deep sense of loss. They were mourning a dead life. The ‘cultural desert’ of London was no more than a convenient counter to identify their sense of displacement, their longing for a past which could never be recovered. Seen from this perspective, London was as much a cultural desert as the most remote corner of Australia.
    The tragedy of such lives is that an inevitable and natural nostalgia, an ever-present clog at the exile’s heels, is invariably expressed in terms of comparisons and judgments which are made without much pertinence or justification. In a most important sense, such people have ceased to live; they are the living dead. What is different seems to them, naturally enough, inferior. A new environment, with its real or imagined disadvantages, is often blamed for the simple fact that people have been wrenched from the old. The agony of loss and longing casts a sentimental glow around what has been lost; it is always inclined to denigrate the new. We do not know how to recognise the benefits of a new world because the old has placed a template over our eyes—we perceive nothing except what those apertures allow us to see. Our lives are dissipated in longing and in the suffering of loss, even though what we have lost is only a country of the mind, a memory, or even a pure invention.
    As we approached our cousin’s house near a bushland reserve on Middle Harbour on that February day in 1947, the process I have been describing had already commenced. We were making comparisons between our old life and the new. And because we did not know how to make such comparisons, or on what to base our discriminations, we had begun in our arrogance and ignorance to judge harshly. To understand the source and the implications of those hastily achieved judgments—which I am still prone to make, long after I have come to realise that they are often partial and false—I must record what I can remember of our life before the moment of our arrival at the end of the rainbow, a moment which marked the cutting of our last ties with the past. Although my parents and I could have no way of knowing at the time, the instant we caught sight of those streetlights on a dark headland, our former life entered the realm of legend.

B EFORE THE F LOOD
    Memory does not go back very far in a family like mine. Our story is a commonplace tale; it has been told many times. The broad chart of our particular fortunes nevertheless reveals something important about the perplexity of those people whose familiar existence was disrupted by the great upheavals of the middle of the twentieth century, who were obliged to remake their lives in circumstances that produced confusion, anguish and, for some, a debilitating sense of loss.
    I know something about my grandparents, a little about my maternal great-grandparents, but beyond them there is nothing. Or rather, what came before must have been those inhabitants of the Austro-Hungarian world who were at one time Austrian, at another Hungarian, who may have lived in Bohemia, or in Moravia, or even outside the actual political confines of the Empire, perhaps in places like the Russian