And the many-domed, many-towered city of Paris, her roof slates glistening like dragon scales under the capricious sky: she was one of the constellations by which the course of that world was fixed. More than any other city, she was the spirit of our spirit. She came directly from our blood as almost no other city did. Yes, indeed, you heard correctly. I say: we, us, our—our spirit, our blood. For I include myself, despite all the snide hardness of the French today. I consider the city of Paris not only as a city of Frenchmen. It still belongs to me as well. I’m conceited enough to consider myself a child of Western Civilization, albeit a foundling, if you like, or a stepchild, since the lost half of my life belongs to the half of Europe that did not pass into American hands; still, women in Kishinev did not wear veils—Pushkin hated the place, but he occasionally visited it to see classics like Racine, Molière, and Scribe. It even had an electric trolley line (not in Pushkin’s time, of course, but during my childhood). I may be wrong, though: the droshkies had the same foot bells as the streetcars elsewhere, and perhaps I’m even confusing this with my memory of Jassy or Czernowitz. You can certainly correct me here, Mr. Brodny . . . You see, I left Bessarabia at a tender age; I was brought up in Vienna—in less than ideal manner, admittedly, but still in European traditions, intellectual attitudes, emotional norms (intellectual errors and emotional failings, if you prefer). We never managed to establish with any certainty in which church of the Christian denominations, and indeed even whether, I was baptized. But anyway I’m not circumcised. Indeed, my Viennese relatives were out-and-out anti-Semites. If my cousin Wolfgang had not died a hero’s death very early in WWII, he would most certainly have occupied a high office in the SA and, after denazification, in West Germany’s judiciary . . . With a probability verging on certainty, I can claim to be pure Aryan, albeit not raised in the cult of Wotan. I was urged to fear God and love his sweet son—with a beard on the cross, and without a beard as dear baby Jesus. I speak four of the main European languages quite fluently, plus a few less important ones (for instance, Romanian and Yiddish) rather glibly. Not to mention my infamous talent for imitating any dialect in a highly entertaining fashion. I can sing songs from Hungarian, Romanian, and Greek operettas. My Balkan culture, which I sometimes even exploited professionally, was the true substance that I gave to my formative years in Vienna. Still and all, I have read around in seven literatures, I eat with a knife and fork, shave daily, suffer from the same tooth decay as Tintoretto, Blaise Pascal, and Oscar Wilde. I can’t simply be dismissed without further ado as a Levantine stranded in the West, some member of an auxiliary nation, like a Volhynian German resettled in the Reich, a type having as great a right to asylum here as a Tartar abandoned by Barnum’s International Show of Shows. I presume to be as much at home on this side of the Elbe as on the other. By no means—I don’t need to emphasize it—am I an American. I was, alas, not so consistent as you, Yankel Brodny. I did not become what our sort logically had to become after losing our other half. And yet fate would have it that I have to run around in Paris as a stranger, and, on the other hand, converse with you, J. G. the American, as if you were my brother Abel!