Tradition and Alienation - The Memories of Jewish Private Lecturer Max Ungar (1850-1930)

By Vicky Unwin

Max Ungar (1850-1930) was the son of an Orthodox Jew born in Boskovice, Moravia, and pursued a scientific career in Vienna University after which he took over the failing family business. He returned to Vienna for a few years before coming home to Brno in a private capacity. His memoirs encapsulate many multi-faceted change processes. Although he wrote his memoirs chronologically, there is a recognisable leitmotif: on the one hand his escape from Orthodox Judaism into a century of high liberalism and the turning to science and knowledge; while on the other hand it charts his failure as a devotee of the humanism he was dedicated to as result of his pursuit of science and knowledge. In this respect Max Ungar’s reminiscences written in 1928 but covering the period 1855 – 1892/1928 are particularly significant for their overlapping topics: for its Jewish history during the Austro-Hungarian monarchy in the 19th century and for the portrayal of identity in the modern period.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vicky Unwin
• Release date: Dec 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005646486

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Tradition and Alienation

The memories of Jewish private lecturer Max Ungar (1850-1930)

Published by Vicky Unwin at Smash words

Copyright 2020 Vicky Unwin and Miroslav Imbrisevic

Original German edition copyright 2011 Studienverlag Ges.m.b.H., Innsbruck

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Contents

Introduction to the English Translation

Introduction to the original text

Part I 1850 – 1864

Part II 1864 until…

Archive

Photographs

Family Trees

End Notes

Introduction to the English translation of Mark Hengerer’s Tradition und Entfremdung: die Lebenserinnerungen des jüdischen Privatdozenten Max Ungar (1850-1930)

I first heard about my great-great-uncle Max’s memoirs from Dr Jaroslav Bránský, the esteemed scholar of the Jewish community in Boskovice and Moravia. I had been in touch with him when I found references to his work in Dieter Sudhoff’s tome on my grandfather, Hermann Ungar. [¹] I was just embarking on the research for my book, The Boy from Boskovice: a father’s secret life (pub. January 2021) which seeks to uncover the truth about my father and his family, all of which he kept hidden until his cousin turned up on my doorstep one day…but that’s another story and you can read about it in my book (which has quite a bit about Boskovice in it).

In the back of his Židé v Boskovicích (The Jews of Boskovice) Bránský includes a summary of his book in English written by the genealogist Henry Wellisch, who mentions that Hugo Gold attached Max Ungar’s reminiscences at the end of the Boskovice section in his magnum opus .[²] So I tracked down Henry, who in turn directed me to Hans Wellisch (no relation). He had met Dr Bránský several times in the course of researching his Boskovice family antecedents. He sent me the first 20 or so pages that he had translated and, after some googling, I identified the Max Hengerer edition of the memoirs, [³] ordered them and set about getting them translated. My motivation was to ensure that scholars and descendants of families who were annihilated in Holocaust should have access to some contemporary memories of life in 19th century Moravia; of course I also had a vested interest to learn more about my own family. My thanks to Miroslav Imbrisevic for trawling through the dense text and knocking it into English.

Before getting stuck in, I thought I should pay tribute to Dr Bránský, who died in 2017. I only managed to meet him the once (in 2012) and, like my Uncle Max, I kept a diary of that meeting. It is interesting not only because I recorded his mentions of the illustrious inhabitants of Boskovice, but it also provides an orientation round the town which very much reflects Max’s reminiscences.

Bránský arrived punctually at 9 am, clad in maroon scarf and warm coat; we both [my husband was with me] remarked later how much like my father he looked, the shape of the head and the widow’s peak hairline. Before we set off he told us little of the local history: the hotel we had been staying in had been an old convent/monastery attached to the Schloss. The Graf [Mensdorff-Pouilly] had been very generous to the Jews and gave them land to expand the ghetto, and to build a new wall. Hermann Ungar recalled inscribing his and his loved one’s name on it when he was little (his cousin and first love Blanka Totis perhaps?). The Grafin was taught French by no less than my great-great-grandmother [Jetty Biach probably, Max’s mother], and Bránský liked the irony of a Jewish woman teaching nobility how to speak French when it should have been the other way round!

We parked in the old town, first passing the school where all the Jewish children went, and an attached space where Max Ungar remembers they put on plays. An attractive corner house was home to the Eisler family of philosophers and painters, friends and relatives to the Ungars. Edmond Eysler was a famous operetta composer, second only to Lehar in Vienna [see the family trees at the end].

In 1832 a huge fire destroyed two thirds of the ghetto; much of it was rebuilt in Schloss or imperial style, with ornate columns and sunbursts over the doors and bows over the windows. The shop in Brunnenplatz (three fountains in fact, of which the pump of one remains) with the asphalt roof used to sell fireworks and other odd things.

Two old houses nearby remain, one the Ticho house. Ticho was a doctor and the son a great friend of Hermann, some of them managed to escape to the US [one of whom gave testimony to the Ungars murdered in Auschwitz and Treblinka], some are buried in the cemetery, we saw their graves later. The next-door house which now has an antiquarian bookseller was the house where Herrmann senior lived with his wife Jetty [Biach] and where Emil was born. It was the Biach house i.e. he moved in with his wife’s family before he bought the Kaiserhaus opposite [Simon and Blimele Biach]. This was where the liquor was made; the children all slept in the main stube. Bransky’s home was just down from these houses, just outside the ghetto, being a Catholic. He remembers playing with my father when they were both small boys.

Moses ben Hirsch Ungar (1750-1814), lived in a house on the corner [no 60] when he was Chief Rabbi in Boskovice and made liquors which he sold from the Biach house where later his son [Marcus] lived [no 46]. The houses then, unlike now, were built on a slope [‘die Asphalt’ in the memoirs] – now it’s all graduated by level – and Max Ungar recalls sledging down both sides of these slopes as a boy.

When Herrmann bought the Kaiserhaus he put two houses together to make one big one; the main door in the middle was to the house, the door on the left to the liquor shop; on the right was a room (where we had our drink the night before) where the. Czech [Christian] workers hung out and ate. The balcony over the first door was the main bedroom where Hermann Ungar was born; and it is from here that he saw the view that inspired his short story ‘Dream’. The liquor was made in a small building round the back, in the courtyard which was home to the ‘Arbour’ of Hermann’s memory and which formed the basis for the eponymous play. There was a private fountain in the yard where Christian workers would pump water for the whole house.

We walked around the old quarter, now freshly painted and rather too clean and tidy and somehow soulless devoid of people as it was; I couldn’t help wondering about the collaborators who must only have been too pleased to see their rich Jewish neighbours disappear, and were quick to claim their fine houses and furnishings.

The synagogue itself bears witness to Holocaust guilt syndrome: being meticulously renovated with huge sums from the EU, it is nevertheless a place of beauty. Dating from 1639, but first mentioned in 1586, with elegant calligraphy on the ceilings and some fine murals, it is still in excellent condition and original according to Bránský, with the ceilings dating from 1650 and the latest addition to the building being 1698.

In the courtyard by the synagogue an enormous ritual bath or mikvah, with nearby mikvahs sadly not visible though meant to be amongst the finest in the area; an enormous bath house is also being restored, as is the school where Hermann Ungar went as a boy (now yellow!). It is so hard to imagine what it must have been like, and all those relatives long gone living there. Nevertheless I felt a real sense of affinity for Boskovice, yet sad about the history tied to this beautiful place.

We managed to persuade Bránský to come into the graveyard with us though he was terrified of getting tick fever and recounted stories of people going in there and laughing about the possibility and then getting sick. He certainly didn’t hang around, only long enough to show us the graves of Herrmann and Jetty (Biach) Ungar and Fanny Totis, Blanka’s mother, who was Max’s sister. The graveyard was hauntingly beautiful, with well-kept graves in formal lines going up and down the hills; amazing it survived as it did, though Emil’s[Ungar] grave is unmarked despite its approximate whereabouts known as he died in 1940 and one suspects the Nazis only allowed for the rudimentary burial of Jews and, of course, no one would have had any money for gravestones then and, after the war, there was no one left to remember the place, let alone erect memorial stones.

We wandered off to the Bránský’s house – he told us he liked to sit in his yard in the afternoons and look out over the graveyard; he could see people coming and going and said there was quite a lot of interest in the graveyard (now a national monument by the way). One day he saw some older people in heavy overcoats come and they were devastated because it was locked, so he got a ladder and helped them over! There were some quite illustrious people in Boskovice including the quite famous businessman, Loew Beer, who is in Schindlers List apparently and who, after the war (he survived), had factories in South Africa, Vienna, Hungary. His descendants are now in England, Canada and Sweden. Another is Prof. Rabbinovitch now in a US university…but not many came back after the war [14 to be precise].

On the doorstep we ran into his wife, who had an enormous bloated leg, stuffed into bedroom slippers who was out walking their decrepit dog, 17 years old apparently. We were led inside for coffee and some chocolate biscuits. It was hard talking in German to him the whole morning and to try and optimize the knowledge that he could give me; there is no doubt I will not see him again, as he is very frail and, having seen his computer, I am amazed that he has published one book this year and has another coming out soon! We talked about Sudhoff who he said rang him all the time (I think he found it slightly wearing, as did my father) but then he said no one should die at age 50, and I said something like or younger, like our daughter. His reply was that he often thought about this and all he could say was the gods love those who love them (rough translation from the German, my father funnily enough had quoted this at me once or twice; it may be a loose transcription of the ancient Greek motto, ‘God helps those who help themselves’). I was moved, almost to tears.

When I returned to Boskovice with my half-sister in 2017 I had been hoping to see Dr Bránský but was told he was too ill and, sadly, he died shortly afterwards. And with him the last living memory of the Ungars of Boskovice.

As a postscript, on this same visit to Czechia my sister and I went on one of the synagogue tours of Prague. As ever, I was unable to find the Ungar and Kohn names in the Pinkas synagogue so I asked Marketa, our guide, if she would be able to help us.  ‘Ungar! But Tomas Ungar was my father’s best friend!’ she exclaimed. This Tomas, not my father, is Max’s grandson, the son of Fritz’s son Herbert, the sole survivor of the camps. He had died in 1997, she explained, but she was a friend of his son Amos and would put me in touch. Which she did and shortly after he visited me in my London home. So it was that quite by chance I established a link to Max Ungar’s great-great grandson.

You can read and see pictures from all my visits to Prague and Boskovice on my site www.vickygoestravelling.com.

* * *

So here is my attempt at a translation of parts of Hengerer’s introduction; I have only used the relevant and less academic sections. The German is so complex that I have had to simplify and possibly inadvertently changed the meaning slightly. However, it may still read as dense as occasionally I could not fathom the meaning of the text. My German is very rusty, so please forgive any inaccuracies! And it is followed by the [much better) translation of Uncle Max’s memoirs. It might be interesting to compare my impressions of Boskovice with his descriptions in the first few pages.

Mark Hengerer’s introduction to Tradition and Alienation: die Lebenserinnerungen des jüdischen Privatdozenten Max Ungar (1850-1930)

Background

Max Ungar (1850-1930) was the son of an Orthodox Jew born in Boskovice, Moravia, and pursued a scientific career in Vienna University after which he took over the failing family business. He returned to Vienna for a few years before coming home to Brno in a private capacity. His memoirs encapsulate many multi-faceted change processes. Although he wrote his memoirs chronologically, there is a recognisable leitmotif: on the one hand his escape from Orthodox Judaism into a century of high liberalism and the turning to science and knowledge; while on the other hand it charts his failure as a devotee of the humanism he was dedicated to as result of his pursuit of science and knowledge. In this respect Max Ungar’s reminiscences written in 1928 but covering the period 1855 – 1892/1928 are particularly significant for their overlapping topics: for its Jewish history during the Austro-Hungarian monarchy in the 19th century and for the portrayal of identity in the modern period.

The historical situation was analysed for the longest time using the terms Emancipation, Assimilation and Anti-Semitism. The discussion first questioned the success of Assimilation rather than the concept itself. As a result, it turned to the concept of acculturation while at the same time further detailed analyses were developed, especially on liberalism and bourgeoisie, on anti-Semitism and on the subject of nationality. In addition, there were studies on new forms of Jewish society, in particular on Zionism and the subject of Jewish Identity….

The structure of the text

The text of Max Ungar is so significant as an important source of Czech Jewish history that the section between 1850 and 1865 was published in a history of the Jews of Boskowice (Bránský, pp 266-301). The meaning of the text as a narrative stems, to a large extent, from the fact that Ungar explicitly renounced an interpretation of his own life and in this sense set his memories against Goethe's ‘Poetry and truth’. In this way he opens up the text to a large number of subjects which, given the narrative form, could hardly have flowed into the text using this style. So we see subtexts and interpretation arising out of the bare facts of his life, his themes, and his way of dealing with themes. Because he refrains from interpreting his experiences, the description of his life gains an unexpected, if unpredictable, transparency without the author realising it.

Occasion, plan, development

The memories of Max Ungar came about at the request of his son Friedrich: ‘Fritz has requested that I might like to write my memoirs for the family’. This request gave Max Ungar a timely and thematic frame within which he was able to orient himself. Superficially, the memories record a specific period up until the onset of the future, in 1892, when Max and his wife and his 12-year-old son Fritz left for Brno, ‘where we have remained until today and where I wish to end my story’. He omits the 36 years of the memories up until the time of writing and thus it suggests that the continuity of the place (Brno) was also a continuity of a way of life.

Consequently the presentation of the characters is always set within with the time frame up to 1892. Important later events in the life of specific characters are communicated as if within this time frame, even though they are not, such as many reported death [and other] dates (e.g. in 1892 the marriage of his brother Emil with Jeannette Kohn; the death of the mother of his friend Ingrisch; the birth of his niece Margaret Totis; the death of his brother-in-law Adolf Teveles; the death of Strassberger in 1902; leaving Judaism in 1911; the death of the mother of Marie Ptaczek in 1912 [his mother-in-law]; the death of Max Biach; the death of his sister Rosa in 1914; the death of his mother in 1926; the death of his sister Fanny in 1928; the death of Ludwig Girtler). The fact that these were family members points to their central importance in the text that emerged for the family.

The wide canvas, with the descriptions of the members of the Ungar family, as well as the relatives and in-laws, explains the emergence of connections in the family reunions that recurred over the years until the murder of most family members under the Nazis. Hence the numerous bridges that are built in the text to the ‘present’ of the year 1928, or to times still to be lived by his son. He frequently uses the words ‘Today’, or ‘Now’ as a reference to the time of writing the memoir. In the memoir there are countless expressions of continuity with the vanishing point of 1928. The strong focus on the family in the memories is explicit and does not effect the structure of the story as a whole.

When it was written Max was not the only person involved within his close family circle. During this time, his son Fritz regularly had lunch with him, and his grandchildren George and Herbert read him a few documents for his memories. His wife was apparently constantly commenting on the memories as was his sister-in-law Emma Plschek. The text became a common text in the close family environment. By attributing his memoirs to the 'one author' Max conceals this – although he partially disclose it with some casual references to his family form time to time. By 1928, he was already being confronted with the literary processing of his family, though the work of his nephew Hermann Ungar, even though it was from his nephew’s perspective. He assumed that characters described in The Class,[⁴] also appear in his memoirs and as a result his examination of reality is assumed to be literary fiction.

Text and subtext

While the family is the central reference point and the authorship in a narrow sense is an important part of this, the family relationships – as well as the genealogy – are also an important theme in this story.

However, it appears to be just as significant that Max Ungar is compelled to explain the living conditions and attitudes of the protagonists that feature in his own life to his descendants, who had become estranged from them [I think he means traditional Jewish life] and seems to threaten understanding. This attracts many instances in the terminology when, for example, the Catholic community is talking about ‘Jewish East’. The depiction of the Jewish Orthodox religion in Boskovice conveys experiences of such a strange world to the grandchildren that he feels the needs to explain it. These descriptions are not contained in an encyclopaedic telling, but rather developed through those instances that stem from the discomfort Max Ungar feels between the old and the new worlds.

From this opens up the real structure which is implicit in the text itself. In his subtext, Max Ungar tells stories which on the whole have a general theme, but which are attributed with differing structural contexts and phases. These are the estrangement of the Jewish Orthodox world, the failure of his integration into the academic world, and the difficulty and suffering of his stable family, over almost half a century, in trying to establish a well-being and a transition into a modern way of life, and a contemporary way of working.

Boskovice: alienation, break and reconciliation

Max Ungar was born in the true sense to a Jewish Orthodox World, albeit in one of the abolished ghettos, where all social, religious and business connections still functioned. Boskovice was one of the oldest Jewish communities in Moravia and since the 17th century had been one of the most important. The Jewish population was ghetto-ised in 1727 but reopened under the influence of the Josephine Reforms. In 1848 the Jewish community was allowed to establish itself as a political community alongside its Czech-speaking Christian neighbours. The cultural community split from the political community in 1884, and in 1919 the two Boskovice political communities were officially united. From the mid-1850s the Jewish population was subject to industrial influences. In 1851 Boskovice had a seat on the Moravian Country Rabbinate. In 1857 the Jewish community included around 2000 people, although there was a steep decline towards the end of the century. In 1900 there were only 590 registered, and in 1942/43 they were almost completely annihilated by the Nazis. There was a largely independent Jewish School, in fact described in 1854 by Max Ungar as child heritage institution, set up during the term of the Jewish Mayor Wohlmuth (1852-58). It moved in 1854 to house no 97 and was in 1879 converted to a kindergarten. From 1853 there were three classrooms, from 1858 four classrooms, from which Max Ungar graduated. In 1853 this school was relocated from its original location to the renovated house.

Inconsistences in the living world: parents, family (ies), friends

[By the time he was born] Max Ungar’s parents were already showing small discrepancies from a supposedly cohesive living environment. His parents were not entirely observant in their practice of piety. His mother deviated from some prescriptive practices which often led to quarrels with his father, and she was afraid of making mistakes, which the young Max mistook for fear. This contrast he describes very clearly: ‘My mother never had a devout mind, she wasn’t as strictly Orthodox as my father, even rather free-thinking in her views.’ His mother read books in the afternoons of Shabbat. Nevertheless, she remained substantially, but not completely, true to the Orthodox belief structure which, from the perspective of the young Max, merged with his father’s wishes. Only in a couple of instances did she not comply with them. She kept her own hair, whereas other Jewish women cut their hair before marriage and