Hugo Schwyzer

At long last, I am home and getting ready to return to blogging. The fall semester starts next Tuesday, and I am energized and excited about the term to come.

My wife and I spent the last two and a half weeks in Europe. Some public Flickr pictures are here. I haven’t gotten around to labelling them, alas.

This trip was about a mixture of sentiment and service. Since 2006, each of us has lost a father, and we had a strong desire to visit the land of our paternal ancestors. My father was born in Vienna, Austria; my wife’s paternal grandparents were emigres from Croatia. As different as our heritages are on our maternal sides, both my wife and I share a common paternal link to the lands of the old Austro-Hungarian empire.

I hadn’t been to Vienna to visit family and see my Dad’s hometown since 2000. It was wonderful to be back in my favorite European city, beloved mostly because of its familiarity. My German was painfully rusty but still marginally serviceable, and I was able to show my bride some of the unique treasures of that city. My father’s family had fled Vienna in 1938, after Hitler’s annexation of Austria. Ethnically Jewish but nominally Catholic, their conversions and baptisms were no defense against Nazi notions of racial purity. They spent the war and the years afterwards in England, but by 1960 my father had emigrated to the States while my grandmother and her daughter returned to Vienna. Other family members, including both of my paternal great-grandmothers, died in the Shoah. And while some of the descendants of the murdered could never live happily in Austria again, most of my family chose to do so. Despite what was done 70 years ago, I feel very much at home there.

We then moved on to Croatia, spending time in the two great World Heritage sites of Split and Dubrovnik. My wife’s paternal grandmother was born in a little town called Bribir, northeast of Split and inland from the Dalmatian coast. (The nearest city of size is Sibenic.) We hired a driver to take us to Bribir (he had to look it up on a map), and we spent a moving hour walking through the tiny old town and visiting the historic archaeological site (dating back to Roman times) on the hill overlooking the community. The region is still clearly scarred by the war of the early 1990s; our driver told us that Bribir had been largely destroyed in fighting between Croats and Serbs. Many of the villages had been ethnically cleansed, and it was haunting to drive by so many burned out and bombed out houses that, fifteen years on from the fighting, have not yet been rebuilt. In both Vienna and Bribir, my wife and I felt the haunting touch of a history of genocide on our shoulders.

Dubrovnik, where my father’s parents honeymooned in 1927, was as magnificent as advertised.

The last of the heritage stops on our European trip was in Belgium, where we visited some dear friends of ours in Antwerp. On my mother’s side, I have Flemish roots — my great-great-great grandfather had been born in Bruges before emigrating to England. We toured Antwerp and Bruges, and for the first time in a while, I “broke vegan” to consume both dairy and eggs in the form of an enormous Belgian waffle.

We finished up in London, where we saw more friends and where I gave a lecture to nearly 100 people at the Kabbalah Centre. We flew home yesterday, and we were back in time to hear all of Barack Obama’s speech, about which perhaps I will have more to say later.

In any event, it is good to be home. I am looking forward to an autumn of good teaching and good blogging. And though the heat is still on here in Southern California, I can sense that fall is just around the corner. Fall is my happiest time of year, as it is for many of my friends. I look forward to being back in the blogosphere, wrestling again with issues large and small.

But for now, I am going to drag my jet-lagged body out for a much-needed run. Perhaps McCain will have announced his pick for veep by the time I get back.