Adventures Upcoming

These two items are very precious, and they have something in common.

Vienna.

The Venus of Willendorf is something I have admired for much of my life. This small clay sculpture is 30,000 years old. That is 1500 generations worth of the passage of time. One thousand five hundred incarnations of lifetimes have passed since she was molded by hand by someone in the Austrian Alps, which also happens to be where my own very ancient ancestors are probably from. The original is made from a piece of limestone that was tinted with red ochre, and is considered to be a Mother Goddess. It is one of the first human representations known to art history, and is now housed in the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien.

The particular clay version you see in this picture was handed to me by a stranger at a Women's Art festival, with the words:  "I think this should be yours." With no more explanation, I accepted this gift and she has hung above my desk ever since, a reminder of the mystery and the deep connection we have to ancestors, women, hunter-gatherers, humans that came before any recorded time. 

The next object, in some ways, has actually an even more mysterious and unsolvable provenance. My aunt Evie told me many years ago that her mother, my Grandmother, spent her first honeymoon in Vienna. As a young woman, my grandmother was a remarkable person. At age 13 she took an ocean liner alone (steerage class, of course) from the small village of Viznitz in what is now Ukraine, alone, to emigrate to the US. The ship hit an iceberg and sank, she waited 6 weeks in Nova Scotia to get her papers in order, then ended up at Ellis Island. Many mishaps later at the age of 18, she met and married a talented musician and composer, Joseph Peyser, who was affluent enough to take her to Vienna to hear music and enjoy their newly married bliss. This solid sterling silver purse was a wedding present he gave her. She must have felt on top of the world, and that all her troubles were finally over. 

However, her newly wedded bliss was not to last, and we know very little more of this story, because one short year later, back in Brooklyn, her new husband and a newly born infant perished in the influenza epidemic of 1918. Suddenly, she was a 19 year old widow with a one year old baby, my Aunt Evie. She want on to marry Joseph's younger brother, Adolf, and years later had my mom and my uncle George. And she never talked more of the tragedies of her early life.

Ever since my Aunt Evie told me this, I wanted to go to Vienna, to wander the streets, to go to concert venues to hear the classical music she and Joseph probably enjoyed. My grandmother, a poor immigrant who barely could read or write English got to peruse the magnificent concert venues of Vienna with this precious pure silver evening purse, only to have this glamorous life ripped away in one short year.

I have always viewed a trip to Vienna as a pilgrimage to honor her.

AND it turns out the precious Venus of Willendorf is also living now  in Vienna. And the original stone it was carved from is believed to be from eastern Ukraine, exactly where my grandmother started her life before coming to the US.

So, this March, I will go on a pilgrimage. Luckily, my niece Laurel has started an academic job there, so I have someone with whom I can experience some of the wonders of Vienna, in memory of the Venus of 30,000 years ago, and Bella Peyser, of 108 years ago.