to attend his son’s wedding in Jerusalem. It turns out—such a surprise, we had no idea—that he has a grown son, a son from an early marriage. Suddenly, now Uncle Aaron tells your father that he was once married to some Czech, a woman with serious mental problems. He met her when he was living in Paris. A sad story, very sad. Because the son grew up without him, and the mother, who didn’t have a clue, sent him to a Chabad school, and what can you expect when you send a child to Chabad? The boy grew up ultra-Orthodox, came to Israel, didn’t serve in the army, landed up in a black-coat yeshiva. Now they’ve arranged a match for him, and even though to this day he never had much contact with his father, he invited Aaron to the wedding out of honor for his father. That’s one good thing that has to be said for those people, I have to admit: Honor thy father and thy mother. Aaron has another son who lives in New Mexico, about him we actually knew, we even told you once, his mother is a professor of archeology, she studies the Indians, and this son, who is your second cousin, treats his father very differently. Aaron told us that he isn’t even prepared to come and visit him, even though he offered the mother to pay for the tickets.
Aaron came in December but they already started talking about him in the summer, in the wake of a surprise letter and a long, expensive phone call in which he renewed the connection with my father, his dear cousin. It occurs to me now that my parents described him in way that would have fitted nicely into one of Alice’s idiotic columns: I even remember my father defining him as “a classic Jewish intellectual” and a “colorful character on the personal level.”
I don’t remember him being spoken of before, but once the letter arrived, the talk began to bubble and the anecdotes about “Erwin, to me he’ll always be Erwin”—overflowed to the paying guests as well. All my parents’ acquaintances were required to bask in the glow of our uncle’s glamour, whose glory could be assumed to reflect on his more modest relatives too.
My grandmother Sarah Gotthilf and her sister-in-law Hannah escaped from Vienna in November 1938, carrying in their arms sons who were intended to be the first but turned out to be the last. My grandfather was murdered in Dachau and his brother in Nisko, but we won’t go into that here. The women crossed from Switzerland to Italy, where they spent six months in Genoa—judging by the way my father told the story it sounded as if they had set out on a tour of classical Europe—and then Sarah, who had contacts with the Zionists, obtained a certificate and sailed with her baby for Palestine, while the beautiful Hannah and her son Erwin—that’s what they called him then—made their way to England.
Equipped with enthusiastic recommendations—her dissertation on Feuerbach came out in book form and Freud himself sent his compliments—Hannah Gotthilf found her way to the most interesting circles of the period, and in ’47, two years after the end of the war, she married a well-known economist from Oxford who was also an aristocrat boasting the title of Sir.
As you may imagine, the son of Lady Hannah received the best possible education—the sciences, the arts, classical languages. His Hebrew was classical too, and at the age of twenty-one Erwin, who had in the meantime become Aaron, was already studying for a doctoral degree at the Sorbonne in Paris.
His reputation preceded him, wherever he went he stood out as an original thinker, and since the academic world in France before the students’ revolution seemed fossilized to him, he didn’t wait to complete his doctorate but took advantage of the first opportunity that presented itself to emigrate to America. There are mean-spirited dwarves everywhere. Pettiness and envy too are universal, but Aaron in his innocence believed that he would enjoy more intellectual freedom in America than in Europe.
The main subject of his studies was modern totalitarianism, and he shocked many people when he chose to focus on the writings of the Marquis de Sade. The Marquis, claimed Aaron, drew a dark, prophetic and amazingly accurate picture of modern tyranny.
The issues that engaged Aaron were always broad, too broad for the Procrustean bed of academia, and despite the high esteem in which he was held, the trailblazer also acquired a number of enemies. For three or four years it seemed to him that he had found himself a home in the University of Columbia, but for a man like Aaron every home is only a port from which to sail onward. In the wake of all kinds of slander that arose, he transferred to the University of New Orleans, and from there this Jew went on wandering to other stations and other ports.
Unlike those of his colleagues who secluded themselves in ivory towers, Aaron turned from the outset to the non-academic public as well. His articles were published in dozens of newspapers, and he made frequent appearances on television as well as on the radio. But Aaron was not the kind of sycophant who was only seeking popularity, and the things he wrote and said gave rise to more than a little opposition. The hippies considered him one of theirs, until he poured scorn on them in a stinging essay. A highly regarded Jewish journal flaunted him, until he insisted on publishing a paper on “Jewish murderers in the service of Stalin.” The New York left, which in the past had attempted to embrace him, has not forgiven him to this day for a brilliant article analyzing their psychology. That’s Aaron. A complex personality. Not an easy person, clearly. Not an easy man, but a deep one. Possessing a profundity you don’t often see today.
Uncle Aaron’s history was not always recounted from the beginning, sometimes my father expounded on a single chapter: Genoa, England, the title of Sir, the interesting circles of the period, the Sorbonne University in Paris, the Marquis de Sade, stations and ports. But I remember well how every chapter of the story concluded with the same words: deep, profound, complex.
“Aren’t you sick of hearing about him?” I asked Elisheva. But my sister said that she was glad for Mommy and Daddy. She was glad because both of them were glad, and now that Daddy had a cousin he was sure to be happier, because family was good, and it was sad when somebody had a relative he didn’t see.
If it had been voiced by anyone else, this sentence could have been interpreted as a complaint about my absence, but Elisheva never hinted, and I ignored the non-existent hint and the unuttered complaint and slipped away again to pursue my own affairs. If they were all happy, why should I question their happiness? And to my friends at school I threw out: “A cousin of my father’s is coming, a British aristocrat or something, now they’ll force me to come visit all the time, what a bore.”
What room should they give him? My parents debated the question, and dwelled pleasurably on the subject right up to the eve of his arrival. First floor or second? Opposite the stairs or at the end of the corridor? Double or single? Our uncle would pay, he had made this an explicit condition, the income from three weeks was nothing to be sneezed at, but we had always preferred guests who came for a prolonged stay, and the ones who became like part of the family always received preferential treatment. If he preferred a double room, we would give it to him at the price of a single room. Number eighteen had a pastoral view, twenty-two was more modest, but he would have more privacy there, and for someone who was writing a book there was nothing more important: quiet and privacy, privacy and quiet—that’s what our place gave its guests and that’s what we could offer someone who had stayed in some of the most luxurious hotels in the world. Pay attention, girls, we won’t disturb Uncle Aaron, and on no account will we impose ourselves on him. We’ll spend just as much time with him as he wants to spend in our company, and we have to understand that he won’t spend as much time with us as he might wish, because he’s working on a book.
•
The business of the book was especially thrilling to my mother. From the intimate way she spoke about it you would have thought that he sent her drafts for her comments: Aaron will take advantage of his stay in Israel to go into the archives, but what Aaron’s working on isn’t just another piece of ordinary research. We know that this time it’s something much more literary. Aaron has set himself a high literary challenge. Aaron is about to deal with something that nobody before him has even dared to touch. His book will present a historical angle that other people haven’t had the courage to approach up to now.
