You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
At the end of the last century, when nearly all the Jewish inhabitants of the Polish town L. were killed by Cossacks in a pogrom, the surviving members of the Grünbaum family fled to Vienna where their eldest daughter was married to a furrier. The other children having perished, the family now consisted of the son-in-law Nathan Levi, a grandchild, and the parents-in-law. Young Mrs. Levi, the second Grünbaum daughter, had not died from kicks or blows in the pogrom itself, but from the consequences of a premature birth, for she had witnessed the murders of her own brothers through a small window in the cellar where she was hiding. She had been the favorite daughter. The elder one to whom they now traveled had always been looked upon as disagreeable and insufferable. Otherwise she might not have been given consent to marry so far away, even if into a family that hailed from the same town. Her longish face displayed features that were somewhat morose and uninviting, and it was hard to tell whether her peevish disposition was responsible for her aspect or whether her aspect had preyed upon her disposition.
When she came for her people at the East Railway Station in Vienna, her mother in all her despair couldn't shed the feeling of how dead the younger daughter was, how outrageously she had died, and how the sullen, wry-mouthed elder one was still living. Because despair, instead of soothing, relentlessly sharpens the memory of the dead and the semblance of the living. As was the elder daughter, so, too, was the son-in-law.