(PHD in MUSIC) a famed composer/ conductor &
author who was born a Jew in Budapest, with THE FAMILY NAME “SHATZ”. (The
family had been diamond merchants in Antwerp from Renaissance times.) Shatz as
a surname would NOT WORK for the career of this 6’4” tall, blue eyed man. Conspicuous Jewishness would shut doors for him. He had
moved to GERMANY where the MUSIC INDUSTRY was much like the Pop Music INDUSTRY
is for us today. Only it was all classics. He co-created the first radio
station in Germany in Leipzig and conducted at the Opera for over a decade. If
anyone heard the name SHATZ they immediately thought ‘JEW.’ And you could
forget about a career so, having this HUNGARIAN PERSONA and bright blue eyes,
he became SZENDREI, and occupied the POST OF A HUNGARIAN (known across Europe
for being artsy,). If you saw the Ralph Finnes movie “SUNSHINE” where Gorgeous
boy Ralph plays three generations of Jews, playing grandfather, father and son,
three generations, all whom were killed by the MAGYARs, on the tiniest whim,
you’ll understand that HITLER was only doing what other countries were doing
and had been doing for centuries. Poland was the worst. When there’ weren’t
pogroms, the teen boys went out Friday nites and murdered Jews for fun.
So you’ll have an idea why, (as he saw a big music career
coming,) my composer/author grandpa SHATZ changed his name to SZENDREI a TRUE
MAGYAR name. Gramps landed on the Orchestra Podium in Leipzig Opera in Germany,
was fine for more than a decade until the day he told a dirty joke to the
orchestra during rehearsal, calling Hitler party “the national clitoral
party” as the word sounds the same as ‘nationalist’ party...Some Brown Shirt
tuba player or drummer broke Gramps home’s windows with rocks.. Gramps moved
instantly from LEIPZIG to BERLIN. His ascendancy in music industry was timed to
Hitler’s own and living in Berlin, he got a good look at what ADOLPH WAS UP
TO. He knew important people but he
wasn't protected by his luck. The day the Nazis burned the books, -- his 13
books on Jewish music, David’s Harp, and Music of the Diaspora and others went
up in flames along with all the Jewish authored books in the country. My PISCES
GRANDFATHER was very prescient; he had the family pack up the silver, his
books, a few trunks of furnishings which they shipped to Paris along with a
Bluthner mini grand piano! They took a taxi to the train station to repatriate
in sleepy beach town ‘CASSIS’ in PROVENCE, France, for the duration of the war.
He left only once, to go to a concentration camp, show his Hungarian passport
and get my soprano aunt out, because she was Hungarian, not German and the
Nazis had no right to grab her. She had diamonds in hem of her skirt, ready for
Nazis. They got her out of her dressing room in Belgium. She gave gems to
guard, said ‘call my daddy,’ he did. Daddy got her out. She married CHARLIE
FAWCETT, the real HERO behind the JULIA ROBERT CHARACTER in THIS new Julia /Hanks Film, CHARLIE WILSON’s
WAR. Charlie told Joanne Herring about Afghanistan. Being the houseguest of
King of Morocco for years, he’d learned the truth about what was going on
there. How the Russians were taking over. Charlie was an elegant Carolina
southern boy who’d worked for the Red Cross during the war and had married 9
jewesses to get them out of Europe and she got to L.A. As a kid I saw her sing
“Hansel and Gretal” at the Shrine Auditorium. My grandparents got to NEW YORK,
later, in ’45 then they moved to Hollywood where Gramps taught music on that
Bluthner until his death. Gramps lived well into his mid nineties, with his
soprano daughter and his Vienese wife making strudel and Vienna Torte and
gardening with joy in West Hollywood’s sunny clime, so much like that of
Cassis. My Dad was already a composer/arranger at MGM. Henry Mancini, Johnny
Green, Tony Martin and Cyd Charisse came to Grandpa's funeral where 13 cantors
paid tribute to Alfred Shatz and when I signed the guest book outside the
Temple, I signed it “Anita Shatz.”
THE INFLATION YEARS by ALFRED SZENDREI
Before the end of my first year, I obtained a three-year contract from the opera management with a rising salary and so our near future was provided for. What no one had predicted and what made our material wellbeing an illusion, was the “at the start” creeping, then galloping and finally all-engulfing, overflowing destructing inflation. A generation who did not live through it, cannot imagine the situation, in spite of the large number of newspaper articles and books which have been published on the subject in the entire world, then and later on.
If one wanted to buy a pound of butter before 10 am, one had to wait until 10 am to pay, when the first dollar rates of the day were published by the banks because the dealers would adjust the price of their wares to it. At the height of the inflation, our salaries from the theatre went up every month, then every two weeks, later every week and finally twice a week. The moment we received the money, it had to be spent, because it would be worth less most of the time by the same afternoon.
Many bizarre situations developed because of this stampeding devaluation. For instance, I once paid too much income tax and was invited by the tax authorities to come and collect a reimbursement. The amount I had paid too much was at that time quite considerate compared to my income. When I collected the reimbursement, it was hardly sufficient for a ride on the tram.
Mrs. Schumann-Heink gave us $10 as a birthday present to help pay for a bicycle for our boy. I deposited this $10 bill at the down payment for the bicycle for the remaining amount, with the intention of retrieving the American banknote about a week later when the payment needed to be settled. I used this trick four times, with the final result that in a few months, we not only owned four bicycles, but at the end still had the $10 note still intact.
Our dentist’s brother, who visited Leipzig from America, had bought amongst other things, a four story rental house in the best part of town for the exchange worth in German marks of just a few hundred dollars. We learned this later from him, when we coincidentally lived in the same building in New York.
In the summer of 1924, my family and I went on an extensive cycling tour of Bavaria. Since I couldn’t carry the money we would need for the trip, I opened a Post Office savings account: with my deposit book I could collect money from every German Post Office. At the end of our tour, we needed an entire rucksack to take away the money we collected from the Post Office.
The most fervently discussed however, were the postage stamps. Firstly, the postage went in hundreds, then thousands, then two-thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions and finally billions of German Marks. Every philatelist had visible and physical proof of it in their stamp collection. I still doubt that someone who has not experienced this situation can imagine it truthfully.
The sudden switch of the monetary value to gold reserves of Germany in December 1924 had, in fact, solved the debt and obligations of the German state, but had at the same time robbed the entire population of their savings and had driven a large number of them into poverty and proletariat. This is public knowledge; I only recount this because it affected my own life as well at that time.
Of course we didn’t know at first that we, as a nation, were infected with the “inflation plague.” Slowly rising prices of consumer goods and later also of groceries were accepted as inevitable results of losing the war and the resulting reparation payments. We, as did thousands of others, used the early period of the inflation to our profit by speculating on the stock markets. Going by the advice of well-meaning friends, I had bought stocks. An American hit of the day was called “Everybody is doing it,” and indeed, everyone in Germany who had a little money to spare, had invested in stocks. I diligently studied the stock exchange rates to chuckle about how much I had “won.” I soon found out, however, that it was nothing but self-deceit, for as much as the worth of my stock went up, so much less became their monetary value. I got rid of my stock while there was still time to do so, so I didn’t lose in the end. Those who out of ignorance or stubbornness couldn’t or wouldn’t part with theirs have lost everything.
Because of the increasing “endearment,” as the first stage of the inflation was called, my wife needed to take on work with her singing to bring home some extra money, as my income from the theatre could no longer be stretched to support us. Even as my opera activities lost their brightness, I was astounded by the sheer number of private students who wanted to study harmony, composition and orchestration with me. Most of them were foreigners, who had to pay me in the currency of their own country. In German currency I would have had to raise my honorarium every month, and later every week. Apart from many Germans, I taught students from Greece, Bulgaria, Switzerland an many other countries, even one from Iceland."
MY NOTES:
German currency must have changed daily vis a vis foreign money. Not
understanding currency arbitrage, I can't imagine how a tourist could hand you
a hundred dollars in their coin or even the local coin and it would make a
difference which it apparently DID. But oddly I DO KNOW. An Italian client sent
me a fifty Euro bill in the mail. It’s slowly gone up in value from Fifty bucks
to 75$. So I do know that in times of great inflation, we have to be on our
toes. It is possible that if you render a
service which FOREIGN visitors might need, they’d hear the INFLATIONARY PRICE,
100$ an hour..and think, Hmmm, in English pounds, that’s nothing. In Euro’s that’s
zippity do-dah and they’d pay happily. I know that right now, FOREIGNERS come
to our FASHION DISCOUNT houses to buy PILES as we’re the new Tijuana. For them.
And when we go to PARIS, we can’t even believe that our meal costs us l00$ a
person! And a hotel is 400$. Of course, NEW YORK having lots of European
visitors charges 400$ for a hotel room right now, knowing that to a European,
that’s bupkes.
I definitely have Grandpa's genes as I have many websites on FRUGAL COOKING, FRUGAL GARDENING, COTTAGE INDUSTRIES and FRUGAL LIVING, SURVIVING THE COMING JOB CRUNCH COPING WITH JOBLESSNESS.
Also http://www.masterjules.net/joblost.htm and THE MONEY SECRETS ARCHIVE and the PHILOSOPHY
to SEE YOU THROUGH THIS NEW, DARK AGES….
But a lot of that writing comes from my California Grandparents. They turned
their home into a commune basically when they opened a boarding house in San
Luis Obispo. Remember, during dark
times, all folks need is a roof, food, heat and a bed. And a CANDLE to read by.
TRUE REASONS for WW II. INFLATION! GERMANY BURNED THEIR MONEY for HEAT! It was
WORTHLESS. INFLATION and the WORLD BANKS DREW ENTIRE PLANET INTO WW II. With
inflation dogging our heels, it could happen again, here!
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NOVELS
ABOUT THE DEPRESSION http://wal.loswego.k12.or.us/sandsp/Great%20Depression%20Web%20Site%20Doebler%20and%20Yost.htm
“Studs Terkel, HARD TIMES. James T. Farrell Gas
House Mc Ginty , Young Lonigan. Many
more.
GRAPES OF
WRATH, Steinbeck.
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A pal’s 8 yr
old granddaughter demands her family rent a big house, like her friends have, not
an apartment. I told the panicky granny
to get CHILDREN’s books on the Great Depression and gently ‘splain’
reality to her. Actually renting a house and turning it into a boarding house
is a fab idea. Here are some titles for children: Year Down Under by
Richard Peck, What You Know First by Patricia MacLachlan and illustrated
by Barry Moser, and The Gardener by Sarah Stewart and illustrated by
David Small. http://www.carolhurst.com/subjects/ushistory/depression.html
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Easily found
at ABEBOOKS.com, USED. HOW TO ORDER
AT BOTTOM DOLLAR, my sly secrets.
Remember any
other titles on Great Depression? Write me at astrology at earthlink dot net.
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