Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind by Sarah Wildman

grandfather and his friends as we sit in cafés earnestly discussing history and the state of the world. I wonder, a bit, if my appeal is my Jewishness, as though I am somehow a part of a subconscious atonement plan. At the same time I don’t care. I like it, this strange connection. I like his anger. It feels entirely inappropriate to our generation; it comforts me that I am not the only one still thinking of these things.
    And then there is Thomas, the one other Jewish fellow, a thin, beautiful, Budapest-born philosopher with dolorous eyes, an ever-present pack of Nil cigarettes, and a postcard for the 1924 movie  Die Stadt ohne Juden ( The City Without Jews ) pinned to his office corkboard. In the film, a city banishes all of its Jews and then falls apart; the city has to invite them all back. It is a comedy. I fall in love, a little bit, with them both, Thomas and Uli; I fall in love, a little bit, with everyone at my Institute.
    It is here, in Vienna, when I realize I have always lived with ghosts. I have always sought, in some way, to understand what connects me to my grandfather, to this time. I spend night after night, for months,drinking with Germans and Austrians; we reassure one another that we are disconnected from the war, distanced by more than time, that we are not to blame.
    Yet I wonder, even as I collect a group of friends in this town, if I have any place here at all. In Vienna, outside my tight intellectual cohort, when I mention my family, the room turns silent and aggressive, or silent and sad, or silent and annoyed. God. Another Jew looking for her roots, they seem to be thinking. Why must you people always be with your heads in the past?

    I think of Valy often as I walk these streets, as I meander down Heinestrasse, the street listed as hers on her school forms, as I visit the places she mentions in her letters. Nowhere is Vienna more idealized than in Valy’s letters. “Unfortunately, I don’t have much good to tell you about my work right now,” she writes in late spring 1941 . “A couple of days ago, alas, I returned from the course I had written to you about. It was quite wonderful! Full of youth, spirit and verve! For the first time, since Vienna, I again felt glad and young! Now it has finally come to an end, unfortunately. I did a lot of teaching there and I believe that I have become a well-respected teaching authority there—your legacy, Karl! Upon my return, I unfortunately had to learn that I no longer can continue my work at the hospital and at the seminary for kindergarten teachers due to a general cut in positions. If I do not succeed in becoming confirmed as an itinerant teacher for various retraining facilities, I will have to start working in a factory before too long.”
    Vienna, for Valy, the longer she stays in Berlin, becomes as much a symbol of freedom and life as my grandfather himself. She is a faithful recorder of her time in the city. She writes on it, muses on it, returns to it again and again. She and my grandfather, she writes, spent an “unspeakably beautiful ” summer together in the Mediterranean-like warmth of Lake Wörthersee, in Carinthia, near the camp for Zionist Jews, swimming alongside the athletes of Hakoah of Vienna, the superstar sportsmen and women of the era, the best swimmers inEurope. In the winter, they dance at the Medizinerredoute, the medical students’ formal ball. They debate how they can be together with no money: it is one thing to travel as students; it is another to live, forever, impoverished. One day, as they walk in the Augarten, my grandfather tells her that she should marry. She doesn’t understand what he means—to him? To anyone? Is it to pull her back from her mother, who waits for her in Czechoslovakia? Is it to keep her from focusing only on her work? She wants to know what he meant; she doesn’t ask.
    The night after she graduates from medical school, they stand on the Ringstrasse, the grand Viennese circular boulevard