The Elixir of Immortality

by Gabi Gleichmann

  WHEN CHIARA HEARD of these developments, she was distraught. Amschel maintained a surprising calm. She demanded that Amschel immediately present an abject apology to von Wartenburg and try to persuade him to forgo the duel. She had a profound horror of such barbaric behavior. Especially because she knew that Guido, who had never touched a weapon in his life, would be easy prey for the general, a man who had literally grown up with a sword in his hand. She remembered that the general would soon have to repay a large loan he had taken from Amschel six months earlier, and she begged her husband to try to hush up the affair by offering to discount the debt.

  IN THE CENTER of Chiara’s study loomed a desk with a quantity of drawers, files, niches, secret drawers, and lids. That impressive monument in dark wood with light-colored inlay resembled an empty stage with trapdoors, movable panels, and cleverly designed secret spaces, a repository that only the most talented thieves could ever persuade to reveal its contents. Curiously enough, Chiara was irresistibly drawn to clutter. Her desk was always covered with miscellaneous piles: letters, documents, books, dictionaries, pens, teacups, wineglasses, scissors, small change, even the occasional garment. But one day she cleared the desk and placed a large empty bottle in the center of it. The sight of that bottle, fiasco in Italian, squeezed her heart and filled it with grief. A fiasco. It symbolized her disastrous failure with her young son, Guido.

  GUIDO’S CHEEKS were bright red and his eyes were downcast. He was a short young man of nineteen, frail, with delicate features and an unusually large nose. At times of calm his large dark eyes were filled with intelligence and warmth, but now they were radiating grief and pain. From his very earliest childhood his pensive face had given his mother the feeling that he would not live very long, or if he did, that he would become a burden to her.

  “Guido, tell me on your word of honor,” said Chiara, “is this true? Did you and Anton …?”

  “Yes, Mother,” he spared her from asking the question and added without flinching, “We love each other.”

  “ ‘Love each other,’ ” Chiara repeated the words. “You have dragged us into the gutter. Without moral scruples and with no consideration for your family, you have committed a horrible crime. If your father knew of your shameful behavior, he would be rolling over in his grave.”

  “But Mother, we love each other.”

  “You have no idea what love is,” she said, and rolled her eyes.

  Neither spoke. The room filled with an uncomfortable tension. Chiara was not so bothered by the fact that Guido had an unspeakable vice; what pained her most was that he had hidden it from her and concealed his own nature. He was a different person from the one she had believed him to be, and that made him a stranger to her. He had shared with her only a trivial portion of his inner life; the rest, the important part, that which overshadowed all the rest, he had shared with someone else. After a long moment Chiara broke the silence. She told Guido to leave the room and get out of her sight because she could not bear to deal with him any longer. That was an odd reaction, one might think, from a woman who had always looked at the world around her with such steady and unflinching eyes.

  GENERAL VON WARTENBURG refused to accept Amschel’s offer. He regretted profoundly that they found themselves in such a difficult situation, one that jeopardized their friendship. Circumstances obliged him to defend the good name of his family. “For the sake of honor,” as he expressed it, “we must humbly submit to our fate.”

  “My dear banker,” he said, “do your best to see the duel from a different perspective: Consider that I am generous enough to offer Guido the oportunity to demonstrate once and for all that the legend about the cowardice of the Jew is just that: a legend.”

  Amschel wasn’t able to find words adequate for a response to this before the general clicked his heels and made the prescribed inquiry: “Where and when can my seconds locate your stepson?”

  THE ONLY PERSON in the house Guido could talk to was Angela, who was always ready to turn the page whenever someone committed an offense. But this time he declined her offer to discuss what she called his “misfortune.”

  Amschel had no time for him because he was deeply engaged in trying to limit the negative effects of the scandal and counter the malevolent rumors about the vast banking enterprise his father had built up and he was now responsible for managing.

  His mother locked herself in her study and refused to see him. His brother, Gérard, was studying in Berlin.

  Anton had been dispatched to his uncle in Prussia, depriving Guido of any possibility of contacting him. A benevolent retainer told him in confidence that once in Prussia Anton had been persuaded by his uncle to marry to a certain Baroness von Proschwitz, a maternal cousin who was as stupid as a donkey and devoid of any female grace. That report wounded Guido terribly. He was devastated by the thought that he and his beloved would perhaps never see each other again. He was struck by deep despair. Reflecting on the matter, he realized that his mother, of all people, was capable of understanding him, for she must have suffered the same sort of anguish when his father was imprisoned in the Conciergerie. But he had fallen into disgrace with her; her silence and turned back were the severe punishment for his shameful offense. This made his grief and isolation even more terrible. And, moreover, he feared that the general’s seconds would turn up at any moment.

  Guido abandoned hope for the future. His desperate desire to hear the voice of his beloved again and to feel the smoothness of his skin had become too much to bear and were made even more bitter by his mother’s rejection. He decided that as a man sentenced to death, he would send her a final message. He wrote to her that even though people often laughed behind her back when she said so, she was right to maintain that if someone threw a straw into the Main River, it would sink at once.

  Then Guido went to the southern corner of the huge garden, where the ashen-gray waters of the Main flowed gently past, and drowned himself in the river.

  GÉRARD SPECIALIZED in the complexities of international law. No one at the Rothschild Bank had developed such expertise. He had brilliant prospects. With Amschel’s hearty approval he married Diana, whose father owned the Oppenheimer bank. The arranged marriage quickly bore fruit; one year later Jakob was born.

  For some reason unknown to me, my great-uncle almost never mentioned Chiara’s elder son. All he said was that Jakob was scarcely out of the cradle when his parents, Gérard and Diana, died.

  THE HEP-HEP RIOTS began on August 2, 1819, in Würzburg. Within a few days, all across the thirty-six German states indignant crowds went out on the streets and violently demonstrated their anger that prominent Jews, inspired by the French Revolution and particularly by all its declarations about human rights and civil rights, were making utterly absurd demands for reform. The savage, bloody pogrom raged for several days. Thousands of Jews were attacked, beaten, and murdered, and their homes and offices were looted.

  In Frankfurt the Jewish ghetto wasn’t the only target. Rioters made their way to the Rothschild house, then pillaged and burned it. The charred bodies of Angela, Gérard, Diana, and two aged women servants were later found in the ruins. The only survivor was a manservant found curled up in a fetal position, badly burned and weeping.

  AMSCHEL HAD LONG LOOKED forward to seeing his own features mirrored in the face of a beloved son. During his early years with Angela he often imagined how the swollen figure of his pregnant wife would be transformed into that of a new mother, tired but happy, holding their firstborn son to her breast. In his imagination he could hear the newborn’s first cry as the air made its way into his tiny lungs after he emerged from the warm paradise of his mother’s womb. He could almost feel the tiny, soft infant fingers in his own hand.

  But Amschel never had any children of his own.

  He sometimes thought of Chiara’s firstborn son as his own, his natural heir. That is why his grief over the death of Gérard was even deeper and more overwhelming than that he suffered at the loss of his wife, Angel
a.

  THE DARK MONTH of August was followed by a dismal autumn. The winter promised no relief. Chiara and Amschel usually spent Christmas in Bad Ragaz, but this year they remained in Frankfurt. There was no question of making the long journey to Switzerland with an infant of only nine months. Amschel was deprived of the reinvigorating massages and other treatments that were his favorite treats, and that year he couldn’t mingle with the bank’s growing crowd of international clients at the Hotel Quellenhof, where spa cures and the casino attracted the royals, the titled, and the upper crust of society.

  JAKOB THOUGHT that Chiara and Amschel were his mother and father, for they had always treated him as their own son, from love for his vanished parents. Two additional qualities bound him to their hearts in undying love: this adorable child’s nose was incredibly large and his right shoulder was somewhat twisted, so that he looked as if he had been born humpbacked. Custom inured Chiara and Amschel to the sight of him and so they never thought of his curious posture, but strangers noticed it immediately. It never occurred to anyone to tease him about his deformity. But the reactions of others made it difficult for him to forget his handicap.

  The size of his nose distinguished Jakob from all other children. He did not know that the burden of that gigantic nose turned up in each generation of our family and signified that he would achieve great things. Chiara often reassured him and told him he was the very image of his grandfather, Nicolas Spinoza, the large-nosed revolutionary. That pleased him very much.

  THE BLOOD of the Spinozas and the Luzzattos mingled in Jakob’s veins. Many generations of both families had devoted themselves to study. They loved books and juggled ideas, an occupation they preferred to jingling coins. Chiara taught him three languages when he was still quite young, put into his hands the most important books from the cultures of three countries, and admonished him as often as she could, “You possess utterly only that which is in your own head.” As they set forth together on stimulating mental journeys into the past, she impressed upon him again and again that material objects disappear, things pass away, nothing is forever, one can never live any time but in the present moment, and there is no life after this one. She was determined to ground him in the traditions of Jewish thought and ethics.

  ———

  FOR AMSCHEL MONEY was a means, never an end in itself. Karl Marx was completely mistaken when he described Amschel as a heartless man of questionable financial integrity, obsessed with riches. But I don’t intend to write a polemic here; I want to give a straightforward account of the facts.

  Old Rothschild had taught Amschel that one’s reputation in the Jewish world was linked not to wealth but to one’s wisdom and knowledge. A wealthy man in the Judengasse was respected only if he was also learned. The Talmud, his father told him, exhorts one to resist the temptations and pitfalls of wealth. The founder of the Rothschild bank stressed that his real goal in amassing a fortune was to raise the level of his cultural sophistication and that of his family, and to improve their social standing.

  Amschel saw the talents of the Spinozas and the Luzzattos clearly reflected in the boy’s mental acuity. In great admiration of Chiara’s undertaking, he encouraged her to equip Jakob with every possible intellectual advantage. He himself proceeded much more carefully and sought to extend the boy’s horizons by opening for him the world of finance, orienting him step by step to the rules of that game. He placed his faith in the combination of theoretical knowledge and pragmatic intelligence.

  AMSCHEL FOLLOWED the intellectual debate within the German empire with deep concern, for he wished and devoutly hoped that the German-speaking lands would be the first in the world to realize the freedoms and ideals advocated during the French Revolution and, not incidentally, would in his lifetime become the lands to free the Jews after centuries of oppression. What most disquieted him was the hallowing of Germany’s so-called sacred obligations and the malevolent depiction of Jewry as an international and emphatically non-German threat. Jews were alleged to be foreigners incapable of setting the interests of the German fatherland above all else. There was talk about an inherently creative Aryan intellect and a Jewish character completely bereft of originality and capable only of imitation. Aryans were described as conscientious, moral, logical, and vigorous, while Jews were sly, immoral, illogical, and passive. Aryans were praised for their deep sense of the ideal and the heroic, and for their love of their native land, especially its forests and the Alps. Jews were blamed for their eternal rootlessness and saddled with responsibility for every evil since the beginning of time. They were always to blame. A Jew was always a Jew—first, last, and always.

  AT HIS FATHER’S DEATHBED Amschel had promised to remain forever true to his Jewish faith, even though already as a young man he had closed his heart to any belief in God. Many of those in his circle of acquaintances were obliged to renounce Judaism, for the hatred of Jews was palpable in the very air that one breathed. They converted, took Christian names, and assimilated. His own brother Solomon, who lived in Vienna, was advised by court officials to embrace Christianity when the emperor granted him the Austrian title of baron. Amschel forbade it, exercising his prerogative as head of the family. He wrote to Solomon, “I hope you are aware that our ancestors have remained true to our people and our traditions for thousands of years. I have never represented myself as anything other than what I am: a Jew from Frankfurt. And I will shun any Jew who converts to Christianity.”

  At the age of sixty Amschel was an exemplary man of the world, both in the French sense—that is, as a member of society—and in the German one, as a man who has seen the world.

  Sometimes Amschel would imagine that when Jakob came of age he would give to his ward the heraldic shield he had inherited from his own father. It symbolized the red flags waved by Eastern European Jews in sympathy with the ideals of the French Revolution. His father placed that red shield over the main entrance to the newly furnished offices when he established the bank in 1792. Amschel hoped the gift would spur Jakob to change his last name to Rothschild, just as Amschel’s father Mayer Amschel Bauer had done.

  AMSCHEL DIED with quiet dignity. He had come to a truce over many long years with that old enemy of his, rheumatism, but his body was unable to prevail over the problems of his ailing heart. He never mentioned the pains in his chest, for he had always been a discreet individual, a man who preferred to make light of his problems rather than to afflict them upon others. As a result, his death was completely unexpected by everyone. He went to sleep one evening and did not wake the next morning.

  The funeral ceremonies were worthy of Amschel. In one of the drawers of his desk they discovered a paper with a preliminary effort to outline a last will and testament. His wishes concerning the funeral were followed to the letter. He wanted a simple coffin of dark wood, and he specified that only his closest family members were to accompany him to the graveside for his final journey.

  A FEW WEEKS AFTER Amschel’s coffin had been lowered into the ground, his four brothers assembled for a family council to discuss the future of the bank. Such meetings were unusual, since they lived in different parts of Europe where each managed his own branch. Solomon, the head of the Vienna section and eldest surviving brother, automatically assumed his role as the new patriarch. The others listened respectfully and with great interest as he outlined plans that were both farsighted and carefully thought out. He asked whether the piece of paper with Amschel’s last wishes should be considered a legal document and then answered his own question, stating that it was invalid as a last will and testament, since no notarius publicus had witnessed the text. Therefore, Solomon concluded, there was no reason to satisfy the departed’s wish that Jakob, a young man not even of his own flesh and blood, should inherit his shares in the bank. There was even less justification for the young man to become a member of the board of directors.

  “If nothing else,” he said, raising his voice, “this document confirms the truth of the rumors that have been circu
lating in the bank for some time. Chiara and Jakob exploited Amschel’s prolonged illness. Loyal colleagues observed with disgust as the two systematically abused the confidence of our dear brother. An individual whom I trust implicitly has informed me that they have long manipulated Amschel and deceived him. Chiara is the brains behind it all, that notorious old woman who’s been living at our expense for as long as I can remember. It’s clear that she aimed for the young Spinoza to take over our family business and usurp our birthright. In her naïveté she overestimated Jakob’s ability and underestimated our intelligence. Any concession to them is completely out of the question.”

  Solomon received unanimous support at once. This being confirmed, he proposed a resolution to amend the firm’s statutes of incorporation: Only those who were born members of the Rothschild family could own shares in the bank and serve on its board of directors. They passed the resolution by acclamation. He admonished the brothers to avoid the ravages of a struggle for power, since any such conflict would prejudice the interests of all. It was therefore vital that despite his considerable contributions to the firm, Jakob should at once be relieved of his duties.