Lucy Glaser Merritt - July 8, 1991
Cultural Life
Did you and your family, attend uh, the theater, opera?
Yes, yes. Mm-hm. Both. My father had stood in line twenty-four hours to hear Caruso. And uh, the ??? very cheap. You could buy very cheap opera tickets for, you know, the whole season, so we always did that for myself. So, and my father was a vocalist by avocation and they gave evenings at home where they sang, you know, played the piano and sang, like ??? Lieder, that kind of stuff.
At your house?
Yes.
Did you also play?
Well my, I was given lessons for four years but I guess I didn't, didn't take.
Have you read Stefan Zweig?
I've read some of his work, yeah.
He has a memoir of Vienna in the '20s and '30s in which it sounds like it was a paradise for...
It uh, it was very pleasant life. The woman who worked for my mother-I don't want to call her a maid because she became part of the family. And after the war when I went to see her and I took a bath, she came in and washed my back and said, "I've always washed your back." That was in 1958. So it, it was a different life. And they were uh, the entertainment was very culturally oriented. And both theater and opera they went to. Although my father was more interested than my mother.
Was your father in the First World War?
Uh, briefly when they. He, he was inducted and I, I don't know, they wrote him unfit or something. But he didn't serve very long. But his youngest brother died in the war.
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