Home Is Somewhere Else: A Conversation with Lilian R. Furst

Following the Nazi invasion of Austria in 1938, a Viennese dentist named Desider Furst, his wife, and daughter found themselves fugitives, holders of German passports branded with a red "J" for Jew. Now, nearly sixty years later, the daughter tells their story in counterpoint, alternating chapters of her father's memoir with her own recollections. In this edited interview aired on Soundings, the National Humanities Center's weekly radio show, Wayne Pond talks with Lilian Furst about her book, Home Is Somewhere Else: An Autobiography in Two Voices (State University of New York Press, 1994). A 1988-89 Fellow of the Center, she is Marcel Bataillon Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Partial support for this broadcast came from Carolina Power and Light.

POND: Lilian, give us a sense of where your story begins and where it ends.

FURST: The story begins in Vienna in 1938. At the end of that year we boarded a train west to Cologne--my parents discussed whether to go east or west, and my mother said, "No, not east. West." We tried to get into Holland but didn't succeed, so at Christmastime in 1938 we crossed illegally into Belgium and lived there for two months, evading the police. Then my father learned that he was one of forty Austrian dentists to be admitted to England. On the first of March 1939, we departed for England--with some difficulty since Belgian authorities questioned how we had got into the country. My father took the British dental exams after going six months to dental school, and he was sent to Bournemouth on the south coast, where there was a shortage of dentists. We arrived on the first of May 1940, and on the tenth of May when France fell, my father was interned as a German for four months. We were in London during the bombing. Then we evacuated to Bedford, finally moving to Manchester in 1942, where my mother's family had settled. (They had been in the cotton business in Vienna with commercial contacts in Manchester.) We lived there from 1942 until we came to this country in 1971.

POND: Does the word "luck" figure in your story? Obviously your parents were making decisions informed as best they could under the circumstances. But, as you point out in your book, you were unbelievably fortunate.

FURST: Yes. And I think that was connected to my parents' religious faith. They believed that people didn't have enough information to make good or right decisions; one had to trust one's instincts, and one had to have faith.

I had experienced anti-Semitism before. My first memory of that was when I was two and a half. A little boy in the park asked me, "Do you have a Christmas tree?" When I replied "No," he said, "Then you must be a Jew." I had never heard the word, and it meant nothing. But I wept for a week--it sounded so horrible.

POND: Part of what trails you is that large red "J" that was imprinted on your passports. It accounts at once for your identity, and also for your rootlessness. I gather that you feel you do not lack an identity, but you do lack a home.

FURST: I certainly don't lack an identity, and my identity comes in large measure from my being Jewish and my being a refugee. When I was on the verge of becoming a United States citizen, I was very hesitant to take the oath because I had to forswear allegiance to all other sovereigns. I talked half the night with my father. I couldn't forswear Great Britain, I said, because the English had taken us in; they had educated me; I have a real loyalty to them. My father argued that there will never be a war between England and the United States. Even if there were, nobody, he said, would want me--with my poor athletic abilities--on their side. None of these arguments counted with me. But in the end, he said, "Whatever piece of paper you carry, you will always be a Jewish refugee." And that is my identity.

POND: Lilian, tell me about the memoir that your father wrote. There was a time in your life when you were reluctant to look at it, and yet those 135 pages have furnished the basis for a very compelling piece of personal literature.

FURST: My father was prompted to write his memoir by a patient in England. He practiced as a dentist before the days of Muzak, so to distract his patients from their treatment he told them stories. When he remarked to one patient, "I have had four nationalities and never been a spy," the man, a historian, said, "You ought to write this down." When we came to this country, and I went out every day to teach Harvard summer school, he was left alone in the house, with no yard to care for. So he began to write. And he wrote and wrote. He wrote in long-hand, and then he typed it with two fingers on his 1930s Olivetti typewriter, working on it for maybe a couple of years.

POND: How did you feel about your father's project?

FURST: I was glad that he had found an occupation, but I was reluctant to read it. In the years that I'd been away from home, he had written me a letter every Sunday. He had managed half a page. I could envision him sitting there, biting his pen, wondering what to write, and then he would say, "One tulip is in flower in the garden." I had this image of him as not having much writerly ability. I didn't want to look at the memoir because I thought I'd be disappointed, and I feared he would read that in my face.

POND: You were afraid that you were going to be too critical of the work of somebody whom you loved very deeply?

FURST: Yes. Also, we had an agreement that he would never try to read my work. I once read aloud to him a public lecture that I was going to give. I wanted to time it. Within the first three minutes he went to sleep, and he awoke at the end. He said it had nothing to do with my lecture; this was his time for taking a nap.

Home is where my things are. Home is nowhere. Maybe home is beyond the grave; maybe in that yonder realm there will be release from otherness. I have dear friends, former students and colleagues, who form some tie to this world, especially when they need me. The telephone is indeed a lifeline. I float on the periphery, at home yet not truly so in Europe, Great Britain, or the United States. My geographical roots are shallow; only those created by the brand mark of the red "J" run deep into my being.
--Lilian R. Furst, Home Is Somewhere Else: An Autobiography in Two Voices

POND: Let's talk about the story that you tell in Home Is Somewhere Else. You, your father, and mother leave Vienna in 1938. Your book in some ways fits into the category of Holocaust literature. Yet you are one of the lucky ones. You are a survivor--not, as you say, an Anne Frank. What is it, then, about this story that deserves to go public? It does not reflect the experience that we normally associate with the Holocaust.

FURST: It deserves to be told precisely for that reason--because it represents a sizeable group of people whose lives were decisively shaped and changed by the events of the Holocaust, but who were not brutalized, or imprisoned, or sent to death camps.

POND: And yet you were brutalized. There is, as you say, scar tissue on your soul.

FURST: I realized that only in retrospect--partly through writing about the experience, partly from seeing this German passport with its red "J." But especially I realized it after my father's death, because we had formed a unit of two, and we could exchange ideas. When I was left alone, I felt alienated. I realized how different I was from other people. And I began to understand the effect of my childhood experiences.

POND: Tell me more about how this book originated.

FURST: I finally read my father's memoir because a friend wanted to borrow it. I thought I should take a little look, and I was astonished at what he had achieved. After I read it, it was deposited in a social history archive at London University. I never planned on writing this book. Then in the summer of 1991 when I was in California, a friend of mine at Stanford from Czechoslovakia, Susan Groag Bell, published her autobiography, Between Two Worlds, in which she recounts her experiences in British boarding schools. I was reminded of my own stay at a boarding school when I was eight. I had packed my computer for the return to Chapel Hill in two days, so I began to scribble a chapter I called "Chertsey," which was the place where the school had been.

POND: Did you think of this as speaking to your father?

FURST: Not at first. I just wrote. And once I started, I couldn't stop. I wrote a chapter called "Vienna," and I went on and on. Only when I had written several chapters did I realize that their titles were the same as my father's. He had arranged his by the places we had been--Vienna, Cologne, Brussels, London. I had done the same, and the idea came to me of alternating the chapters. But I wrote mine before I reread his--I didn't want mine to be contaminated by his. Then I reread his and put them on the word processor. People keep saying to me, "It must have been painful." On the contrary, it was a very joyous thing for me. Some of the events were painful, but what was joyous was reconstituting, even if only on paper, my family, because it had been so important for the three of us to stay together.

POND: What does it mean to you to be a survivor?

FURST: I assign the Diary of Anne Frank in a course on adolescence in twentieth-century literature, and it tears me apart each time I read it. I feel that so easily, but for the grace of God, there go I. I don't want to sound moralistic, but I think because I did survive, I am obligated to try to make something of my life, to do something for other people, to contribute something to this world. And I think I can do that by teaching. My students are very important to me. I hope I can give them some access to and understanding of those worlds that I knew and that are now gone.

POND: Your book is subtitled "Autobiography in Two Voices" and takes the form of a dialogue between you and your father. But we certainly do not want to neglect the presence of your mother. Tell me about her.

FURST: At a late stage, I added a chapter about her called "The Silent Third Person." She didn't leave anything in writing, but she was very, very important in our lives. She was born in Poland, and she was one of the early women to go through medical school in Vienna after the First World War. It was very difficult for her, not only because she was a woman, but because she was Jewish.

POND: Was she a literary person? You say at one point in your book that you were born into your profession; that is, you had a comparative literature mindset. Can that predisposition be traced to your mother?

FURST: She was much more literary than my father. She never practiced her most beloved profession after 1938, because she had no British qualification. So she began to read very widely, and she took interest in what I was doing. But I am a comparatist because I always heard my parents comparing--school systems, college systems, life styles. I didn't know until I was twenty-one and went to Cambridge that there was any method other than the comparative.

POND: The story that you tell in your book, though it does not involve the horrors of the Holocaust, does reveal a deep psychological unfolding--coming to terms with one's personal history in a larger social context. Can you give us an example of an event that stands out in your mind?

FURST: Our house was full of books. Books were best friends. One of my earliest memories is seeing my parents throw many of their books into our huge stove. These were books that had been banned by the Nazis. That was a very staggering and incomprehensible event to me at age six.

POND: One of the things that goes on in literary studies is looking for the distinctions, the subtleties and the contradictions. As you look back on this experience, when your family was forced to leave Vienna, do you think of it solely in black and white terms?

FURST: Not at all in black and white. My memories as a six-year-old were too limited, I think. But the main point that came across to me from reading my father's memoir many years later was that we would never have escaped had it not been for the Austrians and Germans who broke the law to help us. And I was always taught, even as a small child, never to categorize people as "the Germans," "the French," "the Americans," "the Jews," "the Arabs," but that there are good and bad everywhere. I think that this is an important message to convey.

POND: Is this book about leaving things or about finding things--achieving a sense of tranquility, if not peace, about this experience that your family went through?

FURST: I think it is both and neither. It is a book about learning to accept your life. I am astonished by young Americans who make a life plan: "In three years I'll be doing this. In five years I'll be doing that." My life has taught me about contingency, that history reshapes lives, that we have to be open and flexible. We have an obligation to remember the past, but we need also to live in the present and to take what it offers. Had I stayed in Vienna, I'm sure I would have gone to medical school. I would have married one of the little boys I played with in the park--I still write to one. As it is, I am in North Carolina, a professor of comparative literature. My life is different from what it would have been, but I don't think it's worse.

POND: How do you think of that red "J" that now embellishes the cover of this book? How do you come to terms with your Jewishness in the 1990s, looking back sixty years to the events of this book?

FURST: It's absolutely central to my life. I light candles every Friday, and I remember all the members of my family, and my father's family who perished in the Holocaust. I have a mezuzah on the door. I observe the Jewish holidays. I'm not a member of any congregation, but this has nothing to do with theology. I find it difficult to identify with American Jews, who see themselves primarily as Americans and secondly as Jews. I have been an Austrian, a German, I've been British, now I'm American, but I am first and foremost a Jew. My citizenship is more or less coincidental, although I'm a very loyal citizen. I believe in paying my taxes and doing all those things. Citizenships can change, but my Jewish identity cannot. I still, for example, send contributions to the Association of Jewish Refugees in Great Britain because that is an important organization.

POND: Do I understand that after a fashion this book originated at the National Humanities Center?

FURST: Oh, yes. Lots of things have originated at the National Humanities Center. When I was here in 1988-89, I was working on All Is True: The Claims and Strategies of Realist Fiction, published by Duke University Press. But the seeds of many other things were sown during that year, not only the book I began to write in 1991--Home Is Somewhere Else--but also my interest in medical history and in linking medical history to literature. I am currently editing a collection of twelve essays by various scholars on women physicians and healers. It runs from figures in classical antiquity to contemporary African Americans. It's going to be published by the University Press of Kentucky and called Climbing a Long Hill, a phrase that comes from Sarah Orne Jewett's novel, A Country Doctor. The titular character tells Nan Prince that if she wants to become a doctor, it will be like climbing a long hill. It is dedicated to my mother.

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