BOOKS
491
When Marcel was nine, the family moved from their small Polish
town to Berlin, so his father could search for work. Already a voracious
reader, Marcel fell in love with German literature and devoured hun–
dreds of stories, novels, and plays. Reading for him was sheer pleasure;
he could not get enough. At the same time, his father was still struggling
to find ways to support them. School was threatening. Marcel would
often watch students being walloped with a cane for offenses he could
not understand. Fifty years later, he remembers how he felt after wit–
nessing a fellow student being beaten:
I experienced something
I
never quite managed to shake off, some–
thing that accompanied me all my life. Perhaps I should say "has
accompanied me." I mean fear-fear of the German cane, of the
German concentration camp, of the German gas chamber, in short,
fear of German barbarism.
It
would only get worse. After the Nazis seized power and began to
exclude Jews from every aspect of German life, Marcel looked to his
father for guidance, but found little. Marcel refused to go to the syna–
gogue, believing it to be a waste of time to watch a bunch of old men
"mumbling more or less brainless texts and actually regarding this as a
personal dialogue with God." His father continued to go alone, unable
to persuade him. Marcel remembers sadly, "I never hated my father.
Unfortunately, I never respected him either, 1 always simply felt sorry for
him." Regrettably, it seems possible that Judaism became forever entan–
gled in the young boy's mind with his father's ineptitude. All children
are entitled to believe that their parents will always be there to save
them. Marcel could not; his parents had neither money nor contacts and
did not even think of emigrating. The Nazi threat grew more aggressive
each day, and Marcel found what little comfort he could at school,
where teachers were dazzled by his literary precociousness.
Already a teenager, Marcel became almost obnoxiously self–
absorbed. He was encouraged by a teacher who told him to ignore the
current conditions in Germany and to keep studying. He dreamed of
becoming a literary critic. By
1938,
he says, he had read
lall thel plays of Schiller and most of those by Shakespeare, nearly
everything by Kleist and Buchner, all the short stories of Gottfried
Keller and Theodor Storm, some of the great and mostly volumi–
nous novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, of Balzac, Stendhal, and
Flaubert. I read the Scandinavians, especially Jens Peter Jacobsen
