Bonyhady, an art historian and environmental lawyer, writes intelligently, inquisitively. I had the impression that the top layer of this memoir stands guard for other stories that are harder to show and tell, and which can only be suggested. With his opening observation that ‘Nineteen thirty-eight was a good year to be a removalist in Vienna’, he clinches the irony of the book’s title, Good Living Street, which is a translation of Wohllebengasse, his family’s one-time Viennese address; ironic because, of course, it wasn’t ever all good. He focuses on three generations of women: his great-grandmother Hermine Gallia, who was indeed painted by Klimt; his grandmother Gretl, who, with her sister and daughter, escaped Nazi persecution in 1938 and came to Australia; and his mother, Anne. Through them the idea of good living shifts from meaning the enjoyment of immense wealth and status to the far greater fortune of survival and the chance to rethink and reconfigure one’s life.

Portrait of a lady, Klimt’s painting of Hermine Gallia, was exhibited at the Vienna Secession in 1903. At that conjunction of art and life, she was aged thirty-three, ‘the daughter of a wealthy industrialist from the small Silesian town of Freudenthal’, and ‘married to her uncle Moriz, who had made a fortune as a businessman in Vienna’. Bonyhady points out that by the standard of the times – when arranged matches mostly ended in adultery, separation, or divorce – ‘her marriage should have been unhappy’, but he finds touching evidence that Hermine and Moriz loved one another. Clearly, she was not one of the many women who were both the subject of Klimt’s art and his affections. Fittingly, hers is one of the less playful of Klimt’s portraits. It now hangs in London’s National Gallery (having been offered to the Art Gallery of New South Wales as a gift in the early 1960s, only to be declined).

Bonyhady’s story of how the Gallias made and spent their fortunes locates them at the centre of Vienna’s early twentieth-century cultural florescence. Lavishly, they purchased paintings by important artists, and commissioned entire households by leading designers. Their favourite was Josef Hoffmann, who, like Klimt, was one of the founders of the Vienna Secession in 1897 and who, in 1903, established the Wiener Werkstätte. The Gallias travelled, entertained, attended everything: operas, operettas, concerts, circuses, the latest plays by Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Henrik Ibsen, and Arthur Schnitzler. They worshipped the music of Richard Wagner. ‘The family’s biggest Wagner year was 1912, which ... started on New Year’s Day with Die Meistersinger’ and continued at a steady pace with Lohengrin, Götterdämmerung, Parsifal, sometimes more than one performance of each, and included a pilgrimage to Bayreuth.

As patrons and participants, they relished the latest vogues of aestheticism and liberalism – a new kind of social plasticity, which was also a fragmentation – that manifested itself in all aspects of the culture, including religion. According to Carl E. Schorske (Fin-de-Siècle Vienna [1985]), by the early twentieth century ‘the usual moralistic culture of the European bourgeoisie was in Austria both overlaid and undermined by an amoral Gefühlskultur’. You loosened your oedipal bonds, you followed your instincts, you started afresh. In this atmosphere, in what Schorske calls a ‘strong assimilationist thrust’, large numbers of Jews converted to Catholicism, the Austrian state religion. The Gallias were part of this thrust. But anti-Semitism in Austria remained entrenched, and Bonyhady points out that the process of exchanging one identity for another was never a comfortable shift. The most affecting aspect of this book is to follow the author as he maps his family’s assimilationism in order to find his own way back into – and out of – their intricate story.

If Hermine was a good wife and magnificent hostess, it emerges that to her daughter Gretl she was only a so-so mother. We are told that ‘like most wealthy Viennese who had babies in the 1890s, Hermine employed wet nurses for her children ... generally unmarried mothers who ... left their own children in foundling homes and went to live in their employers’ apartments’. Bonyhady suggests that the earliest photographs of Hermine with her children, in carefully staged studio scenes, already showed maternal distance rather than intimacy.

Good Living Street owes a great deal of its vibrancy to the diaries his grandmother Gretl kept throughout her life, and which the author regards as a significant part of his inheritance. As a young girl she wrote, ‘I lead a lovely life in the middle of my happy family. I do not deserve to be loved. I record this tragic story so as to try to control my feelings and stop myself talking about it.’ Gretl was rather histrionic, and ‘her materialism was intense. Just as she listed her birthday and Christmas presents, so she recorded many of the family’s latest acquisitions and newest forms of consumption.’ Bonyhady wonders if she was aware of her privilege. She was happiest on the dance floor. When she fell in love, she noted in 1915 that ‘this unfortunate war is the one thing that disturbs our happiness’. But Gretl’s first fiancé didn’t survive their disagreements regarding the design of their future apartment; the engagement was broken off. Thereafter she was ‘often in raptures over music and musicians’. Her father died in 1918. In 1921 she married Paul Herschmann. ‘Paul’s antipathy towards Catholicism soon divided them.’ At Christmas ‘he looked on the family’s candlelit tree with a mocking smile, contemptuously lit a cigarette and was generally scathing. While Gretl was hurt by his response, Hermine never forgave him.’ After her divorce in 1923, Gretl lived at Wohllebengasse with her daughter, Anna, who was known as Annelore.

Annelore also kept a diary from an early age, but, unlike her mother, she ‘revealed little of herself’. She later thought her childhood was spent too much in adult company, for which she blamed the matriarchal Hermine, who had continued to dominate their lives until her death in 1936. On the other hand, Annelore was so spoilt that one relative thought ‘after her upbringing in the Wohllebengasse it was a wonder that she turned out at all’. Bonyhady comments that ‘just as Gretl had gone through World War I getting ever more presents, so did Annelore during the Depression’.

As the Nazis gained power in Austria, Annelore wished for nothing more than to be inconspicuous, to be like all the other young women in dirndls and white socks, to go dancing, and to nurture her crush on the conductor Bruno Walter. When Gretl’s sister Käthe was arrested, these younger Gallias slowly woke from their enchantment. The family was identified as Jewish, and Annelore could no longer attend school. Eager to enjoy the last days of a disappearing world, she went to the opera: in September 1938 she attended eleven performances, in October eighteen. Most incredibly, on 9 November – Kristallnacht – she went to The Magic Flute. ‘As the Nazis terrorised Jews across the city, the removalists swaddled the Gallias’ furniture in blankets and wrapped their silver, glass and ceramics in layers of tissue paper, ready for shipment around the globe.’ Then Gretl, Käthe, and Annelore began their journey from Austria to Australia, where Gretl became Margaret and Annelore became Anne, while Käthe only gave up an umlaut to become Kathe. ‘Their crates, filled with the contents of Good Living Street, contained the best private collection of art and design to escape Nazi Austria’, and ‘their destination was a block of flats in the Sydney suburb of Cremorne’. Told with affection and humour, the Australian part of the memoir becomes the story of these three women’s ingenuities, educational opportunities, and newly found freedom.

Anne’s marriage in 1948 to the young communist Eric Bonyhady, who came from a strict Jewish family, presented other kinds of challenges, for she was loathed by her in-laws for being a convert, and because she hated them in turn for their hold over their son. So ‘Eric and Anne spent Easter with Gretl and Kathe and Passover with the Bonyhadys ... for all their similarities, theirs was a mixed marriage.’ They were divorced. With Anne especially, despite her academic achievements and spirit, we sense someone who is rather damaged. She shows little interest in the fate of her father, who had survived the war but was physically and mentally a broken man. She appears unaffected by his reaching out to her, and by his lonely death in Toulouse in 1958; later she visits France, but not his grave.

We learn that in her sixties and seventies, Anne continued to travel with only a rucksack, stayed in cheap hotels, and avoided good restaurants. She ‘looked back on her childhood in Good Living Street as the worst part of her life – even more traumatic than her experience after the Anschluss under the Nazis. Her account of her first fourteen years until Hermine died is imbued with not just resentment, fear, and anxiety, but also a keen sense of the enduringly damaging consequences of how she was raised.’ Her son points out that one of her lasting ambitions was to be inconspicuous.

At first I thought that in reading this book I was entering what Schorske called ‘the swampy world of Austrian art nouveau’, but I finished it with something much less clichéd, much more layered: a sense of the weight of inheritance – an emotional as much as a material or cultural legacy. Not what we inherit, but how we inherit. As Leonard Cohen says, ‘Take this waltz, it’s yours now. It’s all that there is.’

In the course of researching Good Living Street, Bonyhady discovered that many of his family did not manage to escape persecution and died by murder, illness, or suicide. When he came across his uncle Franz Herschmann’s name on a Jewish Memorial Centre website, with the information that he had died in Auschwitz in 1942, ‘it was one of those moments that changed my place in the world’.