Contributor's contribution: Two Jews (My Vienna Story)
Just like Göring said ...
David Zellnik is a playwright, lyricist, and librettist. His work has been performed around the world — and probably near you, too.
1.
Do you know that feeling when you’re in the city where your father was born in 1931? The father who was eight years old when he fled Hitler’s Vienna with his parents and they lost almost everything, but of course they were the lucky ones?
And then it’s 2024, and you’re living in Vienna for four months — now a dual citizen — and when you tell this to Austrians, they beam: “We’re so happy the Jews are coming back!”
You want to reply: “Um, those Jews are dead”?
That feeling.
2.
In November 2023, I was invited to tell two, ten-minute stories at the prestigious Volkstheater — and I was terrified. I’m a playwright, not an actor, but playwrights kinda view every chance to present work in a theater as The Opportunity My Career Now Hinges On, so I did not wanna fuck it up. Which is why part of me — the larger part probably — was willing to say anything to make the audience love me.
(We are a shameless tribe — playwrights, that is — not to be trusted. In fact, after I saw “The Lives of Others,” a film set in motion by a playwright’s ambition, I made a habit of warning my friends: Please know that I will report this conversation to the secret police if it gets me a Broadway production.)
3.
And yet the smaller part of me wanted — insistently, stupidly — to tell the truth. The truth about you-know-what. Because the Germans and Austrians have gone especially crazy since October 7th. I had this fantasy — maybe many readers of The Bupkes do — that as a Jew, I could say things others cannot. Things the Germans and the Austrians must secretly know.
That I could come down from the mountain, Zarathustra-like, and proclaim: “Don’t you know yet? Don’t you know that Israel is insane?”
4.
This is the true story of an encounter I had in Vienna one year ago — one that haunts me because I can’t decide whether it is about a hot stranger’s ethnic impersonation, Dolezal style, or my own arrogance thinking I can police another person's identity.
That is all a long way of saying that, last year, I met a tall, blond Jew in Vienna. We hit it off. And then Israel came up …