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Our lives are the product of our times. Unlike most people, Oscar Strenbach had two lives: one, in the Vienna in which he was born, grew up, and became a lawyer, and the other in New York, where, as a refugee from the Nazis, he became a psychoanalyst.
Dr. Oscar Sternbach was Viennese and a Jew. He bridged two cultures, the Jewish ghetto of the Leopoldstadt where he first lived, an area that teemed with new arrivals from the sprawling Austro-Hungarian Empire—thus a multicultured ghetto—and Vienna, a cosmopolitan city that almost rivaled Paris. Oscar was a part of both these worlds: the world of Jewish ritual of observant Jews, and the world of the intellectual free-thinkers. His Vienna was the world of Freud and psychoanalysis; the writings of Zweig, Schnitzier, and Kraus; the music of Beethoven, Mozart, and Strauss. The city burgeoned with intellect and culture, and Oscar absorbed this milieu. There were many facets to Oscar: He was not only an amateur opera singer, pianist, and painter, but also a political activist. He was a member of the Student Socialist Organization at the University of Vienna, and he dreamed, as did a number of the Viennese analysts (Otto Fenichel, Annie and Wilhelm Reich) of a successful socialist revolution. Oscar hoped for a new world order in which he could play a significant role.
Though Oscar was cognizant of psychoanalysis, both because it permeated the Viennese atmosphere and because he was a distant relative of Freud, his first love was law. He clerked for a number of judges, but at the point of his beginning a very successful law career, the Nazis invaded Austria. Thus, as Oscar