Eve Neuhaus
Bio: Born to older Viennese refugees in Philadelphia, in 1950, I never was part of the mainstream. At seven, instead of going to Sunday school or Hebrew School, my parents began sending me to stay with family friends in a Quaker intentional community. Summer days swimming in the pond and riding bikes, dinner with leaders of the Civil Rights movement. At twelve, I discovered my tribe at Lighthouse Music and Art Camp, and not much later explored the world of psychedelics. I spent my college and hippie years in Philadelphia, and in England and Wales, but mostly in the countryside near Ithaca NY, where I raised five children and taught in the public schools. In 1979, I was fortunate enough to have the Guru-I-thought-I-wasn’t-looking-for come to my door. Formally Shrimahant Swami Ganeshananda, Ganesh Baba integrated Kriya yoga and cannabis use. Three years of profundity and fun, the highest of highs and the lowest of lows, followed. Ganesh Baba's teachings have served as my lens on life to this day. Later, I did an MA in Myth at Pacifica Graduate Institute, 2001-2003, wrote a middle grades fantasy, Journey to Mythaca; and a book on Ganesh Baba and his teachings, The Crazy Wisdom of Ganesh Baba. For many years, my husband Tom and I had a chocolate business in San Luis Obispo, CA, called Mama Ganache. Today, we live Cordes-sur-Ciel, France, where we marvel at our surroundings every day. I write books and blogs; he has a small chocolate cafe in the village. My recent novel, Red Vienna, historical fiction based on my parents’ stories, was released in 2024. An astrologer once told me I was born under a charmed sky. I wouldn't be rich but I'd always have enough. Funny thing, I did turn out to be rich, though not in the conventional sense. Today, in my 70's, I have everything anyone could want. The purpose of this blog is to share my treasures with you.
Eve Neuhaus 
Lovely thoughts, well said, delicious even…. Yours is the first blog I have ever read (or encountered!)….
Thank you so much, Susan. I was just reading something you wrote: the interview with Joe and Elisabeth in the SLO Journal a few years ago. Elisabeth is my next neighborhood interview here. I’m working on it now though it may not be the next piece I post.
Dear Eve,
best wishes to finally entering our age 🙂
you hopefully remember us – Hedwig and me from Vienna Austria calling on you in 2011.
It’s a good time now to keep a little promise I then made to you when I then took a photograph from a picture on a wall in your house showing a building in Vienna where your aunt lived in. I promised you to tell you the name and address: it’s Rabenhof in Vienna’s 3rd district. It’s an unusual perspective so I only now discovered that it really is it.
When I now browsed you website I found the photographs of your parents and it struck me that I know the name of their friend Papanek, I even think to now the name of the man who warned you father to escape the Nazi-police (Felix Slavik) but I don’t the names of your parents whose moving story you told us. Could you tell me? I’d like to know all this because I want to tell a bunch of friends about our journey to California this weekend and maybe will write a small book about “our journeys to the lost neighbours” we would have had if the Nazis had not expelled or even killed them. Part of this eventually was our trip to California, too.
my e mail-address is
Lo.Glatz@chello.at
Looking forward to read some lines from you
Lorenz
Dear Eve, you are the treasure, thank you for sharing 🙏🏼
Merci!
Dear Eve,
I have just started reading Red Vienna and have found it deeply evocative. Like you, I was born in 1950 of Viennese parents who managed to escape. My father, born in 1914 in the IXth (Döbling), was deep SDAPÖ and a Rote Falken. My mother, born in 1919 to Östjuden immigrants from Ukraine, lived in the Second District. Her family were Zionists and left for Palestine in 1935; my father and his sister got out in March of 1939 and came to the US.
My parents, especially my father, was almost certainly present at many of the events described in your book, lustily singing “DIe Arbeiter von Wien” with the rest of the Red Vienna youth. I wouldn’t be surprised if my parents knew yours. I look forward to reading it all!
Hello Peter,
How nice to meet you! I’m so glad you’re enjoying the book.
Your parents were a little younger than mine, but it’s quite possible that they crossed paths. My father was born in 1911 in Vienna, and my mother in 1913. His father came from Tarnopol, which is now in Ukraine. I left the neighborhoods they grew up in the same in the book, my father in Brigittenau, my mother in Alsergrund.
Where were you born and where did you grow up? When I was a child I hardly knew any other children of Viennese refugees, but in the process of writing the books I’ve tracked down a handful. Some of their family stories are woven into my narrative.
I’m currently doing one more read-through before I send the second volume, which covers the characters’ years as underground activists between 1934 and 1938, out to agents. My father’s active participation in the SDAP’s successor, the Revolutionary Socialist Youth, in those years stopped the US from giving him citizenship. He had a green card until he died.
Please tell me more of your family’s story. Thanks so much for writing!
Eve
Hello Eve,
I see we have even more in common! My mother’s parents were from Nova Ushytsya, not at all far from Ternopol. The were emigrating to the US in 1914 and had gotten as far as Vienna when WWI broke out. Well-treated but interned as enemy aliens, they stayed on after the war and had two daughters, my mother being the younger. My grandfather, the son of a butcher, turned himself into a “Russian furrier” and carved out a comfortable life, also in Alsegrund. My mother and her sister became attracted to Zionism and as things got worse and worse after 1933, my grandfather also began to think about emigrating to Palestine. The did so in 1935. In 1939 they moved again, this time to Washington, DC, leaving my mother’s sister behind in Palestine. It was in DC that my mother met my father, who with his sister–a graduate of the University of Vienna law school–escaped in 1939. My father had been thrown in jail by the Gestapo, but my aunt had worked for a judge who used his influence to get him released. He went underground until it was possible for them to get out into Italy and depart from Genoa on the SS Rex to the US. He had an immigration visa, having been sponsored by a relative who was a bartender in the Occidental Hotel in Washington, DC, which is where he and his family settled. He met my mother at the DC Jewish Community Center and they were married in 1940. Both became naturalized US citizens. My father joined the US ski troops (10th Mountain Division) but was seconded to intelligence for his native-speaker command of German. He and my mother returned to Austria with the US Army of Occupation, which I think he found quite satisfying. I was born in 1950 and grew up in DC. I now live in Maine.
He preserved all of his documents, which makes it relatively straightforward for me to apply for Austrian citizenship as the descendant of an Austrian victim of Nazi persecution, something the Austrians have made easier since 2019. Have you considered such a step?
Peter
Very interesting! I got my Austrian citizenship a few years ago when the law changed. I spent about three years before that jumping through various hoops to qualify under the previous law. I had to be born before 1963 to a father (not a mother!) who was an Austrian citizen when I was born and who qualified in a few other ways. One thing I had to prove was that he hadn’t fought in the army of another country. That was problematic because my father had been interned, along with another 2000 Austrian refugees, by the French in 1939. All the prisoners had to sign papers volunteering to fight for the French army. The internees never were trained or fought—they were prisoners, but his name was on list somewhere. It was the last piece of documentation I had to provide, and I had just contacted a French historian to verify that he wasn’t a real volunteer, when the law changed. I picked up my new passport at the Austrian Embassy at the height of Covid. Paris was freezing cold and totally empty, but the Austrian embassy staff welcomed me warmly.
hi Eve, I came across your blog by accident. I have just passed on Red Vienna to a friend of mine whose parents were Vienna refugees. Talking to him their circumstances were very similar to your parents. He was born and brought up in the Bronx. He has just retired as a professor of environmental economics at UNC Charlotte. John
Thanks, John. I’ve met so many very interesting fellow children of Viennese refugees. I hope he enjoys it. Meanwhile the second volume is slowly moving toward publication. Thanks again for your support!