Letter from Arnold Zweig to Sigmund Freud, May 29, 1932

Luitpoldbad
Oberdorf bei Hindelang
Bavarian Allgäu
29. 5. 32

Dear and honoured man,

You have replied to my letter so quickly, at such length and with so much perceptiveness that I have been preoccupied ever since with my reply to you, though I have not, it is true, been able to take any active steps in the matter. On the contrary, I have had to deal with a whole mass of trifling affairs, unrewarding and yet time-consuming: a radio talk to America, which was, it is true, technically amusing, on the theme ‘Has Europe fought its last battle?’ It was a tedious business writing it in English and fitting it into the time (17-18 minutes); a radio talk in Berlin for the P.E.N. Club, an address to the P.E.N. Club, and then immediately after this I had to make all the arrangements for a disappearance of 3-4 weeks. And in the midst of it all the decision about my work for this summer-it is to be not a long novel but a shorter and quite different one, so that what I wrote you about must wait till later. And now I have been here about nine days, of which only one and a half have been fine. I am deep in my work and equally deep in depression, which is connected with the rain, with Bavarian memories, with the grey sky, the terrible political situation in Berlin, with my physical exhaustion after my long journey, but above all with the theme of my work itself. This is the shorter novel dealing with the murder of the Dutch-Jewish writer, J. I. de Haan, in Jerusalem (1924) and the Arab revolt of 1929. The theme has been in my mind for a long time. The figure of this Orthodox Jew who ‘reviled God in Jerusalem’ in clandestine poems and who had a love-affair with an Arab boy-this important and complex character gripped my imagination while the blood was still not dry in the whole affair. My trip to Palestine brought the old plan to life again and for a month I sketched away at it in the country itself