By STEPHEN MOTIKA Special to the Palisadian-Post When literary critic Majorie Perloff published ‘Wittgenstein’s Ladder’ in 1996, the last thing she expected was to be asked to write a memoir. The book, which traces philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s influence on 20th century art and literature, includes a brief reference to Perloff’s own Viennese origins. James Laughlin, the founder and publisher of New Directions entreated her to write her own story for the press. At the time, she didn’t think much of it. Yet Laughlin had planted a seed, and when he died the following year, Perloff took seriously the idea of writing a memoir. Although she found many books about the Holocaust, none told the story of fully assimilated Jews who considered themselves Austrian before all else. Overcoming the fact that she was 6 when she emigrated in 1938, and had few memories of Vienna to relate, her chronicle would focus on the role of the ‘High Culture’ her family so enjoyed and their own relationship to race and identity. Furthermore, ‘what happened to Viennese culture when it was forced to assimilate into the democracy of the United States?’ The result, ‘The Vienna Paradox,’ has just been published by New Directions. Perloff, who has lived in Pacific Palisades since 1976, arrived in America as the German-speaking Gabriele Mintz, and from that moment on she badly wanted to be an American. When she entered the Fieldston School in the Bronx at age 13, she changed her name to Marjorie after she received a letter from her ‘big sister’ at the school, Margie Leff, who also happened to be the most popular girl in her class. She was eager to have ‘a golden Manhattan name rather than the ‘foreign’ Gabriele.’ Upon arriving in New York, Perloff’s father, who had been a successful lawyer, returned to university so he could make a living in this country. He then went to work for a Wall Street firm, while his wife returned to school, eventually becoming a professor of economics at Columbia University. Yet, for all their professional success, Perloff maintains that her parents never really belonged, ‘never felt at home in this country.’ Although they lived in post-war America, their hearts and minds remained in a Vienna long since gone. Perloff did not suffer from their hesitancy, and after high school went to Oberlin College before returning to New York to finish her bachelor’s degree at Barnard. Although she was an excellent student, her parents had little concern about what she would do with her life other than that she marry well. She met her husband, Joseph Perloff, a young doctor from New Orleans, and they married when she was 23. Two daughters soon followed, and although Perloff held several odd jobs, she knew she wanted to return to graduate school to study literature. Living in Washington D.C., at the time, the only university that offered a Ph.D. in literature was, ironically enough, Catholic University, where she was a student and later an assistant professor. After a long academic career spent at the University of Maryland, USC, and Stanford, where she is now professor emerita, Perloff will return to USC in the fall as a Scholar in Residence. In her critical work, she has focused on poetics, with books on Yeats, Robert Lowell, Frank O’Hara, and another half-dozen titles dedicated to avant garde poetry. Only in preparing to write ‘The Vienna Paradox’ did she read deeply in the Germanic literature and history, including the works of Robert Musil and Joseph Roth, that she had resisted as a youth. In addition to telling the personal story of her family, Perloff writes a great deal about the paradoxical reality of Vienna, at once ‘the great imperial city, with its opulent, gorgeous, erotic painting and design’ but also ‘Hitler’s Vienna, whose housing was so substandard that young men arriving to seek their fortune in the capital often ended up in bedbug-ridden shelters that were breeding grounds for violence and political upheaval.’ Perloff has wrestled with the city’s contradictions for decades, as recently as a couple of weeks ago when she read about the opening of the city’s Liechtenstein Museum. While she would ‘love to see it,’ she dreads traveling to such an anti-Semitic city, to a country that she believes never ‘de-Nazified.’ Trying to make sense of the complicated relationship between being Jewish and Austrian, Perloff’s cites her maternal grandfather, Richard Sch’ller, the Austrian foreign secretary under Chancellor Dollfuss and a special delegate to the League of Nations, who ‘was regularly begged by his superiors to ‘allow’ himself to be baptized.’ For his refusal, his wife was not allowed to attend the hundreds of state dinners he was obligated to attend. In fact, much of Perloff’s family seemed unaware of how anti-Semitism affected them, considering it ‘something that concerned other people.’ She writes in the book: ‘The Nazi takeover of Austria and immediate expulsion and torture of Jews came, as my mother notes, as a terrible’and unanticipated’shock.’ Still, her family was lucky enough to be able to escape Vienna, while many of her relatives did not. One, the painter Helene von Taussig, found refuge in a convent before being sent to die in a Polish concentration camp. Perloff also notes the hesitancy of intellectuals of the time to write about and protest Nazi policies. In the correspondence between philosophers Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin in the 1930s, there is little mention of the atrocities being committed against Jews by Nazi assailants. As Perloff has lectured from the book, she’s been surprised how many people conceive of the Holocaust as a single, unprecedented event. ‘It was a culmination of what had been happening for 10 years, not a unique concept. The world knew about these events; if you go back, you’ll find it all over the newspapers of the time.’ Her memoir has also changed the course of her own academic work. Perloff recently gave a paper on Samuel Beckett, stressing that his early writing was all about the war, not an abstract notion of alienation. She thinks the very fact that this has not been mentioned in the critical literature reveals just how many of the French were Nazi collaborators. ‘I think we’re at the beginning of a period of discussion that will ask what really went on during this time,’ she said. Perloff completed her book over two years ago, and feels like she would have been less laudatory of America if she had conceived of the book after 9/11. Although she thinks her family was fortunate to have emigrated here, she worries about our political climate and ‘American’s apolitical nature.’ In ‘The Vienna Paradox’ a critic has found a political voice, which stresses how important it is to privilege ‘diversity and democracy’ over a ‘high-art culture, a national culture.’ Perloff’s book reminds us how difficult it is to maintain the privileges of a free society. Marjorie Perloff will read from and discuss, with UCLA Professor Michael Henry Heim, ‘The Vienna Paradox’ at the Villa Aurora next Tuesday, July 20, at 8 p.m. Contact 454-4231 for reservations. Shuttle service starts at 7:30 p.m. on Los Liones Drive.
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