by Mischka's War- A Story of Survival from War-Torn Europe to New York (epub)
Rapid social and economic change brought a variety of discontents, including, as a by-product of industrialisation, the appearance of a large and radical working class, from which came a whole cohort of Latvian revolutionaries. In the 1905 Revolution, which plunged the whole of the Russian Empire into chaos for more than a year, Riga was in the forefront. Misha’s grandfather was not a revolutionary, but— appropriately for an ancestor of Misha’s—he was interested in technology, including photography. He had got too rich, according to Misha’s analysis (perhaps based on his mother’s report) and was ‘bored to death’:
So he dabbled with this and that, and tended to disappear for months at a time, reappearing dead drunk in the middle of the night, to disappear again some months later. His last entry in the book of history was in 1905, when he assembled photographic equipment and left to photograph and document the [Russian] revolution. He never returned.
That was the part of the grandfather’s story Misha particularly liked, the reason the grandfather deserved a musing. Provincial Latvia had bored Grandfather Janis, so he left. Misha as an adolescent approved of that. He had similar plans for himself, though in his case the idea was to go west rather than east.
Olga was one of Janis and Julia’s three children, including an older sister, Mary, and a son who played the violin, fought in the First World War and either died there or, in one version, went off to fight for the Reds in the Russian Civil War (around 1918) and never came back. The departure of Olga’s father when she was eight must have made for a difficult childhood, all the more since her mother was away for months in hospital and sanatorium. As the family—Olga does not specify its members, but it included an uncle and a piano-playing cousin—gathered to celebrate Julia’s long-awaited return, her fourteen-year-old cousin played a Chopin étude that was forever marked in Olga’s memory.
I never knew Olga, who died long before I met Misha, and his unfailingly admiring comments about his mother inspired a certain unspoken scepticism on my part: someone so wise, benevolent and generally saintly seemed not only implausible but almost dull (how wrong I was about that). It didn’t help that Misha expressed to me in the 1990s the same feelings about the sanctity of motherhood and the special qualities of maternal love that, as I now know, he had written in almost identical words in his diary in his twenties. This was alien territory for me, and for a long time it turned me off Olga. When I first started doing research on the family, I started with his father.
The bare outlines of the story that I got from Misha were as follows. Arpad Danos, born in 1882, was a Hungarian who, as a singer with the Hamburg Opera, was touring in Riga when the First World War broke out. Since Hungary was on the Axis side in the war and Russia on the Allied, Arpad became overnight an enemy alien. He solved this problem by going undercover as a soloist with the Riga opera, using his stage name of Arimondi (this overt way of going underground greatly appealed to Misha). There he met and married a young Latvian singer in the opera chorus, Olga Viksne, daughter of the absconding miller and his wife Julia. A gymnasium graduate and cosmopolitan Anglophile, he subscribed to the London newspaper the Morning Post, probably more for its excellent international and cultural coverage than for its conservative politics. Arpad was not only an opera singer but also a sportsman: he had competed in the Paris Olympic Games in 1900 in the triple jump, Misha said, but gave up competitive sport on the insistence of his singing teacher. Twenty years later, and pushing forty, he had acquired a girth suitable for an opera singer of the day but definitely not for a triple jumper—as we see from the photograph at the head of this chapter.
Now there’s an interesting parent, I thought. Indeed, I think so to this day, although much about Arpad remains frustratingly elusive. The puzzles start with his family back in Hungary. Misha, although photographed at the age of six in Hungarian costume, had little interest either as child or adult in Hungary or the ramifications of the Danos family. His brothers Arpad Jr and Jan were more attentive, and much of what I found out about the family after Misha’s death came from them. They both remembered visits from the Danos aunts who brought the Hungarian costumes at the end of the 1920s, and Arpad Jr knew the Hungarian side of the family quite well, having as a fifteen-year-old spent a year with them in Hungary because of ill health. According to their accounts, the paternal grandfather, Josef Deutsch, was a Catholic schoolteacher of German colonist stock who, as a civil servant at the turn of the century, had to take a Hungarian name because of the government’s Magyarisation policies, and chose the name of Danos. He was married to a Spaniard, the impressively named Johanna da Quilla, and they had nine children (though Arpad remembered the names of only eight of them), of whom Arpad was the third. Jan amended the original version, after postwar contact with surviving members of the Hungarian family in which he discovered that the family was at least partly Jewish, to make grandmother Johanna da Quilla a Spanish Jew and a baroness.
Given my curiosity about the Jewish part of the family tree, I was fascinated but also puzzled by this information. Did Spanish Jew mean Sephardic? Were Spanish Jews likely to be baronesses, and if so, according to whose titles of nobility? I pestered all my friends with expertise in Jewish history about these questions and essentially came up with a blank. Nobody knew anything about aristocratic, possibly Sephardic, Jews called da Quilla, in Hungary or anywhere else. So I found a young Hungarian researcher, Kata Bohus, and set her on a search in the birth and marriage and other contemporary records. She came up with a marriage record for Joszef (sic) Deutsch, but alas the wife had the more prosaic name of Janka Weiner. The parents’ name change was not recorded, but in 1898, four of their sons registered a change of last name to Danos.
The parents’ marriage certificate contained no information on the nationality, race or religion of the couple, but all the other documents Kata found, as well as some in Jan’s private archive, indicated that the children of the marriage were consistently identified as ‘Israelite’, both in their school records and in the registration of name changes. It may be, as Jan suggests, that for Hungarian bureaucratic purposes in cases of mixed marriages, the mother’s nationality was passed to the children, and that the Danos children were baptised and brought up as Catholic and identified as such. Certainly Arpad Sr called himself a Catholic when marrying Olga in Riga. Of the family remaining in Hungary under the Nazis in the Second World War, most came through alive, but one sister was denounced as a Jew and perished in a concentration camp. Deutsch, however, was often a Jewish name in Eastern Europe, and other Hungarian families who changed their name from Deutsch to Danos in the same period appear to have been Jewish, though not necessarily identifying as such. My sense, and Kata’s, is that the Josef Danos family was very likely Jewish on both sides, albeit assimilated, German-speaking and secular.
Everybody gets their family stories a bit wrong and it’s a shame to spoil a good one. But as regards other elements of the family, I must sadly report that according to Kata’s researches, Arpad Sr did not compete in the Paris Olympic Games, despite Arpad Jr and Jan confirming Misha’s recollection on this point. Still, you can see why the Olympics lodged in family memory as a shorthand. Arpad Sr actually was a promising athlete, first mentioned in the Budapest sporting press around 1899, whose best events initially were the long jump and the triple jump, and who then became Hungarian national champion in the high jump in 1903. He did indeed qualify for the Olympics in 1900, but lack of funds evidently prevented him from going to Paris to compete.
Arpad landed in Riga accidentally and never seems to have thought much of Latvia, although by a quirk of fate he would be the only member of the family who did not try to leave it in 1944. Yet when he arrived there in 1914, Riga was in the midst of an artistic flowering; not at all a bad place to be as far as culture was concerned. A spectacular local Art Nouveau movement in architecture in the prewar decade, led by the Russian-educated Latvian German Mikhail Eisenstein (father of the famous Soviet filmmaker Sergei), had given Riga the highest concen
tration of this style in the world. In the 1920s, Arpad Danos and his family would live in one of the Art Nouveau apartment blocks, with the family of Isaiah Berlin (the British philosopher) round the corner in another. Arpad’s affinity with the modern in music, particularly the art songs of the French composer Claude Debussy, would have been congenial to the international- and modern-minded Riga public. Opera was also flourishing. Up to 1913, it was mainly performed in the German Theatre by touring companies like Arpad’s, but in that year, a Latvian opera company was formed, whose soloists included Paul Sakss, Arpad’s future brother-in-law, and later Arpad himself.
It was the First World War that essentially destroyed Riga as a lively, modern, cosmopolitan city, turning it into the depressed backwater that Misha grew up in and his parents in varying degrees disdained. The war inflicted tremendous damage on Latvia, particularly on Riga. There was fighting on Latvian territory from the first months of the war, and by 1915 several major Latvian cities had fallen to the Germans, although Riga held out amid fierce fighting until the summer of 1917. The Russians carried out a wholesale evacuation of industry from Latvia in 1915, which according to Latvian nationalist sources, amounted to a ‘wholesale plunder’, and about a quarter of a million Riga workers and their families left for the Russian heartland in a departure that often proved to be permanent. This, incidentally, seems to have affected the Viksne family fortunes, since Olga’s mother owned houses occupied by workers in the Riga suburbs, and after the workers’ evacuation eastward, these houses had been arbitrarily demolished. Over a hundred thousand Jews—three-quarters of Latvia’s Jewish population—also went east, either in flight or through forcible relocation by the Russian military (who regarded them as sympathetic to the Germans). The result was that by 1920, Latvia’s population had lost a million people (down from 2.6 to 1.6 million), and Riga’s population had halved, down to under 200,000. As one historian writes, ‘from a noisy, bustling industrial and cultural metropolis, Riga was transformed into a quiet provincial centre’.
Schools and public institutions were evacuated to Russia during the war too, which was evidently how the teenage Olga Viksne found herself in Petrograd (the wartime name of the capital, formerly St Petersburg) around the time that the country was sliding once again into revolution. Her sons came up with various versions of how she got there, but Olga herself settled the question in an autobiographical fragment found in her papers: ‘My school was transferred from Riga to Petrograd. My sister was married to an opera singer and was herself studying singing in the State conservatory in Petrograd, so I went to live with them.’ Her school was quartered in one of the elite Russian girls’ schools in the very centre of the capital, taking the afternoon shift. Since Olga had the mornings free, she used to wander around the fashionable centre of the city, where the atmosphere was ‘exceedingly gay and lighthearted’, and officers could be seen walking with ‘beautiful fur-clad women’ as if they were on holiday, not in the midst of a war. She must have travelled, too: one of her diary entries in the 1920s recalls two visits to the provincial town of Iaroslavl, north-east of Moscow, the first time during the war to some event in the officers’ school, when the mood was still upbeat and extravagant, and a few years later, in 1918 or 1919, when ‘fear was already blowing openly through the streets’.
This mysterious second visit to Iaroslavl, when, alone for the first time in her life, she lived ‘unforgettable days of hunger and self-elected loneliness’, suggests that Olga’s life at this point was in chaos, along with Russia’s and Latvia’s. At the time of Russia’s October 1917 Revolution, which brought the Bolsheviks to power, Riga and the rest of Latvia were in German hands, and the Treaty of Brest (signed under duress in March 1918 by the new Soviet government) gave Latvia to the Germans. With German defeat in November 1918, however, this became null, and the region sank into near anarchy, with various groups seizing power in quick succession. Latvian politicians immediately declared the country’s independence, but after the Bolsheviks’ Red Army came in, a Latvian Socialist Soviet Republic government (allied with Soviet Russia) was established. This lasted only a year or so before Riga was seized by the German Freikorps (freebooters from the defeated German imperial army), who launched a ‘White terror’ against the Reds. An independent Latvian state with the constitution of a parliamentary republic emerged tentatively at the beginning of the 1920s.
Sometime in this chaotic period, young Olga married a postal official, probably Russian, and began a brief career as a coloratura soprano with the Riga opera (the sequence of these events, and the place of her first marriage, is not clear). In any event, after seven and a half months, she left her husband (this could perhaps explain the period of self-elected loneliness in Iaroslavl) and ran off with the operatic tenor Arpad Danos. The version Misha had from his mother, somewhat bowdlerised, had her boarding a train to Petrograd to marry her fiancé when Arpad appeared dramatically at the station and snatched her off. In fact, she was with a husband, not a fiancé, when Arpad, who had also been married, came on the scene.
Arpad may not look like a romantic hero in the photos we have of him from this time, but Olga certainly saw their relationship in high romantic terms. As she later recalled their first meeting, he saw her at a concert and said to his friend and fellow-musician Hans Schmidt, ‘That is my bride, I will sing her the Dichterliebe (Schumann’s song cycle, A Poet’s Love).’ He duly launched into the cycle’s first song, ‘Im wunderschönen Monat Mai’ (‘In the Wonderful Month of May’), which to Olga became ‘their’ song. Afterwards, ‘Hans Schmidt led me to the window, took both my hands, and said “Let me look at you. You want to marry this man. Are you brave enough?” “Does one need to be so brave?” “To live with a man of genius, yes.”’
No marriage certificate survives in Olga’s papers, nor any indication of how (or if) she and Arpad managed to disengage themselves legally from previous spouses. According to Olga’s diary, the date of the wedding was 19 May 1919, a month after the Bolsheviks had taken power in Riga, and they were married in a Catholic church in Riga. This was not because they were religious but because a church marriage was important to Olga’s mother Julia (although her own confession seems to have been Protestant) and because Arpad, whose official identification in Latvia was Catholic, often sang there. It was the groom’s thirty-seventh birthday; the bride was twenty-two. Olga put up her long hair in what she described wryly as an ‘enemy-of-the-people’ style (meaning that the puritanical Bolsheviks would have regarded it as ‘bourgeois’) and wore a white dress she made herself from odd bits of material from a second-hand shop. For the reception, so her mama informed her, they had nothing to offer but potatoes.
The young couple were evidently not Bolshevik supporters, but Olga seemed inclined, at least in retrospect, to treat this first Soviet occupation with humour, as one of those upheavals in the external world you just have to cope with as best you can. As it turned out, Arpad and Olga did rather well out of the Bolsheviks, albeit indirectly. Their first marital apartment had six rooms, fully furnished and with a little garden, and on top of that it came for free. That was because the owner—a friend of Arpad’s with the title of baron, whose pastor brother had fled—was in bad odour with the Bolsheviks and wanted to protect it from nationalisation by putting friendly and politically inconspicuous tenants in.
It was a marriage of passion that, according to Olga’s later reflections, she saw as shaky from the start. ‘A wedding?’ she wrote a few weeks before the event, in a diary entry simmering with jealousy sparked by the discovery of a photograph of his former wife in his drawer. (The entry is in Russian rather than the usual German, the language she and Arpad mainly used at home.)
Will I manage not to torment him, weak as I am? Jealousy of his past tortures me unbearably … A wedding awaits me, I’m going to marry him … When I married [illegible], I was sure that I would live my whole life with him. And then I left him after 7 and a half months. Now I already know in advance, that we can’t stand th
is mutual tormenting for long, yet all the same, there’s going to be a wedding … My God, how I hate him, how jealous I am of him. How ridiculous and pitiful he seems to me, and how I respect him. How I despise him and how I loved him—love him now!
She must have been already pregnant with Arpad Jr, who was born in January 1920, seven months after the marriage. Michael (Mikelis) followed in 1922, and Jan (Janis, Jochen) in 1924. Years later, in a subsequent journal kept in America, Olga remembered that at the time of Misha’s birth, the marriage was already in trouble: ‘I loved my husband and was unhappy. Actually, when Mischi was born, the watershed was already behind me. I had already begun to get used to being inwardly alone.’ Perhaps so, but the operatic passions of love and jealousy continue to dominate her original diary (written in a notebook entitled ‘the book of my marriage’) throughout the 1920s.
2
Childhood
Three Danos boys—from left Arpad, Jan and Misha—in Hungarian costume, 1928.
MISHA’S parents were riding high in his childhood. Servants were part of the household, the family slept between ‘top-quality sheets’, and their multilingual cosmopolitanism was, if anything, a social advantage in the cultural elite in which they moved. All that changed in his adolescence, when Arpad Sr lost his money and his singing voice, the parents separated and a new spirit of assertive Latvian nationalism made foreigners like Arpad feel unwanted.