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My maternal grandfather Josef Meller was born in Vienna 100 years ago today. He took this photo of himself at his piano, I guess in the 1950s. He died aged 64 when I was 7, but late in his life he did something wonderful that would change my life when I was an adult. A thread...
In 1939 Josef and his parents fled the Nazis and had the good fortune to find refuge in England. He settled near Richmond in Surrey, where he became a respected architect, and where he and my grandmother brought up my mum and her sisters.
My childhood was full of elderly Jewish relatives & their friends, whom I remember with love & affection. But like many descendants of refugees from the Nazis, I had no idea as a kid about the world they'd left behind. No idea of their unspoken trauma from uprooting and fleeing.
It was only as an adult I thought of all the questions I wished I'd asked them... by which time it was too late, they were all gone. I really thought I'd never have any answers to where my roots lay on my mum's side of the family.
I knew Josef was from Vienna, but nothing about his ancestors. Until my mid-20s, in the absence of other evidence I assumed, for reasons that now seem naive, that his family were middle-class assimilated Jews who'd been in Vienna for some generations.
The stories I'd read about impoverished eastern Jews living in squalid shtetls seemed somehow remote from my family's past. Then in 2007 my grandmother died and my mum cleared out her house. She found a document dedicated to my sister, my cousin and me.
‘14th April 1982,’ it began. ‘BEFORE THE APOCALYPSE. An account of growing up in Central Europe in the twenties and thirties of the twentieth century for Keiron, Laura and Daniel, to give them some idea of the background of one quarter of their ancestry.’[That's you, @Dan_Meller]
Had this been a book or a movie, this plot twist would have seemed implausible. But here it all was: in the early '80s my granddad had started writing a memoir of his family history. But he didn't finish it, so he put it in a drawer. It stayed there for quarter of a century.
Thirty-odd typewritten pages... when I got my hands on it, I savoured it line by line. It seemed too good to be true. Our family's history, interspersed with anecdotes and facts, the genealogy detailed back through three wide generations. Names, dates, stories, opinions, jokes.
My grandfather’s Hebrew name was Ephraim Josef ben Menachem Mendel ben Mordechai, and back in the 1890s his parents Mendel and Liebe were born in Cieszanów in Poland and Mostyska in the Ukraine. I'd never heard of these places! I looked them up... old shtetls in what was Galicia.
While I was grieving for my granny, the emotional impact of this document hit me even harder than it would have otherwise. I wrote a bit about it in my last book:
Terror drove my ancestors to Vienna, my teenaged great-grandfather Mendel having survived a pogrom in which a pistol was held to his head, while Cossacks ransacked the house in futile pursuit of the hoard of coins and jewels that surely every Jewish home contained somewhere.
I had never heard of Mostyska, and I probably never would have done. A couple of years ago, while I was in Ukraine researching my Joseph Roth book, I took a day trip to the old shtetl, the first member of my family to return for a century. It was a profoundly moving experience.
The house was gone but the town's layout was unchanged. With the help of a tour guide I visited the house's location, beside a marketplace -- now a park -- where my ancestors had been traders. The old synagogue (pictured, now flats) still stood nearby. I had a good look around.
Most powerfully for me, I visited the cemetery where my ancestors were buried, and paid my respects. This is how it looks now. The gravestones were all smashed and gone, we assume destroyed by the Nazis. It is a wildflower meadow, where the local farmer grazes his goats.
My granddad's decision to record his memories and knowledge of our history changed so much for me. It connected me to a deeper Jewish history I had previously felt disconnected from. It disabused me of some silly ideas.
And it gave me hope and confidence because it showed you never know what's out there, what surprise might present itself. I've found this useful as a source of hope in life in general, but especially as a researcher of non-fiction books. You never know what might turn up.
In the memoir he said he wrote it at my mum's suggestion, so I should thank her too! I want to say to anyone thinking of writing down memories for their grandchildren but unsure if they're of interest: they will be. Do it. It's the most incredible gift you can give them.
Here I am with my granddad circa 1980. He was an avid reader; I've inherited many books from him about Vienna & prewar Jewish life that have immensely helped my research. I still feel connected to him. So, thank you Josef, I remember you with love and gratitude. Thread ends.
One more thing I should have thought of! I picked some buttercups at the cemetery in Ukraine where my ancestors were buried, brought them back pressed in a book, and now here they are in my house in Norwich. A reminder of my family history and my granddad’s memoir.
