A Hasid at a bank machine on a Vienna street. (Julian Ungar-Sargon, July 2026)

I have spent a lifetime learning how to enter spaces

The university room, the hospital room, the officers’ room, the room lined with books whose authors I never thought I could engage

I learned Bach and Mozart Freud and Jung, the upper middle class manners of the English

(though my skin color was a little too olive for my teachers) the double-blind rules of science, that reason and the correct shprach might finally make me a stranger to no one.

And somewhere along the way I learned another art:

how not to announce myself

Not to deny my ethnicity

(after all I never relinquished my skull cap in those spaces)

But (maybe fooling myself that I could be)

a man first, a physician, a scholar, a political left-leaning European enlightened socialist—

and let the Jew arrive later.

Then I returned to Vienna,

the city my father lost.

How beautiful it was.

The buildings still stood upright as if nothing had changed since they ruled an empire. The melange was served carefully. Mozart........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)