Repatriation and the Pull of the Past

The Consulate General of Austria in Los Angeles is located in a glorified strip mall in Brentwood. I always imagine consulates to look like they do in New York: stately townhouses on the Upper East Side with impenetrable, overworked facades. In London, where I live, the embassy is in Belgravia, one of the city’s most expensive districts, and the building has an impressive and looming colonnade. The Los Angeles architecture was a bit of a letdown: corporate black glass. The only indicator that we had entered foreign soil was a small brass plaque in German. I had flown to Los Angeles that morning with my dad and brother for the final, but at the same time first, step in applying for Austrian citizenship. It had taken us almost four years to get to this point.

In sixth grade, for Cultural Heritage Week, I had anxiety about what to present. My classmates all seemed so interesting: One was the great-granddaughter of a railroad tycoon, another of a Manhattan Project scientist. I wrote an essay about the Upper West Side and coaxed an A out of my teachers, probably because I served bagels. I’m the heir of a pocket-maker, a jeweler, and the great-great-granddaughter of a ship’s captain. I come from thieves in Georgia and bluebloods in the Bronx.

We know very little about my mom’s side of things, only that they have been around the United States for quite a bit of time. My great-grandmother Grace, an ugly lady and my namesake, started her journal, “I was born a Georgia cracker” if that’s any indication of things. (Apparently, or at least according to Wikipedia, “Georgia cracker” is much less of a pejorative than just “cracker” though I’m not sure there’s much comfort in that.) In high school, my US history teacher Mrs. T, a lumpy white lady who whooped a lot, was obsessed with Native Americans. She asked us one day to go around and say where our families came from, and when it was my turn I said America, because that is true and because I didn’t know what else to say. Mrs. T whooped, “What tribe are you?” I saw my grade rise rapidly, but I wasn’t fast enough to come up with a lie and so just as quickly, it dropped again.

On my dad’s side, my grandmother is the youngest in a large family. Her grandfather was a sea captain with a Scottish last name. There were lots of cousins and aunts, and everyone did wholesome outdoor activities like lake swimming and hiking. Instead of talking about her family, my grandmother, a real babe in the vein of Lauren Bacall, liked to tell us about her suitors at Cornell and how she would stop at the bar on her way to Hunter College High School in Manhattan.

We have a history of obliteration: gassed at Auschwitz and shot at Bełżec. My grandfather Leo was the sole survivor of a whole history of Lindauers. Of the actual details, I learned very little growing up: In 1940, my grandfather Leo fled Vienna; he was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust. After working in London, he immigrated to the United States, met my grandmother and, in 1949, they moved to Los Angeles and had four kids. He died of leukemia in 1983. I never met my grandpa and never got to ask him anything.

Lindens, on a whole, are a forward-looking group. Even our last name is new, shortened by my grandfather upon his arrival in the United States. Family lore has it that he chose Linden so that his kids would always be in the middle of the classroom, never first or last for anything. I would never change my last name. Besides what that means for feminism, Linden is a tree and I like that there is life in my name and that my grandfather created it.

When my grandmother was alive, she was always calmly and rationally divvying up her belongings. She asked me repeatedly to claim items with a Post-it note and my name; I only ever marked mementos of her childhood and letters from my grandfather, the bits and bobs no one else thought to want. When she died, my dad and his three siblings went to Palm Springs to sort out the house. At some point he called my mom: “No one is gunning for the photos; should we take them?” My mom, a materialist in the least judgmental way, was shocked and told my dad to grab them all.

I am an oddity of a Linden, completely fascinated by what came before. I fell in love with Europe as an idea a long time ago, well before I understood any nuances in culture or history, before I recognized the problems of a generalizing storybook narrative, before there was an oversized platform for UKIP and Marine Le Pen. I was seduced by a past dotted with queens and yellowed stone ruins. In carpool one afternoon in second grade, my friend’s mom asked us where we would go if we could travel anywhere. Someone said Mumbai and another girl Peru. I said Vienna. I wanted to know where I had come from.

*

My parents lived all over Africa and Europe before I was born. They stressed the importance of being a person of the world and I always planned to live outside of the United States. School was the easiest way to do it, so I studied abroad and earned a master’s degree at Oxford, a place where the heft of history is inescapable. Jumping from student visa to student visa is not a permanent solution, or at all financially viable, and I am reminded every day that my life here is short-term. In the end, it was Reagan, my mom’s hairdresser, who suggested repatriation. Her grandfather was Portuguese and she had recently and successfully applied for naturalization; while reading up on the application she had come across the Austrian Nationality Act, which repatriates those whose families were persecuted by the Third Reich.

The process for repatriation is straightforward: Prove your lineage through birth certificates and marriage licenses, and then prove that you were hunted down. I began with a family tree.

My grandfather was born Leo Zigellaub false Lindauer in 1917 Vienna. The end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Armistice Day was still over a year away. He had an older brother, Joseph, and a sister, Ruth (I have yet to find her birthdate), who, along with my great-grandparents, lived in an apartment inside the Ringstraße. My dad has Grandpa Leo’s documents from the University of Vienna, a miniature book with his enrollment certificate and signature. Facing the paperwork is a photo of Leo. Lindens have either giant or microscopic heads; my grandpa’s was a bowling ball.

My dad suggested we look through the old photographs to see if there might be anything useful tucked into the pages. There’s a section of my parents’ garage that is a Jenga tower of furniture and boxes; in the very back is where my grandmother’s photos had been stored after she died. We sorted through pictures of my dad and his siblings, their summer holidays, and my grandmother’s many relatives. Tucked underneath all of the albums no one had wanted was a single maroon book, slim with a funny textured front. Inside were photographs of Grandpa Leo in his teens and twenties, and two pictures of my great-grandparents. “I’ve never seen them before—my grandparents,” said my dad.

There is no word in English to express the feeling of seeing the face of a dead family member for the first time: something akin to a melancholic shock, a dull, yet overwhelming wave. It can take you out at the knees. It is rare that this wave hits both parent and child at the same time. If there is such a word, I’m sure it is in German.

My dad wrote to his siblings for any information or documents they had. My aunt in San Antonio sent a packet of papers. Inside was a notice of property seizure stamped with Nazi insignia, and more than a dozen letters Leo had written to the Red Cross asking for help finding Joseph and Ruth. The tone is measured but these are desperate letters, a kind of desperation of which I have no grasp and never want to understand.

I don’t know if Leo ever found out what happened to his family; it took me weeks of online research. In the Yad Vashem database, I entered the information for Chaim (Karl) Izak Linadauer Zigellaub, my great-grandfather. He was deported on February 15, 1941 to Lublin, Poland, presumably to the Lublin Ghetto. If he didn’t die in the Ghetto, he would have most likely been transported to the Bełżec Concentration Camp where almost 500,000 Jews were murdered. There was just a single mention of his name on a deportation list; the space between the specifics and the unknowns is enormous. Brieche, his wife, and Ruth’s fates are unknown but almost certainly they were taken to Auschwitz. Improbably, Joseph made it to China where he died in the Shanghai Ghetto. It’s no wonder my grandfather forced time to carry him towards the future.

My uncle in Los Angeles sent my grandparents’ marriage certificate. In addition to Leo’s naturalization paperwork, which I had already requested, and copies of everyone’s birth certificates, I needed both my grandparents’ and parents’ marriage licenses. Every document requires an Apostille certificate to make it recognizable internationally, and each state in which a document was initially issued has a different Apostille process.

The birth certificates for my dad, my brother, also named Leo, and me were easy. I spent twenty minutes online and ordered them from City Hall. A bow-tied courier collected them from my office and drove to Sacramento to get the Apostille seal. It was expensive but efficient. The marriage licenses proved much more complex. My dad believed his parents had been married in Worcester, Massachusetts; their marriage certificate said Stafford Springs, Connecticut. Neither place yielded anything.

As for my mom and dad, they were married at my maternal grandmother’s apartment in New York City. It was easy enough to get a copy of the license, but the Apostille proved allusive. Last September, Mom and I tried in person.

At the New York City Clerk’s Office, we were ushered into a back room. It was comically dark for 11 a.m. We were given a slip numbered 193; the ticker was at 82 when we sat down. I don’t think anyone moved the entire time we were in there. The room was full of miserable people, zombies of bureaucracy. Even a bride—with brilliant dyed red hair—and her soon-to-be husband looked like they had sucked a lemon. The entire situation was so Kafka it feels stupid to write Kafkaesque. Two hours later, a mustached man called out 193. Drained, we put in the request for an Apostille seal. “Ma’am, you should be at the annex of this office. We do all the other certificates here. Not the Apostille.”

I bought an expensive pretzel from a street vendor outside City Hall and we walked further downtown. Waddling in front of us down the stairs—a sweeping underground staircase—were the bride and groom. My mom gestured in sympathy, which went unnoticed. The office itself was well-lit and competent; the lady helping us wasted no time and said we needed to get to the Department of State and would have to pay with a money order.

I bought another expensive pretzel; by now, the paperwork was dotted with mustard fingerprints. The money order office felt like a scam and had cheap cottage-cheese walls. In front of us, a woman with dazzling crystal-encrusted nails talked loudly on her cell phone. As she waved her hands forcefully, the crystals caught the light and made rainbows. We got the money order. We found the Department of State. The line for an Apostille was fifty people long. We decided to mail in the documents. Kafka always wins.

*

Suddenly, everyone had an opinion on Vienna, a city doomed by its history. Either, it is too nostalgic for the decadent empire, or too cagey about its criminal past. “Why would you want to be Austrian when they danced in the streets for the Anschluss and showered Hitler in flowers?” “Austria has never paid for its role in the war.” Several people suggested I read Edmund de Waal’s memoir The Hare with the Amber Eyes. It is the story of de Waal’s ancestors, the Ephrussis, once a great Jewish banking dynasty who lost almost everything in the war. The same people also suggested I watch The Woman in Gold which stars Helen Mirren as Maria Altmann and Ryan Reynolds as E. Randol Schoenberg, her earnest lawyer. Altmann is struggling to recover Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, a painting of her aunt which was seized by the Nazis. (Spoiler: There’s no Klimt in my past.)

I did finally make it to Vienna, the second-to-last stop on a lazy and meandering summer holiday. In the opening pages of Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh wrote, “Oxford, in those days, was still a city of aquatint.” Vienna felt that way too, a bit indistinct around the edges as if it was unsure of what time it belonged to. And in Vienna, I too fell out of time. The city is a jewel box and as saccharine and sumptuous as its famous desserts. I ate Sacher torte at Café Sperl and spent a day in the Kunsthistorische. I bought a postcard featuring Empress Sisi, wife of Emperor Franz Joseph I, known for her ludicrous beauty routine and very lush hair. Enormous roses grew in the Volksgarten. As poor of a descriptor as it is, everything was beautiful.

I have never felt like I belonged to one place or another. Home is people, and if you have your people, you feel at home, and it so happens that many of my people still live near my original home of San Francisco. But as I’ve grown up, I’ve had several homes, some more permanent than others. Right now, I feel equally displaced between London and San Francisco, an unceasing game of tug-of-war. These and others are the places mapped into my brain where I get that comfortable purr in my stomach upon arrival. On that first trip to Austria, in the blinding sunshine, I felt to be of Vienna if not Viennese myself. If it was not home, it could someday become one.

Vienna is desperately longing for something it once was. As Alice Gregory wrote recently in T Magazine, “The Austro-Hungarian Empire fell a century ago next year, but the physical remains of its influence are perfectly preserved.” The pull of its history is inescapable. In my own family, I keep looking back for what was lost, only there is nothing left to grab a hold of.

In the Brentwood strip mall, at the Consulate, Cecilia, a grumpy Foreign Service operator begrudgingly began to organize our paperwork. We didn’t know we were going to need triple copies and my mom’s passport, even though we had been repeatedly told that she was ineligible for naturalization. When Cecilia noticed that my brother Leo and her son shared the same birthday, albeit seventeen years apart, her mood brightened noticeably. Turning to my dad she asked, “Did you know your birthday is five days before an Austrian national holiday?”

We had traveled to Los Angeles to deliver the applications but also to be fingerprinted, a step, we learned, that would actually have to happen later. The man who would inspect the applications was away on holiday for a month. But Cecilia was optimistic on the whole: “Your father is Austrian, so you are Austrian.”

Los Angeles makes my dad talk about growing up. He has an amazing ability to reflect upon the city’s developments. It’s a funny if appropriate city for time travel, with all the vintage fonts and dreamy light. In the few hours remaining before the flight back to San Francisco, we walked the beach in Venice, a place entirely of this time and not at all.

In his memoir The World of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig wrote, “I look up again and again to the ancient constellations that shone on my childhood, comforting myself with the inherited confidence that, some day, this relapse will appear only an interval in the eternal rhythm of progress onward and upward.” Zweig, ever prescient, left Vienna where he had lived most of his life for England in 1934; he never returned.

We are in the middle of another relapse; who can say who the victims will be? I’m not naïve enough to think that becoming Austrian will make up for everything that happened to my family, to the people I will never meet, or stupid enough to think that I can ward off whatever is coming. But I have hope that this tiny act of reclaiming something I hadn’t even realized I was searching for will be a reckoning of sorts. It is an uptick, a restitution, the constellations of my childhood able to burn brightly again.