Margy Gerber, Bowling Green State University

Emigrant/Immigrant Experience as an Ever Changing Silhouette Vladimir Vertlib’s Quest for an Austrian Heimat

Born in Leningrad in 1966, Vladimir Vertlib emigrated with his parents in 1971, the beginning of a ten-year odyssey which would lead from Israel to Vienna, to brief stays in a half dozen other countries and repeated migration attempts in Austria and Israel before the family finally settled in Vienna in 1981. Vertlib speaks of a boomerang effect, implying that their returning to Austria was more an involuntary reflex than a willed decision; Vertlib‘s parents viewed Austria as a “Land der Mörder.” Encapsulated in the Russian Jewish immigrant enclave in the Brigittenau district of Vienna, the school child Vertlib learned that die Einheimischen were not to be trusted. Relations with the Austrian Jewish community were also tenuous, for the Vertlibs, like other Jews from European Russia, were Jews in name only, and their life experience differed in essential ways from that of the Austrian Jews. As a Viennese Jewish character in Vertlib’s autobiographical novel Zwischenstationen remarks: “Russen durftet ihr nicht sein, richtige Juden seid ihr keine mehr, Gojim aber auch nicht.”

Vertlib’s enculturation into Austrian society was correspondingly slow. When he began to write in the early 1990s, it was with the realization that his experience as emigrant and immigrant provided him with an unusual vantage point from which to view Austrian society. Vertlib maintains that for emigrants Heimat is a reale Fiktion, since, in contrast to the native population, emigrants create for themselves an idealized image of Heimat. Memories of the past and perceptions of the present merge in ever new configurations, like a Schattenbild the appearance of which changes in keeping with shifts in the viewer‘s perspective and in the angle of the lighting, while the silhouetted subject itself remains the same. This Schattenbild, the influences which change its form and the commonalities which constitute its essence, are the subject of Vertlib’s writing.

My paper will investigate Vertlib’s discussion of the emigrant/immigrant experience and its effect on his search for an Austrian identity in his novels (Die Abschiebung,1995; Zwischenstationen,1999; Das besondere Gedächtnis der Rosa Masur, 2001; Letzter Wunsch, 2003) and other shorter texts. Topics will include the special perspective of the Russian-Jewish immigrant on Austrian society and the Austrians themselves, and the influence of Vertlib’s native Russian and knowledge of Russian culture on his writing.