A Family History Of Smoking

A FAMILY HISTORY OF SMOKING

Andrew Riemer

CONTENTS

I

II

III

IV

Notes

Picture Credits

Acknowledgements

I

UP IN SMOKE

Like most families of their time, mine was made up of smokers and non-smokers. That is not surprising, yet in a curious way—and this struck me only recently, at a time when I thought I had stopped smoking, or was at least trying to stop—there was a very sharp division within the two branches of my family, a division that ran through several generations, despite the inevitable exceptions. People in my mother’s family were, on the whole, smokers. They smoked pipes and cigarettes, cigars and cigarillos. They were devoted to smoking and they saw it as one of the greatest joys and comforts of life, as I do still in my heart of hearts. On my father’s side of the family there were very few smokers. Some of them, most of all his mother, my grandmother Ilka, were fiercely opposed to smoking; they regarded it as an unspeakable habit. My grandmother’s convictions and her contempt for anyone who insisted on puffing away lay at the root of much tension in the family. My father used to say that disdain for people who smoked was firmly entrenched among his mother’s people. Their contempt for smokers was one of the reasons why her parents were so fiercely opposed to her marriage to my grandfather, someone I never knew and a man, I came to realise in later years, over whom the family had drawn a veil of silence. He was a champion smoker, and also a bounder, perhaps a cad, and in my grandmother’s mind that came to be linked inextricably with the vile habit of smoking. One of my father’s most vivid memories of his adolescence was the fuss that broke out when his mother thought—wrongly as it turned out—that she could smell tobacco on his clothes when he got home from school one afternoon.

All that belongs, of course, to my family’s history of not smoking. Yet that history is inseparable in my mind from the other story, the story of the people on my mother’s side who loved being swathed in clouds of smoke, for whom what you smoked and how you smoked proved one of life’s most absorbing preoccupations. Both sets of stories are small-scale histories of their age, the history of families living, some prospering, some experiencing the depths of financial and social misery, in the European heartlands in the late nineteenth century and in the first half of the twentieth. Perhaps it is only because I now think of myself as someone who is no longer smoking—though over the years my acts of recidivism have been many—that these histories of smoking and not smoking preoccupy my mind to such an extent. Nevertheless, one aspect of this possibly trivial preoccupation conjures up a horrible thought whenever I turn my mind to those long-dead people, about whom I know so little, yet people who live so vividly in my imagination and in the family legends of which I am now the sole custodian. Most of my father’s family went up in smoke in 1944. On the other hand, several people in my mother’s family survived. They survived war; they survived the terrible persecutions in which so many of my father’s family were slaughtered; and they also survived the bombing raids over Budapest and Vienna, cities where many members of my father’s family met their deaths. Indeed, one or two among my mother’s people managed to hang on until they had chalked up a spectacular number of years on earth—none more so than my great-grandfather on my mother’s side, the beginning and the end of whose life was intimately bound up with tobacco, the evil weed so despised by my father’s mother and her family.

THE YELLOW TRAM

On a bitter winter morning in 1950, my great-grandfather David struggled into his threadbare overcoat, which had been once upon a time, during his days of glory, a magnificent garment, the envy of a village or small town on the border of Austria and Hungary. On that bleak morning he managed somehow to pull his mittens over his gnarled hands, wrap his scarf around his neck and grasp the handle of his stick. He started to pick his way down the staircase of the block of flats in Budapest where he had been living for some years with his two daughters, my grandmother Sidi and her younger sister. He was in his ninetieth year, almost deaf, nearly blind. As he was crossing the narrow street, where the tram-tracks reached right up to the kerb, he neither heard nor saw the yellow tram bearing down on him. He died almost immediately, crushed under the wheels.

In later years, after she came to live with us in Sydney, Grandmother Sidi used to tell over and over again the story of the day when her father lost his life. The two women had begged him not to go out. It was a cold, dark morning; a filthy pall of fog shrouded the city. The streets were slippery, and there was bound to be ice everywhere. My great-grandfather had plenty of tobacco in his pouch, his daughters tried to tell him, they had looked, just to make sure: there was enough there to last two or three days. And besides, if he really thought that he needed to get more, one of them could easily go across the street to the tobacconist to fetch it. All he had to do was to tell them what to get. They knew, of course, that whatever they said would prove useless; the ritual of my great-grandfather’s daily visits to the shop across the street had little to do with tobacco. He was lonely; his world had been steadily falling apart after the disastrous days in 1919 when the family lost everything. His wife was dead; so was his only son, whose disappearance he mourned despite the contempt he had long felt for the ne’er-do-well. Ever since 1919, he had been living on the charity of relatives—at first his cousins in a small city on the western edge of Hungary; then my parents for a few years until we were forced to leave our house on the outskirts of Budapest at the end of 1942 or early in 1943; now his two middle-aged daughters, both widows, with whom he had survived the war. The grey-haired tobacconist across the street, though no more than a youngster in my great-grandfather’s eyes, was the one person left who understood him, with whom he could talk about the past, about things that mattered, about what had become of their world. So everyday, if he could, he made his way to the other side of the street, where piles of rubble still lay in those places where, before the war, grandiose façades strove to impress and deceive the eye, and spent an hour or so chatting, gossiping, at least as far as his poor hearing allowed, with the shopkeeper who, miraculously it seemed, had been permitted to continue dealing in the tiny amounts of tobacco and cigarettes he could lay his hands on in those newfangled days of socialism. So on that raw winter morning my great-grandfather swept aside his daughters’ objections. Old and frail as he was, time had done little to take the edge off his stubbornness and determination. He had always got his way, my mother and grandmother used to say. He had always expected to be obeyed. So his daughters stood back and helped him into the worn, patched coat they both remembered from his prosperous days half a century earlier, they watched him fumble with the mittens my great-aunt had knitted from the few scraps of wool she had managed to scrounge in those days of shortages, and they held their breath as they watched him take unsteady command of his stick. Then they opened the front door of their poky courtyard flat on the second floor and listened as carefully, tentatively, he placed his stick and then his feet on the first, then the second tread of the staircase. They listened to the steady sound of the stick as my great-grandfather picked his way down to the hall. They almost sighed with relief, my grandmother used to say, when they heard the small door in the arched gateway slam shut behind him. He had made it that far, at least. A few minutes later they were roused by the clatter of boots running up the stairs, furious battering on their door and a young neighbour’s breathless cry that the old gentleman had been run over by a tram.

THE GOOD EMPEROR

Great-grandfather David’s family came from a dusty village not far from a shallow, reedy lake at the eastern extremity of Austria or on the western edge of Hungary. They were never entirely sure of their true nationality; all they knew was that they had lived for generations around or near that lake, that they had intermarried with people of their own kind, who had also settled in that district, and that they were fluent in two languages. They slipped with the greatest of ease between German, or at least the dialect of Burgenland, the easternmost province of Austria, and Hungarian, sometimes mingling both in the one breath. For a hundred years or more, whether they lived in Austria or Hungary was almost beside the point. That changed, at least officially, a few years after my great-grandfather’s birth in 1860. In 1867, the nationalist stirrings in various parts of the Habsburg empire forced the reluctant Emperor Franz Joseph and his advisors to grant a limited degree of self-determination to Hungary, a former kingdom that fell into the possession of the Habsburgs after the expulsion of the Turkish invaders in the late seventeenth century. After that, some members of those families found themselves living in Austria, others in Hungary. None of that mattered much except that those living in Hungary had to tussle with officialdom in two languages, rendering unto the Kaiser what was his due in German and fulfilling their obligations towards the King of Hungary, the selfsame Franz Joseph of course, in Hungarian. Otherwise, they remained subjects of his Imperial and Royal Majesty.

Until my great-grandfather’s spectacular and sadly shortlived days of glory as one of the district’s most influential merchants during the closing years of the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth, the family—and here I am referring to the people who were swept together by the tide of marriages, most of them arranged marriages, contracted no doubt with a prudent eye to financial matters and to ‘keeping things in the family’—had led modest, at times precarious, lives. Some were shopkeepers in one or another of the cluster of dusty villages nestling around the shallow lake. Others were itinerant traders, hawkers in all likelihood, while others still, the more prosperous among them perhaps, kept taverns. One or two families experienced great hardships as farm labourers. Others, like my maternal grandfather’s people, had managed to carve out a niche for themselves as petty bureaucrats, notaries or, as in my maternal grandfather’s case, village schoolmasters.

Nothing about these people and the lives they led survives outside the legends my grandmother Sidi used to spin throughout her life. She was the family memorialist and myth-maker. Throughout the years that she lived with us, at first in my parent’s house on the outskirts of Budapest and later on in Sydney, she was a constant source of beguiling, often improbable instalments of a family saga that seemed to grow richer and more fascinating at each telling. I have forgotten many of these tales, though I find that with the passage of time more and more are returning—or perhaps my imagination is inventing episodes that I can hear with my mind’s ear in my grandmother’s voice, in that mixture of German and Hungarian that remains for me one of the most potent emblems of that family’s complex identity and place in the world. One story in particular goes back to my early childhood, when she used to tell me all kinds of folktales and fairy stories, interspersed with family legends. The one I remember with particular vividness, even after the passing of almost seven decades, was the story of how the family—though which branch of her family she had in mind was never made clear—became the beneficiary of great blessings from above. By that, I do not think that she meant to imply the intervention of divine providence, though there may have been a hint of that thanks to her fundamentally superstitious outlook on the world. The great blessing had flown from a mortal source.

Long, long ago, the story began, there was a time when great hardship visited the family. Everyone faced ruin and starvation. Each day the store of food carefully set aside against such times diminished little by little. Finally, there was almost nothing left. It was then that the head of family—who this might have been did not matter in the least to me as I listened, entranced by the story—decided to set out in search of help. He tied a few crusts of bread in a piece of cloth and started to walk the dozen leagues to Vienna, the imperial capital. The going was hard. Snow lay all around, the days were short, the sun stayed hidden behind thick clouds, and the nights were bitter and moonless. Nevertheless, our ancestor encountered one piece of good luck: the lake was frozen solid, so he could take a short-cut across its surface. He arrived in the great city half frozen to death, famished. A distant relative who lived on the outskirts took pity on him, gave him shelter overnight and a few morsels of food to help him on his way. Eventually, the patriarch reached the great castle, the resplendent palace where the Emperor and his courtiers lived in unimaginable luxury. At first he was refused entry, but our brave, determined ancestor showed such persistence that eventually he managed to make his way into the presence of a powerful nobleman, who listened patiently to the tale of the evil days that had descended on our family. The great nobleman whispered in the ear of someone even more influential and powerful until, at length, word of the family’s plight reached the Emperor himself. The monarch graciously granted our ancestor an audience, after which the patriarch returned to his village, over snow-covered fields, over the frozen lake, bringing the glad tidings. The Emperor had taken pity on his suffering subjects, because of their loyalty and dedication to their sovereign. And so, my grandmother’s story went on, the patriarch, like a latter-day Moses, held up high in front of his amazed people a document on thick parchment, bearing the imperial seal itself, a guarantee of the Emperor’s benevolence. Henceforth, the family would know nothing but prosperity until the end of time, and they would be respected by their neighbours, even those evil people who had scorned and insulted them.

As a child I was entranced by this story. In later years I rarely thought about it; it was no more than another tiny fragment among the debris of a strange, almost incomprehensible past. Recently, however, I have been thinking more and more about that curious tale. Was it, I find myself asking ever more frequently, a legendary account of how the family came to achieve at least a modicum of stability and prosperity in the generations before my great-grandfather’s rise to success at the end of the nineteenth century? Was that tale, in other words, a mythologised version—like those legends of columns of smoke by day and fire by night or the parting of the Red Sea—of something far more commonplace yet equally momentous? Had my grandmother Sidi’s story risen out of the social, political and perhaps religious currents of the Habsburg Empire?

What follows may be just as outlandish as the stories my grandmother used to tell me in my parents’ ultra-modern house on the outskirts of Budapest, or when, in later years, she reminisced aloud, mostly to herself, during those days in a Sydney suburb when her mind was beginning to fade. Nevertheless, I believe that the legend contains at least a grain of truth about my family history.

In 1780 the Empress Maria Theresa, the portly double-chinned matriarch, went to meet her maker, whom she had worshipped so passionately throughout her reign, while revealing all along a healthy regard for what Bismarck was to call Realpolitik a century later. Her son Joseph II could, at long last, exercise sole rule over the Habsburgs’ vast domains. Joseph was a child of the Age of Reason; at the beginning of his reign he set out to be a model prince of the Enlightenment. His realm was to be governed, down to the least detail, by the dictates of reason and natural justice. Nothing escaped his benevolent attention. He abolished serfdom and capital punishment. He took steps to curb the growing vogue for lavish funerals among Vienna’s newly affluent bourgeoisie. He decreed that German, the language of the imperial capital, must be the language in which operas at the court theatre were to be performed—though later on he changed his mind, deciding that Italian was after all the natural, indeed the only possible language of song. These and many other reforms marked his short reign. He died in February 1790, just a few months after the fall of the Bastille and well before he could have come to learn what may be done in the name of Reason, particularly to his sister, the empty-headed Marie Antoinette.

I like to think that two of Joseph’s reforms underscore the legend of how my mother’s side of the family came to achieve prosperity and even more significantly perhaps, a degree of respectability. The first