“I didn’t run away from home. My childhood was very quiet and bourgeois compared with yours. I fantasized. I thought I would be an actress like Marlene Dietrich and have wealthy lovers. Then I thought I might be a female aviator who crash-landed and had to live with someone like Tarzan while the rest of the world searched for me. When I was rescued, they would understand that I had been forced to submit. There may have been wild Indians involved.”

“In any respectable fantasy.”

She took a deep breath. “But from the age of fourteen on, the central fantasy I had was of fear. Not anxiety: fear. That everyone wanted to hurt me, kill me. Not my mother or father, of course, or my family, but everyone else—the gardener, the streetcar conductor, the postman. Street cleaners, ladies in the candy store and police, naturally. I stopped going to school for weeks at a time. Our doctor said I was suffering from unspecified hysteria. An alienist came from Berlin and said I was suffering from a female castration complex. Perhaps so, but I thought he wanted to torture me. A crazy child! They took away my pencils, scissors, even my stockings.

“My father knew Freud. He wrote to him in Vienna. Freud wrote back to say I was suffering from a ‘flight motif.’ More and more German Jews, he said, were suffering from ‘flight motif,’ but it was his opinion that Nazi brutalities were diminishing and that a young girl should ignore the threats in the newspapers and consider how extremely unpleasant it was to be a refugee. I remember he added in a postscript that all he ever wanted to see in America was Niagara Falls. There is some charm in Freud contemplating the great running bath of Niagara Falls. My mother and father were reassured because they were Germans first and Jews second. So I was sent to the sanatorium, where sometimes we were given water cures and sometimes sleep cures, and where I hid in my bower full of numbers and bees. At lunch we listened to Goebbels on the radio loudspeaker. Everyone had to.

“Actually, the doctors were kind. One who was a Communist suggested the trip to Sweden. He falsified the documents without telling my parents, but I think they knew he put me down as Aryan. How else would I be allowed to leave? It took a Communist to know how to do such things. He was going to escape too, so it was not all out of goodwill. It was an odd thing. We docked in Stockholm, and suddenly I was not crazy. I do wonder, Joe, why me? Why—out of all my family, good, rational people, uncles, aunts, rabbis, professors, babies—was I the only one to escape? The question is, Did God save me or did He just forget me? So I am ready for a new God. Thinking Woman sounds to me like a great improvement.”