The Jews in America Trilogy (31 page)

Not all episodes had such happy endings for Frieda. In 1894 she was having a particularly trying year. Her father had insisted that she could not make her debut until she was eighteen, and, since her birthday was in February, this meant she would miss the entire winter debutante season. Her best friend, Addie Wolff (the daughter of Abraham Wolff, another Kuhn, Loeb partner), was having her party at Sherry's, but Jacob Schiff would not let Frieda go. He said, “If you are seen in one place, you'll have more invitations. We'll have the same scene each time, and I can't make exceptions. For your own good, I don't want you to come out.” So Frieda stayed home.

He often forbade her to do things “for her own good,” and he had become obsessive about what he called her “innocence.” In his determination that even her mind should remain virginal, he carefully arranged her life so that she would meet neither men nor girls her own age. He kept her busy with volunteer work and fund-raising. Anders Zorn painted Frieda Schiff's portrait during that lonely winter of her eighteenth year, and her dewy innocence shines from the canvas. She was high-cheekboned, with a thin, patrician nose, clear-eyed, dark-haired, slim-waisted, dressed in pink. She had one advantage to outweigh some of the drawbacks that went with being Jacob Schiff's daughter: she was beautiful.

She was permitted to have an eighteenth-birthday party, memorable because a musical teen-ager named Walter Damrosch sang and acted out a parody on Wagner's Rhine Maidens while standing in a tin tub full of water. But otherwise the year had been unexceptional and unrewarding. She had had no experience with boys whatever, beyond stiff and formal conversations with male partners at her father's stiff
and formal dinner parties, where the young people were always seated “below the salt.” Whenever a boy spoke to her she blushed fiercely.

That summer Jacob and Therese Schiff took Frieda and Morti on another of their ritual grand tours of Europe. One of the stops was, naturally, Frankfurt, where the Schiffs were invited to dinner at the home of some people named Dreyfus, who were Loeb cousins. “Are there any young men I would like in Frankfurt?” Frieda whispered furtively to a friend.

“Oh, you must meet Felix Warburg,” said the friend. “He's the handsomest man in town.”

A Warburg family genealogy, prepared in 1937 and updated in 1953, fills a volume very nearly the weight of Webster's International Dictionary, and the Warburgs take their family with even heavier seriousness. The Warburgs put the lie to the much-repeated claim that “all the best Jews are from Frankfurt” (whence, of course, come Schiffs and Rothschilds). The Warburgs are from Hamburg. The family is said to have originated centuries ago in Italy (many Warburgs have a Latin look), where the name was del Banco, “the bankers,” since Jews were not permitted personal surnames. Recorded history first places them, however, in Warburgum (or Warburg), a small town in central Germany, from where, over three hundred years ago, they migrated north to Hamburg.

The Warburg claim to being one of the world's noblest Jewish families (and the Warburgs are far too proud to actually
make
such a claim; they let it be made for them) is based on many things. A great many Warburgs are wealthy, and have been for several hundred years, but the splendid ring of the Warburg name has more to it than money. The family bank, M. M. Warburg & Company in Hamburg, was an ancient affair, founded in 1798, which lasted well into the Hitler era, when it was forcibly confiscated in 1938 by non-Jews. The Warburgs have also been distinguished in fields other than banking; they are a particularly
rounded
family. There have been Warburgs prominent in the military, in manufacturing, medicine, politics, book publishing, diplomacy, education, and the arts. There have been Warburg authors, scientists, composers, critics, inventors, and professors.

There are Warburgs today in every corner of the world—from New York to London to Shanghai to Tokyo to Melbourne. One family habit, which helps keep the Warburgs straight in various parts of the globe, is to give Warburg children first names appropriate to the countries where they were born. Thus Elena, Oliviero, Gioconda, Francesca,
and Italo Warburg are all Rome Warburgs. Eva and Charlotte Warburg, who became Israeli Warburgs, have children named Dvorah, Gabriel, Benjamin, Tama, and Niva. Ingrid is a Stockholm Warburg. When Renata Warburg was married to Dr. Richard Samson, she tried hard to conform to his mystic Indian cult of
Mazdasnan
and lived for a while with the Maharaja of Indore. Their child, Matanya, is therefore a Zoroastrian Warburg, or at least a Warburg from his mother's maharaja period. She later divorced Samson, left India, married a man named Walter Strauss, moved to Glasgow, and named her next child Carol.

Felix Warburg, who, Frieda Schiff had been told, was the handsomest man in town, was the son of Moritz Warburg, and Moritz Warburg was the youngest of six children of Abraham and Sara Warburg. Abraham Warburg died when Moritz was very young, but Sara Warburg, one of several strong-willed Warburg women, remained very much alive. Moritz's older brother Siegmund became titular head of the bank after his father's death, but as long as Sara lived Siegmund and Moritz had to report to their mother each evening after the Stock Exchange had closed. They brought their account books with them, and Sara grilled them thoroughly on each detail of each transaction. The two men's wives waited patiently at home until Sara was satisfied that the boys had put in a profitable day at the bank and dismissed them with a little wave of her hand. If Sara was not satisfied, she would sit very still in her thronelike chair, gazing at her sons hard and long. Then she would say, “Now. Explain yourselves. Siegmund, speak first.” On such nights, the lights in Sara's big house in Rothenbaum Chaussee burned late.

Sara was widely respected by men because she “thought like a man,” and she had many influential men friends, among them the poet Heinrich Heine,
*
who once dedicated a poem to her (and it was not a poem about banking, either), and Prince Otto von Bismarck. Like her spiritual sister, Henriette Hellman Seligman in the United States, Sara was not a woman to be put off by royalty. She and the Prince corresponded regularly, and each year it was her custom to send him a package of Passover cookies. But one year the imperial court chaplain preached some anti-Semitic statements which incensed Sara. Bismarck was not really responsible for them, but he did not reproach the chaplain, and Sara decided that her friendship with the Prince should be terminated. At Easter, when the Prince had not received his customary cookies, he sent an aide to see Sara and ask what had happened. Sara told the Prince's emissary loftily, “If he doesn't know, tell him to come
and ask me himself. But he won't ask. He knows quite well why he didn't get his cookies.” He never did ask, and he never received any cookies from Sara again.

Sara's son Moritz married Charlotte Oppenheim, and they had seven children—Aby M., Max M., Paul M., Felix M., Olga M., Fritz M., and Louise M. Warburg. Felix Warburg used to sign his letters:

because he saw the Warburgs represented in the heavens, with each of the Warburg children a star in the Big Dipper. This Warburg family lived at Mittelweg 17 and were known as “the Mittelweg Warburgs” to distinguish them from Siegmund Warburg's family, who lived on Alsterufer and were called “the Alsterufer Warburgs.” To confuse things somewhat, both Siegmund and Moritz had sons named Aby, after their joint grandfather. But, to unconfuse them somewhat, the Mittelweg Aby—and all the other Mittelweg Warburgs—had the middle initial “M,” which was not for “Mittelweg,” but for Moritz, their father. Still, all those M's helped keep the Mittelweg Warburgs straight. Meanwhile, the Alsterufer Warburgs gave their children the middle initial “S,” for Siegmund. This tradition has been carried on in both branches of the family.

Felix's mother, Charlotte, was like her mother-in-law Sara, a strong-minded woman who openly dominated her timid little husband, who, by the time she met him, was already used to being cowed. Charlotte also took pride in herself as a matchmaker, and was forever inviting young couples to dinner, where her practice was to send them out for walks in the twilight afterward, and then lock the French windows behind them. She would not let any of her “matches” back inside the house until, as she put it, “it” had happened.

Felix's father, Moritz, was the official leader of the sixteen thousand Jews in Hamburg. He thoroughly disapproved of the migratory wave of young Jews out of Germany in the 1850's, '60's, and '70's. For one thing, M. M. Warburg & Company was prospering, and he saw no need for
any of his sons to “seek their fortune” in any such distant place as the United States. Also, as one of the family wrote of him, Moritz was a man “not distinguished by great physical courage.” The thought of himself or any member of his family crossing the Atlantic terrified him. “
Das Wasser hat keine Balken,
” he used to say—“Water isn't very solid”—and once, when his mother ordered him to England on business, he begged her not to make him go. But Sara insisted, and Moritz crossed the Channel on his knees, praying all the way. When required to serve in the Hamburg City Militia, Moritz enlisted as a trumpeter. His wife, either proudly or mischievously, used to show the certificate he got for this service to everyone who came to the house. Moritz was also vain, and covered his baldness with wigs of varying lengths.

The Warburg children were, on the other hand, a bold, bright, and lively lot. Felix and his brothers were strikingly handsome youngsters, dark-haired with snapping black eyes. There is some argument today about “the Warburg mouth,” which is said not to have been “good” where the boys were concerned. But the boys, as soon as they were able, wore the heavy mustaches that were the style of the period, so their mouths didn't matter. Felix, like his name, had a happy face, and his mustache curled upward. His brother Paul had a sad face, and his mustache turned down. Paul was a scholar. Felix was a blade. He loved beautiful things—beautiful women, music, books, paintings, horses, sailboats, clothes, and (in time) motorcars. He was also something of a rebel. He openly scorned the conventional Jewish orthodoxy of his home, which he used to say was “maintained more from tradition than from conviction.” He was embarrassed by such rules as having to have a servant carry his textbooks to school for Saturday sessions, and having to adhere to the dietary laws whenever he went to a restaurant or traveled. He itched to go places and become his own man.

His oldest brother, Aby, was a rebel too. He had married a girl named Mary Hertz, described in the family as “an unusual girl”—unusual in that she was not Jewish. It was the first Warburg mixed marriage, and it stirred up such a storm that the couple were asked, “out of respect to the Jewish community of Hamburg,” to leave the city to wed.

At sixteen Felix was taken out of school and sent south to Frankfurt to work for his mother's family, the Oppenheims, who had a precious-stone business there. His brother Max was already in Frankfurt, studying business, and the boys' mother wrote to Max telling him to take good care of Felix, and see that he took “language and violin lessons, select nice friends for him, prevent him from being too extravagant,
and see to it that he takes one bath weekly.” But Felix could take care of himself. He was already a
bon vivant
, and he cut quite a swathe in Frankfurt. In his snappy dogcart he drove his young friends and his Italian teacher (he had selected a very pretty young woman to teach him that language) on gay excursions to the Waeldchen, Frankfurt's prettiest park. In Frankfurt he met Clara Schumann, the widow of Robert Schumann the composer, and Mme. Schumann developed quite a case on Felix Warburg. This raised an eyebrow or two. He was just eighteen; she was nearly seventy.

Felix Warburg very nearly didn't go to the Dreyfuses' party. The Dreyfuses, he said, gave “the dullest parties in Frankfurt,” and he was not a man who liked dull parties. But his parents, who were visiting in Frankfurt, insisted because their old friend Jacob Schiff would be there, and they reminded Felix that Schiff had given the Warburg boys a toy fort during the period he had worked for the Deutsche Bank.

So, reluctantly, Felix went, and met Frieda Schiff, who was wearing the pale pink gown Zorn had painted her in. “I don't
think
I flirted,” she said many years later, “because I had been brought up so strictly, and had gone out so little, that I was not too certain of myself.”

That night Felix went home, long after midnight, knocked on his parents' door, and said, “I have met the girl I'm going to marry.”

Matchmaker Charlotte was disgruntled because this was a match she had not arranged. Moritz Warburg was even more distressed when he heard that it was an American girl. Sitting up in his bed in his nightshirt and cap, he cried, “She will have to live in Germany, you know!”

*
Heine also turns up in the Schiff family tree; his stepgrandfather was a Schiff.