Address Unknown (4 page)

Before leaving however, procure the following reproductions for branches of German Young Painters’ League, looking forward to the joint exhibit in May or earlier: Picasso 17 by 81, red; Van Gogh 5 by 42, white; Rubens 15 by 204, blue and yellow.

Our prayers are with you.

Eisenstein

S C H L O S S  R A N T Z E N B U R G
M U N I C H , G E R M A N Y

February 12, 1934

Mr. Max Eisenstein

Eisenstein Galleries

San Francisco, California, U.S.A.

Max, My Old Friend:

My God, Max, do you know what you do? I shall have to try to smuggle this letter out with an American I have met here. I write an appeal from a despair you cannot imagine. This crazy cable! These letters you have sent. I am called in to account for them. The letters are not delivered, but they bring me in and show me letters from you and demand I give them the code. A code? And how can you, a friend of long years, do this to me?

Do you realize, have you any idea that you destroy me? Already the results of your madness are terrible. I am bluntly told I must resign my office. Heinrich is no longer in the boys’ corps. They tell him it will not be good for his health. God in heaven, Max, do you see what that means? And Elsa, to whom I dare not tell anything, comes in bewildered that the officials refuse her invitations and Baron Von Freische does not speak to her upon the street.

Yes, yes, I know why you do it – but do you not understand I could do nothing? What could I have done? I did not dare to try. I beg of you, not for myself, but for Elsa and the boys – think what it means to them if I am taken away and they do not know if I live or die. Do you know what it is to be taken to a concentration camp? Would you stand me against a wall and level the gun? I beg of you, stop. Stop now, while everything is not yet destroyed. I am in fear for my life, for my life, Max.

Is it you who does this? It cannot be you. I have loved you like a brother, my old Maxel. My God, have you no mercy? I beg you, Max, no more, no more! Stop while I can be saved. From a heart filled with old affection I ask it.

Martin

E
ISENSTEIN
G
ALLERIES
S
AN
F
RANCISCO
, C
ALIFORNIA
,
U.S.A.

February 15, 1934

Herrn Martin Schulse

Schloss Rantzenburg

Munich, Germany

Our Dear Martin:

Seven inches of rainfall here in 18 days. What a season! A shipment of 1,500 brushes should reach the Berlin branch for your painters by this weekend. This will allow time for practice before the big exhibition. American patrons will help with all the artists’ supplies that can be provided, but you must make the final arrangements. We are too far out of touch with the European market and you are in a position to gauge the extent of support such a showing would arouse in Germany. Prepare these for distribution by March 24th: Rubens 12 by 77, blue; Giotto 1 by 317, green and white; Poussin 20 by 90, red and white.

Young Blum left last Friday with the Picasso specifications. He will leave oils in Hamburg and Leipzig and will then place himself at your disposal.

Success to you!

Eisenstein

E
ISENSTEIN
G
ALLERIES
S
AN
F
RANCISCO
, C
ALIFORNIA
,
U.S.A.

March 3, 1934

Martin Our Brother:

Cousin Julius has two nine-pound boys. The family is happy. We regard the success of your coming artists’ exhibition as assured. The last shipment of canvases was delayed due to difficulties of international exchange but will reach your Berlin associates in plenty of time. Consider reproduction collection complete. Your best support should come from Picasso enthusiasts but neglect no other lines.

We leave all final plans to your discretion but urge an early date for wholly successful exhibit.

The God of Moses be at your right hand.

Eisenstein

When “Address Unknown” was first published in the United States, in
Story
magazine in September 1938, it caused an immediate sensation. Written as a series of letters between a Jewish American living in San Francisco and his former business partner who had returned to Germany, the story, early on, exposed the poison of Nazism to the American public.

Within ten days of publication, the entire printing of that issue of
Story
was sold out, and enthusiastic readers were mimeographing copies of the story to send to friends. National radio commentator Walter Winchell heartily recommended the story as “the best piece of the month, something you shouldn’t miss,” and
Reader’s Digest
put aside its long-standing no-fiction rule to reprint the piece for its more than three million readers.

In 1939, Simon & Schuster published
Address Unknown
as a book and sold fifty thousand copies—a huge number in those years. Hamish Hamilton followed suit in England with a British edition, and foreign translations were begun. But 1939 was also the year of
Blitzkrieg;
within months most of Europe was under the domination of Adolf Hitler, the Dutch translation disappeared, and the only other European appearance of
Address Unknown
was on the
Reichskommisar
’s list of banned books. So the story remained unknown on the Continent for the next sixty years, despite its great impact and success in the United States and England.

Author Kressmann Taylor, “the woman who jolted America,” was born Kathrine Kressmann in Portland, Oregon, in 1903. After graduating from the University of Oregon in 1924, she moved to San Francisco and worked as an advertising copywriter, writing for some small literary journals in her spare time. In 1928 the editors of the
San Francisco Review
, a magazine she particularly liked, invited her to a party, where she met Elliott Taylor, the owner of his own advertising agency, and they were married within two weeks. When the Great Depression hit the advertising industry, the couple bought a small farm in southern Oregon. Taking their two small children and adding a third in 1935, they literally “lived off the land” growing their own food and panning for gold.

In 1938 they moved to New York, where Elliott worked as an editor and Kathrine finished writing “Address Unknown.” Elliott showed it to
Story
magazine editor Whit Burnett, who immediately wished to publish it. He and Elliott decided that the story was “too strong to appear under the name of a woman,” and assigned Kathrine the literary pseudonym
Kressmann Taylor
, a professional name she accepted and kept for the rest of her life, largely because of the success of
Address Unknown
. This is how she describes the original motivation for the story:

        
A short time before the war, some cultivated, intellectual, warmhearted German friends of mine returned to Germany after living in the United States. In a very short time they turned into sworn Nazis. They refused to listen to the slightest criticism about Hitler. During a return visit to California, they met an old, dear friend of theirs on the street who had been very close to them and who was a Jew. They did not speak to him. They turned their backs on him when he held his hands out to embrace them
. How can such a thing happen?
I wondered
. What changed their hearts so? What steps brought them to such cruelty?

        
These questions haunted me very much and I could not forget them. It was hard to believe that these people whom I knew and respected had fallen victim to the Nazi poison. I began researching Hitler and reading his speeches and the writings of his advisors. What I discovered was terrifying. What worried me most was that no one in America was aware of what was happening in Germany and they also did not care. In 1938, the isolationist movement in America was strong; the politicians said that affairs in Europe were none of our business and that Germany was fine. Even Charles Lindbergh came back from Germany saying how wonderful the people were. But some students who had returned from studying in Germany told the truth about the Nazi atrocities. When their fraternity brothers thought it would be fun to send them letters making fun of Hitler, they wrote back and said, “Stop it. We’re in danger. These people don’t fool around. You could murder one of these Nazis by writing letters to him.”

When that incident occurred, it rated only a small article in the news, but it caught Elliott’s eye; he brought it home to Kathrine, and it gave rise to their joint idea of using a letter as a weapon. She took that idea and went to work on the story she wanted to write.

        
I wanted to write about what the Nazis were doing and show the American public what happens to real, living people swept up in a warped ideology.

The result was “Address Unknown,” a great success about which
The New York Times Book Review
stated in 1939, “This modern story is perfection itself. It is the most effective indictment of Nazism to appear in fiction.” That indictment continued in Kathrine’s next book,
Until That Day
, published in 1942.

Following the war, when further indictment of the Nazis no longer seemed necessary,
Address Unknown
slipped from public notice and was largely forgotten, other than its inclusion in an occasional anthology. Elliott Taylor died in 1953, and Kathrine lived as a widow for the next fifteen years, continuing to write and to teach writing, journalism, and humanities at Gettysburg College, in Pennsylvania. Retiring in 1966, she moved to Florence, Italy, where she experienced the great flood of the Arno river in November of that year—which inspired her third book,
Diary of Florence in Flood
, published to critical acclaim in England and America the following spring.

En route to Italy in 1966 on the Italian Line’s
Michelangelo
, Kathrine met the American sculptor John Rood. The two felt an immediate attraction, had a shipboard romance, and were married the following year in Minneapolis, where he made his home. Thereafter, they lived part of each year in Minneapolis and part in the Val de Pea, outside Florence. Even after Rood’s death in 1974, Kathrine kept both homes for nearly twenty years, living quietly in each six months a year, simply as Mrs. John Rood.

Then, in 1995, when Kathrine was ninety-one years old, Story Press reissued
Address Unknown
“to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps” and because, as
Story
editor Lois Rosenthal wrote, its “significant and timeless message” had earned it “a permanent place on the bookshelves” of America. The book was well received, and Kathrine, happily signing copies and granting television and press interviews, was gratified at its re-emergence, this time with the status of an American literary classic.

Kathrine Kressmann Taylor Rood died in July 1996, late in her ninety-third year, sharp-witted, perceptive, and enthusiastic, even about the end of life. “Dying,” she said in her last week, “is normal. It’s as normal as being born.” And she was ready. She had lived several successful lives: as a wife and mother, as a popular professor, and as the author of three books and a dozen short stories, one of which,
Address Unknown
, was recognized as a classic while she lived.

Shortly after her death, a copy of the 1995 reissue came into the hands of French publisher Henri Dougier of Editions Autrement, Paris. He saw at once its relevance to the entire European community, both those members who had lived under Nazi domination and those who needed to know what it had been like. He determined that a French translation must be undertaken, and that translation, by Michele Levy-Bram, hit the French bestseller list in late 1999. Fifty thousand copies sold that first year, and another fifty thousand in the early months of 2000; the book was selling far more than it ever had in the United States. And other Europeans were reading it, calling for its translation and publication in their own languages: Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Hebrew, German, Greek, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Portuguese. This handsome new edition by Souvenir Press is yet another chapter in its ongoing success story. I am most gratified that my mother lived long enough to see this little book recognized as the classic it’s become.