WHEN THIRTY-YEAR-OLD Anna Bertha Leitich (nicknamed “Tizia”) stepped off of the ship Zeeland at Boston Harbor on February 21, 1921, she felt that she had stepped onto another planet. The Zeeland had departed nineteen days earlier from Antwerp, Belgium, leaving behind a frightfully altered European world that Leitich hardly recognized anymore. Born in Vienna in 1891, she had grown up in a fine upper-middle-class apartment in that city's Sixth District, a few paces from the church where the body of the composer Josef Haydn had lain in honor before he was interred near the Esterhazy Palace in Eisenstadt. Her father, Albert Leitich, was the well-respected director of a school in the nearby Stumpergasse. Her mother, Emilie Schmid Leitich, was a former actress at the royal Burgtheater who taught French at the same school. Anna Bertha was the oldest of four children. With her parents and her brothers Friedrich and Hermann and her sister Helene, she spent her summers vacationing on the Wallersee or the Attersee with other members of the fashionable middle class. Even though she was not a part of Vienna's nobility, her father's eminent position in society meant that she was addressed, even as a child, with the title “hochwohlgeboren”: most highly born.

Like so many other children of turn-of-the-century Vienna's Bildungsbürgertum (a German term that not only refers to the grande bourgeoisie or upper middle class but also to a specifically educated, cultured segment of that class), Leitich was consumed with the world of art, literature, and music. She preferred the company of books to that of her peers: “Ich lese Ibsen,” she wrote in a diary entry in 1908. “So viel wie Ibsen hat mir niemand gegeben… . Ich verkehre mit niemandem als mit meinen Büchern. Mit denen spreche ich.” (I am reading Ibsen. No one has given me as much as Ibsen. I do not spend time with anyone but my books. I speak with them.) Besides Ibsen, Leitich mentions another writer who exerted a powerful influence on her life: Felix Salten. She boasts of having read one of his novels at least ten times, and she and all of her friends discussed Salten during breaks at school.