The city that I remember, the Berlin of the eighties, was rugged and grey. But it had nothing forbidding in its aspect, rather an air of homely and familiar comfort. There were few private houses, but people lived in their apartments in large, airy rooms with tall French windows and neat, white tile ovens. The streets were monotonous in appearance but admirably clean. There were no posters, no public advertisements except upon the pillars erected for that purpose, the traffic of horse-cars, omnibuses and cabs was orderly and convenient. The cabs, driven by red-faced, loquacious cabbies in blue-caped coats and top-hats, were cheap. My father and mother, though far from rich, used them constantly, and I remember being driven for hours through the black-draped city on that icy day in 1888 on which the old emperor's body lay in state in the cathedral.
My earliest glimpses of beauty are characteristic of the city. One was the windows of the Royal Porcelain Works on the Leipziger Strasse. With all the exquisite sensitiveness of childhood I saw those wonderful little figures and their porcelain veils and draperies and delicately moulded forms. They were so tiny and yet so perfect, and they thrilled me far more than Ranch's equestrian statue of the great Frederic or the chariot of victory over the city gate. The latter were dutifully impressed upon me by my father; my mother let me stand and gaze my fill before the windows of the porcelain shop... But the great sight to me, which I never saw without a lifting of the heart, was a certain public square. One walked or drove through a short street in which villas stood in gardens; at the end of that street one came upon the square quite suddenly. To that moment I always looked forward; the sensation was like the sudden crash of an orchestra. For the square spread out with an airiness, a fine and noble amplitude of shape and proportion, a grace and majesty at once that I despair of rendering into words. I have seen nothing like it since. Perhaps it seemed finer to my childish eyes than it was or is; but I am willing to yield to that old vision as a true one, since the seat of beauty is after all in the beholding mind...
Beyond the square lay the Tiergarten. Thither I was taken on many pleasant afternoons. And I can still see very clearly the statue of Flora surrounded by gorgeous flower-beds and the monument to Queen Louise and the "snail hill" swarming with other children and their nurse-maids; I can still hear their merry cries; I can still feel the stinging coolness on my heated throat of the milk sold at the famous kiosks of Bolle. But when I was four or five years old I would beg my nurse to take me to the gold-fish pond. It was generally still by the little artificial lake and I loved the stillness; the dark green foliage was very thick all around and the dusk fell early there. The mute darting about of the fishes seemed mysterious and soothing, the stone benches were cool and strong and bare. I felt in this spot without knowing it, the majesty of places withdrawn from the cries of men... Another scene of the great park I remember: a winter scene. Bare trees and the frozen river around the Rousseau Island and the gay scarfs of the skaters. And suddenly dusk and a brazen sun-disc black-barred by trees. Then the swift early winter night and the gas-lamps of the streets and the warmth and security of home...
But the out-of-door scenes of winter that I recall are few: another square and the snow-flakes falling thick and my father and I walking across it to a Vienna cafe where he played chess on Sunday mornings. This is one scene. And another is our sturdy maid carrying me from a playmate's house to a cab through a blinding blizzard. And the third is the Christmas fair— long since abolished— on the Belle-Alliance Square. Twinkling lights in the frosty air, and booths noisy and gay with cheap toys and cakes, and everywhere the sharp odor of the fir-trees.
I loved spring more than even this— the cool, virginal, gradual spring of the North. The windows were opened and children reappeared on the streets and great boughs of lilacs were sold. Have the German lilacs a headier and sweeter fragrance than ours? It seemed to fill the air and the heart; it meant the winds of spring and people sitting in gardens and casting aside their cares. For the Germans, I can recognise now, yield to the natural moods of the seasons. Spring is to them still the spring of the folk-songs and they would like to pack a bundle and wander out into the land with lilac blossoms in their hats... My father and mother took a cab on Sunday and drove in the Tiergarten or else went by boat up the river Spree to Treptow and there we sat on pleasant terraces and watched the life on the water. Even then I loved to see men and youths in their skiffs with bare white arms and legs and paddles flashing in the sunlight and took a deep delight in the strong, silent, virile rhythm of the rise and fall of their oars. And my father gave me a cylindrical box of tin and taught me to recognize and gather a few of the commoner herbs and grasses. Or tried, rather, for even at five my mind was impervious to the facts of science and soon I carried sandwiches in my "botanising drum."
In the summer of my sixth year my father rented a house by a lake in Straussberg near Berlin. The village was still isolated. You took the train and then a stage-coach to reach it. There were swans on the lake and a boat, sheep in the meadows and goose-berry bushes in the garden. Over all a deep, brooding, old-world peace. My father employed weavers in the village and I saw them in their houses at the hand-looms. It was a city-child's first taste of country life. And the crow of a cock across the fields or the bleat of a sheep still brings to me a vision of the Brandenburg country-side. When we returned to Berlin I entered school and life became a grave and ordered matter.
Our home was a flat of seven rooms furnished with more solidity than grace. Beds, tables and chairs were of massive walnut and of a design so old-fashioned that I see it returning into favor. All these things had not been bought in shops. According to a sound, old custom even then, I suppose, on the wane, they had been made to order by a small master cabinet-maker. Here lived my father, my mother, my maternal grandmother and I. Nor must I forget the faithful, kindly Kathe who was with us and served us until that home was broken up. There entered into my perceptions, also, a janitor, his lank wife, their pale, blond children. But these remained remote and dim.
My people were Jews of unmixed blood and descent who had evidently lived for generations in the North and North East of Germany. I have before me now a picture of my grandfather taken in the sixties. Despite the fact that he performed rabbinical functions to scattered congregations in East Prussia, I observe that in contravention of the law, his face is clean-shaven and that he has no ear-locks; he is clad in the Western European fashion of his day. He was a large man with a liberal forehead, a humorous mouth and kindly eyes. From old, half-forgotten anecdotes I glean something of this character. He had much rabbinical learning, but a whimsical contempt for the ritual law; his familiar friends were the Protestant Pastor and the schoolmaster of the village; he was of frugal habits but of something dangerously like incompetence in worldly things. The power and intensity of the family belonged to my grandmother, who was much his junior and who survived him for over twenty years. It was she who had run the primitive little factory that turned cotton into wadding for the greatcoats needed in the severe winters on the Russian frontier; it was she who had toiled early and late that her sons might have an academic education. They were grateful to her and provided for her in her old age with a fine generosity. Of intimate tenderness to her they felt but little. She was a tall woman and a dour. She had strong practical sense but a tyrannical and gloomy temper. To me she melted, the only child of her youngest and of her only girl, and the memory touches me of her sitting on the green rep sofa, glasses on nose, and reading aloud to me the German fairy tales of which I never tired.
My father and mother were first cousins. Their racial and social origin was the same. So that I need not dwell on my paternal grand-parents of whom I know but little. The mother (my grandmother's sister) had died early. My grandfather had started out in life as a tanner, but had succeeded neither at his trade nor at anything else. I remember him well, for he was our guest on every Sunday. His white moustache and Vandyke beard gave him an air of false distinction, for his intelligence was limited and his manners clumsy. My mother treated him with gentleness, my father with a distant kindness. For my grandfather, being poor, had turned over his oldest child at the age of five to childless but wealthy relatives and this uncle and aunt had been, in the deeper sense, the only parents whom my father had ever known. From them, too, came the moderate but real prosperity that we enjoyed.
Other forms and faces are much clearer in my memory— a large circle of uncles and aunts and cousins, all acting with a special tenderness to me as the youngest child in the group. And chiefly I recall my mother's oldest and favorite brother. He was a man in the forties when I knew him, very tall and very stout. He was his mother's son. But her imperiousness and moroseness had been tempered in him by a fine and trained intelligence and by contact with men and with notable affairs. He had passed through the gymnasium at Insterburg and then studied law at Konigsberg. Thrice he had fought for his country, in 1864, 1866 and 1870, and from the campaign in France he had returned with the iron cross. He had abandoned the law and occupied a distinguished position on the staff of a well-known Berlin newspaper. Punctilious and exacting and a tireless worker, he showed the kindlier elements of his nature in a wide hospitality and for many years his house in Berlin was the gathering place of the younger graduates of his Burschenschaft and his university. The letters which he wrote to my mother in America in the course of two decades I am glad to possess. The style is clear and expressive with a touch of austerity, the contents unaffectedly high-minded, melancholy (the badge of all our tribe) and warmhearted.
This uncle had married a Gentile woman and for years the marriage was a stormy one. But his daughter, a fair, engaging girl somewhat older than I, was the companion and playmate of my earliest years, and the relations between my aunt and her Jewish kin were cordial and unclouded.
In truth, all the members of my family seemed to feel that they were Germans first and Jews afterwards. They were not disloyal to their race nor did they seek to hide it. Although they all spoke unexceptional High German they used many Hebrew expressions both among themselves and before their Gentile friends. But they had assimilated, in a deep sense, Aryan ways of thought and feeling. Their books, their music, their political interests were all German. I remember but one phrase disparaging to their Christian countrymen. It was a curious one: "What can one expect? The Gentile has no heart!"
Two scenes stand before me which symbolise the character of the social group from which I sprang. This is one: I am sitting in a half-darkened room and my heart beats and my cheeks burn. It is Christmas Eve. I look out through the dark pane and across the street. Ah, there, behind an uncurtained window, a tree with candles. Quickly I turn my eyes away. I do not want to taste the glory until it is truly mine. And at last, at last, a bell rings. The folding doors open and there— in the drawing room— stands my own tree in its glimmering splendor and around it the gifts from my parents and my grandmother and my uncles and aunts— charming German toys and books of fairytales and marchpane from Konigsberg. And my mother takes me by the hand and leads me to the table and I feel as though I were myself walking straight into a fairytale...
And the other scene: It was my grandmother's custom, in pious remembrance of her husband, to visit the temple on the chief Jewish holidays— New Year and the Day of Atonement. And once, on the day of the great white fast, I was taken there to see her. The temple was large and rather splendid; the great seven-branched candelabra were of shining silver. The rabbi, the cantor and the large congregation of men were all clad in their gleaming shrouds and their white, silken praying shawls and had white caps on their heads. I can still see one venerable old man who read his Hebrew book through a large magnifying glass. The whiteness of the penitential scene was wonderful and solemn. Then the first star came out and the great day was over and in the vestibule I saw my grandmother being reverently saluted by her sons who wished her a happy holiday.
Two scenes. But the first was native and familiar to the heart of the child that I was: the second a little weird and terrifying and alien.
My father's foster-father was a man of some education and reading. Also an astute man who despite his severe lameness conducted a successful importing business from his armchair. His wife was a warmhearted woman, but incurably erratic and had ended in hopeless madness when my father was a youth. It is clear that the adopted child received great kindness, was treated with indulgence or overindulgence, but never received any rational guidance. He was taken to France and Switzerland before he was fifteen, his ample allowance permitted him to satisfy his tastes in books and music and amateur scientific experimentation. But neither his mind nor his character underwent any discipline. Thus he grew up generous but wasteful. The bitter experience of later years corrected that fault. It could not correct his over-eagerness, his lack of intellectual restraint, his habit of Utopian scheming, or the harsh self-assertiveness by which he strove to deaden his own sense of failure and insignificance. But neither could it impair his beautiful unselfishness and courage or his tireless devotion to the things of the mind. In later years I often found myself at variance with him in matters of opinion and belief; yet in face of his unfaltering devotion I was always consoled by the thought that I have scarcely a sound interest in literature or philosophy the impulse toward which had not come to me from his teaching and from his example...
He completed the course of the Royal Realschule at nineteen. He was too uncertain of himself to insist on prolonging his studies at the university; he already loved my mother and so he entered a well-known house of woolen manufacturers. By this time his foster-mother was hopelessly insane and his foster-father had fallen under the influence of an inferior woman. He had no real home. And so his request to be set up in business and to marry was readily granted. At twenty-three he was a father.
I often reflect upon his tragic youth. He was only a boy, crude, passionate, impulsive. He disliked his business but dared not slight it. Upon him were the eyes of my grandmother and of my mother's brothers. Their scrutiny, I am afraid, was more severe than sympathetic. The society in which he lived placed great stress on dignity and seemliness of demeanor. And so he tried hard to play the man and the man of business. That, under these circumstances, he escaped obvious disaster for eight years bears witness to his feeling of duty and his endurance.
My earliest recollections of him are all of his hours of escape from drudgery and care. He would sit in the mellow gas-light of our sitting-room and read far into the night. Or I would wake up and see him in the adjoining room, reading in bed by candle-light. And on cold or rainy Sundays and holidays he would spend hours and hours at the piano. He played most imperfectly at best, but he read his scores accurately and with fine musical intelligence and his halting technique did not prevent him from hearing all the grace and charm of Mozart, all the loftiness and solemn sweetness of Beethoven...
My mother did not come to Berlin until her father died. She was then only twelve years old. But a deep and tenacious loyalty attached her to the bleak East Prussian village of her childhood, and for years she was never weary of telling, nor I of hearing, stories of those early days. Thus I know how the intense, dark-eyed little girl with the very red cheeks of a northern climate hastened, wrapped in a heavy shawl, through the snowy dusk to afternoon school, clutching a candle with which to light her form. Or how, on other days, she went eagerly to the house of a superannuated spinster who had been a governess in gentlemen's families to learn French and crocheting and tatting. She brought from that old home, moreover, a fine heritage of folk-songs and tales and sayings. Much that I learned from her lips as early as I learned anything I have found since in the collections of folklorists and students of popular poetry and song. She was all her life, despite her Jewishness, her wide and sad experience and her artistic tastes, a spiritual child of the German folk. A hundred times, when her hair was white and her heart worn with sorrow and disappointment, I have seen in her eyes, in her whole self arise suddenly a ghostly but sweet shadow of the sturdy East-Prussian lass— simple and deep-hearted and of the very soul of her homeland.
Her education in Berlin was old-fashioned and limited. It was long before the days of the gymnasium for girls. Yet within its narrow range the Hohere Tochterschule had thoroughness. My mother's knowledge of French, at least, was sound and extensive. Her chief interest, however, in those days, was music. Her alto voice was well cultivated. When I awoke to the consciousness of art I found that I knew— and could remember no time at which I had not known— the words and music of practically all the great songs of Schubert and Schumann, of Franz and Mendelssohn and Brahms. So often, during my childhood, had I heard them from her lips.
Her girlhood was not happy. The social environment was cruelly rigid; one breathed according to law. She wanted to enter a seminary for teachers; she begged to be allowed to learn book-keeping. But since there was no need, her brothers decided that it was unseemly for a young woman to work outside of the home. When the dusk stole into the small Berlin flat and she was weary of music and embroidery, she would go out in all weathers and hurry through the streets and let the rain beat upon her face— intensely troubled, rebellious against the forces that held her. Yet she was quite helpless. For her strength never lay in nimbleness of mind; neither then nor later did she reflect closely; it lay in the fullness and richness of her emotional nature. But she had been carefully taught to distrust her impulses. She wrote verses and dared not show them. Even so she was considered unconventional and shrank more and more within herself. She entertained a deep affection for a young pianist through whom she caught glimpses of a freer life. But he was hopelessly poor and drifted away. She received the most intelligent sympathy, after all, from her young cousin, my father. They read the same books, loved the same music, nursed their enthusiasm on the same plays. He was reputed, moreover, to be the heir of a very large fortune. Neither knew that his foster-father, as a matter of fact, had lost many thousands in the financial collapse that followed the inflation of the early; seventies. And she thought, quite rightly, that money means liberty in the higher and finer as well as in the coarser and more obvious sense.
Once married, however, my father's crudeness and violence wore on her; a moroseness in him which was the result of the harsh pressure which he endured and would not admit, estranged her. Again she was baffled and solitary. Then her child was born. The tension snapped. Into the channel of her maternal love she poured all her passionate ideality, all her deep yearning, all her half-inarticulate ambitions, all the splendor of her frustrate hopes. In the wild and tragic munificence of her love she kept nothing for herself. Utterly she transferred the centre of her being to another. It was wrong! Wrong to herself. The world is wide and its paths are many and the fate of no man is quite his own to shape. So that through my failures and misfortunes and enforced wanderings her life was again beggared and often darkened. I loved her and I mourn her with all my strength. Yet to her great love I was— as any man would have been— but an unprofitable servant.
My life until I went to school was an intense waking dream. The pretty toys I had interested me but little. I shrank from playmates not through timidity but because they interrupted my imaginings. Their amusements seemed aimless and their noise made me feel sick and faint. Yet I was by no means a delicate child; I was sturdy and broad-chested and passed vigorously through two rather severe illnesses that attacked me early. But just as the taste of certain dainties that I liked gave me a pleasure that was almost too keen, so disagreeable sense-impressions made me dizzy and, on at least one occasion, violently ill. An old aunt had died and my mother took me with her on a visit of condolence. The room was full of black-garbed women; there was a faint stale odor of flowers and a continuous buzz of conversation. It all seemed hideous to me; I fainted and had to be carried home. The only child whom I admitted to full intimacy was my fair-haired cousin. She was musical, her voice was soft, her ways with me were gentle. I loved to touch the fine texture of her skin and the silkiness of her long hair. Curiously enough I cannot remember how, in those earliest years, we entertained each other. I recall with the utmost vividness that I thought her lovely, and that the sight of her touched me like the lilacs of spring or the sound of singing...
Most of my waking dreams have vanished from my mind. But two I entertained so constantly and so long that I remember them as though they had been realities. I imagined a great garden in an endless summer. In it were gathered under cool groves the few people whom I loved. There were tables under the trees laden with things to eat— roast duck and Baumkuchen and clusters of large, cool, translucent grapes. A Never-Never land. The other dream was more boyish. I saw myself, clad in green huntman's garb, a cock's feather in my hat, riding swiftly on a small, lithe horse. Whither or why? I don't know. That vision of myself was enough and was a source of endless delight.
When I was four years old I was sent to a Kindergarten. But I was so obviously unhappy and listless that the principal asked my mother to keep me at home. Then my grandmother taught me my letters and my real life began. My first two books were collections of stories written for little children and I thought them delightful. But someone brought me a small, greenish volume bound in boards. It was called Bechstein's Marchen. Faded and tattered the little book lies before me as I write. I turn the pages— to this day I know them almost by heart— I look at the small, stiff, quaint, inimitably haunting wood-cuts.... Immemorial romance, sombre and magical world of dim forests and mediaeval cities and doomed kings, of shepherds and gnomes, full of old racial memories, free as the imagination of childhood, deep as the heart of man! The style, I see now, was worthy of the matter— concrete, marrowy, quaint as the wood-cuts with flashes now and then, of a wild, grotesque humor... For the first time in my life I became insistent, begging for books and more books. Thus I read Grimm and Andersen for myself now and the Arabian Nights and a large and precious volume called Al-Runa in which were gathered fairy-tales of all peoples— German and English and Norse, Romaic and Russian and the weird and cruel legends of the Southern Slavs. I read until my eyes ached and my forehead was fevered. If my mother bade me go and play in the open I lay on the door-step without and wept in a passion of despair. No wonder! I have lived with books and loved the best things in more than one literature. Yet what has the highest delight of later years been to that pure and passionate joy, that ecstasy of absorption in which I became one with the things I read and saw with my own eyes castles by the shores of Norseland, dragons on the banks of lustrous rivers and with my own ears heard the blowing of the horns of Elfland....
My condition was, of course, an unhealthy one, and my mother dealt with it energetically. On four afternoons a week I was sent to the Tiergarten in charge of a young Kindergartnerin, on other afternoons my mother took long walks with me, a habit which we continued for many years. I said that she dealt with this matter energetically. But not with this alone. Her love was no ignoble indulgence. It held no element of moral sloth. My diet was determined by the family physician, not by my liking. For every time I tasted sweets or pastry, an American child of to-day tastes them a hundred times. I slept on a pillow of horsehair; I used not the traditional feather-bed but the hardier blanket.... It never occurred to me that I could fail to obey my father and mother; it never occurred to my cousin and the other children whom we knew that they could fail to obey theirs. Thus between parents and young children the relations were far more dignified and becoming, far more fruitful of a fine piety than any I have seen since. There may have been an occasional injustice. We are all human. There was no noise, no wrangling, no vulgar antagonism.... After the care of my body, my mother's love took the form of an intense and glowing ambition for me. I was to realize my highest possibilities, to develop every faculty, to attain every ability and grace that mark the complete man. I learned skating in winter and swimming in summer, always under competent instruction. I was taught music and gymnastics. I have heard mothers complain with a certain wistfulness that it was time for their children to go to school. I have seen them put off the evil day. My mother with her German ideals felt altogether differently. With almost an austerity of joy she welcomed the autumn of my sixth year. The great process of development was now to begin in earnest. The day was a solemn day for her. Consciously she now dedicated herself to a double watchfulness, helpfulness and devotion during the momentous years that were to come.
The society into which I was born, whatever were its virtues or its faults, had one notable quality: it knew what it wanted. A few aims and their implied values were fixed. The kind of school I was to attend was never debated. It was an absolutely foregone conclusion that a liberal education was the necessary foundation of right and noble living. My parents were of modest origin and of modest means. But if anyone had questioned my being prepared for the gymnasium and proceeding from thence to the university, they would have held it a prophecy of my early death. My uncles entertained the same feeling concerning their sons, and among the painful memories of my childhood is the gray, tragic face of one of them whose boy had that day failed to pass his Reifeprufung. So deeply did this conviction, which was considered beyond discussion, sink into my consciousness that, to this day, the debate concerning the value of a higher education so often heard among us in America, has no more real content for me than a debate concerning the value of bread....
The gymnasium which admitted me to its Vorschule was housed in an ancient building, four stories high, constructed of heavy and rather gloomy stones. I do not know where it was. I know that on my way to school I passed one house that was almost hidden by roses in the spring, and that I passed a handsome new church that stood in a small, green square. The wooden stairs of the gaunt, old schoolhouse were deeply worn by the steps of generations of boys and youths, the yard was bleak and paven, the rooms light but barren of any adornment; the forms were dark-brown with splashes of ink.
During the first week at school I learned to know loneliness and homesickness and began to develop, too, a certain quiet stoicism which staid with me for many years and did me measureless harm. The teacher, a lank, kindly man with a long, blond beard, left the room for a little. He found it in uproar when he returned. I had been quiet. But I, too, felt the smarting taps of his cane across my shoulders. I did not cry and I did not tell my mother until years later. It was the only punishment I received at the school during the two years of my attendance. Soon this very teacher singled me out with much kindness, visited our home when I was ill with a heavy cold and commended me to the teacher who followed him. By this time too, I had made friends of several of my little fellow-pupils and the first wretched feeling of forlorness had worn off.
The instruction was simple in its subject-matter: reading, writing, arithmetic, singing, gymnastics and "religion." I know now that it was remarkably thorough. I am hopelessly stupid at figures. For six weary years at high school and college I dragged my numb mind through five or, at the best, three periods of mathematical instruction a week. I could not tell now, literally to save my life, the nature of a quadratic equation. But I know the elementary arithmetic learned, in that German school. I don't need to multiply simple figures, for instance. I know the answers instinctively and at once.... The hour I liked best was that known as "religion." As a Jew I could easily have been excused from attending. But my parents had no prejudices in this respect. And they were right. For there was no hint of dogma, not even of moralizing. The teacher simply related to us the Old Testament legends in chronological order, and to me it seemed as though I heard a new and fascinating set of fairy-tales. I had a vision of the tower of Babel piercing a tropic sky, of long lines of camels under solemn stars, of tall, dark maidens carrying pitchers to ancient wells by the tents of Jacob....
The home-work was harder. My mother's intense ambition for me made her severe. She bought a desk for me which stood, as did its chair, on a little wooden platform several feet in height. While I sat at this desk she could, small as I was, stand beside me. And so we worked together until my tasks were perfectly done— until I had written my copy-book page and could recite my verses without hesitation. These tasks, I think, grew longer than was quite wise during my second year at school. I shed some childish tears of weariness, I know, and my mother grew a little anxious over my lack of zeal.
But life was not all work. There was the magic of Christmas and Easter with generous vacations; there was the delight of spring with flower-girls on the curb. I had an allowance of one mark a week now and spent most of it on posies for my mother and my blond cousin. Above all, in winter there was an occasional visit to a theatrical performance of some fairy play— a pleasure almost too rich and keen to be quite free from pain. Also there were children's parties. But I cared less for these than for a quiet afternoon with one of my fellows at school— a little lad of almost girlish delicacy and of my own tastes. And there were long walks with my mother, and skating in winter with my cousin and summer outings.... A rich and happy childhood. Even my grandmother's death darkened it only for a week or two. Nor, in my childish preoccupations, did I hear the mutterings that proceeded the final crash of our prosperity and our hopes.
Years afterwards I learned, of course, all the disheartening details of my father's financial ruin. They would make but a dull story. Late in the year 1889 his foster-father died and left him about twenty thousand dollars, the remnant of a once considerable fortune. With this sum he rashly engaged in an undertaking of which he knew nothing— the importation of Italian fruits. He paid an exorbitant sum for the good-will of a worthless firm, for lighters that did not exist, for customers that could not he found. In three months he was ruined and, overcome by shame and despair, fell ill. His illness was not of the body. It was a slight attack of melancholia. The psychical inhibitions were, of course, paralysing. Yet no one, not even his physician, quite understood that fact. He was urged to see friends and former associates, to seek a position here and there. But it was impossible for him to face the world. Aimlessly he wandered about and reported (and probably believed) that he had met only coldness and rebuffs. My mother, not dreaming that his mind was sick, credited these reports; they shook her faith in men and increased her fundamental self-distrust. Thus in the midst of friends and kinsmen who would, in the traditional Jewish fashion, have scolded loudly but helped generously, my father and mother were isolated, embittered and helpless....
A day came which I have never forgotten. My father and mother stood in our living room. A shaft of September sunshine fell upon them both. My father held his hand to his mouth; one of his delusions was that his tongue was slightly paralysed; my mother turned the pages of a letter. Her eyes rested on him in sorrow and perplexity. Suddenly she spoke: "Would you like to go to America?" My father drew himself up. A strange and almost unnatural relief came into his face. "Yes," he gasped. Then he turned to me with the first smile he had worn in weeks. "Would you like to go to America, to Uncle S.?"
Long before, the youngest of my mother's four brothers had emigrated to America. He was said to have prospered moderately there. The letter was from him. The relief which my father had shown was followed by a fever of activity. Though his life had been, however rash and foolish, of an unblemished honor, he councilled my mother to secrecy. She blamed herself bitterly in later years for having followed his council. He was like a man trying to flee from himself.
Weeks of turmoil followed. I felt keenly the hidden terror and the loud confusion. My father was possessed by the morbid notion that he himself would have to carry all our luggage. He sold our furniture, his excellent library; with difficulty my mother saved the silver and linen and my books.... It was autumn and it rained and rained. My mother felt a thousand hesitations. Again and again she was on the point of speaking out, of appealing to her brothers. Pride and self-distrust and my father's sudden, diseased energy constrained her. Then, one day, the tickets had been bought and, with a very ache of tragic foreboding, she faced an accomplished fact. Deep in her heart she nursed one bleak consolation. The two thousand dollars with which my father intended to start life in America were in her keeping. Whatever happened she determined to cling to enough for our return passage....
Hamburg! I shall never forget it, though I was but a child of eight. A sky of slate, an angry wind, ancient streets with tall, gabled mediaeval houses leading to a square, the stuffy hotel full of horse-hair covered chairs and sofas, the sad-faced man who exchanged German money for American, the broad Elbe river and the fog-horns of the tugs and ferries. The fog-horns... I stop writing and listen. Beyond the park, close by the river, the train comes in. Its whistle blows a hoarse blast. Straightway— it never fails— thirty years are swept away, I am in Hamburg again, proud of my long great-coat, filled with a strange sense, half of expectancy, half of terror, wondering at the whiteness of my mother's face and the unspeakable wistfulness in her eyes....
At ten in the forenoon we boarded the ferry that was to take us to our ship. It was the old Hamburg-American liner Suevia. She carried only first-class passengers and steerage. We were among the former. The trip took several hours, I believe, but I am not sure. Then the great ship received us and to me it immediately became a world of wonder. At luncheon I marvelled at the array of wine and water glasses hanging like chandeliers above the tables, at the swivel chairs fastened to the floor, at the strange sounds on the lips of other passengers. "They are speaking English," my father said to me.
Dark fell; the ship was in motion; my father paced the deck, up and down, up and down. At last a shattering doubt of this adventure had come into his mind. My mother stood by the railing. She held my hand in a convulsive grasp and covered me with the cape of her long coat. The tears rolled down her cheeks as the twinkle of the last shore-lights died and nothing was left but darkness of the land she was not to see again.