Address Unknown

by Kathrine Kressmann Taylor

The voices of the two friends are pleasingly distinct – Max in San Francisco a little more colloquial, Martin in Munich a little more formal – but at the beginning of the novel they seem united in their attitudes. Max describes himself as selling the paintings Martin is sending over from Germany ‘at an appalling profit’ and delights in getting an indecent price for an ugly Madonna from old Mrs Fleshman. ‘You speak of the poverty there’, he writes. ‘Conditions have been bad here this winter, but of course we have known nothing of the privations you see in Germany.’ From the thirty-room house he’s been able to buy so cheaply, Martin responds, ‘The old despair has been thrown aside like a forgotten coat. No longer do the people wrap themselves in shame; they hope again.’ The bad Jew-baiting, he writes, is only ‘the little surface scum when a big movement boils up.’ For many of Kressmann Taylor’s contemporary readers, these words would have held no irony.