The Door Opens
$2.00
By DOUBLEDAY, DORAN
THIS little book is a father’s loving account of two little girls whose childhood was spent in Vienna when the world itself seemed young and the Danube blue. Since it was first published, Vienna has been enslaved and freed, and Ernst Lothar’s elder daughter, Agathe, has died. But the only sorrow in this book is the sweet one of growing up. for if is the story of how the door to the world first opened to Agathe and to her younger sister, Hanni.
One finds here the things all men share in memory regardless of time and place: the schoolroom tension before the first examination, the blackboard waiting with its figures to be added, multiplied. Agathe was “ minus-good ” in arithmetic, but excellent in singing and a subject called Lebenslcunde (knowledge of life)—an excellence which meant she was ready for the third grade. And there are the birthday spoiled by Hanni’s temperature (is there ever a holiday without a sick child?), the purity of First Communion, the excitement of carrying the bride’s train at the first wedding, and the magic of their first theater, the Vienna Opera, red plush and gilt gateway to fairyland.
In acquiring Lebenskunde, little Agathe and Hauni encounter sorrow and death. All their lives Fräulein had watched over them. It was she who had worried when they were sick, remembered where last summer’s clothes were put and when Grandpa’s birthday came. Now the moment had come when the children no longer needed her. a moment all too familiar to Fräulein, who gave her life to other people’s children, but one which taught the little girls that saddest of words, “good-bye.” And when old Marie dropped dead in the kitchen she had served so long, the little girls knew the sorrow of no words at all.
Ernst Lothar calls his book “a little memorandum of first steps on the road.” They are happy and familiar steps, recorded with love, and there is no reader who will not find here a treasured piece of childhood and of the children of his heart.
DOROTHY HILLYER