I believe he lost almost all of his family in the Holocaust, certainly his parents. He was a war hero - fought as an RAF pilot after fleeing Prague, which is no doubt why he wound up in Canada afterwards -

lagatta, you say:

quote:

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Yes, the show was really a look backward at a disappeared Austro-Hungarian pre-war world, but I think public broadcasting has room for a little nostalgia, of that high culture sort,

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Now, I didn't know the show, so maybe it was just nostalgia. But to me, the story of that world is still most interesting and is in many ways still playing itself out.

It turns up in the funniest places. For instance, have you ever read Rebecca West's Black Lamb, Grey Falcon, which is about the history of conflict in the Yugoslavia of the interwar period? I think most people pick up that book either because they're curious about West her cranky self or because they really want to know the roots of conflict in the Balkans -- and I suspect a lot of readers have had the same "What the hell???" reaction I did when she segues almost immediately in her intro, away from the main subject of the book and to a long, very long, very very very long -- and witty and eccentric -- history of ... the collapse of the A-H Empire! Other writers of various sorts, in several different disciplines, have done this to me often enough that I have come to think of that collapse as a thing, a solid object in history, the CAHE, sort of like the DRE (decline of Roman etc).