Quarrel & Quandary by Cynthia Ozick Read Free Book Online Page A

one-sided infatuation of Jews in love with high German culture and with the
Vaterland
itself. The Jewish passion for Germany was never reciprocated—until now. Sebald returns that Jewish attachment, although tragically: he is too late for reciprocity. The Jews he searches for are either stricken escapees or smoke. Like all ghosts, they need to be conjured.
    Or, if not conjured, then come upon by degrees, gradually, incrementally, in hints and echoes. Sebald allows himself to discover his ghosts almost stealthily, with a dawning notion of who they really are. It is as if he is intruding on them, and so he iscautious, gentle, wavering at the outer margins of the strange places he finds them in. In “Dr. Henry Selwyn,” as the first narrative is called, the young Sebald and his wife drive out into the English countryside to rent a flat in a wing of an overgrown mansion surrounded by a neglected garden and a park of looming trees. The house seems deserted. Tentatively, they venture onto the grounds and stumble unexpectedly on a white-haired, talkative old man who describes himself as “a dweller in the garden, a kind of ornamental hermit.” By the time we arrive at the end of this faintly Gothic episode, however, we have learned that Dr. Henry Selwyn was once a
cheder-yingl
—a Jewish schoolchild—named Hersch Seweryn in a village near Grodno in Lithuania. When he was seven years old, his family, including his sisters Gita and Raya, set out for America, like thousands of other impoverished shtetl Jews at the beginning of the century; but “in fact, as we learnt some time later to our dismay (the ship having long since cast off again), we had gone ashore in London.” The boy begins his English education in Whitechapel in the Jewish East End, and eventually wins a scholarship to Cambridge to study medicine. Then, like a proper member of his adopted milieu, he heads for the Continent for advanced training, where he becomes enamored—again like a proper Englishman—with a Swiss Alpine guide named Johannes Naegeli. Naegeli tumbles into a crevasse and is killed; Dr. Selwyn returns home to serve in the Great War and in India. Later he marries a Swiss heiress who owns houses in England and lets flats. He has now completed the trajectory from Hersch Seweryn to Dr. Henry Selwyn. But one day, when the word “homesick” flies up out of a melancholy conversation with Sebald, Selwyn tells the story of his childhood as a Jewish immigrant.
    The American term is immigrant, not emigrant, and for good reason, America being the famous recipient of newcomers: more come in than ever go out. Our expatriates tend to be artists,often writers: hence that illustrious row of highly polished runaways, James, Eliot, Pound, Wharton, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway. But an expatriate, a willing (sometimes temporary) seeker, is not yet an emigrant. And an emigrant is not a refugee. A
cheder-yingl
from a shtetl near Grodno in a place and period not kind to Jews is likely to feel himself closer to being a refugee than an emigrant: our familiar steerage image expresses it best. Sebald, of course, knows this, and introduces Dr. Selwyn as a type of foreshadowing. Displaced and homesick in old age for the child he once was (or in despair over the man he has become), Dr. Selwyn commits suicide. And on a visit to Switzerland in 1986, Sebald reads in a Lausanne newspaper that Johannes Naegeli’s body has been found frozen in a glacier seventy-two years after his fall. “And so they are ever returning to us, the dead,” Sebald writes.
    But of exactly what is Dr. Selwyn a foreshadowing? The second account, entitled “Paul Bereyter,” is a portrait of a German primary-school teacher—Sebald’s own teacher in the fifties, “who spent at least a quarter of all his lessons on teaching us things that were not on the syllabus.” Original, inventive, a lover of music, a scorner of catechism and priests, an explorer, a whistler, a walker (“the very image … of