Yes I like this ugly Nolde. Smoke black as pitch and the Elbe like molten lava. You see into my soul, don’t you! Not that I have wished to disguise myself.
So I return Towboat on the Elbe to my tenacious American cousin. THANK YOU but please do not write again. And do not call. I have had enough of you.
Palo Alto CA
11 December 1998/ 2 A.M.
Dear “Cousin”!
Your sixteen-yr-old photo I made a copy of. I like that coarse mane of hair and the jaws so solid. Maybe the eyes were scared, but we know how to hide that, don’t we cousin.
In the camp I learned to stand tall. I learned to be big. As animals make themselves bigger, it can be a trick to the eye that comes true. I guess you were a “big” girl, too.
I have always told the truth. I see no reason for subterfuge. I despise fantasizing. I have made enemies “among my kind” you can be sure. When you are “back from the dead” you do not give a damn for others’ opinions & believe me, that has cost me in this so-called “profession” where advancement depends upon ass-kissing and its sexual variants not unlike the activities of our kindred primates.
Bad enough my failure to behave as a suppliant female through my career. In the memoir I take a laughing tone speaking of graduate studies at Columbia in the late 1950s. I did not laugh much then. Meeting my old enemies, who had wished to crush an impious female at the start of her career, not only female but a Jew & a refugee Jew from one of the camps, I looked them in the eye, I never flinched but they flinched, the bastards. I took my revenge where & when I could. Now those generations are dying out, I am not pious about their memories. At conferences organized to revere them, Freyda Morgenstern is the “savagely witty” truth-teller.
In Germany, where history was so long denied, Back From the Dead has been a bestseller for five months. Already it has been nominated for two major awards. Here is a joke, and a good one, yes?
In this country, no such reception. Maybe you saw the “good” reviews. Maybe you saw the one full-page ad my cheapskate publisher finally ran in the New York Review of Books. There have been plenty of attacks. Worse even than the stupid attacks to which I have become accustomed in my “profession.”
In the Jewish publications, & in Jewish-slanted publications, such shock/dismay/disgust. A Jewish woman who writes so without sentiment of mother & other relatives who “perished” in Theresienstadt. A Jewish woman who speaks so coldly & “scientifically” of her “heritage.” As if the so-called Holocaust is a “heritage.” As if I have not earned my right to speak the truth as I see it and will continue to speak the truth for I have no plans to retire from research, writing, teaching & directing doctoral students for a long time. (I will take early retirement at Chicago, these very nice benefits, & set up shop elsewhere.)
This piety of the Holocaust! I laughed, you used that word so reverentially in one of your letters. I never use this word that slides off American tongues now like grease. One of the hatchet-reviewers called Morgenstern a traitor giving solace to the enemy (which enemy? there are many) by simply stating & re-stating as I will each time I am asked, that the “holocaust” was an accident in history as all events in history are accidents. There is no purpose to history as to evolution, there is no goal or progress. Evolution is the term given to what is. The pious fantasizers wish to claim that the Nazis’ genocidal campaign was a singular event in history, that it has elevated us above history. This is bullshit, I have said so & will continue to say so. There are many genocides, so long as there has been mankind. History is an invention of books. In biological anthropology we note that the wish to perceive “meaning” is one trait of our species among many. But that does not posit “meaning” in the world. If history did exist it is a great river/cesspool into which countless small streams & tributaries flow. In one direction. Unlike sewage it cannot back up. It cannot be “tested”�“demonstrated.” It simply is. If the individual streams dry up, the river disappears. There is no “river-destiny.” There are merely accidents in time. The scientist notes that without sentiment or regret.
Maybe I will send you these ravings, my tenacious American cousin. I’m drunk enough, in a festive mood!
Your (traitor) cousin,
Lake Worth, Florida
15 December 1998
Dear Freyda,
How I loved your letter, that made my hands shake. I have not laughed in so long. I mean, in our special way.
It’s the way of hatred. I love it. Though it eats you from the inside out. (I guess.)
Its a cold night here, a wind off the Atlantic. Florida is often wet-cold. Lake Worth/Palm Beach are very beautiful & very boring. I wish you might come here & visit, you could spend the rest of the winter for its often sunny of course.
I take your precious letters with me in the early morning walking on the beach. Though I have memorized your words. Until a year ago I would run, run, run for miles! At the rain-whipped edge of a hurricane I ran. To see me, my hard-muscled legs & straight backbone, you would never guess I was not a young woman.
So strange that we are in our sixties, Freyda! Our baby-girl dolls have not aged a day.
(Do you hate it, growing old? Your photographs show such a vigorous woman. You, tell yourself “Every day I live was not meant to be” & there’s happiness in this.)
Freyda, in our house of mostly glass facing the ocean you would have your own “wing.” We have several cars, you would have your own car. No questions asked where you went. You would not have to meet my husband, you would be my precious secret.
Tell me you will come, Freyda! After the New Year would be a good time. When you finish your work each day we will go walking on the beach together. I promise we would not have to speak.
Your loving cousin
Lake Worth, Florida
17 December 1998
Dear Freyda,
Forgive my letter of the other day, so pushy & familiar. Of course you would not wish to visit a stranger.
I must make myself remember: though we are cousins, we are strangers.
I was reading again Back From the Dead. The last section, in America. Your three marriages�“ill-advised experiments in intimacy/lunacy.” You are very harsh & very funny, Freyda! Unsparing to others as to yourself.
My first marriage too was blind in love & I suppose “lunacy.” Yet without it, I would not have my son.
In the memoir you have no regret for your “misbegotten fetuses” though for the “pain and humiliation” of the abortions illegal at the time. Poor Freyda! In 1957 in a filthy room in Manhattan you nearly bled to death, at that time I was a young mother so in love with my life. Yet I would have come to you, if I had known. Though I know that you will not come here, yet I hold out hope that, suddenly yes you might! To visit, to stay as long as you wish. Your privacy would be protected.
I remain the tenacious cousin,
Lake Worth, Florida
New Year’s Day 1999
Dear Freyda,
I don’t hear from you, I wonder if you have gone away? But maybe you will see this. “If Freyda sees this even to toss away…”
I am feeling happy & hopeful. You are a scientist & of course you are right to scorn such feelings as “magical” & “primitive” but I think there can be a newness in the New Year. I am hoping this is so.
My father Jacob Schwart believed that in animal life the weak are quickly disposed of, we must hide our weakness always. You & I knew that as children. But there is so much more to us than just the animal, we know that, too.
Your loving cousin,
Palo Alto CA
19 January 1999
Rebecca:
Yes I have been away. And I am going away again. What business is it of yours?
I was coming to think you must be an invention of mine. My worst weakness. But here on my windowsill propped up to stare at me is “Rebecca, 1952.” The horse-mane hair & hungry eyes.
Cousin, you are so faithful! It makes me tired. I know I should
be flattered, few others would wish to pursue “difficult” Professor Morgen-stern now I’m an old woman. I toss your letters into a drawer, then in my weakness I open them. Once, rummaging through Dumpster trash I retrieved a letter of yours. Then in my weakness I opened it. You know how I hate weakness!
Cousin, no more.
Lake Worth, Florida
23 January 1999
Dear Freyda,
I know! I am sorry.
I shouldn’t be so greedy. I have no right. When I first discovered that you were living, last September, my thought was only “My cousin Frey-da Morgenstern, my lost sister, she is alive! She doesn’t need to love me or even know me or give a thought of me. It’s enough to know that she did not perish and has lived her life.”
Your loving cousin,
Palo Alto CA
30 January 1999
Dear Rebecca,
We make ourselves ridiculous with emotions at our age, like showing our breasts. Spare us, please!
No more would I wish to meet you than I would wish to meet myself. Why would you imagine I might want a “cousin”�“sister”�at my age? I like it that I have no living relatives any longer for there is no obligation to think Is he/she still living?
Anyway, I’m going away. I will be traveling all spring. I hate it here. California suburban boring & without a soul. My “colleagues/friends” are shallow opportunists to whom I appear to be an opportunity.
I hate such words as “perish.” Does a fly “perish,” do rotting things “perish,” does your “enemy” perish? Such exalted speech makes me tired.
Nobody “perished” in the camps. Many “died”�“were killed.” That’s all.
I wish I could forbid you to revere me. For your own good, dear cousin. I see that I am your weakness, too. Maybe I want to spare you.
If you were a graduate student of mine, though! I would set you right with a swift kick in the rear.
Suddenly there are awards & honors for Freyda Morgenstern. Not only the memoirist but the “distinguished anthropologist” too. So I will travel to receive them. All this comes too late of course. Yet like you I am a greedy person, Rebecca. Sometimes I think my soul is in my gut! I am one who stuffs herself without pleasure, to take food from others.
Spare yourself. No more emotion. No more letters!
Chicago IL
29 March 1999
Dear Rebecca Schwart,
Have been thinking of you lately. It has been a while since I’ve heard from you. Unpacking things here & came across your letters & photograph. How stark-eyed we all looked in black-and-white! Like X-rays of the soul. My hair was never so thick & splendid as yours, my American cousin.
I think I must have discouraged you. Now, to be frank, I miss you. It has been two months nearly since you wrote. These honors & awards are not so precious if no one cares. If no one hugs you in congratulations. Modesty is beside the point & I have too much pride to boast to strangers.
Of course, I should be pleased with myself: I sent you away. I know, I am a “difficult” woman. I would not like myself for a moment. I would not tolerate myself. I seem to have lost one or two of your letters, I’m not sure how many, vaguely I remember you saying you & your family lived in upstate New York, my parents had arranged to come stay with you? This was in 1941? You provided facts not in my memoir. But I do remember my mother speaking with such love of her younger sister Anna. Your father changed his name to “Schwart” from�what? He was a math teacher in Kaufbeuren? My father was an esteemed doctor. He had many non-Jewish patients who revered him. As a young man he had served in the German army in the first war, he’d been awarded a Gold Medal for Bravery & it was promised that such a distinction would protect him while other Jews were being transported. My father disappeared so abruptly from our lives, immediately we were transported to that place, for years I believed he must have escaped & was alive somewhere & would contact us. I thought my mother had information she kept from me. She was not quite the Amazon-mother of Back From the Dead…Well, enough of this! Though evolutionary anthropology must scour the past relentlessly, human beings are not obliged to do so.
It’s a blinding-bright day here in Chicago, from my aerie on the fifty-second floor of my grand new apartment building I look out upon the vast inland sea Lake Michigan. Royalties from the memoir have helped pay for this, a less “controversial” book would not have earned. Nothing more is needed, yes?
Your cousin,
Lake Worth, Florida
April 13, 1999
Dear Freyda,
Your letter meant much to me. I’m so sorry not to answer sooner. I make no excuses. Seeing this card I thought “For Freyda!”
Next time I will write more. Soon I promise.
Your cousin
Chicago IL
22 April 1999
Dear Rebecca,
Rec’d your card. Am not sure what I think of it. Americans are ga-ga for Joseph Cornell as they are for Edward Hopper. What is Lanner Waltzes? Two little-girl doll figures riding the crest of a wave & in the background an old-fashioned sailing ship with sails billowing? Collage? I hate riddle-art. Art is to see, not to think.
Is something wrong, Rebecca? The tone of your writing is altered, I think. I hope you are not playing coy, to take revenge for my chiding letter of January. I have a doctoral student, a bright young woman not quite so bright as she fancies herself, who plays such games with me at the present time, at her own risk! I hate games, too.
(Unless they are my own.)
Your cousin,
Chicago IL
6 May 1999
Dear Cousin: Yes I think you must be angry with me! Or you are not well.
I prefer to think that you are angry. That I did insult you even in your American soft heart. If so, I am sorry. I have no copies of my letters to you & don’t recall what I said. Maybe I was wrong. When I am coldly sober, I am likely to be wrong. When drunk I am likely to be less wrong.
Enclosed here is a stamped addressed card. You need only check one of the boxes: angry not well.
Your cousin,
P.S. This Joseph Cornell Pond reminded me of you, Rebecca. A doll-like girl playing her fiddle beside a murky inlet.
Lake Worth, Florida
September 19, 1999
Dear Freyda,
How strong & beautiful you were, at the awards ceremony in Washington! I was there, in the audience at the Folger Library. I made the trip just for you.
All of the writers honored spoke very well. But none so witty & unexpected as “Freyda Morgenstern” who caused quite a stir.
I’m ashamed to say, I could not bring myself to speak to you. I waited in line with so many others for you to sign Back From the Dead & when my turn came you were beginning to tire. You hardly glanced at me, you were vexed at the girl assistant fumbling the book. I did no more than mumble “Thank you” & hurried away.
I stayed just one night in Washington, then flew home. I tire easily now, it was a mad thing to do. My husband would have prevented me if he’d known where I was headed.
During the speeches you were restless onstage, I saw your eyes wandering. I saw your eyes on me. I was sitting in the third row of the theater. Such an old, beautiful little theater in the Folger Library. I think there must be so much beauty in the world we haven’t seen. Now it is almost too late we yearn for it.
I was the gaunt-skull woman with the buzz cut. The heavy dark glasses covering half my face. Others in my condition wear gaudy turbans or gleaming wigs. Their faces are bravely made up.
In Lake Worth/Palm Beach there are many of us. I don’t mind my baldie head in warm weather & among strangers for their eyes look through me as if I am invisible. You stared at me at first & then looked quickly away & afterward I could not bring myself to address you. It wasn’t the right time, I had not prepared you for the sight of me. I shrink from pity & even sympathy is a burden to some. I had not known that I would make the reckless trip until that morning for so much depends upon
how I feel each morning, it’s not predictable.
I had a present to give to you, I changed my mind & took away again feeling like a fool. Yet the trip was wonderful for me, I saw my cousin so close! Of course I regret my cowardice now, its too late.
You asked about my father. I will tell you no more than that I do not know my father’s true name. “Jacob Schwart” was what he called himself & so I was “Rebecca Schwart” but that name was lost long ago. I have another more fitting American name, & I have also my husband’s last name, only to you, my cousin, am I identified as “Rebecca Schwart.” Well, I will tell you one more thing: in May 1949 my father who was the gravedigger murdered your aunt Anna and wished to murder me but failed, he turned the shotgun onto himself & killed himself when I was thirteen struggling with him for the gun & my strongest memory of that time was his face in the last seconds & what remained of his face, his skull & brains & the warmth of his blood splattered onto me.
I have never told anyone this, Freyda. Please do not speak of it to me, if you write again.
Your cousin
(I did not intend to write such an ugly thing, when I began this letter.)
Chicago IL
23 September 1999
Dear Rebecca,
I’m stunned. That you were so close to me�and didn’t speak.
And what you tell me of�What happened to you at age thirteen.
I don’t know what to say. Except yes I am stunned. I am angry, & hurt. Not at you, I don’t think I am angry at you but at myself.
I’ve tried to call you. There is no “Rebecca Schwart” in the Lake Worth phone directory. Of course, you’ve told me there is no “Rebecca Schwart.” Why in hell have you never told me your married name? Why are you so coy? I hate games, I don’t have time for games.
Yes I am angry with you. I am upset & angry you are not well. ( You never returned my card. I waited & waited & you did not.)
The Gravedigger's Daughter: A Novel Page 58