Dear Vivian in Canada, Rabbi Ken in California and others who told me “Don´t go to Vienna because you will only meet antisemitism in that city.”
I have just returned from the most wonderful eight days of my life, visiting the capital of the great music I have loved since I was a child.
Finally, I was in a place where the majority love and respect so-called “highbrow” culture which only “sissies” (and not real macho men) are supposed to love.
(We or I grew up being told a real machoman should love American football, boxing, rock music etc. and not Wolfgang and the three Bs.)
In the capital of classical music, Vienna, I felt as if what I have loved since childhood and to which I have dedicated my life was “normal” instead of loving and defending the “crappy” (that´s the best word for it) low culture which has swept most of the world.
And I was always treated with courtesy, politely and everyone tried to help me when I lost my way or couldn’t understand how things are done in another culture.
No one shot me on the subway or on a Vienna tram or pushed me onto the tracks of the underground near where the classic film, the Third Man was filmed.
No one screamed at me: “Read the instructions!” when I was unable to fill out on the computer or iPhone ticket requests, boarding passes ,etc —or items others used to supply for us in days before cyberspace ruled our lives,
I did feel however the shadows and ghosts of past in the neighborhood Leopold Stadt where I happened to have chosen, by some strange coincidence, my hotel.
The neighborhood remains as it was in the days most of Stefan Zweig (who fled Vienna for Brazil): a Jewish neighborhood with even Hasidic (or ultra-conservatives) running about, residing or working, but they have been joined by new immigrants from Syria, Vietnam, Italy and other parts of the world. All are seeking a better life than the one they left behind and have chosen this city which has been evaluated as the most civilized metropolis in the world.
And on the block where I marveled at the Museum where Sigmund Freud once analyzed his patients, I saw buildings where the apartments of Jewish residents were expropriated and their former residents were sent off to Hitler´s concentration camps.
But that was in the 1940s when I was lucky enough to have been born in New York City and not Vienna (where I would have been another victim of the Holocaust).
On the Jewish New Year, I was not only welcomed into the oldest and most traditional synagogue in the city—the same one frequented by Nazi hunter the late Simon Wiesenthal—but protected by armed police and military who searched, questioned me and demanded to see my passport.
And on the first afternoon of the Jewish New Year, I was pleasantly surprised to witness alongside the Blue Danube, made famous by Johann Strauss, the Jewish community gathered for Taschlich , the traditional prayer of throwing one´s sins away into the waters.
To make this evaluation briefer, it is 2022 and not 1938 when Hitler annexed Austria with his infamous Anschluss. We cannot forget the horrors of the past but it is time to try and start over.
Vienna is still an old city with the houses of apartments of the greats of music including Johann Strauss, this city and others but it is also a thriving metropolis where I witnessed a new, young generation spending a peaceful and romantic weekend which includes good music and theater and cultural life and also fine restaurants and cafes.
And miraculously Vienna seems almost crime free: really a miracle in comparison to the USA of my birth and Brazil of my adult years
And any metropolis which can re-create the “Magic Flute.” by former resident Wolfgang Mozart and hold children´s attention (and there were so many of them quiet and well behaved at the Volksoper theater) can’t be all that bad.
Hopefully this enthusiastic visitor will be back as soon as possible to the city which breathes great music and seems in 2022 to be a haven for all races, creeds and nationalities: Vienna.