Norman Eisen - The Last Palace: Europes Turbulent Century in Five Lives and One Legendary House

Over the Atlantic Ocean; April 10, 2010

I picked up the heavy white receiver of the phone beside my seat and asked the operator to place a call to my mother.

I listened in as he opened a line and dialed.

Hello, she answered with her distinctive Eastern European lilt.

Frieda Eisen?

Speaking.

Will you accept a call from Air Force One?

Yes, she replied, sounding excited but skeptical.

Hi, Mom, I said.

Oh, Nachman, she exclaimed, calling me by my Yiddish name. I thought it might be President Obama!

No, its just me.

Thats good, too, she said, laughing. What are you doing on Air Force One?

Im traveling with the president. To Prague.

What? Why?

He has asked me if I will take over as ambassador there.

Whose ambassador?

Ours, of course. The United States.

I waited for a cry of delight. My mother had been born in Czechoslovakia and immigrated to the United States from there. She sang me some of my first lullabies in Czech and Slovak. She venerated the father of the country, its first president, Tom Masaryk; his successor and protg, Edvard Bene; and their most brilliant modern successor, Vclav Havel. And she took great pride in my own accomplishments as a first-generation Czech-Jewish American, most recently my job as a White House lawyer. I thought she would be thrilled that I would be representing the United States in todays Czech Republic.

Instead, the line was silent.

Maminka? I asked, using the Czech diminutive for mother. Are you there?

Yes, she answered, clipping the word short, her voice suddenly flat.

Whats wrong?

Nothing.

You dont sound very excited.

Hmm.

Mom, what is it?

More silence.

Finally she spoke.

Im scared.

Of what?

That they will kill you.

I was stunned.

Who will? I asked.

She paused before answering.

You know what happened to us there.

In 1944, the Nazis deported my mother and her family from their small town of Sobrance to a ghetto, and then to Auschwitz. There her parents, most of her other relatives, and almost everyone she knew from her village were murdered. She had survived, eventually making her way to the United States and starting a new life.

I knew that her scars had never completely healed. But she loved and longed for all that she had lost, and I had been sure that she would see the presidents offer as I did: vindication. Coming full circle. An American success story.

I said as much.

I couldnt bear it if anything happened to you, she whispered.

I silently cursed myself. I should have seen this coming. But I had been so caught up in my own excitement that it hadnt occurred to me that she might react like this.

I had learned from our lifetime togetherthe hard waythat arguing with my mother was not effective when her anxieties flared. I had another idea.

Mom, guess where the ambassador lives?

Where?

Otto Petscheks palace.

Ohhh, she gasped. Really?

My mother may have been the poorest Czechoslovak Jew and Otto Petschek the richest. Otto and his family were famous among their fellow Czechsthe local equivalent of the Rothschilds or Rockefellers. Their Prague home was a Beaux-Arts masterpiece that conjured Versailles, with more than one hundred roomsso many that no one seemed to agree on an exact count. It was chockablock with antiques, old-master paintings, rare books, and other precious objects that Otto had collected and that remained in the house. The mansion spread out across a lush garden compound the size of an American city block. Erected after World War I, it had been called the last palace built in Europea final monument to a gilded era that definitively ended in 1938.

My mom thawed a little as we talked about the palaceenough for me to seize the moment.

Mom, I told her, we would love it if you would come with us. My wife, Lindsay, and I had agreed that we wanted Frieda to join us in Prague.