He was not a refugee, not an immigrant, not a displaced person. Or, rather: yes and no. When he and I became close friends, he once said to me: “Sometimes Americans ask, ‘When did you come to this country?’ I did not come to America; I went there.” And if he was asked why, the “when” was the answer to that: 1939. He was twenty-five years old, very intelligent. He knew and felt that Hitler was about to conquer much of Europe. About the United States he had not many expectations or illusions. He saw it as a strange exaggeration of Europe, because the United States, too, was a product, an outcome, a result of the “modern age” that was not about to last long. Progress was not forever, though Americans thought it so.
On a cold March noon he boarded a modest French ship from Le Havre. He remembered those two large words painted on the seaward wall of a factory, though Le Havre was no longer a big harbor. New York was more than a harbor. It was a big maw, a safe haven, especially for the hundreds of thousands who fled from Europe to the United States, especially from 1938 to 1942. He was one of them. He looked quite a bit older when I first met him. I know not much, even now, of his youth. It was a brown fug, most of it, he once said, though I can piece together some things he told me from time to time. He came into his world in 1914 in Moravia, then of the Habsburg Empire, and later part of Czechoslovakia, the people there German and Czech. His father was a shoe manufacturer. His mother had about her all the marks, the conditions, the characteristics of middle-class motherhood. She doted on him and protected him. He was their only child. I saw an early photograph when he must have been around ten, good-looking, large wondering eyes, a strong nose and a definite mouth, not really childlike. Around that time he recognized—more than discovered: recognized—his attention to music. His parents got a piano teacher who came twice each week to their bourgeois flat with its black Erhard piano. There was an English teacher, too. This sounds like the life of a high bourgeois family, but it wasn’t: These were not luxuries but instruments for the education of their only child. Of his elementary and then gymnasium years he said nothing, because he remembered of them little or nothing. He was a loner at school. That he knew, but there was his growing captivation with music.