Listening to Papa grunt in response as he slid into the cab alongside me, I realized that he didn’t know how to read the driver’s comment. Was it a slur about our eastern European heritage? We’d been told that, even though they adamantly maintained their independence and neutrality in the face of the relentless European empire building that surrounded them, the Swiss looked down upon those from the eastern reaches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And yet the Swiss were the most tolerant people in other ways; they had the most lenient university admissions for women, for example. It was a
...more
