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Categories: uncategorized

Tags: anecdotes, radio

Date: 02 December 2007 12:42:54

Nice anecdote on Radio 4's Desert Island Discs this morning. The castaway was the cellist Stephen Isserlis, whose grandparents (like my parents) were Jewish refugees from Nazi Vienna. When they originally moved from Russia to Vienna in the early 1920s they went looking for lodgings and were shown round by a landlady who was 105. Learning that Isserlis' grandfather was a musician, she exclaimed, 'Oh no, I'm not having a musician. We had a musician as a lodger when I was a child and he was a filthy man, always spitting on the floor'. Grandpa Isserlis inquired what the musician's name was, and the old lady replied, ' Beethoven'.

This reminds of a story from my frequently removed distant cousin Jonathan. Apparently a friend of his knew an old lady who had known Sigmund Freud. When asked, 'What was Freud like?' she answered, 'Oh, a brilliant man, the cleverest I've ever known. Such a waste'. 'What do you mean,' asked her interlocutor, 'a waste?' 'All this psychology', replied the old lady, 'such nonsense.'