The Jews in America Trilogy (60 page)

I have taken note of the very long list of people who have written asking for help but to whom you felt we could not give assistance because their relationship could not be proved, or because they were too old, or undesirable for emigration. While many of these cases are undoubtedly worthy or very pathetic, I think you will have to maintain the position you have already taken.… I think that we have assumed all the responsibility that we dare to undertake, and those people who are not related or not connected will have to be helped through general funds. The list for whom we have already issued affidavits is really a staggering one, and I believe we now must simply permit those who wish to emigrate to work through usual channels. I hate to take this position because I know of the urgency of the situation.…

The letter closes on this dismally prophetic note: “I think, however, that these people who have written us are in no different position from the thousands of people who need assistance and must be helped, if at all, through general funds.”

Therese Loeb Schiff worried about her half-brother, Jim Loeb, who still lived on a forest estate outside Murnau, Germany. After many years he had married a woman named Toni Hambuchen who had been his nurse and companion through some of his worst periods of depression. Working on his collection of rare books, the two had become virtual recluses, and rarely ventured outside their house. Still, the citizens of Murnau had grown fond of their mysterious and lonely neighbors, and on James Loeb's sixtieth birthday they had given him the Freedom of the City. He accepted the honor shyly, and withdrew to his house. Soon afterward, Therese Schiff received word that both James Loeb and his wife had died, quietly, within a few weeks of one another. This was in 1933, but poor Jim Loeb's struggle with Nazi Germany was not yet over.

Soon Murnau extended the Freedom of the City to Adolf Hitler. James Loeb had died without direct heirs, but he had become attached to his stepson, Joseph Hambuchen, Toni's son by a previous marriage. The bulk of the Loeb estate went to Joseph—which was fortunate, since Joseph had American citizenship through his stepfather and, as a result, escaped having his property seized by the Nazis. The collection of
books was hastily shipped to England, where it was stored throughout the duration of one war. He had bequeathed his art collection to the Munich Museum, where it still is, though since Hitler James Loeb's name has never been mentioned in connection with it. Jim Loeb had been concerned about his mental health, and about his brother Morris, the chemist, who was certainly “peculiar,” and about his sister Guta, Mrs. Isaac Newton Seligman, who was in a New York State sanitarium. And so Jim Loeb had given several large sums of money for the foundation of a neurological and psychiatric research center in Munich under Dr. Binswanger, who had treated him. The research center was a project that excited him even more than his library, and plans for it had filled the last months of his life. But Loeb's building, taken over by the Nazis soon after his death, was turned into a center for experiment of race-superiority theories, and his name was scratched from the stone.

In 1947 Felix Warburg's son Paul was making a tour of inspection of the American Zone in Germany with Ambassador Lewis Douglas, and the two men stopped at an American Army guest house in Murnau, outside Munich. The first thing young Warburg saw upon opening the door was a portrait of his great-grandfather, Solomon Loeb. With a start, he realized that this was his Great-Uncle James Loeb's house, and that the kindly, worried, dyspeptic founder of Kuhn, Loeb & Company, one of New York's greatest Jewish banking houses, had gazed dispassionately upon a German drawing room throughout the rise and fall of Hitler's Third Reich.

The ironies go on and on. In the early 1930's Otto Kahn, in his sixties, had suddenly been smitten with a longing to return to Germany. Writing of the cities of his youth, Mannheim and Bemberg, he said: “How lovely those places are! What a romantic spell attaches to them! The older I get the more I develop a regular sentimental ‘Heimweh' in the spring.…
Mein Herz ist nicht hier.
”

In Mannheim, where Kahn's homesick
Herz
lay, his father had founded a reading room for workers, and Kahn had continued to support it. In 1932 Otto Kahn sent his contribution of a thousand marks to the Bernhard Kahn
Lesehalle
of the Mannheim
Volkshochsschule
, saying, as he did so, that he couldn't continue his support “with self-respect as a Jew if, after the lapse of another year, the Hitler party continues to be by far the strongest and most popular party in Germany.” In much less than a year the Nazis had closed the library, fired the director, confiscated the books, and that dream was over. Sadly,
Kahn declined an invitation to attend a dinner of the Academy of Political Science when he heard that the German Ambassador to Washington would be there. He advised his steward, also, to serve no more Moselle and Rhine wines at the Kahn table, and all future orders from his wine merchant in Frankfurt were canceled.

Finally—the most painful decision of all—Otto Kahn discontinued plans, which had been quietly undertaken for some time, to convert to Roman Catholicism. He simply could not bring himself to desert his people at a moment when they faced their greatest crisis. As he said, at a banquet for the Joint Distribution Committee, “This is the time for every one of us to heed the call of the blood which courses in his veins and loyally and proudly to stand up and be counted with his fellow Jews.” Yet we can almost hear him add, “
Mein Herz ist nicht hier.
”

Other Jews, who had accused Otto Kahn of being a passive anti-Semite, and who never realized that he was merely indifferent to Judaism, were jubilant. “At last Otto Kahn is
bar mitzvah!
” they cried. In the winter of 1934 he went, as usual, to Palm Beach, returning to New York at the end of March. On March 29 he went to his office, and there, rising from luncheon in the Kuhn, Loeb private dining room, he fell forward, dead. Everyone was sure he would have been pleased that he looked so well—his beautiful mustache brushed, his Savile Row suit immaculate, a fresh carnation in his buttonhole, and his English shoes from Peale's, under his spotless spats, boned and rubbed to a fine, soft gleam.

In the same year a dream ended for the Seligmans, too. They had founded, long before the First World War, an orphanage in their native village of Baiersdorf, and had continued to support it. It was a nonsectarian institution, and, indeed, it had always cared for more gentile children than Jewish. Nonetheless, it was closed. And, in the process, Henry Seligmanstrasse changed its name to Adolph Hitlerstrasse.

“This man,” Otto Kahn once said, “is the enemy of humanity. But he attacks each of us in such an intensely
personal
way.”

*
Schacht was later tried, and acquitted, as a war criminal.

*
Since the war the Warburg bank has been called Brinckmann, Wirtz & Company, but it is the private hope of the Warburgs that the historic name will soon be restored to it.

47

WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

As the German Jewish crowd composed itself after the agony of the Second World War, it attempted, without ever so saying, to impose a sort of order on itself, a scheme of values, and a system for dealing with the problems which it had begun to see as inevitable. It was decided, for example, that the proper moment for “telling” a boy that he was Jewish, and therefore “different,” was on the eve of his departure for boarding school. In the drawing room the little conference was called, with Mother, Father, Grandmother, and Grandfather present in, often, a very solemn circle. Thereupon what might be called the Facts of Faith were presented. One young man, raised to consider himself a “free-thinker,” recalls such a moment shortly before he was to leave for Taft, and remembers asking, in awe, “Does that mean that I'm related to people like Albert Einstein, and Otto Kahn, and Robert Moses?” He was told yes, that this was true, but that there were also certain difficulties inherent in being Jewish, and that, somehow or other, these had to be faced and handled. As a result of these revelations, young Jewish boys have often set off for Taft, Middlesex, Hotchkiss, Kent, and Exeter in a high state of nervousness, and, since the teens can be a heartless age, many have encountered the predicted troubles.

James Warburg was only in the seventh grade when he made the unsettling discovery. His parents, Paul and Nina Warburg, had become “twice-a-year Jews,” attending the synagogue only on the Jewish New Year's Day and the Day of Atonement, and of his parents' faith young James only knew that “I felt warmly about Grandfather Warburg's Friday evenings and loved the sound of Hebrew. On the other hand, I was repelled by the proselytizing religiosity of my New York uncle, Jacob Schiff.” At Miss Bovee's Elementary School in New York, which James attended, it was the practice for each student to put his initials in the upper corner of each school paper before passing it forward. As Warburg remembers in his autobiography,
The Long Road Home
, “A slightly older boy whom I rather liked used to insert an E between the letters JW with which I initialed my papers until I put a stop to it by signing myself JPW. Apparently the word ‘Jew' could be a term of opprobrium; and apparently there were some, or perhaps even many, people who disliked Jews and looked down upon them. My mother confirmed that such was indeed the case. She said that because of this a Jewish boy should always be very careful not to push himself forward. This puzzled me. It seemed like accepting some sort of second-class status.”

It goes without saying that a boy brought up in a strict orthodoxy, or even with the emphasis on ritual that Jacob Schiff had recommended, would suffer no such confusion. James Warburg continues, “I gathered the impression from both of my parents that, no matter what other people might feel, to be a Jew was something of which to be proud. Why this should be so remained unclear. Evidently, my parents wanted their son to feel that he had fallen heir to a precious heritage, but neither of them could nor would explain just what remained of this heritage if the Jewish religion were shucked off. It seemed to me that nothing more remained than a disbelief in the divinity of Jesus Christ.”

Faced with these uncertainties, and with parents who—as the joke went in the crowd—were “just a little bit Jewish,” James Warburg reacted the way several of his generation did. He decided that if he was going to be a Jew “and suffer whatever social or other disadvantages this might entail” he would be “a
real
Jew,” like his Grandfather Warburg. He announced at the age of ten that he wished to study Hebrew, to learn Jewish religious history, and to be
bar mitzvah
. He also revealed that he intended to become a rabbi, at which piece of news “My parents were rather surprised—whether pleased or displeased I could not tell.” (One can rather imagine, however.)

That the rabbinate did not gain James Warburg, and that his
religious zeal was short-lived, can be blamed on his Uncle Felix, who had, from the beginning, an unfailing instinct for what made an upper-class American. He had made sure that his own children learned all the proper upper-class things—that they played tennis, rode well, and could handle a sailboat. He had made it a tradition for Warburg boys to go to Middlesex, one of the most socially impeccable New England schools, with a socially impeccable headmaster, Frederick Winsor, whose wife was “a Boston Paine,” and where daily and Sunday chapel—Christian—were compulsory.

Paul Warburg was never certain how he felt about New England boarding schools—so many boys seemed to emerge from them having lost their Jewishness altogether—but Felix insisted that Middlesex was just the thing for the aspiring rabbi, James. Four years later James Warburg graduated from Middlesex not even so much as a twice-a-year Jew; he was, he said, a “Jeffersonian deist.” He added, furthermore, that he was “never aware of the slightest trace of anti-Semitism among the teachers or the boys”—nor was there, of course, any anti-Jeffersonianism.

Other sons of the crowd, however, have encountered anti-Semitism, both subtle and overt, at otherwise fine boys' schools where “Jew-baiting” continues to be a popular sport. Perhaps the sport persists because the young Jew is so well prepared for it—defensive, edgy, quick at times to sense aspersions where, perhaps, none were intended. But often they
are
intended. At the Hotchkiss School, not too many years ago, the son of one of New York's most prominent Jewish families, a bright, active, and well-liked boy, was considered a promising sculptor and was given a one-man show. His show included a number of handsome heads molded of soft modeling clay. One morning it was discovered that someone, in the night, had defaced each of the heads by giving it a large Semitic nose. The desecration outraged Headmaster George Van Santvoord, who made it the basis of a stirring chapel sermon. Most interesting was the attitude of the young sculptor himself, who had begged that the matter be forgotten and was so embarrassed at being the subject of a sermon that he became sick to his stomach.

At Williams College, meanwhile, a nephew of Governor Herbert Lehman was taken into the Governor's fraternity, Phi Gamma Delta, and then politely told that he would be “the last of your family. We can't take in too many of you, you know.” This young man, however, decided to stay in the fraternity, though since then fraternities themselves have disappeared from the Williams campus.

Though anti-Semitism did not end with Hitler, it has been said that
the Second World War did much to eliminate hard feelings between German Jews and the later arrivals from Eastern Europe. “World War II Made One of American Jewry,” an item in the Jewish press announced not long ago. This, however, is open to some debate. When the oldest daughter of Mrs. John D. Gordan (who is a Goodhart, a Walter, and a great-granddaughter of Mayer Lehman) was considering colleges, she settled upon Barnard, “largely because of the high percentage of Jewish girls.” But when Miss Gordan arrived at Barnard, and revealed her family's connection with the Lehmans, Goodharts, Walters, and with Temple Emanu-El, “All the other girls,” says her mother, “immediately assumed that she was the worst sort of snob.”