Читать книгу Westward. Encounters with Swiss American Women онлайн

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The house of her grandparents is still standing; it’s where her mother with her twelve siblings grew up in very modest circumstances. Rosa has preserved lots of mementos of her parents, certificates, pictures that she fetches while narrating her life.

Her mother, Marie Ozeler, came to Switzerland as a maid in 1910. Her father, Florian Lechner, the son of a small gardener in Vienna, trained as a butcher’s assistant and later a head butcher making sausages, emigrated from Austria to Switzerland in 1911. He was ambitious. After years as apprentice and journeyman with different master butchers he dreamed of becoming independent in his new home country. In Zurich-Oerlikon a workers’ restaurant, the Dörfli, was up for rent. Yet he didn’t have a wife who could help. He told his colleagues, and one of them gave him a tip about an industrious waitress by the name of Marie who worked in the restaurant at the Klusplatz. She fell in love with the handsome go-getter with his bold dreams. “Mama married in a black dress and high, sturdy shoes. This was the custom for people from the lower income classes at that time. What would she have done later with a white dress and elegant shoes?”