The members of the Jewish community here are beginning to look upon me
as a queer sort of person. In a measure, it is the duty of a new
physician of the Jewish belief to associate with the "gentry" among his
co-religionists. That is what is expected of me; and certainly I ought
long ago to have left my card at the doors of the Jewish families that
are well-to-do, and, as they think, aristocratic and cultivated. On my
desk lies a long, imposing list of persons of consequence, and it is my
firm intention to pay them my respects; my predecessor urgently
recommended me to do so. "You will get into things most quickly," he
said, "if you make your way among the well-to-do Jewish families. The
community has a reputation from of old for setting great store by
culture and refinement; and what better for you in a small
out-of-the-way place than a stimulus now and then in the form of a visit
to some pleasant home? The evenings are long; you can't forever be
playing Skat." I certainly can't, because I know precious little about
the game--and so the cultivated Jewish families are my future here. For
the present I have found something else, which gives me more than I can
expect from the stimulus of would-be aesthetic Jewish wives and maidens.
I dearly love my fellow-Jews. But my love for them must not blind me to
their weaknesses, and among their weaknesses I count an assumption of
culture, a pseudo-refinement of the intellect, which has taken
increasing hold upon the daughters of our race. How often I was
disagreeably impressed by them in Berlin when they spoke about anything
and everything, with that half-culture which produces the feeling that
they are not concerned with knowledge, but with the effect to be created
by their apparent "information" upon all subjects. What don't they know!
What don't they want to know! How often I was tempted to say to one or
another of them: "The learning of many things does not cultivate the
mind; learn to believe and to think." And must I repeat the same
experience here? I am uneasy; my predecessor sentimentalized too much
about the "educated" Jewesses. Some of them, he unluckily told me, had
been "finished off" in prominent educational institutions in foreign
countries. I know all that, and I'm afraid of it, this finishing-off
process of the ladies' seminaries! But probably there will be nothing
else for me to do. If the winter evenings here are really so long and
dreary, I may not be able to resist the torment of hearing young lips,
soft and rosy for kissing, put the question to me: "What do you think of
Nietzsche's 'Beyond evil and good,'" or "Do you think the painters of
the Quatrocento and the Secessionists have anything in common?" How that
hurts! Almost a physical pain! At all events it has often spoilt my
taste for kissing soft, rosy lips.
If I would seek wisdom, if I would drink at the source of life, here, in
this place, I shall not go to youth, but to old age.
I spent some time again with Simon Eichelkatz this afternoon. Outside it
was raining and storming. A raw, grey day of autumn, the first this
year. Up to this time the weather has been good. Over the small, quiet
room a something brooded, something contemplative, genial, spiritual.
Half dream-like, half meditative. Like the dying away of a great
melody. I wondered if Simon Eichelkatz had ever heard of _Stimmungen_. I
longed to put the question to him. "Tell me, Reb Shimme" (that is how I
call him now), "when you are here all by yourself, in this great
silence, do you ever have a feeling as if--as if--how should I say?--as
if you were a part of your surroundings, as if everything that is about
you helped along to give form to certain ideas in your mind?"
I had to smile as I put the question. "Now say _milieu_," I scoffed at
myself; and yet I never before felt the significance of the word so
strongly as in that moment. The old man looked at me as though he wanted
to find the meaning of the incomprehensible question in my face. His
gaze, still clear and keen, rested on me thoughtfully, then passed
quickly through the room, as though this would bring him enlightenment
upon the relevancy of my question. Finally, he said slowly, as though
he were formulating his thoughts only with difficulty:
"I hear the silence about me--is that what you mean, Herr Doktor? I hear
the silence, and so I am not alone. My soul is not deaf, and everything
about me speaks to me. And the table has a language, and the chair on
which I sit, and my pipe, Herr Doktor, my long pipe, it talks a good
deal--and the _Kiddush_ cup here, and the spice-box--I wonder what they
have lived through and have to tell about--and when the sun shines
outside and peeps through the window, it's one thing, and when it rains
like to-day, it's another." He rested his head on his hand. "But the
silence is never dead--it lives as I live."
Friedrich Eichner's form rose before me, as it looked several years ago,
when I heard him in his lecture room speak on Zarathustra's "still
hour."
"That's just what is called _Stimmungen_, Reb Shimme," I said, as in a
confused dream. He nodded his head several times, but said nothing in
response.