Straight Outta Moravia: A Jewish Saga That Lures Us In

Can the Holocaust be 2020 funny? That’s the question Americans are asking about “JoJo Rabbit,” a recent film about Hitler, a boy, and the boy’s mother starring Scarlett Johansson. The film’s directors and screenwriters reckon the only way to get millennials to the Germany of the Holocaust is to appeal to humor through current music and current-sounding jokes in their own language. The characters in this film about a small German town pun in English. Some critics have declared “Jojo” a success, but others leave the theater to ask themselves: “But how was it really?”With the memoir “Uncle Otto’s Puppet Theater: A Jewish Family Saga,” author Brigid Grauman places a different bet — that even now, audiences can appreciate the humor and horror of the past on their own terms. Such a bet takes both modesty and hard work, but Ms. Grauman pulls it off.Ms. Grauman’s story starts with her great-grandparents, who lived in Austria and Moravia after the turn of the century, and covers what happened to them all, and their spouses, and children. Seven of her relations deposited their memoirs for safekeeping with Ms. Grauman, itself a remarkable testimony of their trust in her. From them, and her own memories, Ms. Grauman assembled this account.The result is a group staging of an enormously talented family of merchants and artists falling casualty to, but also often surmounting, National Socialism. The author’s father, Bob, was born Robert Graumann in 1925, and, she writes, while young admired the nationalist Austrian leader and diplomat Engelbert Dollfus. Dollfus was short, and his nickname was “Millimetternich.”Bob wasn’t even aware he was Jewish until the Anschluss let him know, and relocated his family to Havana (they liked it), New York (neither Brooklyn nor the Upper West pleased them), and finally Vineland, NJ, where they followed immigrant tradition by Americanizing their name (dropping the second “n”) and raising poultry.Uncle Otto, so gifted with a sketch pad his drawings can be mistaken for photos, evaded the SS and sat out some of the war in a British detention camp. The postwar period found Otto seated in the back row of the courtroom of the Nuremberg Trials, using binoculars to aid him in sketching Hermann Goering and Rudolf Hess. The British Ministry of Information had hired Otto official artist for the Nuremberg Trials.“I had prepared myself to draw the faces of tyrants, bullies and sadists; my pencil was to be the sword to slay them,” Otto later recalled. “What I saw was a band of timid dejected men, the plea for mercy inscribed on their faces.”Uncle Bus — his real name was Ernest — made it out because he was a competitive swimmer, a pioneer of the butterfly stroke. He survived the Nazis’ Czechoslovakia when he was granted a visa to attend a swim meet in Britain. Both of his parents perished at Sobibor.Uncle Richard Graumann in Vienna proved a gifted playwright and translator of Shakespeare, and on the night of the Anschluss was just putting the finishing touches on “The Tempest.” When the Nazis moved in, the Burgtheater cancelled a planned production of one of his plays, and Richard fled to London. His mother, in despair, stabbed herself in the stomach.Richard’s was the plaint of the refugee: “What was left to us? Mountains and music, that was all.” He described his “duty” in life, one very different from the Nazi notion of duty: to see his Shakespeare translations “rounded off and published.” Richard met the obligation, returning to work in postwar Vienna and leaving behind six volumes of Shakespeare in German, as well as 154 translations of sonnets.Ms. Grauman manages to capture the perpetual anxiety and wanderlust typical of many survivor families. “Safe in England, but never at home” was how her relatives described their situation. The postwar Graumanns were migrants too, though often it was new love or a new job that conferred the status. Or was their restlessness also due to the war?The author’s mother, Aislinn, an Irish Catholic, married Grauman’s father, moved to Switzerland, then took her daughters to Israel to start a new life there, in part, as Grauman notes, because Judaism always drew her. In all her profiles, post- or pre-war, Ms. Grauman captures the despair, hopes and wit of the wandering Graumans and Graumanns.Ms. Grauman picked her title in honor of a puppet theater the talented Uncle Otto cobbled together, and in which he put on little shows about the family and for the family in a family home in Klosterneuburg, or in Vienna.This book shows that Ms. Grauman herself is a dramaturg, capable of pulling a dozen shattered lives together into a pleasing and informative whole. “Uncle Otto” does what the JoJo Rabbits cannot: it finds and gives us the serendipity and insight of prewar and wartime Europe, without superimposing a modern sensibility on the period. Grauman does not shove, she lures.

Straight Outta Moravia: A Jewish Saga That Lures Us In

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