Autobiography: Best known as Cosmopolitan's agony aunt, Irma Kurtz has been a London-based writer of books and articles for some 30 years. Two years ago, she found the journal she kept in 1954 on her first trip to Europe, and was inspired to retrace that journey with her teenage notes in hand. Reviewed by Mary Maher.
Sometime in late January, the US embassy in Dublin wrote to US citizens in Ireland advising them to prepare for repatriation in the event of unspecified hostilities; or so I read in the papers. I decided to get myself on the list for Savannah, an enchanting city down where the song says everything is peaches, including the climate. I also decided I'd dodge any attempt to send me back to Chicago, where the song says nothing about winter's hostilities.
But no letter came my way. I'll bet Irma Kurtz in London didn't get anything from the embassy there either. Quite right, too. These days a staggering number of Americans live in Europe. Most plan to return, and expect ambassadorial shepherding. The US foreign service knows well that the rest of us, despite our accents, passports and passion for peanut butter, will go right on taking our chances over here.
Forty or more years ago, there weren't many Yanks displacing themselves on either short or long term, and those who did met incredulity on both sides of the Atlantic. As Irma Kurtz's father put it: "Why, why do you want to live there . . . they all want to come here!" Her memoir is an indirect and I think instructive answer.
Best known as Cosmopolitan magazine's agony aunt, Kurtz has been a London-based writer of books and articles for some 30 years. Two years ago, she found the journal she kept in 1954 on her first trip to Europe, and was inspired to retrace that journey with her teenage notes in hand. The result is a kind of meditative duet, the ecstatic entries of the girl - furiously spiked with exclamation marks - counterpointed by the reflections of the woman 50 years her own senior.
It's not new, the theme of the naïve American intoxicated by the centuries of civilisation that preceded the New World. But Kurtz is far removed from the age of Henry James. She is a woman of a period that has been revolutionary for women, and an American only one generation away from the shtetls of eastern Europe. Her story says much about women's lives in the last half-century on two continents. As it happens, it also has something to say about war and its aftermath, though such issues can't have been pressing when she set out on her pilgrimage.
In 1954, Kurtz was a Jewish girl from a humble background studying at Col-umbia University. She went to Europe to find the source of what she knew as culture, "the place where words and art and music came from". Nothing unusual here; college education was not only accessible for bright girls of any background, it was a set norm. The summer jaunt to Europe was meant to add nothing more than a touch of polish, for the expectations held for her were also set, if not in stone then primly in aspic, like a 1950s ladies' luncheon.
But what a Europe it was! Kurtz's first passport precluded travel to Albania, Bulgaria, China, Czhechoslovakia (the correct spelling at the time), Hungary, Poland, Rumania or the USSR. ("Cuba, on the other hand, was hunky-dory," the elder Irma observes.) Almost everywhere she did get to go, she saw bombed-out ruins and rubble, queues and shortages, survivors of war scrabbling to get a foothold on some new life.
Though she'd arrived with a suitcase prudently stuffed with sanitary towels - guidebooks at the time urged Americans to bring even toilet paper - the hardship gap between prosperity and poverty didn't seem to strike her. Like many other women who didn't find their voices for another decade, the young Kurtz had all along been harbouring "a sense of something other ahead, something adventurous, something more than a future of prosperity, fidelity and motherhood . . ."
Apart from Greenwich Village, there weren't many options for her; and it's hard to cut loose when your parents are on the same land mass. Whereas in Europe . . .
And so it came to be. Almost 50 years on, her elder self addresses her - affectionately, sardonically, and sometimes sadly - on the nature of change, in people and nations. Insight is Kurtz's stock in trade, and as well as a personal stocktaking, the book is inevitably a reflection on what's been lost as well as gained in Europe's renewal.
There are some memorable passages here, especially when she deals with Germany. In 1954, Kurtz travelled through Germany silently asking "where were you?" of every German past youth. In 2001, the same Kurtz meets a few Germans, including the woman gathering signatures on an anti-racism petition in Cologne who recalls her days in what she thought was a girl guide troop until it became a branch of Hitler Youth.
There is a summing-up, too. Watching the young people in an Internet café in Amsterdam, Kurtz the Elder tells her younger self: "I am glad there was no quick way, mechanical way for you to turn your back on the huge, unformed future and face a tidy, safe image of home and screen . . . had you been able then to transmit an immediate cry home for help, you could well be the pre-destined ex-wife of that psychiatrist in Scarsdale. Or, wizened and boozy, living in the West Village, teaching occasionally at City College of New York . . . "
Whew. There's always something to be grateful for. Thank you, Europe.
Mary Maher is a freelance journalist
Then Again: Travels in Search of My Younger Self. By Irma Kurtz, Fourth Estate, 360pp, £16.99