Address Unknown

by Kathrine Kressmann Taylor

We are vain and we are dishonest because it is necessary to triumph over other vain and dishonest persons. If I do not sell Mrs Fleshman our horror, somebody else will sell her a worse one. We must accept these necessities.

But there is another realm where we can always find something true, the fireside of a friend, where we shed our little conceits and find warmth and understanding, where small selfishnesses are impossible and where wine and books and talk give a different meaning to existence. There we have made something that no falseness can touch. We are at home.

Who is this Adolf Hitler who seems rising toward power in Germany? I do not like what I read of him.

A leader is found! Yet cautiously to myself I ask, a leader to where? Despair overthrown often turns us in mad directions.

The quicksand of despair held them, it was at their chins. Then just before they died a man came and pulled them out. All they now know is, they will not die. They are in hysteria of deliverance, almost they worship him. But whoever the savior was, they would have done the same. God grant it is a true leader and no black angel they follow so joyously. To you alone, Max, I say I do not know. I do not know. Yet I hope.

The Jewish race is a sore spot to any nation that harbors it. I have never hated the individual Jew – yourself I have always cherished as a friend, but you will know that I speak in all honesty when I say I have loved you, not because of your race but in spite of it.

The Jew is the universal scapegoat. This does not happen without reason, and it is not the old superstition about ‘Christ-killers’ that makes them distrusted. But this Jew trouble is only an incident. Something bigger is happening.

You lament but you are never brave enough to fight back. That is why there are pogroms.

I did not expect you would take up arms for my people because they are my people, but because you were a man who loved justice.