Palo Alto CA
1 December 1998
Dear Rebecca Schwart,
My tenacious American cousin! I’m afraid it is no sign of anything, not even “coincidence,” that our letters were written on the same day and that they “crossed.”
This card. I admit I am curious at the choice. It happens this is a card on my study wall. (Did I speak of this in the memoir, I don’t think so.) How you happen to come into possession of this reproduction of Caspar David Friedrich’s Sturzacker-you have not been to the museum in Hamburg, have you? It’s rare that any American even knows the name of this artist much esteemed in Germany.
Sincerely,
Lake Worth, Florida
4 December 1998
Dear Freyda,
The postcard of Caspar David Friedrich was given to me, with other cards from the Hamburg museum, by someone who traveled there. (In fact my son who is a pianist. His name would be known to you, it’s nothing like my own.)
I chose a card to reflect your soul. As I perceive it in your words. Maybe it reflects mine also. I wonder what you will think of this new card which is German also but uglier.
Your cousin
Palo Alto CA
10 December 1998
Dear Rebecca,
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.