For The Furniture ...memories of Vienna, Austria 1938

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                                                                                                         My mother Listening to the Opera 

                                                                                          on a Saturday Afternoon

      My late husband Josh and I dragged so much Furniture out of the Alley. The comfortable sitting

 chairs that filled the living room and famously once a huge desk jutted up a fence in the alley near our 

old apartment. I spotted it, Josh liked it and there we were dragging it down the alley and into the 

apartment and then later across town to the back porch where it took up way too much room My good

neighbor Matt laboriously took it apart and put it in my garage where it now sits. I will get rid of it in 

the Spring. Over time there was other furniture given to us by friends and family like this recliner  chair 

I sit in now that belonged to dear Heidi Schwabacher who I cared for. We inherited it after her death.

 Josh made that recliner his own as he read countless books or writhed in pain...(that is another story.)

This recliner is where I sit as I look around at the Inherited Furniture of Memory that I received from 

my late mother Emily.

 

       My mother grew up in Vienna, Austria. Far away from the fields where my late father labored in the sun picking cotton as his sister told him stories of the movies she had seen. My grandfather was a clerk at the American Embassy and married the beautiful woman Ann my grandmother as she came to process her visa to go to American to study. They settled into an upper class life with maids and the finest furniture much of which I later inherited. The apartment was full of the finest furniture Biedermeyer was the name.  The furniture was the silent witness to the Anschluss in Vienna when Nazi forces occupied the city. Although American my mothers family had to put up a Nazi flag on their balcony. However they were able to put a small American flag next to it. 
Yes, this furniture was the silent witness to the brutality of the Nazis. My mother survived but there were hidden mystical sparks that were not revealed for decades. My late grandmother Ann grew up in an Orthodox Jewish home in Cimpulung Moldevesc in Romania. She left the poverty of that and went to Vienna in hopes of studying in American and met the Clerk Hugo Wallenfels at the American Embassy who she married. Those Jewish sparks flickered but were not revealed. 

      They entertained and many people sat on the furniture....Because of the war they were transferred to Los Angelos. The furniture followed them on a ship that was torpedoed, but as luck would have it, the boat tipped up and the furniture was in the end above the waterline. There in splendor of LA the furniture that had seen so much and heard the Nazi boots marching past led a benign existence.

My brave Mother Emily Not Saluting at a Nazi Rally in 

Berlin in the 1930's

Later after they died all the furniture was shipped to Minneapolis where it filled up our home at 3220 Hennepin Avenue. I grew up with it and the dining room table held our everyday family meals and countless Sunday dinners where my father Jim would cook Sukiyaki or fried chicken in the electric skillet. When the guests came there would be lively discussions and my father would orate his political opinions and jump up from the table to locate precisely the book he was reading. The back porch bookshelves groaned under the weight of his political books that focused on WW 2 and Nazi Germany.

There were liberal discussions and even as their friends railed against the current administration they knew Democracy were never falter. 

The years passed quickly..sometimes benignly and sometimes with great difficulties as I navigated caring for my parents with my brother who also needed care. We sat at the dining room table from Vienna eating the simple dinner Wallace and I had made as we joked in the kitchen. He was "Chef Pierre" and I was "Chef Claudine' A plate of cheese sandwiches, some fish I baked, mashed potatoes.

   My mother died at home January 11, 2011. Then I turned to care for my father. It was only him and me at the table which felt so big now.

We said good bye to the old house and he moved in with Josh and me until his death August 16, 2012.

It was time to move the furniture to my house. A good friend helped me bring the dining room table over to our home in south minneapolis. I remembering him carrying it over his shoulder through the back yard. 

Later i got the small tables, the nesting tables smeared with paint from my brother using them as a palette.

Over the years more Viennese furniture came to my home. The buffet transformed by my sister and boyfriend. 

I had a mystical experience with the big chair. After a long search for my Jewish roots I took my family up north for a few days and had 2 days to myself to write up my Jewish Journey in preparation to going to the mikvah to affirm my Jewish ancestry. I entered the small cabin my brother looked after and lo and behold there was my grandmothers chair that I sat in to write up my 15 year search. 

Later my sister brought me the small chair with its original upholstery.

And so time passes and now democracy falters under a cruel president. It has been a tense and horrible week in Minneapolis as ICE presides now like the Nazis who once marched through Vienna. Once again the furniture bears silent witness to people hauled away. To protests. To clashes. and to the mayor and govenor speaking out against the lawless prescence of ICE. Our president threatens the Insurrection Act. I worry deeply about what comes next as I sit in my grandmothers chair bearing witness once again to a cruel and inhuman turn of events.