The Tongue Set Free, page 27
Making Oneself Hated
That first winter of my separation from Mother and my brothers brought a crisis in the school. During the past few months, I had sensed an unusual restraint among some of my schoolmates, but this restraint was articulated in ironical comments by only one or two of them. I had no idea what it was about. It didn’t strike me that my own behavior could irritate anyone, nothing about it had changed, my schoolmates were the same except for a very few, and I had known them for over two years now. The class had already gotten a lot smaller in spring 1919; the few who wanted to learn Greek had switched to the Literargymnasium. The rest, who had opted for Latin and other languages, were divided into four parallel classes at the Realgymnasium.
With this redistribution, several newcomers had joined us; one of them, Hans Wehrli, lived in Tiefenbrunnen. We had the same road home and grew closer. His face looked as if the skin were stretched tight over the bones, it had something haggard and furrowed about it, which made it look older than the other faces. But that wasn’t the only reason he seemed more grown-up to me: he was reflective and critical and never made remarks about girls, which some of the others had already started doing. On the way home, we always talked about “real” things, by which I meant everything connected to knowledge and the arts and the greater world. He could listen quietly and then suddenly and vividly react with his own opinions, which he grounded intelligently. This alternation of quietness and vividness attracted me, for quietness was not my thing; I was always lively with other people. I felt his quickness as his most intrinsic quality, he instantly knew what you meant without your having to say a lot, and he was always ready with an answer, agreeing or rejecting; the unpredictable nature of his reactions enlivened our talks. But no less than with the external course of these conversations, I was occupied with his self-assurance, whose roots I didn’t know. All I knew about his family was that they operated the large mill in Tiefenbrunnen, which ground the flour for Zurich’s bread. That seemed very useful to me, it was a very different kind of work than what I feared and hated in my uncle and the menace of the “business.” As soon as I got to know someone a bit better, I made no bones about my distaste for everything linked to business and mere personal advantage. Hans Wehrli appeared to understand this, for he accepted it calmly and never criticized me for it; at the same time, it struck me that he never said anything against his own family. A year later, he gave a talk in school about Switzerland at the Congress of Vienna. I now learned that one of his forebears had represented Switzerland at the Congress, and I started to realize that Hans Wehrli was a “historical” person. At the time, I couldn’t have put it in clear terms, but I sensed that he lived in peace with his family background.
For me, the matter was more complicated. Father stood as a good spirit at the outset of my life, and my feeling for Mother, to whom I owed just about everything, still seemed unshakable. But then right away, there came the circle of those, especially on Mother’s side, whom I profoundly distrusted. It began with her successful brother in Manchester, but it did not stop with him. In summer 1915, during the visit to Ruschuk, there was also Mother’s awful and crazy cousin, who was convinced that every single member of the family was robbing him, and who could breathe only in litigation until the end of his life. Then there was Dr. Arditti, the only one in the clan who had chosen what I felt was a “beautiful” profession, the kind, namely, in which one lives for other people; but he had betrayed this profession as a physician and was now in business like the others. On my father’s side, it was less bleak, and even Grandfather, who had abundantly proved his proficiency and, in certain situations, his hardness, had so many other qualities that his overall picture was more complex and more fascinating. Nor did I have the impression that he wanted to rape me into business. The misfortune he had caused was already done, my father’s death was in his bones, and all the evil he had caused there benefited me now. But deeply as he impressed me, I could not admire him, and thus, starting with him and going backwards, there stretched, for me, a history of ancestors who had led an Oriental life in the Balkans, different from their ancestors in Spain, four or five hundred years earlier. They were people to be proud of, physicians, poets, and philosophers, but there was only general information about them, having little to do with the family specifically.
In this period of a sensitive, precarious, and uncertain relationship to my background, an event occurred, which, seen from the outside, must certainly appear insignificant, but which had far-reaching consequences for my further development. I cannot skip it, much as I dislike talking about it, for it was the only painful event in the five Zurich years, to which I otherwise think back with a feeling of effusive gratitude; and its failure to submerge utterly into the wealth of joy has to do merely with later events in the world.
In the years of my childhood, I had never personally been made to feel any animosity towards me as a Jew. In both Bulgaria and England such things, I believe, were unknown then. What I noticed of them in Vienna never went against me, and whenever I told my mother about hearing or seeing anything of that sort, she would interpret it, with the arrogance of her caste pride, as being meant for others but never Sephardim. That was all the more bizarre since, after all, our entire history was based on the expulsion from Spain; but by shifting the persecutions so emphatically into a far past, she thought she might keep them away more effectively from the present.
In Zurich, Billeter, the Latin professor, had once criticized me for sticking my hand up too quickly when he asked us a question; when I blurted out the answer ahead of Erni, a rather slow boy from Lucerne, Billeter insisted that Erni work out the answer himself; he encouraged him, saying, “Just think, Erni, you’ll come upon it. We won’t let a Viennese Jew take everything away from us.” That was somewhat sharp; and at the time, it had to offend me. But I knew that Billeter was a good man, that he wanted to protect a ponderous boy against a quick-minded one, and although it had been against me, I basically liked him for it and tried to tone down my eagerness.
But what should one think of this eagerness of excelling? Part of it, certainly, was a greater liveliness, the swiftness of Ladino, which I had spoken as a child and which had remained, as a peculiar tempo, in the slower languages like German and even English. But that can’t be all: the most important thing must have been my desire to hold my own against my mother. She expected instant answers; anything one didn’t have at hand wasn’t valid for her. The speed with which she had taught me German in just a few weeks in Lausanne seemed justified, in her eyes, by the success of that method. So later on, everything took place in the same tempo. Basically, it all proceeded between us as in stage plays; one person spoke, the other replied; long pauses were an exception and had to mean something very special. But such exceptions weren’t given to us; during our scenes, everything went like clockwork, one person had barely finished his last sentence and the other was already replying. With this dexterity, I held my own with Mother.
Thus, having a natural liveliness, I also felt the need to increase it in order to hold my own with her. In the altered situation of the classroom, I acted as I did at home. I behaved toward the teacher as though he were my mother. The only difference was that I had to stretch my hand up before bursting out with the answer. But then it came right away, and the others were left out in the cold. I never dreamt that this conduct could get on their nerves, much less offend them. The behavior of the teachers toward such swiftness varied. Some took it as an easing of their job when a few pupils reacted all the time. It helped their own work, the atmosphere didn’t get stodgy, something was happening, they could feel that their teaching was good if it promptly triggered the right reactions. Others saw it as unjust and feared that certain slow minds might lose all hope of getting anywhere, precisely because of the opposite responses that steadily confronted them. These teachers, who were not all that wrong, acted coolly toward me and viewed me as some kind of evil. But then again, there were several who were glad that respect was paid to knowledge, and it was they who were most closely on the track of the motives for my flagrant alertness.
For I believe that part of knowledge is its desire to show itself and its refusal to put up with a merely hidden existence. I find mute knowledge dangerous, for it grows ever more mute and ultimately secret, and must then avenge itself for being secret. Knowledge that comes forth by imparting itself to others is good knowledge; it does seek attention, but it does not turn against anyone. The contagion coming from teachers and books tries to spread out. In that innocent phase, it does not doubt itself, it both gains a foothold and spreads, it radiates and wishes to expand everything along with itself. One ascribes the qualities of light to it, the speed at which it would like to spread is the highest, and one honors it by describing it as enlightenment. That was the form in which the Greeks knew it, before it was squeezed into boxes by Aristotle. One doesn’t care to believe that it was dangerous before being split up and stowed away. Herodotus strikes me as the purest expression of a knowledge that was innocent because it had to radiate. His divisions are those of the nations who speak and live differently. He does not strengthen the divisions when speaking about them; instead, he makes room for the most diverse things in himself and makes room in other people who are informed by him. There is a small Herodotus in every young man who hears about hundreds of things, and it is important that no one should attempt to raise him beyond that by expecting restriction towards a profession.
Now the essential part of a life that is starting to know takes place in school, it is a young person’s first public experience. He may want to distinguish himself, but even more, he wishes to radiate knowledge as soon as it takes hold of him, so that it won’t become mere property for him. Other pupils, slower than he, have to believe that he is trying to suck up to the teacher and they look upon him as an eager beaver. But he has no goal in sight that he is aiming at, he precisely wants to get beyond such goals and draw the teachers into his drive for freedom. He measures himself against the teachers and not his schoolmates. He dreams of driving the practical notions out of his teachers, he wants to overcome them. And only those teachers who have not given in to the practical aims, who emanate their knowledge for its own sake—only those teachers are the ones he loves rapturously; and he pays tribute to them by reacting swiftly to them, he thanks them incessantly for their incessant emanation.
But these tributes set him apart from the others, in front of whom he pays the tributes. He pays no heed to them while putting himself forward. He is not filled with any bad wishes towards them, but he does leave them out of the game; they do not join in and they exist only as spectators. Not being seized by the teacher’s substance as he is, they are unable to admit to themselves that he is seized, and they must think he is acting on base motives. They resent him as a spectacle in which no part is allotted to them; perhaps they are slightly envious that he can hold out. But mainly, they regard him as a troublemaker, who confounds their natural opposition to the teacher, which he, however, transforms into a homage right before their eyes.
The Petition
In fall 1919, when I moved to Tiefenbrunnen, the class was divided again. There were sixteen of us; Färber and I were the only Jews in the class. We had geometrical drawing in a special room; everyone had a locker assigned to him there, it was locked and had a name plate. One day in October, right in the middle of my dramatic efforts, which were accompanied by all kinds of elated feelings, I found my name plate in that room smeared up with insults: “Abrahamli, Isaakli, jewboys, get out of school, we don’t need you.” There were similar things on Färber’s name plate; they weren’t identical, and it may be that my memory is mixing some of his insults in among mine. I was so amazed that at first I couldn’t believe it. Until now, no one had ever insulted me or fought against me, and I had been with most of my schoolmates for over two and a half years already. My amazement soon turned into anger; I was deeply affected by the insult, my ears had been filled with “honor” since early childhood. My mother especially went out of her way to dwell on this point, whether in regard to the Sephardim, the family, or each single one of us.
Naturally, no one admitted to it; other classes also were taught geometrical drawing in this room, but I sensed something like malicious satisfaction in one or two classmates when they saw how hard the blow had been.
From that instant, everything was changed. There may have been earlier taunts, which I barely heeded; but from now on, I experienced them with a sharp awareness; not the slightest remark against Jews could escape me. The taunts increased, and whereas they had once come only from a single pupil, they now seemed to come from several. The boys with the most developed minds, who had been with us at first, were no longer here; : Ganzhorn, who had competed with me and was my superior in many ways, had chosen the Literargymnasium, where I really belonged with my interests. Ellenbogen, intellectually the most adult, had gone to another division. I had been together with Hans Wehrli for six months, but he was now in the parallel class; we still had the same walk home, but he didn’t take part in the inner life of the class at this time. Richard Bleuler, a dreamy, imaginative boy whom I had always wanted to be friends with, kept aloof from me. The action, so I felt, came from another boy, a kind of anti-intelligence, in the class. Perhaps he felt a particularly strong dislike of my “lively bustle,” as the later formula put it. He had his own smartness, which didn’t coincide with school smartness; he was also more mature and starting to get interested in things I had no notion of, matters of life so to speak, which, as he must have thought, were more important in the long run. Of the group of boys who were more or less like-minded, for whom matters of knowledge were important or who at least acted as if they were, I seemed to be the only one left, and it never struck me how irritating this “monopoly” must have appeared to the others.
Thus now the attacks threw me together with Färber, with whom I really had nothing in common. He knew Jews in other classes and told me what was happening there. Similar information came from all classes; the dislike of Jews seemed to be growing in all of them and being expressed more and more openly. Perhaps Färber was exaggerating what he transmitted; he was an unreflecting, emotional person. He also felt threatened in more than one way: he was lazy and a bad pupil. He was tall and rather heavy, and was the only one with red hair in class. He couldn’t be overlooked; when he stood in front on a group photograph of the class, he covered the boys in back. His face had been crossed out in such a photo by others in the class. It looked as if they didn’t care to have him so far in front; yet it was a sign that they wanted him out of the class altogether. But he was Swiss, his father was Swiss, his native language was the dialect, the idea of living anywhere else would never have occurred to him. He was afraid of not being promoted to the next grade and, since he usually did badly in front of the teachers, he perceived their dissatisfaction with him as part of the same hostility shown him by his classmates. It was not surprising that the information he brought me from the Jews in the parallel classes was increased by his own disquiet. I didn’t know the other Jewish pupils, nor did I try to talk to them individually. This was his function from the very start, and he did his job zealously and with growing panic. It was only when he told me about one boy—”Dreyfus said he’s so desperate he doesn’t want to go on living”—that I too became panicky. I asked him, horrified: “Do you think he wants to kill himself?”
“He can’t stand it, he’s going to kill himself.”
I didn’t really believe it, it wasn’t all that bad, as I knew from personal experience, there were just taunts, which, however, increased from week to week. But the thought that Dreyfus could kill himself, the very words “kill himself,” gave the finishing stroke to my peace of mind. “Kill” was a horrible word, the war had made it profoundly loathsome, but now the war had been over for a year, and I lived in hope of an Eternal Peace. The stories I had kept inventing for myself and my little brothers, about abolishing war, had always ended in the same way, with the resurrection of the dead soldiers; but now they seemed like something more than stories. In Wilson, the American president, Eternal Peace had found a spokesman in whom most people believed. Today, no one can adequately visualize the power of this hope, which seized the world at that time. I live as a witness that it also took hold of children; I was by no means the only one, my conversations with Hans Wehrli on our way home were filled with it, we shared this attitude, and the dignity and seriousness of our conversations were determined by it to a large extent.
But there was something even more horrifying to me than “killing,” and that was doing it to oneself. I had never really been able to grasp that Socrates took the cup of hemlock calmly. I don’t know what made me think that every suicide can be prevented, but I know I was already convinced of this back then. You only had to find out about the intention in time and do something about it on the spot. I figured out what to tell a potential suicide: He would be sorry if he could find out about it after a while, but then it would be too late. He’d be better off waiting, and then he could still find out. I held this argument to be irresistible, I rehearsed it in monologues until presented with an opportunity to use it; but as yet, no opportunity had presented itself. The Dreyfus business was different, perhaps others were toying with the same idea. I knew about mass suicides from Greek and Jewish history, and although they were usually involved with freedom, the accounts had left me with mixed feelings. I hit upon the plan of a “public action,” the first and only one during those early years. In all five parallel classes of our year, there were seventeen Jews in total. I proposed that we all convene—most of us didn’t know each other—in order to discuss what was to be done, whereby I thought of setting up a petition to the administration, who might not realize what sort of pressure we were under.
