In:
Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress), Vol. 2, No. 3 ( 1993-12), p. 305-336
Abstract:
After my mother died in New York in 1988, I became the keeper of memorabilia that she and my father had brought to the United States from their nearly 12 years of what she used to call “our time” in Bolivia. Among the items I inherited is a framed, hand-colored, artist-signed lithograph of Vienna’s St. Stephen’s Cathedral and the Stephansplatz in dusky, late afternoon light—an early twentieth-century print that my father particularly loved, and which he displayed as a central icon on the wall of our family room in La Paz. It seemingly never occurred to my father and mother, and certainly not to me until recently, that there was something incongruous for Jews like us to have a Catholic cathedral occupy a shrine like space in our home—a position the picture continued to fill even after my family came to this country and my parents became United States citizens. I don’t precisely know when the lithograph was acquired by them—apparently my father had received it in payment for some work he did for another Austrian refugee not very long after arriving in Bolivia—but I remember the picture from very early childhood, its identification with “beautiful old Vienna,” my father’s estimation of its potential value as a signed artist’s proof, and the sense of wonder it inspired in my imagination about a city which I had never seen, in which I was almost born, and about which my parents, my relatives, and their friends spoke so often, and with immense nostalgia.
Type of Medium:
Online Resource
ISSN:
1044-2057
,
1911-1568
DOI:
10.3138/diaspora.2.3.305
Language:
English
Publisher:
University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress)
Publication Date:
1993
detail.hit.zdb_id:
2093489-0
SSG:
25
SSG:
3,4
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