From London to Wisconsin, 1933–2010 by Moira Roth

asjournal.org DOI 10.18422/55-03 Fragments of an Autobiography or Remembering in the House of Time: From London to Wisconsin, 1933–2010 by Moira Roth Moira Roth visited the U.S. in the early 1950s for the first time and decided to settle in the country because she found American universities to be places of her calling. Being deeply attracted to the wide range of ethnic and cultural differences in American society, Roth has since strived for artistic expression and established friendships in all corners of the world. Roth’s memoir pieces span seven decades. They reflect upon encounters with refugees in her mother’s outside London home in World War II, the Bohemian culture in Northern California in the 1960s, and the impact on her of various feminist- inspired art projects in the 1970s and 1980s. We, her readers, find ourselves exploring these decades in the virtual presence of Moira Roth. All Over the Map, The Poor Farm, Wisconsin, Summer 2010 In July of 2010, an elaborate series of exhibitions and theater events titled All Over the Map was held in honor of my 77th birthday at the Poor Farm, a new art space in rural Wisconsin. This space, located in a renovated nineteenth-century building surrounded by farmland, was once part of the Midwest’s system of “Poor Farms,” somewhat akin to almshouses in England and the Armenhäuser in Germany.1 I had spent relatively little time in the Midwest (outside of briefly teaching in Chicago, Illinois and Bloomington, Indiana) and so this encounter gave me an illuminating glimpse into American geography and history I had not previously known. It became a springboard for thinking about my own life, about this country and its complex history(ies), and my own relationship to this history. Among my birthday gifts at the Poor Farm was a total surprise: copies of some thirty-five snapshots of me, ranging from early childhood to the present, collected by the artist Suzanne Lacy, a close friend of mine for many years. She had sent them to Annika Marie (the co-organizer of this All Over the Map project) with instructions that they be “hidden in different nooks and crannies” in the main building at the Poor Farm. Over several days, I had the amazing experience of discovering—sometimes in a cupboard, sometimes in the drawer of a table, sometimes on a windowsill—forgotten images of myself: 1/21 A shy 4-year-old. A more adventuresome 20-year-old attending the University of Vienna . 2/21 A daydreamer along the river in St. Petersburg in 1965. A glamorously styled figure posing in California in 1970. 3/21 And the subject of a dramatic rescue from a sinking riverboat in Cambodia at the end of the 1990s. Searching for One’s Way Home, 2010–2011 These images stirred up recollections of disparate moments in my life. Yet even before encountering them, in May of 2010, I had begun to write a series of texts called Finding One’s Way Home. These texts (still ongoing) incorporate photographs of myself, internet references, and drawings by the Serbian-born, now San-Francisco- based, artist and theater director Slobodan Dan Paich. We have exchanged images and texts daily for the past two years. The first Finding One’s Way Home texts are abstract and rather romantic. Part 1 describes a woman on an unknown island making her way through a forest, holding a bedraggled map and a notebook. She has been told: That it would take her exactly One year and a day To find her way home. By Part 16 the woman realizes that: To continue finding her way home She must leave the beach and the forest On the island, And must go to Europe To find her mother. In Part 17 I plunge—albeit poetically and still using the third-person singular to narrate the tale—into my own World War II childhood. The woman recalls: Nightly hiding in the bomb shelter in the garden city of Letchworth, Where she and her mother lived, Hearing the German planes, the ‘doodlebugs,’ As they flew toward Or away from London. Part 18 describes the refugees from both continental Europe and London who stayed during the war with my mother and me in our home in Letchworth, some thirty miles outside London: 4/21 [. .] Paul Dienes, a mathematician and a poet From Hungary, Exuberant and witty,And Hans Redlich, A Jewish musicologist and conductor, From Vienna (his father was the last Minister of Justice in the Austro-Hungarian Empire) Who had lived in Germany with Liesl, his ballerina wife, Until escaping from the Nazis in 1939, And ending up in Letchworth during the war.She remembers, Sitting with Hans and Liesl, Listening to Monteverdi Vespers On The large Master’s Voice gramophone In her mother’s living room upstairs —decorated with expensive reproductions of Gauguin’s Tahitian paintings—That looked down on their garden Of peonies, blackberries and roses.She remembers summer Sunday lunches in the garden With musical visitors from London Including Frank Walker, Who was researching his biography of Hugo Wolf, And who later —After she had returned from her first visit to the United States when she was age eighteen— Was to put her in contact with Wolf’s illegitimate daughter Who arranged for her to live In a small village in Austria, Gmunden, While she learned German. Decades later, Living in Berkeley, California, She listens to a Hugo Wolf song on YouTube While she recalls her World War II childhood in Letchworth. Reflections in the Café, Berkeley, August 31, 2010: Of Writing, Travels, Rachel Marker and Memories of My Childhood in Letchworth I sit in a café near my Berkeley home, where I have gone to ever since I arrived back in Northern California in the mid-1980s. I come here each morning to have breakfast, read the New York Times and write—not on a laptop but in a notebook. Later, upon returning home, I input my handwritten texts and notes into my computer. 5/21 Me in Nabolom café, Berkeley, 2007. Photo by Laura Janku. Over the last ten years or so I have become increasingly immersed in writing fiction, poetry, and plays, much of it inspired by my travels in Europe (Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Greece, and Spain), Morocco, and Asia. The titles of four of my most recent and as-yet- unfinished series of texts will give, I hope, a sense of my sprawling interests: Traveling Companions/Fractured Worlds (1998–), The Library of Maps (2001–), From Far Away (2003–), and All Over the Map (2010–). A fifth project (also ongoing) relates to the voyaging in time and space of these series: Through the Eyes of Rachel Marker. While staying in Berlin (a city I love) for three weeks in the summer of 2001, I invented Rachel Marker, a Czech Jew who composes daily letters to Franz Kafka after his death in 1924 as she moves through Europe’s twentieth-century history and its cities—living for years in Prague, visiting Madrid during the Spanish Civil War, moving to Paris in 1939, and after the end of World War II settling in Berlin, where she regains her memory (lost during the war) and takes daily photographs of the city’s shadows. The Rachel Marker narrative includes an almost alter ego character whom I have named Moira Marker, inspired, in part, by my own encounters with twentieth-century history and those of people I have known. Today I sit here thinking about the war years in England, and about Paul Dienes and his family, and later the Redlichs. It was a tradition that we would always eat together—long, leisurely suppers accompanied by animated conversations about forgotten history and about music, literature, and art. These exchanges gave me an intimate, comfortable contact with European culture and history far beyond that of most English children at that time. For example, Hans introduced me to Sartre and existentialism when I was about fourteen. My education was furthered by my mother’s choice of a high school for me—unorthodox for its time (coeducational, vegetarian, and rather undisciplined!). In Letchworth—the world’s first “garden city,” created in 1903 by Ebenezer Howard and located between London and Cambridge—the Theosophists had founded the Garden City Theosophical School in 1915, which was later renamed St. Christopher School (although it was not Catholic) and run by Quakers. It had an international student body, which included children from Africa and Persia (now Iran), as well as from continental Europe and, of course, England itself. Adding to this ethnic and cultural mix was a range of class backgrounds; for example, the students from the Gold Coast and Persia were upper class, whereas most of the English students were middle class. Further complicating the picture for me was the fact that my mother came from a very wealthy, upper-class Montreal family, whereas my father had been born into a working-class Belfast family and was the only one in his family to go to college. (My parents had divorced when I was very young.) All this made me frequently feel rather “un-English” as a child, somewhat displaced yet knowing my childhood was unusually interesting and culturally rich. My childhood contacts also left me with a lifelong closeness to Jewish culture, history, and people, although I myself am not Jewish. In addition to Paul Dienes and later the Redlichs, who continued to live with us after World War II, I was deeply influenced by a lifelong friendship with Rose Hacker, an English-born Jew, who with her family stayed with me and my mother for a while during the war.

Load more