For years, Lilian Furst never stayed in one place for too long. She has held appointments at Dartmouth, the University of Oregon, the University of Texas, Stanford, and Harvard, to name a few. For Furst, uprooting has never been anything new—when she was six years old, she and her parents were forced to flee their home in Vienna, Austria, because the Nazis invaded the city. Now Furst, Marcel Bataillon professor of comparative literature, finds home at Carolina and, most of all, in the power of words.
In 1971, Lilian Furst came to America to begin a visiting professorship at Dartmouth College, which had just begun accepting female students. Her first paycheck was made out to “William Furst.” Evidently it hadn’t occurred to anyone that a woman might be teaching at Dartmouth. Furst, who had lived in England since she was seven years old, was astonished at this attitude.
“I was invited to a consciousness-raising session of faculty wives and other women, and I didn’t know what that meant.” In the same breath, she continues dryly, “I had heard in England of self-raising flour, but I had never heard of consciousness raising.”
Furst, now Marcel Bataillon professor of comparative literature at UNC-CH, says, “I never heard or suspected that women were intellectually inferior to men, because I saw in my parents’ marriage a partnership.” Furst’s parents, both physicians and dentists, often consulted each other on cases. Their practice flourished in Vienna, Austria, where Furst was born, until the Nazi occupation forced them to flee in 1938.
Furst recently lectured at Rice University in Texas about what it’s like to “live exile.”
“Not living in exile,” she says, “but life as exile. You see, the worlds that I knew, the world of Vienna, even the England that I knew—they have gone. I looked up exile in the dictionary, and it said, ‘banishment from one’s native or homeland.’ But I don’t have a native homeland.”
Her first distinct memory is of the Nazis’ march into Vienna. She was six years old. She remembers leaning out of the window of her parents’ apartment to see the soldiers, military bands, and motorcades. She couldn’t understand what it all meant, but she knew that her parents were anxious. She felt uneasy, not knowing what to expect.
Six months later, a law was passed barring Jews from practicing any profession. This, together with the arrest of two of Furst’s uncles, convinced her parents that they would have to leave the country. In Home is Somewhere Else: Autobiography in Two Voices (State University of New York Press, 1994), Furst writes about her memories, alternating her account with one her father wrote.
Furst’s uncles, who were wealthy, gained release from prison and permission to leave Austria by making a donation to the Nazi party. Furst’s family then moved into her uncle’s house. Like many others, they could not get a visa to another country.
“No one wanted us,” Furst writes.
One November day Furst’s father came home with the news that temples were on fire, Jewish shops were being looted, and Jews were being made to scrub the sidewalks with toothbrushes. Later they learned the police had gone to their former apartment that night to arrest them. “The oppressiveness of that day is my second totally clear memory,” Furst writes.
Her parents decided to escape illegally. They took a train late one December night to Cologne, a town near the northwest borders of Germany, Holland, and Belgium. After several attempts to find an escape route, they met a man in a restaurant who agreed to take them to Belgium for all their German money.
During the four- to five-hour drive, it began to snow. They reached the Belgian border in darkness.
Furst writes, “The driver walked us quite a way, wading through deep snow, to a railroad bridge. Our guide told us to run across the bridge when he blew a whistle; there would be a Belgian to meet us at the other end. We took the enormous risk: what if there had been no one there?”
Someone was there. He led them a couple of hundred yards to a farmhouse, telling them they were in Belgium. They scraped by for a few months there. Finally England granted them a visa. The country was willing to accept 40 Austrian dentists.
“I trusted my parents to look after me,” Furst says. “It was only in writing this book that I discovered how frightened I had been. As I was writing this in my house, safely in Chapel Hill and holder of a U.S. passport, I found myself trembling,” she says, almost in a whisper. “I relived that fear.”
She describes writing it as “gripping, obsessive.”
“I didn’t want to teach, I just wanted to go on writing once I started. It just sort of tumbled out.” Furst says she realized that her childhood fear was partly responsible for her adulthood bouts of insomnia and anxiety. She has little anxiety over her work, however, she feels in control of it. “I thought I would never finish writing this book,” Furst says with a smile. She holds up a copy of All is True: The Claims and Strategies of Realist Fiction, published in 1995 by Duke University Press. “But it fascinated me. I kept coming back. I have this fundamental interest in how writers use words. I teach literature because I love words, and I think there is a great power in words.”
Furst starts work in the mornings, at home, but first “the most important thing is to brew a large amount of very strong, fresh-ground coffee,” she says. She composes in longhand, then types and edits using a lap-top computer. “I don’t have a large computer,” she says. “I don’t want a house god that will dominate me.”
She devotes many afternoons to teaching, which often benefits from her excitement about her current writing project. A course she teaches on medicine in literature grew out of a book she drafted last year. “If I were just teaching the same old courses, it would get very dull,” she says. “And once a teacher becomes boring, I think it’s time for that person to move on. Doing research is like keeping fit intellectually.”
Furst left England because the United States held more opportunities in comparative literature. “I had realized if I stayed in England, I would get stale and frustrated,” she says. For years, Furst didn’t stay in one place for long. After a year at Dartmouth, she taught for two years at the University of Oregon. Then, while based at the University of Texas for eleven years, she held visiting appointments at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, then Stanford, Harvard, and the College of William and Mary.
“When I was in Cleveland, somebody asked me, ‘Where is your home?’” Furst says. “I answered, ‘Oh, I have a house in Dallas, but I don’t feel it is home.’ People would ask me, ‘How come you ended in Dallas?’ and I said, ‘I haven’t ended yet.’”
One constant, though, has been her students . “My students are my family,” she says. “My father used to tease me that I was worse than a sailor who has a wife in every port. When we traveled throughout this country, I kept having to say, ‘Well, I need to stop and call so and so who now lives here.’”
In 1986, chance to teach in UNC-CH’s long-established comparative literature curriculum brought Furst to Chapel Hill, where she bought a town house almost on impulse. “I feel at home now in my house, and that’s why I spend so much time there,” she says. “I have my mother’s furniture from Vienna there, and I have the rugs and all those things.”
But the culture here is “in many ways still very foreign to me,” Furst says. She doesn’t understand the fascination with football and basketball, and she’s not used to the informal clothes.
“I’ve never owned a pair of jeans and sneakers and don’t intend to,” she says. “There are two things left from my being born in Vienna—my love of coffee, and my love of nice clothes.” Holding out her hand, she says, “I still wear my little watch that I got when I was six. And here is my mother’s ring. So I have all these things from my past life.”
And she also has her books. After last winter’s ice storm, she didn’t mind being “marooned in the house.” It gave her time to read. “I felt badly about missing class, but I quite enjoyed it,” she says. “Books are always friends to me.”