by Mischka's War- A Story of Survival from War-Torn Europe to New York (epub)
But it wasn’t the tailoring/fashion business that preoccupied Olga that winter—a time of record-breaking cold, though Olga never mentioned that in her letters and Mischka only in passing. Her budding career as a sculptor was the first thing on her mind. Shortly after arriving in Fulda, she wrote the most excited and buoyant of all her letters to Mischka about the remarkable way her sculpture prospects had taken off. She had ‘plucked up courage’ to call in at an art dealer’s and offer to sell him one of her figurines for 250 marks. He agreed to buy it and gave her an introduction to a porcelain factory where she could get her figurines fired. As she walked home, an extraordinary thing happened, a bolt from the blue:
[The dealer] appeared at my side, very animated, and wanted to talk to me again, this very day, even though it was late … He wanted to know how many [figurines] I could give him, and in what time frame. He would take everything from me, whether it was heads, arks or costumes. He offered to arrange exhibitions in Frankfurt, Munich and other places, and asked if I would also take official orders, whether I used a model, if there was anything else particular I wanted.
On his insistence, she went to the porcelain factory, where he showed her figurines to a group of about twenty people, including his son and the master artisan, who all raved about their artistry and tried to persuade her to work for them.
They would put an atelier at my disposal; I could come and go when I want to, can produce one figurine in a week or five—it doesn’t matter … It was very hard to stay calm and relaxed. They wanted me to sign a contract immediately. I said I had to think it over and would come back next week. But the director was to come in the next day, so I said all right. Could you come at 10? Yes, I can do that …
Olga was astonished, exhilarated and a bit frightened at the speed with which events were unfolding. She wondered if the dealer could have fallen in love with her, in a coup de foudre, since she couldn’t imagine that ‘the dead figurines could have such an impact’. (In a later letter, she wrote ironically of her disappointment in finding that it was her figurines he had fallen for, not her.) It’s at this point that the reader of their correspondence becomes aware that something had shifted in their relationship. Mischka, now in his twenty-fourth year, seemed to have gained in authority, while Olga’s requests for his advice had not only become more frequent but acquired an almost deferential tone. ‘What will I do?’ she wrote apropos of her negotiations with the art dealer about her figurines. She didn’t understand half the legal language in the contract— terms like ‘retouching’, ‘reproduction’ and ‘author’s rights’. ‘I’m afraid of making a fool of myself. Mischi, if only you were here!’
Mischka replied in measured and weighty terms, advising caution in business dealings:
On author’s rights and so on, naturally you must establish clarity. In a restrained way you must also tell them what you want to get out of it, if others are making money out of you. I hope you didn’t let yourself be caught unawares and make commitments … A name is also something to be paid for.
In the same rather ponderous, ‘grown-up’ tone, he encouraged her to value her art rightly, neither too high nor too low, and recognise that artistic success comes through ‘mastery of materials’ (in other words, no careless or slipshod work).
No doubt this was part of a genuine, spontaneous readjustment of relations as Mischka became fully adult. But it’s also possible that the savvy and self-aware Olga was not just registering an adjustment but consciously encouraging it—in a sense tutoring him in his new role. In the early months of 1947, both of them seem to have been reflecting upon their relationship and even, uncharacteristically, discussing it overtly. Olga’s special place in Mischka’s heart had been evident before—for example, in the reflection in his diary that ‘The highest thing in the world is a mother’s love’. But in March 1947, he raised the question in a letter to her that he thought important enough to copy into his diary:
Dear Mama! It is a strange thing. When I leave you, I always feel bad because I have behaved ungraciously. And another strange thing: I am careful not to let any trace of warmth come into my voice and behaviour. So I jump to the other extreme. Why is this? Why do I put up these barriers? Even writing the salutation of a letter [to you] means overcoming some resistance each time. And yet you are the only Complete Person that I know. Only Arpad [his brother] can compete. Also you are not uncongenial to me …
After a digression into other topics, including the failure of girls of his own age to live up to his ideal, he returns to the question of Olga: ‘Your only “fault” is a lack of precision. That is the only thing that in the course of decades I have been able to observe.’ The letter concludes with some elaborate circumlocutions about ideal types of women that I take to be a typically roundabout way of suggesting that Olga came close to his own ideal type.
Many mothers would have blanched at the difficulties of replying to the text, let alone the subtext, of such a letter, but Olga was up to the task:
My dear Mischutka! You don’t need to feel bad when you leave me. I know exactly how you feel about me, much better than you express it. I respond to your inner attitude. I think that with regard to your behaviour to me, it’s my own fault, that is, the fault of how I brought you up [that is, with the emotional distance discussed above] … Now that unsentimental way of behaving towards each other has become internalised, and we keep it up, even as we know what we are to each other.
Olga’s response continued with a cheerful reassurance that she could always see through him anyway. It was always quite obvious to her, from various little ‘signs that you are not conscious of’, how he really felt at a given moment about her or things in general. She wouldn’t tell him what these signs were ‘so that you don’t hide them’. But the implied comparison with other women set off some alarm bells. She didn’t like his tendency to compare his girlfriends with some ‘ideal type’ and then find them wanting, she wrote brusquely. He ‘shouldn’t try playing this kind of theatre with your wife, when you have one. That can have bad consequences, and deservedly.’
Adding a bit of introspection of her own in a subsequent letter, Olga reflected on her upbringing of her sons, particularly her efforts to maintain some emotional distance:
I didn’t shower you with tenderness, but treated you in a comradely fashion. I never kissed any of you on the mouth, always only on the eyes. When you were still little, you were for me, I could almost say, even if it’s not quite right … sacred, [meaning] that one instinctively feared to profane. Later I intentionally did nothing, I was afraid of awakening your sensuality as young boys too soon.
Whether Olga had succeeded in her aim of discouraging her sons from falling in love with her is open to debate. She may have been more successful in bringing them up to be proud, with a strong sense of their own dignity: ‘I never asked you [her sons] to beg pardon—politely saying sorry is something else. It could make me really angry if Iantschi [Jan] did this on his own initiative, and [I] forbade him to do it.’ Mischka didn’t need instruction on these lines. Olga might tease him in her letters about being a bad correspondent (‘Write soon, dear lazybones!’), but he never started his replies with the conventional apology. I was interested to learn of Olga’s part in developing a trait in Misha that was very familiar to me, but hitherto a bit puzzling. Misha was generally an easygoing man, but he never apologised for anything, large or small. The reflex ‘Oh, sorry’ that punctuates most people’s everyday interactions was quite absent from his. If he saw that he had done something that annoyed me, he would, without comment, simply avoid repeating it.
At this period, Olga was undoubtedly the most important person in Mischka’s life, and he in Olga’s. That, of course, didn’t mean that they lacked separate private lives. Mischka often wrote to Olga about his; she sometimes wrote (but more briefly and in less confessional vein) to Mischka about hers. When describing business relations with men, she might indicate that business did not exclude flirtation, on one or bot
h sides. She would occasionally give an ironic report of a suitor, like the Englishman (probably an officer with the military government or UNRRA staffer) whose love letters kept comparing her to other women, always with the conclusion ‘You are so different, so different’ (Olga quoted this phrase in English).
When Olga’s two German admirers from Riga, Herren von Koelln and Seeliger, showed up again in Germany, Olga passed on the information to Mischka. Von Koelln (or Koellner) was in Wiesbaden and had got a job as a hotel porter. Paul Seeliger, the former commandant, had resurfaced in Flensburg, making contact not only with Olga but also with Mirkin, his former charge in the ghetto. Mischka met Seeliger too, and later told me that the former camp commandant had then
already been imprisoned, de-nazified and released; the latter in a large measure because of the statements of support from some Jews of the Riga ghetto who had survived and made it to New York—they had on their own initiative sent letters about Seeliger to the de-nazification authorities in Germany.
While there is a letter in Olga’s papers that strongly suggests that she and Seeliger had an affair at some point (whether in Riga or in Germany is not clear), no hint of this appears in Olga’s and Mischka’s correspondence. In other words, she would tell him about suitors she was not interested in, but not those she was. Mischka, for his part, either did not know or did not choose to know about any lovers in Olga’s life.
Olga felt the loss of her Riga family keenly. Two of her sons, as well as her ex-husband, were trapped in the Soviet Union, with its closed borders and restricted contact with the outside world. She knew through the DP grapevine of Arpad Jr’s arrest and banishment to Gulag and couldn’t bear to think what might be happening to him. Even with Mischka with her in Germany and Jan probably relatively safe in Riga, she wrote in her diary that ‘life seems to have lost much of its point for me’:
What strange fate has left me making my way in the world like a gypsy. Like a comedian, a buffoon. Smiling and smiling. Very often merry, just as often sad, but always smiling … Once I had a family. Five people, for whom I was the fulcrum. For these people I learnt to bear hard things lightly. For them I learnt to have an eternal smile. And now I am alone …
Olga’s sentiments, as expressed in her diary, often have a theatrical quality. When she wrote to Mischka, the tone was less exalted but the sense of loss equally strong: ‘Almost every night I dream of Arpad or Ianschi, sometimes also of Papa.’ She had an ‘out-of-control yearning’ to see her two absent sons and was making ‘impossible plans’ to go to Riga herself, she told Mischka in January 1946. These plans did indeed seem impossible, given the closed border. But Olga was always a spinner of schemes, and this one surely tapped into the romantic sense of herself that is central in the diary—no doubt she knew the ‘heroic exploit’ genre of émigré memoir exemplified by Princess Volkonsky’s story of crossing the border in disguise after the Russian Revolution to snatch her husband from the clutches of the Cheka. Olga was still thinking about such an exploit several months later. ‘Do you know, Mi, that I am giving serious consideration to fight[ing] my way through to Riga. But first I have to make sure of the Swedish side. I have got things underway with the Swedish church in Hamburg.’ (What this reference means is unclear, but presumably the Swedes had established connections in Latvia, probably covert.)
When international postal service reopened for civilians in Germany in April 1946, Olga and her sister Mary both wrote to Sweden and Riga, hoping to find or get news of Arpad and Jan. Some news came in six months later—a postcard to Mary from the Jewish neighbours who had lived in the apartment below hers in Riga, had spent the war in Russia and had now returned. The neighbours were mainly concerned to recover furniture from their apartment that had been moved to Mary’s after they left, but they had got Mary’s address from Arpad Sr—which meant not only that he was still alive, probably living in the old Danos apartment in the same house as Mary’s, but also that he had information about their whereabouts. This must have been a blow to Olga’s increasingly fond recollections of her ex-husband: he could have got in touch, or at least sent a message, but he hadn’t. ‘Probably he can’t write,’ she commented when passing on the news to Mischka. Actually it seems that Arpad Sr had fallen in love with a young singing pupil and planned to marry her. But Olga, of course, didn’t know that.
Since she started to keep her diary in the early 1920s, Olga had always regarded it as ‘the book of my marriage’. In an entry in the spring of 1946, she expanded this definition to make it ‘the book of my marriage that no longer exists, of my family that has been destroyed’:
I can’t help thinking of my poor awkward old husband. I see him always sitting in front of the radio, straining his ears, or reading a book. I haven’t made any of the people who loved me happy. My poor husband. Probably he still doesn’t understand why I left him.
She thought of Arpad Jr (‘my best friend’) too; and with the approach of St John’s Day (Johannistag)—in Germany a workday like any other, but in Latvia a holiday—she thought of Jan: ‘Oh, Jantschi! Are you still alive … Jantschi! … Where are you, my darling? In Latvia? … Is Balva with you? Are you in Russia? Siberia? Are you a soldier? Oh, Jantschi!’
Olga kept trying to make contact with her son and ex-husband in Riga through any means available. In March 1947, a strange woman knocked on her door in Fulda, looking for shelter for the night. She turned out to be a DP preparing to repatriate to Latvia and promised to try to find news of the Danos family. ‘Perhaps she will do it. I am both happy and fearful at the prospect.’
Then, in 1948, out of the blue, a letter came from Arpad Jr. He said he was back in Riga (though without explicit reference to his Gulag spell and release) and working for the time being as a labourer on bridge construction. He probably also gave the news that Jan and his wife Balva now had a child, since Olga learnt of it at about this time. Reassuring though this was, his letter caused Olga and Mischka as much anxiety as relief.
The letter’s text, in Latvian, has unfortunately not been preserved; all we have is some worried correspondence between Olga and Mischka that includes quotations, whose underlying meaning they were trying to understand. They were worried, in the first place, because they suspected that Arpad had been encouraged or even forced by the Soviet authorities to write the letter and, in the second place, because the letter evidently asked them to come home. Such letters were often sent to émigré relatives—some personal, some dictated and formal, and others in between—because the Soviet state, as well as their families, wanted them back. They knew Arpad had written the letter because they recognised his handwriting, but a close analysis of his corrections suggested that he had a censor, real or imagined, breathing down his neck. Mischka referred to the letter as having the character of an ‘article’ rather than a personal communication, which suggests that Arpad had not only written in an official style but may also have expressed some conventional Soviet-patriotic sentiments. The Arpad they knew had not been pro-Soviet, though who knew what Gulag had done to him.
In fact, Gulag had left Arpad damaged, the result (so the later family story went) of his having intervened in a fight to protect a woman and been badly beaten up for his pains. It would not have been unlike the Arpad I knew decades later to have written something like an ‘article’ to his family, since one of the characteristics of his condition, which seemed to me to be a kind of autism, was precisely his habit of addressing people as if reading out an official text rather than having a personal conversation. The first time I met Arpad, in the early 1990s, he almost ignored Misha, although he hadn’t seen him for years, and thrust on me, as a Russian reader, an elaborate Russian typescript of a draft law for the reform of marriage, the topic that was currently obsessing him. It was beautifully done, both in terms of style and presentation, and if Arpad hadn’t said he was the author, I could have accepted it as a genuine product of the Soviet Union’s utopian moment back in the 1920s. But an ‘article’ obviously wasn’t what Misch
ka and Olga expected from Arpad in 1948.
The Soviets were eager to repatriate their citizens, including those like the Danoses and other residents of the Baltic states whose citizenship was very recent and tenuous. But Soviet repatriation had a bad reputation in the West because of the forcible return of some millions of former POWs and other DPs in the immediate aftermath of the war. Now the Soviets were no longer forcing people to repatriate (with individual exceptions when their hush-hush security services captured suspected war criminals and collaborators in Europe), but the DP community and the Western Allies remained highly suspicious, fearing that even voluntary repatriates would be arrested on their return. Olga’s unexpected repatriating visitor the previous year was one of a comparatively small number of DPs who took up the Soviet invitation.
Mischka and Olga had no intention of going back to Riga, but they were worried that their failure to do so might cause trouble for Arpad, all the more because of his vulnerability as an ex-prisoner. Arpad’s letter urged them to write, as well as urging them to return, but they were not sure if this should be read at face value or, Aesopianly, as its opposite. The issue was whether they should reply and, if so, what they should say. ‘It’s clear that one must write,’ Mischka wrote to Olga. ‘In my opinion the most important thing is that Arpad knows that we have received his news, so that he is not unnecessarily worried. Then we will see how things go. It must be better [for Arpad] to receive as little mail as possible from abroad.’ Olga did in fact write, probably twice, but no further letters came from Riga, and she later felt guilty about having taken the bait in case it had caused trouble for her sons.