And there I had a vision all at once. You, Mr. Brodny, were the model American (hadn’t gone over on the Mayflower, to be sure, but all the more militant in New World spirit for that: a pogrom-tested Babbitt from Galicia), and as the personification of that spirit you were devouring not pâté de grives but a dish named Yurop. The thing you smeared so thickly on your little pieces of white bread and inserted between your perfectly serviced teeth, the thing on which you closed your lips, leaving them to their so original play of expressions while you were totally sublimated to being a chewer and swallower—that thing was not thrush pâté, it was Europe. Her spirit, her soul, her dream of herself, her self-illusion. Her old skillfulness, her inexhaustible wealth of forms, all her many forms so thoroughly imbued with her spirit, with the essence of her being. You devoured her, perfected by Walt Disney and frozen and packed in nylon, in the candy color of a Time & Life magazine insert. Indeed, that was a feast! I saw palaces and cathedrals vanishing into your mouth, which closed over them, contorting—either disdainful or offended, mocking or arrogant—while your teeth chewed. Entire cities, lovelier than Nuremberg, were gobbled up by you, for instance Bruges or Siena or Prague. With you, I tasted Paestum still in swampland and a tangle of wild roses, I saw a spring morning in Brabant melting on your tongue. You forked up the Lübeck Dance of Death and chewed it with delight; you then inserted Michelangelo’s David with its oversize head and fists (but what a head, what fists!), promptly followed by a Klimt portrait of a lady. Shakespeare’s sonnets tickled your palate. You swallowed the façade of Chartres with all the mysterious queens and angels and granted yourself, last but not least, the concluding chapter of Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann. And you washed all this down with a wine that got its color from Giordano Bruno’s blood and its charmingly virile spirit from Spinoza. And on top of this your angelic voice now clambered over the threshold of my consciousness . . .

I had to hold my breath and writhe and squirm to keep from throwing up.

37

I ought to have been overcome by the same pity that I once felt for Christa in Nuremberg. Or rather for the condition humaine in general: for the human creature and the tragicomedy of its existence. But this would have led only to my suffering, and I have avoided suffering as best I could ever since I lost the first half of my life. There has been too much cause for pity since then; one simply can’t manage it.

Do credit me, however, with not dragging the past into presence at least on this occasion. Imagine how simplifying and abbreviating it would have been had I been able to give vent to my dichotomous feelings with a nice hearty “Kike!” What a lovely tension, with the possibility of release granted by such short circuits, has been lost to us because of German immoderation! Europe without hatred of Jews—why, that’s like faith in God without the devil. The loss of a metaphysical dimension. Naturally we’ve subbed in something else in its place: irony. As time goes by it gets ever more bloody. I, however, become more of a coward accordingly.