A Letter From Europe

VIENNA – There is, at first, no culture shock. So much about Europe seems familiar. American civilization, after all, had followed a basically European pattern well into the 1940s. Still in the last years before the suburban dispersal, Boston, with its elegant inner core of theaters, restaurants, and quiet residential streets, with its streetcars and its railways reaching out across a distinctly rural, farming area to other urban centers, remained recognizably a European city. Older Ame...