Aunt Carmen, Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs

Since the beginning of time, long periods of calm are punctuated by decades of volatility.
The last upheavals in the first half of the 20th century, after the Hundred Years’ Peace (1815–1914), culminated in the cultural era known as the Belle Époque. They started with the War to End All Wars (1914–1918). When it ended, empires crumbled, new countries were formed, and borders were redrawn.
Ironically, only 20 years later, a much bigger World War II was started by Adolf Hitler. Again, empires crumbled, new countries were formed, and borders were redrawn.

Three years later, the Cold War drew an Iron Curtain, and empires crumbled again — and so on.

***************

One winter Sunday afternoon, Bruno received a call. “You will likely be surprised, but I am your aunt from Philadelphia. I am at the airport in Calgary and have four hours to pass. Could I come over to meet you?” Bruno was indeed surprised, because he knew he had no relatives on this continent, and specifically no aunts in Philadelphia.

But then she said her name was Carmen Mayer, the same as Bruno’s grandmother’s maiden name on his father’s side. It was an unusual way to find a relative, but he soon found out that unusual was the norm when it came to his aunt Carmen.

***************

She was born in 1923, between the two major wars, a scion of an upper-middle-class family of well-educated and conservative people. Carmen was the first destined to become a globetrotter. Extraordinary times often lead to unforeseen lives for some.

WWII started when she was 16, and at 22 she fought Hitler’s Wehrmacht on barricades in Prague. When she was 25, the country was turned into a communist state after a coup d’état. In her memoirs, Carmen writes what caused her to leave: “Reading the works of the communist leaders Marx, Lenin, and Stalin saved me from the illusion of an ideal, just and classless society. I already knew enough about the complexity of the human psyche, the danger of exploiting people’s desire for an ideal society. The history of the communist movement filled me with dread of inevitable totalitarianism. When, moreover, its implementation by dull, uneducated people led to a cruel wave of injustice, I skied illegally down to Austria on January 19, 1949.”
She was given asylum in Italy, married, had a baby, and got divorced in quick succession. She moved between many European countries to support herself and her child, studying political science and becoming fluent in six languages. That allowed her to translate for international conferences and meet many celebrated figures. She stayed in touch with Amintore Fanfani, who had been her teacher at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan and later served as Italy’s premier six times.

Carmen moved to North America when she was 45. In 1975, she became a professor at Temple University in Philadelphia. Her view was that there was only one serious political task: educating future generations. It became her mission.

The end of communism in the Soviet Union and its satellites in 1989 was the last major upheaval of the 20th century. This time, Carmen did not have to pick up her possessions and flee. But thanks to her zeal to help where it was needed, she felt compelled to give something back to her birth country.

For several summers, she taught courses at Charles University in Prague, her original alma mater, to help with the transition from a totalitarian to a democratic society.

She told Bruno that she quickly realized the Czech students did not understand the differences between the two continents’ educational principles. There is a harsh, structured European approach in which students must meet set requirements to advance to the next level, whether in high school or at university, or they will be held back. This is called “redoublement” in France, “Sitzenbleiben” in Germany, and “propadnout” in the Czech Republic. Failing for the second time results in dismissal.

In North America, teachers tend to accentuate the positive if they see any potential talent in a struggling student, and endeavour to find a way to promote them so they can graduate. Even if they drop out, the results-based evaluation of people’s abilities allows them to succeed. The cases in point:

• Steve Jobs notoriously did not care for school. However, with the right teacher, Jobs found a passion for technology and innovation.
• Thomas Edison, the genius inventor of the lightbulb and phonograph, was considered a failure by his teachers. He was expelled from school at 12 for poor performance in math and his inability to focus.
• Edith Head’s early academic career was marked by failure. After she refocused on her artistic and visual strengths, she found her niche and won a record eight Oscars for costume design.
• Carmen made Bruno realize that people who did not succeed in school, and are not valued in some societies, may have incredible talents elsewhere. One just has to find them and give them a chance.

***************

In his office, Bruno keeps a 3 x 3 x 3/8-inch piece of plywood, just large enough to fit under a dome made from a broken wine glass turned upside down. The board has a circular groove where the dome had been glued to it, but has been missing for decades now. Inside were eight tiny carvings, each from a single piece of linden wood. Facing the semicircle of Seven Dwarfs is Snow White, a 1 & 1/8-inch tall figure with outstretched arms, long blond hair, and a long skirt. In the grass in front of her grows a tiny mushroom, which one needs a magnifying glass to appreciate. The dwarfs reach only to her waist and look as Walt Disney had imagined them in 1925: white beards, peaked caps, baggy clothes, carrying their tools — oil lanterns, picks, and sledgehammers. The miniature is over 80-years-old.

At the time it was carved, Bruno’s family lived in a 19th-century apartment building owned by his mother. She employed Mrs. Koczala, an almost illiterate and poor woman nicknamed “Bábina,” who had been the building caretaker from time immemorial. Bábina lived in the basement next to the coal cellars, the storage lockers, and the laundry room, where water was boiled in a huge cauldron for the tenants to wash their clothes and linens.

It was an unhealthy, dark flat with windows facing the window-wells.

Her son was married with two children. Mr. Koczala was an unskilled construction labourer, a ditch digger. Bruno remembers him as an affable but otherwise ordinary and shy person. He was a ruggedly good-looking man in his late thirties, his body finely chiselled from hard work, and perpetually tanned. His hands were quite rough, good for wielding a pick or a shovel, but with broken fingernails and stubby fingers, seemingly unfit for any precision work. Bruno remembers the day Mr. Koczala gave his mother the little dome with Snow White and her seven dwarfs.

Years later, Bruno emigrated to Canada, and his brother to France. Their mother knew that in exile, even when people are much better off, they lose connection with their past. So whenever she found some memento from her boys’ childhood, she would send it to them. She remembered that Bruno’s brother used to paint as a boy and had eventually become a professional artist, and that Bruno made three-dimensional pieces like wood carvings, ceramics, and models. So when she found Mr. Koczala’s miniature of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to Bruno, she sent it to Bruno, because he was the “craftsman” — assuming he had carved it.

But Bruno is happy to have it even if it is not his, but made by a man with no training and seemingly no talent other than to dig ditches. Or maybe he is happy to have it exactly for that reason. It is an incredible piece of art. How did he do it with those gnarly fingers, Bruno wonders? Where did the inspiration come from, and what tools did he use, before Exacta Knives were even invented?

***************

Bruno never saw Carmen again after he and Elsa visited her little colonial working-class row house in Philadelphia in 2007. She did not live there because she was poor, but because she loved the beauty of the historic quarter of the city and the simple people, her neighbours.

Carmen was a perfect hostess and an even better storyteller. They corresponded regularly. She wrote that she occasionally lunched with Madeleine Albright, her colleague professor of international affairs and diplomacy at Georgetown University, former Secretary of State under President Clinton, and a fellow countrywoman.

Later, when Bruno and Elsa, avid opera goers, were trying to get tickets to the Metropolitan Opera in New York, no easy task, Bruno sent a message, tongue in cheek: since she was socializing with such influential people as Madeleine Albright, surely she could get him two tickets to the Met.

Carmen replied that she had helped Mr. John Pennino, the Metropolitan Opera archivist, with his biography of Risë Stevens, an American operatic mezzo-soprano and actress, and that Mr. Pennino would be happy to help. She gave Bruno John’s direct phone number.

Several months later, Bruno and Elsa met Mr. Pennino and were given a private tour of the backstage of the venerable New York Metropolitan Opera House.

In the acknowledgements to his book, Bruno found Mr. Pennino’s special thanks to “Dr. Carmen Mayer, whose recollections of Risë Stevens in Prague are invaluable additions to the biography. Her dedication to the project has been unfaltering and highly treasured. She is a remarkable woman whose admiration for Risë Stevens equals my own.”

By then, Bruno didn’t expect anything less from this extraordinary woman whom he had sadly met so late in life, and yet learned so much from.