My Grandfather's Head: A Discovery

Abstract: I forgot the 'great pogrom', as my grandmother Edith Bonyhady called Kristallnacht with the voice of experience. I was booking a flight to Vienna where Good Living Street (Allen & Unwin, 2011), my book about my greatgrandmother Hermine Gallia, grandmother Gretl and mother Anne, was to appear in German in August 2013. The publisher, Zsolnay, had arranged for me to give a series of talks that November, so I chose to arrive a few days before the first and to return the day after the last, without thinking these dates might be of any special significance. Ten days before my departure, as I began to prepare these talks, I jogged up Mount Ainslie, one of the best places to think in Canberra, and it struck me: I was scheduled to leave Vienna on the seventy-fifth anniversary of Kristallnacht.