Two Birds in a Cage
Before they are crushed by history, the Brothers Golz are in show business.
Arnold and Emil are twins, with matching pince-nez spectacles and mutinous whirls of black hair. They’re hardly pretty, but there’s something endearingly comic in their pudgy owlishness. A newspaper cartoonist depicts them as odd birds sharing a perch —not owls but parakeets. Which is apt, for together they write feathery operettas for the Viennese stage. These plays have whimsical titles such as Die Königin der Nacht (The Queen of the Night), Die Schöne Ehebrecherin (The Beautiful Adulteress), and Die Meerjungfrau (The Mermaid). In 1932, the year another Austrian, Adolph Hitler gains German citizenship, the pair debut a trifle called Der Jolly Joker.
On March 12, 1938, a week before the siblings turn 62, the jolly Vienna that made them stars is extinguished. After the Austrian Republic is absorbed into the Reich, ancient hatreds find pyrotechnic expression. In November of that year, during the nights of broken glass, the imposing Leopoldstädt Temple, where their father, Josef Goldstein, was a renowned cantor, is put to the torch. Other cultural institutions and businesses ate immolated, alongside every synagogue but one. Jews are attacked in the street and more than 6,000 are arrested. Many of the detained are sent to Dachau. The twins live together with Emil’s wife Fanny, a Moravian Catholic, in an elegant apartment they won’t occupy for much longer. What do they think when the sky turns copper with flame? They must understand their world is over.
But maybe they think, this is simply how it goes. The brothers are cosmopolitans with no use for antique religion. Yet Jew-hating is an enduring habit in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire and far beyond. Wherever it surfaces, there is a tendency to ask what Jews do to bring calamity upon themselves. Antisemitisms (there are as many varieties as blooms) are always with us. Even now, poisoned arguments about Zionism, barely a century old, lapse into calumnies about The Jews, writ large. When a civilization is in shreds, it’s remarkable how many questions become Jewish ones.
The violent eruptions of the last month are made more disturbing by their digital echoes. When the world’s richest man endorses an an ancient libel, we have circled back to a precarious moment. It could be we are anchored to it forever.
But let us revisit Arnold and Emil, who are showmen, not soldiers. Faced with cataclysm, they pile top hats and canes into steamer trunks. They have no bombs, only fur capes, jeweled tie pins, and a lesser Klimt. As the walls close in, they fret about their librettos, which they imagine will propel them onto Broadway. Such ridiculous fancies, hatched at the eleventh hour! These are detailed in letters to my great grandmother, the savior they will never meet.
Darling Cousin, every day we thank God for you.
All family histories tuck away suffering; Pain becomes yellowing abstraction in old photographs. At times such as these, history can be sharpened into a blade. We wind back the clock, to a point when unholy vengeance may be excused. Our ancestors— fools in old-style hats and coats—suffered humiliations, cleansing, massacres, holocausts, medz yeghern, nakbas. They become minor deities in colliding mythologies of loss. It may not matter if it is 1938, 1948, or 2023.
Extras are written out of history’s script using murder as a plot device. The grander narrative is more intransigent. We invent new strutting dictators, new street battles, new necropolises of rubble, more refugees nobody wants. The castoffs poke their dirty fingers through jagged mesh and pile onto foundering boats, only to be turned away at every port. How quickly we return to us and those who would erase us.
In their time, Emil and Arnold tug at a distant American hem. Their father’s brother, Moritz Goldstein, was also a famed cantor, at Kehal Kodesh Bene Israel in Cincinnati, the oldest synagogue west of the Alleghenies. His daughter, Hattie Miller, is the wife of a prominent businessman, a member of the German Jewish elite. That gossamer connection becomes a vital one. Hattie is as fragile as bone china, a lady with servants to hover over her when she takes to her bed. These Austrian cousins are novelties introduced by the Anschluss. Yet here they are, pleading politely to be saved.
Her German is poor, but Cincinnati, a city with deep ties to that country, does not lack for translators. She hires a teacher to read the twins’ letters and dictates replies. Hattie’s side of this correspondence is destroyed along with Europe. The Golz letters survive, along with the Millers’ petitions to officials in Washington and abroad. They leave us with an etching of humanity as it is carefully rubbed away.
Arnold and Emil can only wait. They take their places in the eternal queue of the dispossessed. The do not regale Hattie with tales of Nazi crimes. They do not mention the Jews made to scrub filth off the sidewalks of Vienna and ordered to clean latrines with their bare hands. They do not speak of the Jews herded to Wurstelprater amusement park, where they are forced to eat grass, to make the point that they are lower than livestock. The name Adolph Eichmann, the SS Captain who oversees the Offices of Jewish Emigration, is never put to paper. The mail will be read by censors, and they must be cautious.
Darling Cousin, you are our only hope.
Instead, they write of waiting. Their heavy trunks are to be hauled to Hamburg, and loaded aboard an ocean liner bound for New York. Passage will be arranged for Arnold, Emil, and Fanny. There is only the matter of visas. Time slows to a crawl at shipping companies and foreign legations. It ossifies in the hive of bureaucracies created to dispense with inconvenient Jews. The brothers delicately plead their case. They drop the names of important friends on two continents. They genuflect before jack-booted keepers and pay an extortionate ransom for the privilege.
By the time Hattie Miller holds these letters in her delicate hands, the Nuremberg laws are asphyxiating the Jews of Austria. They are deprived of liberty, expunged from the academy, banished from professions, hustled off the stage. Aryanization is imposed in orderly queues. It is a metric marvel, an industrial complex cranking out yellow stars, and a prodigious tally of lives to be extinguished.
Two little birds who write burlesques are canaries in a coal mine. By 1941, more than 140,000 Jews have fled Austria. Among them are members of Arnold and Emil’s creative circle: Billy Wilder, Erich von Stroheim, Otto Preminger, Hedy Lamarr, Peter Lorre, Erich Korngold, Paul Henreid, and Fred Zinneman. Those artists slip the noose and find haven in Los Angeles. Hedwig Baum, whom everybody calls Vicki, is famed for her novel Menschen im Hotel, which was adapted into the Oscar-winning Greta Garbo vehicle Grand Hotel. After the Third Reich bans her work, she becomes a U.S. citizen. From safety, she writes letters on behalf of the twins. Arnold and Emil will join her in Hollywood and they will all make entertainments together.
Why did they wait? Such a question. The twins have sisters, Pauline, Szidónia, and Bertha, and they have husbands and children. Besides their family is illustrious. They have been celebrated in the salons, palaces, and theaters of the Austrian capital. It’s only natural to cling to old celebrity and a fraying web of relationships as it is snipped away. The Brothers Golz are not young. Vienna is all they know.
The world weeps for youth lost to tragedy. There are no tears for aging folly scribblers. But the old are frightened too, and lunge for an escape ladder. The Reich has no use for decadents like Arnold and Emil Golz. Neither does the United States of America. Hattie’s husband Emmanuel writes to the State Department and his senator, Robert A. Taft, promising to support the brothers when they are delivered from the Nazis. The correspondence is courteous and correct. Nothing will come of it.
To leave Vienna, the twins must forfeit their property and pay the Reich Flight Tax, a levy imposed to stop capital from fleeing Germany. By the end of the 1930s, the law confiscates Jewish holdings at rates approaching 97 percent of total assets. Arnold and Emil are running out of money. They assure their cousin they still have the talent and time to start over in a new country. Der Held ihrer Träum (The Hero of her Dreams) and Wo die Liebe Blüht (Where Love Blooms) can be spun into American gold.
In Washington offices, such talents are not appreciated. Senator Taft helps block 200,000 refugee children from entering the country, because the U.S. has no interest in being swamped by migrants of any age. In 1938, delegates from 32 countries meet in the French spa town of Évian-les-Bains to address a humanitarian crisis. Delegations express sympathy for people like the Brothers Golz, but keep their borders closed. Many politicians share the sentiments of Canadian prime minister Mackenzie King, who wishes to keep North America free “from too great an intermixture of foreign strains of blood.” This reticence has consequences.
History overwhelms Vienna and Cincinnati. When America enters World War II, the letters stop. At the time of the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, where the Germans adopt the Final Solution, 65,000 Jews are trapped in Vienna. Later that year, Arnold is separated from Emil and sent to the Theresienstadt Ghetto with his sisters, Pauline and Bertha. Within a few months, all three are dead. Theresienstadt, the so-called model camp designated for prominent Jews, is actually a killing ground. At least 33,000 inmates, many sick and elderly, are lost to malnutrition and disease. Thousands more are deported to death camps further east.
No one knows what befalls the last sister, Szidónia Klein. Like countless others devoured by war, she is consigned to oblivion. Her death date remains blank. Emil Golz stays alive until 1944. His place of death is listed as Wien, the cause simply Holocaust. Only 2,000 Viennese Jews survive to see the Nazis surrender.
Some birds do not fly free. The Golz Brothers planned an escape, but it eluded them. Their music hall frivolities will never be mounted for the New York stage or transformed into Hollywood movies. Most of their carefully itemized possessions — topcoats and tuxedos, gilded mirrors and Viennese paintings—vanish.
But somehow, their librettos make it across the Atlantic, to Hattie Miller. It is all she has of twin cousins, lost, found, then lost forever. After the war, she sends money to Emil’s widow, Fanny Golz. But within a few years, she fades away, as distant relations and old nightmares tend to do.
Darling cousin, we will always be grateful to you.
Of course they were. For Hattie’s letters, and flickers of hope. The Brothers Golz left their American cousin with a stack of songs about naughty baronesses, errant husbands, lovelorn mermaids, and prat-falling clowns. They gave her a glimpse of their flighty, comic world, of gaily painted wings that soared until they were broken. She stored their dreams in another box, and kept it firmly closed.
The past always finds its way back to us. No steamer trunk or internment camp can confine it forever. History is heavy with menace of fùhrers and sometimes relieved by the dance of jolly jokers. When the world is smashed, it must be built anew. Sometimes our only comfort is a trifling song.
