Introduction The (Mirrored) Playroom Departing for ParadiseBut oh, Kitty! Now we come to the passage. You can just see a little peep of the passage in Looking-glass House, if you leave the door of our drawing-room open: and it''s very like our passage as far as you can see, only you know it may be quite different on beyond. --Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1872) "So Isaac lay and looked at the firmament. And since the stars that illuminate the sea are the same stars that illuminate the land, he looked at them, and thought of his hometown, for it is the way of the stars to lead the thoughts of a person as they are wont." After setting out for Eretz Israel , Isaac Kummer had spent many days and nights in crowded trains that had carried him westward from his town in Galicia: through Lemberg, Tarnow, Cracow, and Vienna to Trieste. Now he was lying alone on the deck of the ship readied to depart the next morning for Jaffa. He thought of his family and friends back in Galicia. A sense of bitterness entered his mind as he thought of the Zionists back in his hometown.

Of course, many liked to talk about Palestine, but they never journeyed any further than their regular summer trip to a European spa: "They''ll give you prooftexts from the Talmud that the air of the Land of Israel is healing, but when they travel for their health, they go to Karlsbad and other places outside the Land of Israel." In his novel Only Yesterday , the classic Israeli writer Shmuel Yosef Agnon narrates the life of a young Zionist from Galicia who leaves Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century as part of the Second Aliyah to Palestine. About the same time elsewhere in Eastern Europe, in the world that Yitzchak Kummer had left behind, there was another fictional departure. In his Yiddish novel The Brothers Ashkenazi , Israel J. Singer vividly describes a lively scene at the train station in the Russian industrial town of Lodz. As Chassidim, farmers, and emigrants crowd together in front of the third-class coaches of a train about to leave for the West, beside other, better coaches, the wealthier bestow flowers and sweets on their departing friends and family:Before first-class and second-class wagons, well-dressed, self-assured passengers were gathered. Porters struggled under mounds of trunks, valises, hatboxes, traveling cases, and portmanteaux filled with enough dresses and accessories for two weeks at a fashionable resort. Dressed in their long gowns and huge plumed hats, the ladies minced along, conversing in German, even though they were still miles from the German border.

Fleeing the oppressive summer heat in Lodz, the prosperous Jewish middle class was, as every year, leaving for a stay at a spa in the West. In but two short generations, Singer''s protagonists had climbed the social and economic ladder into the middle and upper classes of the city, although they still lived a largely Orthodox observant Jewish life. And so they traveled to a health resort that could offer a Jewish ambient and the necessary Jewish infrastructure. People gathered in the Austrian Kurort of Carlsbad. In these two very different tales of departure, the western Bohemian watering place of Carlsbad embodied the image of a place of powerful attraction for European Jewry around 1900. Carlsbad and its nearby sister towns Marienbad and Franzensbad were a veritable mineral springs magnet, attracting the Jewish middle classes as well as Zionists and Chassidim; this even while others, as Singer commented with a touch of irony, "had previously avoided the resort because it had become too Jewish." According to an anecdote from the 1920s, Carlsbad was an iconic image of the spa as such among Eastern European Jews: if you asked a fellow passenger on the train, "Are you going to Carlsbad?" he would answer in the affirmative even if his destination was another spa. In actual fact, during the summer season, an unusually large number of trains from Europe both East and West regularly stopped at Carlsbad Central Station.

In the 1870s, the spa was connected up with the continental rail network, thus eliminating the need for the difficult journey by postal coach. As a result, the popularity of the spa soared, and with it the rapidly mounting number of visitors. The railroad train, as a democratic and affordable means of transport, transformed the structure of the spa public. Now, aside from the old elites, it also brought the broader middle classes and the petty bourgeoisie, blue-collar workers as well as penniless patients, to Carlsbad to "take the cure." Its popularity soon made Carlsbad Central Station an attractive destination for the luxury trains of the Compagnie Internationale de Wagon-Lits et des Grands Express Européens : after the number of spa guests had almost doubled in the period from 1880 to 1895, the South Eastern Railway decided to launch a direct line from London to Carlsbad. During the summer, there was a daily through-carriage of the Orient-Express (Oostende-Vienna/Istanbul) to Carlsbad, and due to great demand it soon became a luxury train of its own. In the summer of 1900, the Karlsbad-Paris Express was launched, and passengers from Russia arriving with the Nordexpress in Berlin had a direct connection from there to the spa. After World War I, the Paris-Prague-Warsaw Express was also routed through Carlsbad as a central East-West railway line.

Once disembarked at the Carlsbad station, travelers had a short journey to the spa area, either by horse-drawn cab, sulky, omnibus, or on foot. Situated in a long, narrow valley on the Tepl River, surrounded by heavily wooded hills, the town greeted guests on arrival with a memorable cityscape: a dense assortment of historical promenades, lobbies, and monumental buildings--an exuberantly eclectic clutter, a multi-story, gaily colored "rendezvous of the cream g'teaux." In the last third of the nineteenth century, far removed from the everyday hustle and bustle of the metropolis, distant from poorhouses and factories, a tourist and medical center had developed here. Once an exclusive space of retreat for the nobility, it had become a magnet for all those who could afford its amenities. If the geographical space that was Carlsbad, situated snug in its narrow valley, presented one and the same vista of entry for all who arrived, extending from the station through the commercial center to the district of the spa, the historical place is multifaceted. It offers numerous channels of access. These led into a literary space, an imagined place, a locality of nostalgic memory, a place of encounter, a site of illness and health, a habitat of pleasure and amusement, a feminine space, a Jewish place, a German place, a Czech one. Of the possible channels of access, the present study focuses on the above-mentioned and widespread imagination of Carlsbad as a Jewish place, with different sides and protagonists, infused with connotations both positive and negative.

There were other spas popular with a Jewish clientele, such as Bad Kissingen, Bad Ems, Wiesbaden, or Oostende, and there were summer resorts, such as the small Styrian alpine village of Altaussee in Austria or the Catskills in New York frequented in particular by a large number of Jewish tourists. But if we wish to sketch a Jewish topography of spas in Central and Eastern Europe at the fin de siècle , then doubtless the "spa triangle" of Carlsbad, Marienbad, and Franzensbad lies at its center. Summertime TopographyIt''s hard to write about Carlsbad. Not because there''s nothing to talk about, but because there''s just too much there. --Zevi Hirsch Wachsman, In land fun maharal un masarik Every summer, a network of destinations promising recreation and recuperation were offered anew to an international middle-class spa public. An "imaginary archipelago" of spas extended across the breadth of summertime Europe, which aligned Oostende, Carlsbad, the Semmering, and the Riviera; in a fanciful geography, they were aligned one almost next to the other. This impression of proximity was intentionally generated by the creation of direct rail links between the large spas, and by international spa newspapers and spa directories as social platforms that were readily available not only locally but likewise in the library rooms and entertainment halls of the competing spas. The fact that the daily programs in all spas were virtually identical in structure awakened a sense among spa guests of an encounter with familiarity.

This was heightened by the similar architecture everywhere and the kindred aesthetics of the gardens and spa hotels in most localities. Quite a few guests spent the entire summer traveling from one spa to the next--some for their amusement, others in search of a healing therapy for an incurable affliction. Ever since the middle classes began in the last third of the nineteenth century to create a new form of mass spas, Jewish spa patrons had played a central role in the summertime experience as a key middle-class group. On the one hand, trips to the spa were considered a representative element in the process of bourgeois socialization for both Jews and non-Jews; on the other, spas as modern medical and tourist centers attracted innovative physicians and entrepreneurs, as well as representatives of urban everyday cultures. International spas, which held out the promise of urban anonymity and diversity, were quite naturally more popular among Jewish spa travelers and patients than intimate spas and mineral springs in the countryside, where they frequently could encounter expressions of anti-Semitism. Their extraordinary attachment to the spas in western Bohemia derived from the interplay of various favorable circumstances, among which the central location between Western.