THE CZERNOWITZ THAT WAS WALKS AROUND A BYGONE LITTLE VIENNA

About the Book

Only monuments remind us today of the golden age of Czernowitz, once the lively capital of the Bukovina, the easternmost region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Even after the once-mighty empire crumbled in 1918, Czernowitz remained a haven of multicultural coexistence, peopled by Jews, Ruthenes, Bessarabians, Germans, Turks, Poles, and Armenians and animated by a proudly Austrian culture. That culture, literary and cosmopolitan, has vanished from this corner of Europe. Local fascists, the Nazis and the Holocaust, and the region’s absorption into the Soviet Union insured that the past has here been lost irretrievably. Now the Bukowina is part of Ukraine, where history is being made again. Otto Appenzeller is a child of prewar Czernowitz, where he absorbed its culture even as the storm clouds gathered. He was born there in 1927; his father was an architect and professor and his mother an accountant. He and his parents escaped the horror of pogroms by emigrating after he joined the Czech brigade, which supported the Soviet efforts to defeat the Germans. He became a neurologist and was delighted to know at least three boyhood acquaintances from this small city followed similar paths in medicine. For him, translating this book summons memories of literary evenings and family gatherings in the old style and festive occasions to celebrate an era that has now long vanished. Cover design by Rose Appenzeller

About the Author

Othmar Andrée was born in 1945 in Radstadt, in Austria. He lives in Berlin, where he works as a publicist and translator. He has been fascinated for many years by the Jewish traditions and culture of Eastern Europe, and specifically with the town of Czernowitz and the history, literature, and art of the province of Bukowina until the second World War. He has published in German, Austrian, and Israeli newspapers such as Die Stimme, Tel Aviv; Israel Nachrichten, Tel Aviv; Zwischenwelt, Vienna; Bukovinskij Journal, Czernowitz, and Spiegelungen, Munich. His translation of the Yiddish memorial text Four Summers with Kubi Wohl, by Vera Hacken, was published by Spiegelungen. This book is dedicated to the memory of Lydia Harnik. Otto Appenzeller was born in Czernowitz in 1927 and now lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA. He is a retired academic clinical neurologist from the University of New Mexico School of Medicine. He knows first-hand the places and some people that are described in the book, and he met Othmar Andrée in Lydia Harnik’s apartment in Czernowitz in 1998, when she was already old and bedridden.