Happy New Year - Shana Tova

 I wish all my readers a sweet, scintillating, and satisfying year!

Vienna -- Pebbles on Gustav Mahler's grave

 Pebbles on the top of Mahler's tomb, following Jewish tradition. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

We are in the midst of Gustav Mahler year -- a double whammy anniversary: July marked the 150th anniversary of his birth; next May marks the 100th anniversary of his death.

Researching a couple of articles (see my article in the nytimes.com here), I spent much of the past few days following the footsteps of  young Gustav  in central Moravia -- the lovely Vysocina upland region, one of my favorite parts of the Czech Republic. I stayed in the pension that now occupies the house Mahler was born in in the village of Kaliste, found the gravestones of his grandparents in the Jewish cemetery in Ledec nad Sazavou, visited various Mahler haunts including Zeliv, the village where his first love lived (and committed suicide), and the house in Jihlava, where the composer lived until the age of 15 and which is now a Mahler museum; I also spent hours driving through the wonderful landscape, listening all the while to Mahler symphonies on the car stereo..... (more on all this in a later post, with pictures).

I skipped over his adult life as a composer, conductor, world star and -- because of anti-Semitism -- a convert to Catholicism in order to get the job of director of the Vienna Opera.

But I did conclude my Mahler weekend with a pilgrimage to his grave in the Catholic cemetery in Grinzing, a wine-making village now on the northern outskirts of Vienna.

Mahler's tomb is a simple upright slab. And on its top, in Jewish tradition, visitors to the grave have placed little stones in his memory (I did so myself). As far as I can see, his is the only tombstone in the cemetery where people have done this.

PS -- Mahler's widow, Alma, is also buried in the cemetery in the next row (other family members are also interred there, too). Which compels me irresistibly to attach this video of the classic Tom Lehrer song about Alma and her three prominent husbands: Mahler, Walter Gropius and Franz Werfel.

Lehrer wrote his song after Alma died in 1964. As he put it:

Last December 13th, there appeared in the newspapers the juiciest, spiciest, raciest obituary that has ever been my pleasure to read. It was that of a lady name Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel who had, in her lifetime, managed to acquire as lovers practically all of the top creative men in central Europe, and, among these lovers, who were listed in the obituary, by the way, which was what made it so interesting, there were three whom she went so far as to marry.

One of the leading composers of the day: Gustav Mahler, composer of Das Lied von der Erde and other light classics. One of the leading architects: Walter Gropius of the Bauhaus school of design. And one of the leading writers: Franz Werfel, author of the song of Bernadette and other masterpieces. It's people like that who make you realize how little you've accomplished. It is a sobering thought, for example, that when Mozart was my age he had been dead for two years. It seemed to me, I'm reading this obituary, that the story of Alma was the stuff of which ballads should be made so here is one.

Slovakia -- I find Bratislava's Museum of Jewish Culture disappointing

 These portraits of rabbis in the museum are prominently signed  but it is far from clear if those signed "Boruth A." were actually done by the Slovak painter Andor Boruth, who died in 1955 -- and it's really doubtful those signed "Szekely" were done by the Hungarian academic painter Bertalan Szekely. Yet there is nothng to identify the artists, the subjects, how and why they got to the museum collection. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber.

I paid a visit yesterday to the Museum of Jewish Culture in Bratislava, a branch of the Slovak National Museum that was reopened in 2009 following the revamping of its original exhibition, which dated from 1993, when the museum opened.

Alas, I found the new exhibit a big disappointment. The wonderful collection of ritual objects, everyday materials, textiles, artwork and more is laid out well -- but the items on display are exhibited with almost no contextual or other information about them: no information on the date, the provenance,  who donated the object, the place of origin; nothing  even on the artists and titles of paintings, even when these are known.

 Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

A collection of photographs of Slovak synagogues identifies the towns but omits even rough dates as to when the pictures were taken, not to mention the names of the architects, information as to when the synagogues were destroyed, etc etc etc. One item on display is a decorative paving stone rescued from the great Neologue synagogue next to the Cathedral, which was destroyed in 1969 when the old Jewish quarter was razed during construction of the New Bridge. But the stone just lies there, a decorated lump, without any explanation as to why it is included in the exhibit...

Nor, in a "symbolic Jewish cemetery" in the basement, an installation of fragments of tombstones, is there information provided as to which cemeteries the stones came from, or about the number of Jewish cemeteries around Slovakia. There is rudimentary information about burial practices, and a bit about inscriptions, but that's it.

What's more, no distinction is made between photographs and copies (such as that of a ketubah) and original objects. And some of the items that did have labels (albeit generic ones) were incorrect: it seem as if meal coupons issued by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee are identified as  certificates issued to guarantee kashrut!

All in all, it was very frustrating -- a sadly wasted opportunity.

Modern museum practice does not seem to have entered here: the only provenance shown was a label on an oil lamp bought in Israel guaranteeing that it was ancient. The objects shown could have come from anywhere: there was little sense of their connection with Slovakia, and even when this connection was presented, it was not elaborated.

The young woman who showed me around could answer only some of my questions -- she went somewhere to consult when I asked her who the artist was of a very lovely water color of a Jewish cemetery. (She found the name of the artist, but nothing more: other, Holocaust-related, works of his, too, are hung with no identification, as is a nice installation of collaged photographs of the Chatam Sofer memorial.)

She told me she informed someone on the design team about my concerns and said he assured her that labels were being prepared. But I have my doubts.