by Mischka's War- A Story of Survival from War-Torn Europe to New York (epub)
The family’s prosperity in the 1920s was not based on Arpad’s singing career, although that seems to have been going well enough, but on a windfall made possible by the Bolsheviks and their brief reign in Riga. Aristocrats, capitalists, high officials and anyone who had been privileged under the old regime feared the Bolsheviks sufficiently to flee, leaving most of their property behind them. Arpad became a millionaire in the early 1920s, according to his son Jan, by selling antique furniture and paintings left behind in Riga by the refugees or confiscated from them. The deals were struck through contacts in the British and American embassies, notably a certain Major Bell. Jan says he was Misha’s godfather and describes him as a friend and fellow-explorer of Jack London, the American adventure-story writer, whose fame in Eastern Europe in the first half of the twentieth century was tremendous. Misha never mentioned a godfather to me, or revealed any special interest in London, although as a child of his time he had surely read him; and I can find no record of a Major Bell (admittedly a common name) in the US Embassy. Perhaps we should banish him to the anteroom of colourful but fictional characters like Johanna da Quilla. Still, Jan’s story makes sense: there would have been money to be made that way, and Arpad was probably sufficiently well connected and enough of a connoisseur to have done it. It would explain how, around 1926, Arpad and Olga had the funds to pay for an extravagant year for the whole family in Italy.
Misha remembered that year in Palermo fondly, his vividest memory being a spectacular win in a pissing contest with local boys. He learnt Italian, though he forgot it again later. For the parents, it became a second household language (Latvian and Russian were only spoken outside, in the street, or to the grandmother), used for ‘pas devant les enfants’ purposes. The parents hired an Italian nanny for the children and spent a lot of time off concertising, according to Jan. Olga later gave a slightly different version: she had given up singing after her marriage, she told the Miami Herald in 1954, thinking that she and her husband should not be in the same business, and switched to sculpture, studying in the studio of Richard Maur (probably in Riga) and ‘later spen[ding] over two years doing direct carving in Rome’. The marriage seems to have looked up in this period, although this is partly a deduction based on the lack of diary entries: Olga used ‘the book of my marriage’ mainly for theatrical expression of moods of melancholy and anguish, so a lack of entries seems prima facie evidence of an upswing. They probably hoped to remain permanently in Italy, but the money ran out (Misha’s version), and in addition (Jan’s version) they may have had problems in Sicily with the Mafia.
The family seems to have been back in Riga by Easter 1927, when Olga’s diary resumes. Arpad Sr was having trouble with his voice, and she wasn’t sure if he would be able to keep singing professionally. She described him as being at a loose end, frequenting cafes and not sure what to do with himself; perhaps a more sympathetic version would cast him as a flâneur. As his combination of musical and sporting skills suggests, he was a man of parts, interested in and well informed on a wide range of subjects, from international affairs to physics. Apparently he was trying to establish himself in the import/ export business, trading particularly with Russia. According to Latvian sources, he was one of the founders of the ‘Rosemary’ canning and sausage company, whose investors included his sister-in-law Mary and her husband Paul Sakss. His son Arpad remembered toothpaste (Olga’s diaries contain references to the dubious fortunes of ‘Chlorodon’) and oil as the mainstays of the export business. Jan said he was a fool as a businessman. His son Arpad was kinder, saying he was too trusting and was often cheated.
In any case, he lost all his money at the beginning of the 1930s, with the onset of the Great Depression, which hit Latvia with force. Misha linked this with the establishment of a state monopoly on certain types of import/export by the Ulmanis government, making his father a victim of growing Latvian nationalism, but the other brothers—perhaps more tolerant of Latvian nationalism than Misha—weren’t sure about this. As Misha’s friend Andrejs Bičevskis, who knew the family slightly in Riga, remembered the story, when Arpad Sr’s oil-import business was bought out or nationalised, he was offered the choice of a lump sum or employment, took the latter and was fired after a month.
The children’s upbringing was Olga’s domain, and she seems to have let them run reasonably wild and follow their own interests. Olga’s mother lived with them, providing a corrective to the otherwise somewhat bohemian mores of the household, and they saw a lot of their two slightly older cousins, Mary’s daughters Ariadna and Jogita. Olga may have homeschooled her children in their early years, since Misha (and probably Arpad too) didn’t go to school until he was about twelve. The two elder boys, Arpad and Misha, were very close, with Jan the younger odd man out. There was a lot of music in the household. Misha sang in a boys’ choir until his voice broke (he told me he was allowed to continue too long, thus damaging his voice as an adult, a fate he claimed to share with the composer Joseph Haydn) and also played the piano. As they grew up, the two older boys became passionate and talented sportsmen.
Olga’s child-raising approach, as she later described it, was to maintain a certain detachment, avoid overemotionalism, including physical manifestations of love, and encourage independent thinking. Misha thought she brought them up in exactly the right way, but Jan, at least as a young adult, was more critical: he considered that she should have set clearer boundaries and perhaps have been a bit more conventional all along the line. More Latvian as well, or at least this was Olga’s interpretation of his criticism. Addressing Jan in her diary on his name-day in 1947, she wrote sadly that ‘we never celebrated your name-day properly. When you were little, we wove garlands and sung folksongs, but it wasn’t genuine. I was then alienated from Latvian society, and partly also from Latvian customs.’ Indeed, three-year-old Jan is virtually swamped in his garland of leaves in the photographs at the head of this chapter, but the costumes he and his brothers are wearing are not Latvian but the gift of a Hungarian aunt.
When I tried to read up on Riga’s history, I was taken aback to find that the city’s historians tend to write about just one national history—German Riga, Russian Riga, Jewish Riga, Latvian Riga—as if the others didn’t exist. But families like the Danoses straddled the boundaries, whether they wanted to or not. The Danos parents normally spoke German to each other and the children at home. Olga was equally at ease in Russian (in fact, her Russian was probably better than her German in her youth), and apparently Arpad Sr was too. The children spoke Latvian to their grandmother and Russian and Latvian on the street. This was nothing remarkable in multiethnic Riga. The Danos family, or at least its head, had Hungarian passports, according to Jan, until growing nationalist pressure led them to take Latvian citizenship in 1934. Misha’s memory was that his father had had a Nansen (stateless) passport after the war.
In Riga, everyone agrees, the Germans constituted the social elite. What is not so clear is the social standing of German speakers like the Danoses who were not actually German. Jan holds strongly to the view that the Danoses were part of ‘German society’ in Riga, although conceding that within German society, they counted as Hungarians. But Misha himself never claimed such membership for the family, and friends of Misha’s whom I interviewed later in life denied that the Danoses could be so described. For one thing, I gathered, they were not elite enough, especially after Arpad lost his money. While the two eldest children were sent to the German classical gymnasium, Jan went first to a French school and then to the Latvian gymnasium, perhaps because by the time he was of high-school age, Latvian identity looked the more likely to improve your life chances. But Jan, like the others, spoke a more or less native German as well as Latvian and a Russian that, by the time I knew him (after decades of Soviet rule), was more or less native too, and much more fluent than Misha’s.
At the end of his school years, Misha kept a diary—in German, of course—which was less a day-to-day chronicle than a series of meditations on
the meaning of his life so far. One of the main topics was his sense of himself as culturally German. ‘I was actually from earliest childhood brought up absolutely German,’ he wrote, ‘speaking German at home, then and now, and being given mainly German children’s literature to read.’ (Wilhelm Busch’s classic German story in verse of boyish pranks, Max und Moritz, remained a prime favourite of Misha’s until the end of his life.) He loved the German gymnasium when he finally got there after a preliminary year in Grade 6 of the German elementary school.
In the gymnasium, it was at first not his fellow pupils who made an impact (‘I had no close friend, and also didn’t feel any particular need of one’) but the teachers, especially the maths teacher, Herr Kupfer. They were, he said, ‘not teachers for me so much as friendly acquaintances, to some extent even more than acquaintances; they all without exception liked me’; they also treated him as an equal, encouraged his already evident talents in maths and physics and left him to spend his time at school more or less as he pleased. That’s the way he put it in his diary, but from what I gathered from his later recollections, it didn’t mean he slacked off, but rather that if he felt like going to a class, even an advanced class in physics when he was still a junior, they let him. It can’t, at any rate, have been too undisciplined, as he retained a remarkable amount of Latin and Greek, which were merely peripheral interests to him, for the rest of his life.
‘I didn’t behave as a schoolboy but in a much freer way’, he wrote, looking back from the heights of seventeen, and I can believe it: behaving as a schoolboy/subordinate/member of a subaltern collective was never in his repertoire when I knew him. It wasn’t that he lacked the bump of reverence: he had enormous respect (much greater than I could generally muster) for various mentors in physics and for individuals whose understanding or simply humanity impressed him. But he had an absolute aversion to acknowledging claims to superior status or position and could be outright rude—though generally a mild-mannered man—when he saw it was expected of him. The converse was that he made no such claims himself, and consequently established the easiest of rapports with the young in later life because he really did talk to them as equals. It’s odd, given the Germans’ alleged love of hierarchy and discipline, that a German gymnasium should have been the first external environment that validated Misha’s ‘free’ approach to adults, presumably learnt in his somewhat bohemian home.
The discovery of friends of his own age came a bit later, outside school and through the sports club. This being Riga, there was of course not just a general sports club for adolescents but a German one, a Latvian one and no doubt Russian and Jewish ones as well. Misha and Arpad Jr were both sports-minded, good at a variety of forms of athletics (Misha was a middle-distance runner and also a pole vaulter,
Arpad a sprinter), and both competed at national level, but for different sports clubs—Misha the German club and Arpad the Latvian. Joining the sports club was ‘a decisive moment in my life’, Mischa wrote in his diary at seventeen: ‘I acquired comrades and was set off in another direction, namely as a young man (Junge). I learnt to understand comradeship and became more and more German.’
Another discovery was no less important: radio. Misha became a passionate radio amateur, though whether this means ham radio (experimenting with wireless communication) or simply building radios and taking them apart I don’t know. As he told the story,
In the autumn of 1937 I chanced to notice in a newspaper, with which I was otherwise never in contact, an announcement for a course for radio amateurs; I enrolled in it immediately. There I was by far the youngest participant [at fifteen], but technically one of the best, if not the best.
One of the lecturers to the group was the head of Riga’s commercial radio station, and acquaintance with him seems to have been a factor in Misha’s obtaining a job at the VEF, one of the world’s leading radio manufacturers, after leaving school. But Misha’s sense of the importance of amateur radio in his life went way beyond the contingent. In a letter to his prospective in-laws twelve years later, he included it as one of the decisive moments in his life’s trajectory, whose meaning was the pursuit of Wissenschaft (‘science’ in the broad German sense of ‘knowledge’).
Neither Misha’s diary nor Olga’s sheds much light on what was happening at home in his high-school years. Undoubtedly it was depressing. Misha’s rotten apples story indicates his dislike of the family’s declining fortunes. When he spoke about the period to me, it was in terms of quarrels between his parents about money, with Arpad Sr continuing his old habits of generous hospitality, including putting up impecunious friends for months at a time, and Olga objecting that they couldn’t afford it. This must have stopped when they moved out of their good apartment in the centre of the city and went to live in a little house outside the city (perhaps, indeed, that was part of Olga’s intention). But nobody liked that set-up, and after a few years the family moved back to the centre, now in Elizabetes Street in the Art Nouveau section, living in the same apartment block as Olga’s sister Mary (probably now divorced) and her two daughters. Arpad Sr tried to make a living as a singing teacher, but not very successfully. The Danoses sold off some of their expensive furniture and art objects. In the end, it was Olga who recouped the family fortunes, establishing an atelier des modes in the mid 1930s that by the end of the decade was providing most of the family’s income.
Information on Olga’s enterprise was comparatively sparse until one day, out of the blue, an email arrived in my inbox from a Latvian scholar, Līvija Baumane, who had discovered Olga and was giving a chapter to her in a study of entrepreneurial Latvian women in prewar Riga. From Līvija, I found out that Olga’s arrival on the commercial scene was hailed in nationalist terms in 1938 as a sign that the centre of Riga was being ‘conquered by Latvian-owned businesses—up until then, members of other nationalities had dominated in the local business and trade sectors’. This sounds like shorthand for the extrusion of Jews and Germans. Among the successful Jewish businessmen in Riga’s apparel trade was David Mirkin, a maker of men’s and women’s gloves with a haberdashery business in the same quarter as Olga’s shop, whom she almost certainly knew (I drop his name here because the Mirkin family is going to reappear in the story). Olga was aiming at the upscale market. The Danoses seem to have had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances in Riga’s elites, which Olga both used and expanded with her atelier. According to a contemporary newspaper report, her salon provided an entrée into ‘a world of elegance’, receiving patterns ‘directly from the fashion capital of Paris as well as New York City’, and also featuring designs by Olga herself. The reporter was ‘able to view the original gold-coloured garment with blue panne flowers belonging to “the well known socialite Mrs. N. N.” And an assistant was just wrapping a parcel containing a beautiful evening dress for the wife of an ambassador—black lace and white tulle, a very current combination …’ Olga was able to open a subsidiary in a resort on Rigās Jūrmala, the favourite seaside haunt of Misha’s childhood, and then in 1939 joined forces with a milliner, Mrs Vera Dagilis, to establish a salon now billed in French as ‘Haute couture et chapeaux. On parle toutes les langues principales’ (‘High fashion and hats. All main languages spoken’).
At some point in this period, the Danoses separated, with Olga moving out to a small apartment in the Old City, leaving the boys with their father in the city apartment, perhaps because it was closer to their school. The sources of Olga’s dissatisfaction, or some of them, can be found in a conversation Misha reported in his diary, without comment, on 24 October 1939. Papa was ‘extraordinarily capable in all areas’, Olga had told Misha. He understood a great deal about economics and politics, was ‘extraordinarily gifted’ in the arts, writing good poetry and short stories and singing Debussy like no other. He had even ‘done something creative’ in the area of theoretical physics. The trouble was, he had made nothing of his gifts, ending up as ‘a miserable little [import/export] agent’. ‘In his youth, he set out to conq
uer the world,’ but he was ‘egocentric’ without being ambitious: evidently, in the end, he didn’t care enough about success and just did what he felt like. This was clearly a disappointment for Olga, with her early sense that she was marrying a genius; but her analysis, for Misha’s ears alone, could also be read as a message that geniuses should not fritter away their gifts but go out and ‘conquer the world’. (Olga had already decided that Misha was the cleverest of her children, and thus the bearer of hopes.) Misha’s diary entry records Olga’s words with such a complete absence of commentary that one becomes all the more curious to know how he interpreted them.
Misha disliked the new living arrangements, and his relations with his father deteriorated. No doubt he also shared something of his mother’s disappointment with his father, as adolescents are prone to do. He must have spent a fair amount of time over at his mother’s shop, because years later, when I was playing Russian popular songs from the 1920s, he recognised them as songs that Olga’s Russian seamstresses used to sing as they worked. He also learnt to judge the fit of a jacket like a professional tailor, an unexpected skill in one who, at least when I knew him, never owned a suit and liked his sports coats shabby—though, like Olga, he wore his clothes with an air. Whether this meant that he sometimes actually worked in the shop, or simply learnt the skill through his automatic habit of closely observing any technical process, I don’t know.
Recalling this period in the 1990s and 2000s, all three brothers agreed that the parents had separated but were uncertain whether they had divorced. This in itself tells us something about the family’s relatively bohemian mores. None of them mentioned affairs on the part of either parent as a reason for separation, but Olga was the spouse who moved out, and it’s clear from her diary that the direction of marital jealousy had switched: while in the 1920s it was Olga who was constantly jealous of Arpad and his connections with other women, in the 1930s it was Arpad who, as she remembered later, ‘pestered me with jealousy’. The diary notes the existence of ‘one I loved apart from you [her husband], whose name in this book will not be named’, but we know no more of him other than the fact that, as of 1948, he was dead.