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PARTISAN REVIEW
themselves to new circumstances (including the immense jump from soccer
to baseball), and expressing themselves in a new language. Their memory
was less encumbered by the recollection of "the good old days." Their roots
in their country of birth had not yet become very deep, and they would find
it easier to grow new roots elsewhere. Some of the older folk would
talk
about their beloved homeland, about a love which could not be destroyed
by hatred and persecution (many of them quoted in Mark M. Anderson's
recent
Hitler's Exiles) .
These were not the feelings of the younger generation.
Or, as Lion Feuchtwanger wrote, "Many were ashamed to be emigrants;
they thought anxiously to hide it." They hoped to return as soon as it
became feasible, and in the meantime, unwanted, gloomy guests, they com–
plained and bickered. But if this is true at all (it seems to be more so for the
middle-aged writers than for the average emigre) it certainly does not apply
to the younger generation. Feuchtwanger also writes that the German emi–
gration was more fragmented than any other: there were emigrants by
choice and emigrants by necessity. But among the younger generation there
were no emigrants who had left because of their political beliefs, because
their books had been burned, or because they were on some blacklist.
The sheer number of these autobiographies is astounding if compared,
for instance, to those arising from the Russian emigration after the revo–
lution of 1917 which, after all, consisted of several million people, many
of them quite literate and no strangers to expressing themselves in writing.
The younger ones among them too felt a close connection with the home–
land and its culture; they had interesting stories to tell, and yet the number
of such accounts is much smaller.
In the case of the young German Jews it was, I feel, not so much a sense
of shock which induced them to write as a feeling of duty to tell the story
to their grandchildren and possibly their descendants. The accounts I have
read do not reflect particular shock because of the cruelty they had wit–
nessed; the great majority left before the outbreak of the war and the worst
they had witnessed was the Kristallnacht pogrom. They were sheltered in
many ways through family, school, and youth clubs, and lived in a world of
their own; their parents suffered and they could not fail to notice it, but the
impact was limited. It is more palpably felt among those living at the time
in Austria and Czechoslovakia, simply because the persecutions that had
taken six years to unfold in Germany were telescoped into as many weeks
in those countries in 1938. Many had the good fortune to emigrate wi th
their families and they were doubly sheltered, in Europe and in their new
homes. Others went abroad without their next of kin, such as the youth
aliya
to Palestine (from 1935 onwards), but they were living in groups in
kibbutzim
and this too provided psychological protection. They were aged
between fourteen and seventeen, and those carried in the so-called "chil-
