When he meets Erika at the Hotel Imperial in Vienna on Wednesdays around eleven, she drinks a small brown, and he can’t help but think of the joke in which a Nazi says to the waiter in the coffee house: A small brown. And the waiter replies: I can see that, but what do you want to drink?
Dirk Stermann has been familiar with Jewish jokes since he met Erika Freeman. When they see each other, she knocks out at least one in a good mood. Erika Freeman, a Jew from New York, met the author on an Austrian talk show that Stermann hosted. She is 96, he is almost 60, but in her head she is “so much younger than him.” That evening on television, the old lady enchanted an entire country with “her wit and wisdom.”
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