The Emigrants

Lazarus Lanzberg stables had been doing better and better in recent years, supplying as far afield as the Rhineland, Brandenburg and Holstein, buying everywhere, and leaving all their customers well pleased and satisfied. The contract Papa had won as supplier and provisioner to the army, which he proudly mentioned whenever he had the chance, had doubtless been the decisive factor in giving up farming, moving from backwater Steinach, and finally establishing a position in middle-class life. At that time I was almost sixteen, and believed that a completely new world, even lovelier than that of childhood, would be revealed to me in Kissingen. In some respects that was really how it was, but in others the Kissingen years up until my marriage in 19 21 seem in retrospect to have marked the first step on a path that grew narrower day by day and led inevitably to the point I have now arrived at. I find it difficult to think back to my youth in Kissingen. It is as if the gradual dawn of what was called the serious side of life, the minor and major disappointments that soon began to mount up, had affected my ability to take things in. And so there is a good deal I can no longer picture. Even of our arrival in Kissingen I have only fragmentary memories. I know it was bitterly cold, there was endless work to be done, my fingers were frozen, for days the house refused to warm up despite the fact that I poked the coals in the Irish stoves in all the rooms; the hoya plant had not survived the move; and the cats had run away, back to the old home, and, though Papa went back especially to Steinach, they were nowhere to be found. To me the house, which the people of Kissingen soon took to calling the Lanzberg Villa, always remained essentially a strange place. The vast, echoing stairwell; the linoleum flooring in the hall; the corridor at the

back where the telephone hung over the laundry basket and you had to hold the heavy receivers to your ears with both hands; the pale, hissing gaslight; the sombre Flemish furniture

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with its carved columns — there was something distinctly creepy about all of it, and at times I feel quite definitely that it did steady and irreparable harm to me. Only once, if I remember rightly, did I ever sit on the window seat in the drawing room, which was painted with foliage and tendrils like a festive bower, and from the ceiling of which a brand new brass Sabbath-lamp hung down, also fuelled by gas; I leafed through a page or two of the blue velvet postcard album which had its place on the shelf of the smoking table, and felt like a visitor, passing through. Often in the mornings or evenings, when I looked out of my top floor window across the flower beds of the spa nursery gardens to the green, wooded hills all around, I felt like a maid. From the very first spring we rented out several rooms in the house. Mother, who ran the household, was an exacting teacher of domestic management. At six o'clock, right after I got up, my first task was to give the white chickens in the garden their measure of grain and fetch in the eggs. Then breakfast had to be made, the rooms tidied, the vegetables trimmed, and lunch cooked. In the afternoons, for a while, I did a course in shorthand and book-keeping that was taught by nuns. Frau Ignatia was very proud of me. At other times I took the children of visitors to the spa for walks in the public gardens — for instance, Herr Weintraub's fat little boy. Herr Weintraub was a timber merchant and came every year from Perm in Siberia, because Jews (so he said) were not allowed at watering places in Russia. From about four o'clock I would sit out in the chalet darning or crocheting, and in the evening there was the vegetable patch to be watered, with water from the well — the tap water cost too much, claimed Papa. I could go to evening concerts only if Leo was home from the grammar school.