I can only guess at my parents’ state of mind when they came to Chicago. They met each other at a social event organised for single refugees like themselves. My father must have been very lonely; it is hard to know whom he could have spent time with or seen or how he lived for his first few years in America. My mother lived with her family but she watched her younger sister marry and her parents gradually age. I imagine that both she and my father were very eager by the spring of 1941 to find someone congenial with whom they could perhaps salvage a new life. They had in common – from Austria – the same taste in food, the same closedness to strangers who may have held different ideas, intimacy at home where polite manners were discarded, the same respect for high cultural institutions (and prescribed medicine), the same need for relaxation through vacations – two a year, for one of which I was hauled out of school for an extra week – an eccentric practice in America where vacations were mostly a luxury for the wealthy. My mother would get extremely anxious if the vacation weather did not cooperate with her plans. There was for her some sense of entitlement to a brief, carefree escape from Chicago apartment life. My parents also shared more or less the same political values from the Austrian socialist tradition and the same indifference to many poorly understood aspects of American life, of how Americans do things. Very significantly, they used money in much the same way and placed a similar value on how to spend it. In the old snapshots, they amused themselves in similar ways at home in their youth – skiing, hiking, swimming. The Bad in Mödling, the site of swimming baths for the public, was unique as a setting for separate snapshots in both their collections.

Both also shared the same attitude to Jewishness. There was nothing ‘wrong’ with it – inevitably one's friends came from these origins – but the general view was that the traditional Jewish ways, barring a sense of humour and an impressive cleverness, were not very nice and were to be suppressed whenever a trait that was identifiably Jewish came out.