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PARTISAN REVIEW
line; and to know she lost her father in this way-he chose to abandon her.
He may have loved her or, lost in his own chaos, he may have given her no
thought at all. And of course, this confusion explained why she went into the
cure of souls business.
As
most doctors do, she sought to cure herself. What
can have been the life of such a person-intelligent, pretty, fatherless, first in
the defeated and bereft Germany of her childhood and then in the triumphant
one of its present prosperity? 1 was thinking about the miracle of metabolism
which doesn't mark such a person with smudges and scars, but allowed her to
be long, lanky, athletic, healthy-looking, with fine eyes. Well, perhaps the
mark of grief was that pensiveness, and in this case the loss had only made
her more attractive. 1 was still thinking about my stupid towel. And 1
wondered what my book about the history of an American Jew meant to
her, but of course 1 wouldn't ask for anything more than the shy
acknowledgment she had already given me. "Do you know any Jews in
Germany?" 1 asked.
1 managed to let the towel fall away.
"There aren't any! They're gone! We killed them all!" Suddenly, at
this point in our conversation, after the calm recitation with which she had
begun, her words seemed to come out of her mouth as a cry.
"But there are still some in Germany," I said.
"I met a Jew who lives two hundred kilometers away! 1 never see
him! We lost all our Jews!"
There was a time of silence. We listened to the Pacific Ocean rolling up
against the cliff, listened to the children playing in the pool as they called out
to each other, splashing and laughing. We paid attention to the lovely bee–
humming summer afternoon. "You're a scholar," 1 said.
"It
should be easy to
find some of your father's fellow-officers, there must be some of them still
alive, and ask what could have been in his mind...."
We had found an odd rhythm. Someone spoke, there were silences
between our sentences, and then a reply finally emerged. But this time the
question was different. She didn't answer. 1 went on: "You could ask his
fellow officers, couldn't you?"
She waited and waited. We sat in a version of the yoga position, cross–
legged and naked facing each other, and then she said: "I don't want to
know. That's the whole trouble. I still don't want to know."
Sitting there naked with the German general's beautiful daughter is an
exaggeration of the condition of American Jews-and of its extreme
manifestation in an American Jewish writer's precarious comfort amid the
astonishing natural bounty of northern California. How can a person come all
this way and so quickly from an egg-dealer grandfather in Kamenetz–
Pomolsk to a hatcher of stories in San Francisco? Rhetorical questions are for