View over Vienna from the south tower of St. Stephen’s Cathedral. (Dietmar Rabich / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0)

My father spoke of Vienna, city of his birth, as though civilization had an address.

city of civil servants and universities, of professors, ministries, concert halls, of art and Kultur, of music disciplined into architecture, of architecture disciplined into stone.

Here, he taught us, was the cultivated world.

He carried that Vienna with him long after Vienna had ceased to carry him.

And so, when my sister and I were young, he insisted that we learn the roots of Kultur: music, history, painting, books — the inheritance of Europe presented to children,

an annual road trip from London (in his Westminster overdrive!) as though beauty might make us safe.

I inherited his pilgrimage.

I took my own children through Europe — Paris, Florence, Rome, Zurich, the old squares and cathedrals, palaces and monuments, the inevitable bronze general still mounted above the pigeons, sword raised toward some forgotten victory.

And always — the Jewish quarter.

A synagogue. A cemetery. A plaque on a wall.

Here they lived. Here they prayed. Here they disappeared.

I walked those streets with interest, sometimes sadness, but mostly the composure of history.

Its stones were old. Its crimes were old. Its dead were dead.

Here something changes.

So exquisitely polite.

The trams arrive. The windows shine. Young people fill the........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)