Die Presse, November 14, 2020
German original: https://www.diepresse.com/5897245/die-judische-kleidermacherin
The story of Ella Shapira mirrors the 20th century. The strong and exceptional woman mastered a life with dramatic upheavals and crises.
Every time the old lady celebrated a special birthday, the 80th, the 90th, she almost made the 100th as well, her family from all over the world gathered at her modest row house at the outskirts of London. Only then it dawned on the Jewish family that there are relatives all over the world, from Austria to Israel, from Denmark to the United States. The queen of these gatherings, their focal point and their reason, was Ella Shapira, born 1897.
Reconstructing the greater family as a family tree would fill a double page in a book. However, many relatives are marked “perished in the Holocaust.” Ella Shapira survived. She had to leave home and family behind three times in order to start fresh in new places, she lived in four countries, throughout an entire century. When she arrive in a new place, she adapted, also to the changing nature of the times.
Two that particularly loved and admired her are her Austrian grandchildren Helen Liesl Krag and Peter Menasse. They devoted a book to their grandmother, who passed away in 1990; Krag contributed the historical background and the long dialogues, Peter Menasse contributed an affectionate essay on the “queen” of his childhood. It turned into an homage and probably also into a document of Jewish family cohesion. The two descendants recognized that they, too, had a past, ancestors, roots, that not everything was expired. Every time he traveled back to Vienna from London, “I had a much bigger family in my heart and in my consciousness than before,” said Peter Menasse. The picture of a big, common family was a touching experience for someone who, like many other children in 1950s Vienna, did not know the typical family constellation father – mother – child.
To get the grandmother to talk was not that easy. Her life philosophy had always been not to talk too much about the past, which is over, but to think about the future: “Who is interested in the past? That was all so poor and terrible, the life,” she said. The grandchildren then wondered how naturally women of her generation experienced history.
She became the center of the family nolens volens. She did not see herself as the head and fixture of a clan so widely ramified, one that she got to see so seldomly. When friends came with the family that tried to hug her, she said while shaking her head “who is this, why does he kiss me? ”She maintained a German language colored by Yiddish grammar, it mirrored her personal history. The long passages of dialogue in the book were printed as such, reading them is a particular delight. Did she correctly master one of the many languages of her life? Irrelevant.
Roots in Imperial Galicia
The family in which Ella Shapira grew up was not typical for East-European Jewry. She had Russian roots and lived in Tarnopol, Galicia, a garrison town of the K.u.K. Monarchy, and was not with many children. Ella had only one older sister, and while the father was devout and thought traditionally, the capable mother asserted herself when it came to the girl’s education. According to her own words, Ella attended “a liberal school, not a devout one.” But she really was taught by life: “Everything that I know I acquired myself.”
She was in luck, she was a child of the early 20th century. At that time, the corset of prohibitions dictated by religion and tradition was not so tight anymore if the family was not too orthodox. Assimilation and Zionism gathered more and more supporters, and the number of women who did not bow to the paternalism of their parents and husbands grew. Instead, they wanted to master their own lives, and that was only possible through education. Migration to the capital Vienna furthered this trend, but could also lead to setbacks of emancipation. If the family rose into the middle- or upper class, the wife had to sit at home, supervise the servants, and add to her husband’s prestige by a pretty appearance.
Ella Shapira went her own way, she did not let anyone interfere. She developed into a confidant and always hard-working woman with a free spirit that made her independent. The poor and devout environment of her childhood and the enlightened, modern life after moving to the West were worlds apart. She began to learn tailoring, because “a woman who is dependent on a man, who cannot earn, that is terrible.”
In World War I – Vienna she muddled through on her own, sent money to her parents at home, got married, and earned customers as an independent tailor with a growing number of employees. In 1935, she became a master craftswoman in women’s dressmaking. That marked the end of desperate poverty that she knew so well from her Galician home.
Piety was now a thing of the past, she said. Despite three children, the marriage became unhappy: “It is difficult for a man when the woman has money.” Politics had left few emotional marks on her, also when she had to leave Vienna in 1938 for England, where she married a second time. With her typical pragmatism she started over again. “I hope you will have a lot of success with your grandmother’s life,” she told her grandchild before she passed away in November 1990 at the age of 94.
Best of Austria’s Jewry
Danielle Spera, director of the Jewish Museum Vienna, presents a fully subjective list in her new book (Almathea Publishers): 100 x 100 Austria: Jewry. It is a compact work on Jews’ contributions to the development of Austria, from science, medicine, music, art, as patrons, to the big economic achievements, for example in railway construction. Spera’s approximation to the issue is a voyage of discovery, from the department store culture to pioneers of dance, from the Jewish protagonists of the Salzburg Festival to the Ferris Wheel in Vienna’s Prater and the founding of the Ottakring Brewery.