When Memory Comes

by Saul Friedlander

  My uncle Hans must have been in his late forties at the time of my arrival: he was a small, squat man with a ducklike walk, at each step balancing his entire frame from one leg to the other. His wife, Lissa, was as tall and emaciated as he was small and squat. A German Jewess, she had fled from Fürth to Norway and from there, in 1942, to Sweden. Like Hans, she was an anthroposophist. I haven’t encountered many families of Protestant pastors of the old European hue; I imagine that in their appearance, Hans and Lissa would have fitted in nicely. They were good people, entirely devoted to the youngsters in their care — and to anthroposophy.

  Most of the caretakers were young men and women; some were attracted to anthroposophy but the majority had merely heard of the place and come as volunteers for a year or two, in search of their future, like me. The odd man out was Herr K.: he had served in the Waffen-SS on the Eastern Front and, after a few glasses of aquavit, he would tell of the Russian villages his unit had set ablaze and the like. My uncle said that K. had come out of remorse. I didn’t think so.

  I don’t remember how many youngsters lived in Saltå during my stay, probably around thirty, all of them Swedes, all of them very ill. Some became quite unruly at times and had to be physically restrained, but mostly for a short while and never in the harsh ways used in state institutions. During my stay, only one patient turned truly dangerous and chose me of all people as his target. Whenever he saw me, his face contorted, clearly indicating a mysterious but irrepressible rage. Had it gone on, he certainly would have attacked me physically. I had to leave for a week or so to a neighboring farm; when I returned, Pär (that was the youngster’s name) had been transferred to another institution.

  The very basic Swedish I soon acquired sufficed for exchanging a few words with my charges when we went on walks (usually I would take three or four of them along). No level of linguistic mastery could help, however, when a member of my little group decided to run into a snow-covered field and lie in the snow, arms and legs flailing in all directions, resisting any attempt at pulling him up. I described one such incident in When Memory Comes (it involved young Hans Z. and not Arne as I mistakenly wrote; Arne could not speak). Although Hans’s speech was limited to just a few sentences, he followed some internal monologue with indistinct mumblings and wild gesticulations. On a day I will never forget, we walked by a local school just as the children were coming out. They saw Hans and the fun began: standing in a wide circle they imitated his gesticulations while taunting him in words incomprehensible to me. My shouting made no difference, and an infuriated Hans threw himself down into a nearby snowfield in a total loss of control. When I reached him and tried to calm him, he suddenly turned his snot-covered face toward me and desperately shouted, “Herr Friedländer! Herr Friedländer!”

  Generally though, the daily routine ran smoothly: gardening, weaving, eurythmic dancing, reading aloud, and taking our meals in Saltå’s large dining hall. The weaving and the eurythmic dancing stemmed from the same principle: instill in the patients a sense of order (the weaving followed simple patterns and so did the dancing, created by one of Rudolf Steiner’s early adepts). The reading in common had a somewhat different aim: every day, one of the Swedish caretakers read some old legend to the assembled youngsters for about an hour. Although, in ordinary terms, most of them were not capable of understanding the story, the assumption was nonetheless that such legends carried archetypal contents (the Jungian concept was not used, but the notion was the same) that, in subconscious ways, had a healing effect. Naturally, this insight could not be verified, but during the readings the youngsters were absolutely quiet and seemed to follow along.

  Belief in the reincarnation of souls underlay these various therapies. Mental illness was but a phase in a long series of mutations; accordingly, all individuals were to be treated with respect and care — as beings who would heal at some stage. No state institution would encourage such attention. Medication was used, but only in homeopathic dosage.

  Don’t be mistaken: we felt strong compassion for our wards, but on occasion we had to laugh at their idiosyncrasies. Göran, for example, the oldest patient and a very big fellow, always impeccably dressed with tie and hat, would never fail to shake your hand and then, while mumbling some incomprehensible incantation, bring his fingers to your throat — not to strangle you, but rather to button your collar for tidiness’s sake. Now imagine Göran (with a caretaker) getting on the train to Stockholm for a visit to the dentist. He would shake hands with all the passengers in the compartment; in turn they would invariably get up to greet this polite newcomer. A few minutes later, though, Göran would suddenly lunge at some traveler’s throat before the caretaker had the time to utter a word …

  Or take Karl-Georg. Day in, day out, he held forth in angry monologues against the Catholic Church, God, the saints, and any related topics; he spoke with blazing eyes and agitated movements, totally impervious to his environment. The angry youngster’s bowel movement took place once weekly; he shunned the toilets and opted for a chamber pot that he filled to the brim. Then came the crucial moment: if no caretaker was around — and you never knew when Karl-Georg would hit the pot — he would open the window of his second-floor room and fling his chamber pot into the courtyard. During my stay no passerby was ever struck by it, but this remained a distinct possibility.

  Arne, the young resident I mostly took care of, was about thirteen. All day and all night long he sang the same three syllables: “Svalla Ble”; it meant nothing. Usually he sang quietly but at times he would raise his voice and yell the “Svalla Ble” at the top of his lungs. It sufficed to say “Tyst!” (Silence!) and the volume would return to normal. Arne had been a bright child, but at some stage a degenerative — and irreversible — illness set in. If you gave him a printed page, he could read the text automatically, in a robotic way, but he could not speak on his own. He died two or three years after my departure.

  3

  What was it that so strongly impressed me during my stay in Saltå? Not anthroposophy, to which I was never attracted, nor caretaking of the mentally ill, which I performed as well as I could but never considered a calling. I could have stayed, but I left at the end of one year, in the summer of 1957. And yet, as long as my uncle was alive — and that brings us to the mid-1980s — I returned several times to visit him and Lissa and to see Saltå again.

  The strong impression left by Saltå was probably due to several elements. Belonging to a community cut off from the “noises” of the world certainly had its importance (in this, my cloistered childhood had left another imprint: I often longed for some kind of retreat, for living in a secluded community); Saltå was not secluded in the least but lay somewhat outside of the real world, given its inhabitants and mainly the melancholy of the Swedish countryside that surrounded it. In the winter one hardly saw the light of day, and during endless summer nights, when you sat on the shore of the sound, nothing broke the deep silence, except, occasionally, a flight of wild geese.

  After leaving Paris — probably during my stay in Saltå — I shed my gregariousness and became much more prone to keeping to myself. The quest — sporadic at that time — for some “spiritual” content played a role. I don’t like using the word “spiritual,” as it may give the impression of my turning toward religion. It certainly does not mean starting to believe in God or adopting any kind of religious doctrine. No, it could rather be defined as a meditative tendency, without the trappings of the form of “meditation” that became so common in the West from the late sixties on. I never meditated as a kind of exercise, as some search for “personal improvement” or “growth.” At times, I simply longed for interior stillness, for just letting the surrounding world take over, wherever I might be at that moment, and emptying my mind of all thought.

  Finally, did the very existence of the Saltå youngsters influence me in a way that I may not have clearly perceived at the time? Most of them carried within themselves something that could not be reached, something that overwhelmed
them, thoughts they could not articulate, feelings they could not express. Of course, there was an unbridgeable gap between their mental illness and the kind of emotional blockage in a life like mine. But, symbolically speaking, in both cases a path was closed, some inner domain remained inaccessible. Without realizing it, I may have found in Saltå’s patients the reflection — albeit a distorted one — of a mute self, that may have attracted me to the school, kept me there, and brought me back several times over three decades.

  The impact of that first prolonged stay also found an expression some thirty years later, which I rediscovered only recently when browsing through old letters. In the early eighties, I planned to write a novel; the title I gave to a publisher was The Journey to Sweden (Le Voyage en Suède). I even signed a contract.

  My stay in Saltå came to an end. In July or early August 1957, thanks to some money I had just received (as I will explain in the next chapter), I took the train to Göteborg. As the train started, a German caretaker and a good friend, Habermann (first name forgotten), stood on the platform, took out his guitar, and intoned a hit apparently famous in Germany in the fifties: “Alles liegt so weit, so weit; schön war die Zeit” (All lies so far, so far; beautiful were the days …). And, with this touch of kitsch, I was on my way. The next morning, I boarded the Gripsholm for New York.

  The Swedish story has an epilogue, however. On the Gripsholm, a very modern liner, my cabin was located on the lowest deck; I possibly even shared it. I have forgotten the details of the voyage, with the exception of one memorable incident. I met a very nice young American couple from Seattle, Pat and Pete, who were returning from their European honeymoon. We spent much time together during the trip, so that quite naturally we also sat together at a small table of four during the captain’s dinner, on the eve of our arrival in New York. The fourth diner at our table was a youngish ship officer, as is customary.

  Our Swedish companion arrived late, which is unusual on such occasions, and when he finally showed up, it was quite clear from his stumbling gait, his perspiring reddish face, his open collar, and his hardly comprehensible greeting, that he was quite drunk. We started eating and he started speaking. He spoke erratically but without stopping. Pat and Pete tried desperately to make some conversation with him while I gave up from the beginning and kept silent. It was a mistake.

  Suddenly our officer — who had of course been briefed about the identity of the three other guests — turned to me and exploded: “You arrogant Jew! You consider yourself better than us, you look down on us, you despise us!” I cannot remember the exact words, yet it is impossible to forget the gist of his tirade. Pat, Pete, and I were paralyzed as he proceeded to hurl one anti-Semitic insult after another. He was enraged, yet could not be overheard at the other tables because of the general hubbub in the dining room. I could do nothing except get up and leave, which I did.

  I don’t know anymore whether I expected my Seattle friends to leave with me or to intervene in any way. They did nothing. I met them the next morning; they apologized and told me that our table companion had been an officer on the Stockholm, which had rammed into the Italian liner Andrea Doria a year beforehand. The Andrea Doria sank, and some fifty people died in the shipwreck. They had heard it all from another officer, to whom they spoke of the incident. Since then, our companion was drinking heavily and had become something of a problem. I understood the explanation. What I couldn’t understand as easily was the anti-Semitic torrent that had erupted. Was I walking on thin ice during my stay in Sweden?

  At the time, it didn’t even occur to me. After all, hadn’t the Swedes taken in the Jews who fled Norway and Denmark? Hadn’t the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg saved thousands of Jews in Budapest during the last months of the war? Yes, the Stern gang had killed the Swedish mediator in the Israeli-Arab conflict in 1948, but it was an assassination that could be attributed to Israel and not to Jews as such. In short, our host’s outburst came from some personal source of hatred. And yet, in its fury, it drew upon common lore, upon something present in his cultural background, something still widely present all over Europe. It still was taboo but the taboo could disappear after a few drinks.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  New Horizons

  When Karl Rossmann, the protagonist of Kafka’s first novel, The One Who Disappeared (often entitled Amerika), sails into New York harbor, he sees the Statue of Liberty holding a sword. I don’t remember anything as ominous when the Gripsholm approached its pier. Yet, instead of the rich uncle who welcomes Karl into a brief life of luxury, I was thrown into the unbearably damp summer heat of New York City and into what was probably its dingiest hotel, somewhere around Forty-second Street. Did I mind? Not really. My suitcase was safely with me, the night went by, and in the early morning I was on my way to the Greyhound station, heading for Boston.

  1

  Let me backtrack very briefly.

  In 1949, my uncle Paul took in the four members of the Neumann family who had arrived from Prague: the mother, Herma, was a cousin of my mother and thus of my uncles. Herma and her husband, Emil, an engineer, stayed with us for a longer period while their twin daughters, Irena and Alena, soon went to live and work in Tel Aviv. Both daughters were about seven or eight years older than I. They had been deported with their parents from Prague to Theresienstadt and then, in late 1944, to Auschwitz, from where they were sent to some German factory. The entire Neumann family survived the war and returned to Prague. The Communist “coup” of 1948 convinced them to leave; although they were not Zionists, the best available option at the time was Israel.

  Both sisters were sophisticated young women and strikingly beautiful. Within a short time, Alena got married to a South African Jew, Norman Lurie, who, ardent Zionist that he was, had built a very posh hotel, the Dolphin, in western Galilee. In the early 1950s Irena got involved in a long and tumultuous affair with Nahum Goldmann, then president of the World Jewish Congress and of the World Zionist Organization. She later married Lane Kirkland, an American labor union leader who became president of the AFL-CIO.

  Irena told Goldmann about my success at Sciences Po and he offered me a job as “political secretary” (whatever that meant), which induced me to leave my temporary position at the Paris embassy. The embassy colleagues organized a farewell party for me and told me how lucky I was to have landed such a great job. On the morrow of the party, I received a telegram from Goldmann informing me that he was sorry but, on second thought, he didn’t need a political secretary. Out of the embassy, without work, uncertain about what I wanted to do in the longer run, I decided on Sweden. I also wanted to put an end to the affair with Maryvonne. This perhaps better explains the voyage.

  After a while, Goldmann realized that he had left me in the lurch. He knew from Irena that I wished to start graduate studies and sent me a check for $2,100 (that went a long way at the time), allowing me to purchase the ticket to New York and even leaving me some money for a few months. Thanks to my Sciences Po results, I had been accepted as a graduate student in the Harvard Department of Government, so that from Boston I proceeded to Cambridge and to some motel on Mass. Ave.

  Why the Department of Government? And why, moreover, did I specifically choose Middle Eastern studies? Probably, as in choosing Relations Internationales at Sciences Po, I kept to the vague idea that, ultimately, this would lead me to the Israeli Foreign Service; in other words, I would become a staunch representative of Israel but spend much of the time outside of Israel.

  Back to Cambridge. During the few weeks preceding the start of the academic year, my material circumstances improved: I moved from the motel to a large apartment together with three other Israelis, all of them advanced graduate students at MIT. I had a girlfriend named Franny and some of the Goldmann money left over; at that point, there was nothing to complain about.

  I greatly enjoyed the peace and quiet of Harvard before the beginning of the school year. Most of the time, I sat in the reading room of Widener Library and read eclectica
lly. Some texts I remember clearly to this day. As I had chosen Middle Eastern history and politics, I systematically went through issues of the Middle East Journal and discovered an article that quite unsettled me: a detailed comparison between Israel and the Crusader Kingdom. Necessarily, the author argued, Israel’s fate would ultimately be the same as that of its medieval precursor. In other words, as the kingdoms established by the European invaders during the crusades lasted barely two hundred years before succumbing to Muslim armies, so would Israel’s fate not be different. As with the medieval forerunner, the presence of the Jewish settlers before 1948 and of the State of Israel that followed were considered intrusions of foreign elements into the body of the Umma (the Muslim commonwealth); they had to be expelled before health was restored. Although the outcomes of the war of 1948 and of the recent Sinai campaign did not point in that direction, the argument seemed historically plausible to me at that time.

  Apart from my intellectual pursuits, I discovered hot pastrami, Reuben sandwiches, and many varieties of pizza that in those years were not very common in Paris or Sweden.

  The academic year started and everything changed. I soon realized that I had no compelling interest in learning Arabic, in the history of Islamic civilization, in village life in Anatolia and all that went with it. The teachers were good, but as Richard II would say, “not greatly good,” with the exception of Sir Hamilton Gibb, who had just arrived from Oxford. At least one Israeli student, Menachem Milson, was his devotee. Later, Milson would become a professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and, in due time, the first Israeli civilian governor of the West Bank.

  One of the freshmen that year was Guido Goldman, Nahum Goldmann’s younger son. When Goldmann senior came for a visit, we met and talked. Goldmann renewed his offer to hire me as his “political secretary” in New York. As my funds had dried up and as Middle Eastern studies bored me, I left Harvard in January 1958, without too much regret.