44 Myron SharafFury On Earth
With a few exceptions, Reich spoke positively about his mother throughout his life.
Indeed, according to his third wife, Use Ollendorff, Reich idealized his mother, always cit-
ing her cooking as a model that Use could not reach^5.
Reich’s view of his father, however, seems to have changed considerably over the
years. As a young man, he was quite critical of him. In several places in his writings he indi-
rectly alluded to the father’s authoritarian ways, and used to speak bitterly about him to
friends. But toward the end of his life, Reich’s attitude softened, and without even mention-
ing the more somber aspects, he highlighted Leon’s positive attributes. Reich took great sat-
isfaction in the fact that his father was not religious, aside from some ritual Jewish obser-
vances to appease more orthodox relatives; that Leon was cosmopolitan in orientation and
modern-minded in his farming practices; that he was a working property owner, not a “par-
asite.” In later years Reich stressed that his mother, too, was very active on the family estate,
a leader who helped organize the women’s work on the farm just as the father directed the
men^6.
Reich’s feelings toward his father—both the critical ones of his youth and the more
positive later ones—are supported by his sister-in-law, Ottilie Reich Heifetz, whom I had the
good fortune to interview at length in 1971. In her seventies then, Ottilie had known Reich’s
brother Robert since 1915, and was his wife from 1922 until his death from tuberculosis in
- She had met Wilhelm, or Willy, as he was always called in those days, when he was in
Vienna in 1917 on a furlough from the Army, and until 1930, they were good friends as well
as in-laws. In addition, Ottilie knew Reich’s maternal grandmother, another source of infor-
mation about Reich’s family origin.
Robert was as reluctant as Willy to speak much about his early family life, referring
to it on several occasions as “unhappy.” But what he and the grandmother told Ottilie gen-
erally confirms Reich’s account. Ottilie pictured the father as extremely clever, a vigorous,
fascinating, and very dominating man, given to outbursts of temper. He appears to have had
a highly possessive attitude toward his young wife that today would be termed male-chau-
vinist.Ottilie recalls Robert relating how his father once hit Cecilia for not having the din-
ner ready on time. His possessiveness is perhaps intimated at the time of the engagement to
Cecilia:her mother had wanted to give Cecilia a family diamond on the occasion of her wed-
ding, but Leon insisted on giving her his own jewelry.
This incident may reflect Leon’s concern over the possible influence of Cecilia’s
mother on her. Ottilie described Willy’s grandmother as a very intelligent, snobbish, dramat-
ic, and meddlesome woman. She seems regularly to have been at odds with Leon, and her
visits to the Reich home were a constant source of tension and trouble, since she appears to
have been quite capable of standing up to Leon and frequently did so, particularly when
Leon and Cecilia quarreled. In one of his few reported criticisms of his mother, Willy was
later to describe her as a “silly goose” because she allowed her mother to influence her so
much; he, too, disliked his meddling grandmother.
However much the grandmother may have contributed to the family tension, there
appears to have been a good deal without her. In a telling anecdote, Robert mentioned to