Lehmann’s own story was half a rumor. Yet that rumor was what led students to vie for a place in her seminar and was probably the reason why she’d been kept on through any controversy. She and Leopold Stein were lovers long ago.
6
WHAT Anna Lehmann actually said was, “Oh, Leopold Stein.” After a dreamy pause, “Leo and I were lovers.” Judit never actually heard her say it, but of course, stories like that do get around. In spite of all the physical evidence, or maybe because of the physical evidence, the story was believed to be true.
Photographs of young Lehmann were awfully arresting. She was a model for some of the great Berlin photographers of her day, not a conventional beauty, but with what some called “the head of a lioness,” a strong jaw, Tartar cheekbones, and thickly lashed eyes. Her hair was black, and she wore it loose across magnificent shoulders. She’d been a student at Heidelberg, liberated by the security of her position as the only daughter of a judge and a woman with a generous allowance from her own wealthy family. She was a child of Weimar when there were no restrictions on education for Jews and few for women, born at precisely the right time. She wore her privilege like a fur coat, unapologetically. She had friends everywhere.
As a child, she had a weak chest, so her parents sent her to a sanitarium in Switzerland with a nanny who taught her French. She’d mix with other patients who came from France or England or Romania or Italy, and she would charm them with her precocious questions. Afterwards, she’d spend summers at one country house or another, collecting languages the way another girl might collect butterflies. She’d pin those specimens down and examine them with a good-natured vigor that was a little frightening to those who didn’t know her.
In Heidelberg, a casual circle gathered in her room for rolls and coffee, and young Lehmann would question them each in turn about—for example—his opinion of Baptized Jews. At least half of those present fit that description, and it was both a relevant and a tactless subject. She’d blink her little black eyes and classify the topic into its spiritual and intellectual components, and it was around that time when someone would say something like, “Well, it’s just easier, Anna.” She’d reply, “In fact, you have a point. Maybe I should try it. Do I have to take my clothing off? Will you come with me and watch?”
That was Lehmann, both clinical and playful. Her father, when he noticed her at all, felt that his girl needed to settle down. Her mother, who was a good deal sharper than her husband, replied, “Don’t worry about Anna. She likes her life too much to threaten it in any way.” Certainly, aside from her originality, there was no cause for scandal. Or not yet. In 1929, when Lehmann completed her degree, her mother asked only two things of her: that she not run through her allowance and that she not get pregnant.
Finances were simple. Young Lehmann’s needs were few. She took a room in an unfashionable boardinghouse and supplemented her income by translating lightweight novels and dry scientific monographs from French to German for a local agency. As for pregnancy, that was hardly a danger. Her inclinations ran in less conventional directions. In short, her mother was correct. She liked her little room that looked out over a courtyard where shabby women hung their wash. She liked the Prussian Archive, where they would always save her a desk with very good light. If her friends considered her eccentric, that never stopped them from submitting themselves to her interrogations, and if any of the men tried to make love to her, she’d blink at them and say, “It’s a strange impulse, this need to copulate.” She was twenty-six years old.
She didn’t even try to find a teaching post. She preferred to be an independent scholar, and the subject she pursued with both passion and emotional detachment was the Jewish Question. She’d chosen that subject not because she herself was, as her mother delicately put it, a German of Israelite Descent, but because it seemed to make the best use of her strengths as a scholar. When she was a girl convalescing in Swiss sanitariums, she’d overhear conversations about the Dreyfus Affair, and the very agitation of all parties made her know it was a question worth pursuing. In a junk shop in Vienna, she’d come across a novel by a Hungarian reporter named Theodore Herzl called The Old-New Land about a settlement of German-speaking Jews who built a productive nation in Uganda. On the whole, her exploration of the Jewish Question was her favorite sort of project, open-ended, with no chance of resolution.
Then one day, a friend said, “I have an answer to your Jewish Question.”
“Are you proposing we move to Uganda?” Anna Lehmann smiled. “Maybe, if you ask me nicely.”
Instead, he introduced Lehmann to a young man with wild black hair and a stained and rumpled suit-coat. This wasn’t the Leopold Stein of the iconic photographs, not Stein postwar. This was Stein just back from the Vilna Yiddish Conference, in Berlin en route to Munich, with his suitcase in his hand. He was two years younger than Lehmann, and he hadn’t slept more than a few hours in the past week. This friend arranged a meeting in a café, and Stein was so full of what he’d seen and what he had discussed in Vilna that, without hesitation, he began to talk and talk.
“Those men have a romantic attachment to exile that’s just plain superstition, but in practice the best of them think like Germans. It’s remarkable to see the thread, the consistency of logic woven right into them, a kind of Ashkenaz blood-memory.”
Lehmann had ordered all three of them coffee, but the friend soon peeled away; he had heard all of this before. Stein kept on talking, his voice too loud, his hands expressive, his big-ness taking up the table. Lehmann made a few mild attempts to get a word in, but it was no use, and she ordered them both cognac in the hope that Stein would just run out, like a Victrola.
Of course, Stein was saying what he’d been saying for five years, but it was new to Lehmann. “There’s a German inside of every Jew in Europe, and if we can only wake that German up—”
“In fact—” Lehmann began, in a fruitless attempt to insert a thought of her own.
“—Indeed. Look at this coffee shop. Look at the dozens of newspapers on the wooden racks. This is our prayer-house, Anna. This is our country. The Germany we made here is a culmination of a thousand years of—”
“—In fact,” Lehmann said, “the Jews in France felt the same way until Dreyfus was framed.”
“Listen,” Stein said. His big, wet eyes looked into hers with such conviction that her own actually widened. “Facts can be lined up. Facts can be knocked down. What matters, Anna, are deeds. What matters is what we do with our bodies.”
“Oh,” Anna Lehmann said. She leaned back in her chair and realized there was no more liquor left in her glass. He was still staring at her, so she said, “I will admit, Leo, that I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
He kept the conversation going, though it was punctuated by disconcerting, liquid stares. Later, she’d learn that he would only do that when he was exhausted, but the erotic charge of those stares worked on Lehmann, and after the lights in that café began to flicker, he asked, “What time is it?”
“Past time for bed,” Lehmann replied. And then she said, “Indeed.”
That same year, Lehmann moved back to Heidelberg, where she assumed a professorship that wouldn’t last for long. Lehmann and Stein wrote each other frequently and at length. Most of his letters were lost when she fled the country, but she’d kept a few, including one that laid to rest the rumor that it was Stalin who had ordered Yiddish banned from Judenstaat’s public discourse.