The terrific Danusha V. Goska sent us her review of The Grand Budapest Hotel many moons ago (March 22, to be exact). We apologize for our lateness on behalf of the Grand Budapest Hotel. Please enjoy.
My Aunt Tetka lived most of her 101 years in Bayonne, New Jersey but she never learned to speak English well at all. Who needed The New York Times, Kennedy’s inauguration speech, or William Shakespeare? Aunt Tetka could sing all one hundred verses of Slovak folksongs.
Visiting Aunt Tetka was a trip to another world, a world she took with her when she (finally!) died. There were many curtains. The air was inside her home was as thick as soup. It smelled sweet, like Uncle Strecko’s pipe smoke, and pungent, of cabbage, onions, and ham. There were sepia photographs of grim faced men with serious mustaches and
women in embroidered babushkas, oil paintings of peasant huts and high mountains, figurines of goose girls, brass ornaments incised with pagan sun symbols and a graphic crucified Christ. Aunt Tetka consumed only pastries, sprinkled with powdered sugar, served on handmade doilies. Five minutes into Wes Anderson 2014 film “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” I was weeping. Anderson took me back to Aunt Tetka.
Continue reading “The Grand Budapest Hotel and Mitteleuropa”
Credit: Dan Steinberg
