Julie Metz - Eva and Eve: A Search for My Mothers Lost Childhood and What a War Left Behind

One of the most engrossing, educational, and emotional and yet efforless reads of the yearImpossible to forget. Zibby Owens, for Good Morning America

Eva and Eve

A Search for My Mother's Lost Childhood and What a War Left Behind

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Julie Metz

New York Times bestselling author of Perfection

Also by Julie Metz

Perfection: A Memoir of Betrayal and Renewal

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The names of some individuals who appear in these pages have been changed.

Copyright 2021 by Julie Metz

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First Atria Books hardcover edition April 2021

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Interior design by Erika R. Genova

Jacket design by Laywan Kwan

Photographs of city skyline and book by Getty Images

Vintage papers Shutterstock

Author photo by Shannon Greer

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-9821-2798-5

ISBN 978-1-9821-2800-5 (ebook)

To my parents, Eve and Frank, who gave me this life

For the Viennese golden age in its ultimate florescence was peculiarly a creation of that Jewish society: a society of outsiders, who, for all too brief a time, had become insiders.

Peter Hall, Great Cities in Their Golden Age

The future keeps mocking the past. The past, in eerie resilience, keeps shadowing the present.

Frederic Morton, Thunder at Twilight

Children are detectives of their parents, who cast them out into the world so that one day the children will return and tell them their story so that they themselves can understand it.

Patricio Pron, My Fathers Ghost Is Climbing in the Rain

I VE NEVER MET this sweet child who smiles at me with the confidence of a well-loved daughter. She is pretty, well-groomed, well-fed. Her dress, purchased or perhaps sewn at home for winter family celebrations, is of a floral material, with puffed sleeves and large round buttons, trimmed in white lace at its high ruffled collar. Her dark, shiny hair is cut short, above her chin, her bangs neatly pinned to one side. If I visited her school Id see an entire classroom of nine-year-old girls who part and pin their hair the same way. She poses on her own in a comfortable sitting room, but in her easy gaze I sense the presence of other people: parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, family friends, and the unknown photographer. Behind her, a few hints of the rooms dcorrounded backrest of an elegant wood chair, sideboard decorated with a lacy cloth, door framed in carved molding against a patterned wallpaperall recede in layers of gauzy focus.

What is it about this girl? She seems at once so innocent, yet so knowing. Her plump cheeks are incarnadine, like a morsel of blush-tinted marzipan, yet something about the intensity of her dark eyes tells me she is fiercer than her sweet presentation.

She will need that fierceness.

In two months this girls country will be taken over by a cohort of extremists led by an authoritarian germophobe who hates people of her kind. He sees them as filth, vermin, contamination. In truth there have always been people in her country who hated her ethnic group, but now their views will be fully validated and normalized.

In six months this well-appointed sitting room will be ransacked and most of the remaining possessions that arent shattered or stolen by an emboldened police force will be sold off so that the family can survive for the next two years.

The girls parents will spend those two years in a struggle against a mighty bureaucracy as they attempt to get out of a once-beloved city whose majority population now sees them as enemies of a new empire. Having lost all rights, the family will now be stateless.

Across the ocean, the latest incarnation of the xenophobic, isolationist America First movement is in full sway. Immigrants are suspect, even those who have thrown off most of their traditional customs in an effort to assimilateto become Americans. People like this girls family are reviled for their mysterious religion, olive skin, and prominent noses. They cannot shake off their reputation as anti-Christian money-hoarders. They speak the language of Americas enemy and surely are spies, however desperately they and their political advocates plead for safe haven from persecution. America First is about protecting jobs from immigrants who will steal employment from true American citizens. America First means resisting engagement in the conflagration that threatens to engulf faraway lands. Let those foreign countries fight their own battles. Let some other place take the great masses of the persecuted and unwashed.

The girl looks at me intently and I meet her gaze. Eighty years have passed since a camera captured her face in the midst of a gentle winter afternoon. Now the gyres of history have revolved. Promoted by another would-be authoritarian and obsessive hand washer, America First is back, emblazoned on posters, T-shirts, and red baseball caps. Different immigrants from the east and south, just as desperate, just as feared and reviled for their dark skin, language, dress, religion, and all-round Otherness, plead for entry and are refused, in the name of national security. In the sweltering days of midsummer, parents and children are separated at the border or deported even as American farmers struggle to hire enough workers to pick fruits and vegetables. America has retreated from its European alliances and the walls of isolationism rise up like the wall an American president wants to build with taxpayer dollars. In an effort to stem the tide of immigrants, right-wing politicians have persuaded fearful British voters to leave the European Union. Other European governments teeter into anti-immigrant conservatism and authoritarianism. Ironically it is Germanys chancellor who continues to uphold the postwar European order of liberal democracy.

I flip the photograph. On the reverse side a diligent family archivist has written January 1938 in soft pencil. The nine-year-old girl in the frilly dress lived in Vienna, Austria, where a world of safety and comfort was about to end. Her name was Eva, and she was my mother. I knew her as Eve.