the house

I talk a lot about people but not much about the places in which they lived unless it is somehow incidental to the particular story at hand. Doing this, however, ignores some of the subtle context of the lives under discussion — maybe their home has no overt role to play in the story told about them, but it is nonetheless an essential piece of who they were.

The picture below is one I have always had, one that belonged to my grandfather. The photograph above is one that was sent to me last week by my cousin in Israel, whose mother Rosa was raised in this house as was her sister, my great-grandmother Helene. This house tells an essential story about Helene, Rosa, their brothers and sisters, and their parents.

Nathan and Amalia Bass raised their 11 children in this house in a small town called Rybky in western Slovakia. When they lived there, it was a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire – part of the Hungarian part specifically. My cousin Egon told me that “the whole village were two rows of such buildings along the road” and it today has a population of only about 441. The house held three units – one occupied by the Basses, the other two by other families. From this house in Rybky, the brothers and sisters moved to Vienna, the capital and the biggest city within the monarchy, something that must have been quite a large transition to navigate. As Egon’s wife Marianne told me, “No wonder and good for them that they all clung together” in this big, different place. Apart from the simple size and scope of the city itself, there were also the challenges of language and high culture. In Rybky, they had all been well educated in Hungarian schools and spoke German at home. Upon moving to Vienna, the older brothers made sure to take care of their sisters, escorting them to the Burgtheater to see sophisticated language in action. The brothers and sisters spent their weekends together, phoned each other every day, traveled together, and sent each other copious letters and postcards when they were apart.

Rosa took Egon to visit Rybky once when he was young, which I presume is when the first picture was taken. My grandmother may have taken her son, my grandfather, to visit once as well – or else my grandfather or another relation visited some time much later. I say later because in my picture, the picket fence from Egon’s picture is missing, the plants hanging over it are gone, the window shutters taken down, the boys are no longer playing in the street. Maybe it just looks that way because one picture is of the front of the house, the other of the back (if you look closely, the doors and windows are in completely different places, hinting that perhaps this is the case). But I can’t help imagining that it is simply because the life the Basses brought to this house had dissipated by the time the second picture was taken. That is a sad way to think of it, I know. But I also know from Egon and Marianne that Rosa, the only sister to survive the war, was quite lost without her siblings once they were all gone. And it is somewhat comforting in a way to think that maybe the house where they were born and learned to stick together missed them terribly, too.

Rybky, Slovakia

Long-ago people seem at their most old-fashioned dressed in their bathing suits. corsets and celluloid collars and other accoutrements of proper dress are foreign to us, yes – but they retain their dignity. Bathing costumes, however, never fail to look anything but slightly goofy and generally unflattering. There is something that is reassuring, really, about the fact that bathing suits have been slightly goofy and generally unflattering since the beginning of time, but I digress.

I did not know my great-great Uncle Wilhelm, nor do i know very much about him. The fifth person from the left, in the striped bathing costume and smugly amused expression, he was one of my great-grandmother Helene‘s older brothers (there were 11 children altogether). He smirks a bit like this in several of the photographs I have of him, and I’m not sure if this is a sign of potential fun or potential obnoxiousness. Either way, he’s a good looking fellow, on vacation with members of the Taussig family (I don’t know who they are) in Grado, an island near Trieste that is now in Italy but then in Austria – one of those strange tricks of World War I’s moving borders. This photograph is the front of a postcard that he sent to my great-grandparents at their summer apartment on the Demelgasse in Mödling, Austria – the week before my grandfather Franz was born in that very place in August 1909.

Therese Feuer Bass

Wilhelm had a beautiful wife named Theresa (or Resi, as everyone called her) and a brilliant daughter named Grete. They lived in Vienna, probably in the same fashionable district as my great-grandparents, and did things like travel in the Alps with various family members. And send postcards. The postcards are the only way I know either Wilhelm or Resi, and since my German is not exactly existent, it is a very sketchy way of knowing someone. Resi’s postcards always seem warm and friendly, slightly gushing; Wilhelm’s seem more reserved, but nonetheless affectionate. Of course, maybe part of why I feel that way is the fact that these postcards – and all the other postcards I have from this branch of my family – begin with the typical greeting “Meine lieben!” (my dears!), something that always touches my heart, even though I know it’s the same as my beginning a letter “Dear so and so.” But. The fact that I know the end that was waiting for these extended family members who loved each other so much and sent each other such postcards, makes it all the more tragic and all the more touching (Meine lieben!).

When World War II came, Grete was living abroad (either in London or the United States – I can’t remember) and her parents were stuck in Vienna. As laws against them became stricter and stricter, Jews were relocated into smaller, crowded apartments in the city, their belongings liquidated. Wilhelm and Resi were finally deported to the Riga Ghetto in December 1941, where they presumably died. There is no record of their deaths, and in fact, their daughter Grete had to petition the Austrian courts to declare them dead in the 1950s.

I don’t really know anything else about them other than that: that they died, perhaps during a freezing winter in a Latvian ghetto, that they were very attractive and that they sent postcards. But I’m going to hold onto the idea that Resi was sweet and pretty and thoughtful; that Wilhelm was a fun time, a person who made sarcastic, dry jokes under his breath if you were lucky enough to sit next to him at dinner, and who always remembered to send a postcard to his sister.

Wilhelm Bass (1872-1941?) and Therese Feuer Bass (1888-1941?)