The Lost Cafe Schindler, by Merial Schindler

This book is framed as a family mystery wrapped within larger mysteries, the sort of book that is best understood by those who have some familiarity with the lost world of European Jewry, that combination of family history and cultural history that finds itself confronted with the large and implacable presence of the Holocaust as well as the examination of the human nature of history’s victors and victims. There are many such fascinating worlds that one can see in this particular perspective, and in this case, we are treated with a view of the fragile but beautiful North Tyrol as seen over the course of decades from a complex Jewish family that moves in to take advantage of business opportunities in the aftermath of the Jewish emancipation in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, thinks itself to have found a settled and welcoming home, only to see it fall apart first in the aftermath of Austria’s defeat and the economic threats of the postwar economy and then in the horrors of Hitler’s Final Solution and its shattering aftermath of loss. While the general pattern is a familiar one, the specific details of this particular tragedy include the author’s distinctly unsympathetic and conniving father and the sadness that results from the tragic confluence of family service to the Austro-Hungarian state that is ignored and unrecognized in the aftermath of the rise of nationalism that the family vainly seeks to oppose.

There are rather telling and sad details that abound here. The author finds herself in possession of some of her father’s effects after his death and seeks to untangle them apart from her father’s exaggerations and boasts, and this leads her to the painful research of the destruction of a family of Austrian Jews whose pursuit of familiar family trades in Tyrol in the 19th century led first to provincial success and then to sad and inevitable ruin, with some of the family being liquidated in World War II and the rest finding a bitter exile abroad. The lost cafe of the book’s title is only one of the things that has been lost. So too, a sense of belonging has been lost among the casual adoption and setting aside of citizenships as the cosmopolitan author finds herself adding an Austrian passport to her British one in order to seek European access in the aftermath of Brexit, as well as a sense of historical understanding of a family’s service to those around them, including one relative’s work as a doctor that got him labeled by Hitler–a patient whom he had treated during the dictator’s youth–as a rare noble Jew. Without a sense of the sustaining pillars of Jewish national or religious identity, the author mourns the loss of a fragile cosmopolitan ideal that she seeks to maintain in her own life, and if the book has a minor happy ending on at least one level, the author finds herself caught in the same historical forces that her grandparents’ generation struggled against ultimately to its ruin, which offers a sense of the continuing sense of tragedy for those who seek to find and enduring place depending on the growth of humanity.

In terms of its contents, this book is about 400 pages long and is divided into six parts, more than 20 chapters, and various other materials. The book begins with a prologue discussing how it was for the author to grow up with her unreliable father Kurt, as well as a family tree of her complex paternal family. The book begins with three chapters in part one that discuss her relatives Sofie and Samuel (1) as well as the family history that led them to settle in Tyrol (2) and to build a local family business empire (3). The next part of the book finds the family dealing with World War I on the Eastern (4) and Southern (5) fronts of Austria’s ultimately unsuccessful war effort and dealing with the aftermath of Austria-Hungary’s defeat (6). The third part of the family finds them seeking to change the family business with the times (7), deal with the reality of marriages (8) as well as a local murder mystery (9), and the threat of Anshluss (10). The book takes a dark turn with the look at family postcards (11), the mystery of two coffee cups that hint at ownership problems (12), an investigation into a relative who served as a Jewish Nazi (13), as well as a toboggan (14). The next part of the book brings a discussion of exile (15), letters to family left behind (16), various foods that symbolize the actions taken by the family (17) as well as others with the family property (18), along with the loss of relatives to the Final Solution (19), and the family’s strange relationship with the local Nazi leader (20). The final part of the book examines the endurance of the family business (21), legal issues involving the cafe (22), and the revival of the cafe under new ownership (23). The book ends with a discussion of memory and memorials in an epilogue, acknowledgements, recipes, and a selected bibliography and notes on sources.