A Letter to My Son, Chris
March 2, 2016 penneyvanderbilt Leave a comment
Gerhart von Kap-herr
My friend Robi Paul Richard
Recently, you told me about a new lady who joined your laboratory and how, being from India, she is familiar with the works of Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. This triggered a memory in me, a recollection in connection with my best childhood friend, Robi Paul Richard.
My mother befriended Robi's grandparents, Fritz and Frida Richard, when they were actors performing in the play "Jedermann" by Hugo von Hofmannsthal in the annual Salzburg Festival and bought a house in the neighbourhood. It must have been after the war, probably in 1946, that I visited them with my mother, but years before, the Richards were affiliated with a theater in Berlin with the director Max Reinhardt. In the late 1920s, Reinhardt staged a production of Tagore's "The Post Office", in which Trude Richard, the youngest daughter, played a leading…