ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud says little about his mother, Amalie Freud, nee Nathanson. Born into a family of fairly successful merchants living in Brody, Galicia, she grew up in Odessa, a town on the Black Sea, in the southwestern corner of the Russian Empire. In nineteenth century Vienna, many Jewish immigrants arrived from Galicia. They were called Ostjuden. After the first partition of Polish territory in 1772, Galicia fell to the Habsburg monarchy. Brody, or Prode, was then turned into a border town at the edge of two Empires, Austro-Hungarian and Russian. Inextricably woven into the texture of Freud’s experience of Jewishness are the ever-present threads and threats of anti-Semitism. The traumatic traces of being construed as part of an “alien race” spanned the whole length of Freud’s Via Regia. Freud’s classic voice, and this is our second conclusion, remains extremely charged and over-determined.
