Letter from Arnold Zweig to Sigmund Freud, November 30, 1932

Berlin-Grunewald
Zikadenweg 59
30 Nov. 32

Dear Father Freud,

This time, for the sake of speed, I am typing my letter to you, which seems to me a heartless way for us to correspond but on this occasion I cannot avoid it. Your attack of influenza makes me more concerned than I can say. Would it not be possible, if the weather is as nice with you as it is here-rather cold, very clear, very dry, many hours of sunshine-for you to go and convalesce for a fortnight at one of the beautiful mountain resorts which you have so near you and which I do not know at all? No inflammation of the ear should be allowed to undermine your hearing and the world's access to you-above all you should not speak of your last work any differently from the way the rest of us do when we mean our latest. I hope I shall soon hear from you that you are once again feeling as strong as the handwriting in your latest letter proclaims you to be.

The content of that letter delights me-that you know. I can bear criticism, I exercise some upon myself, but the very proximity of a book just completed makes it impossible to judge its proportions aright (I am almost without judgement when faced with my typescript, I just feel a pleasure in my own creation and the inevitability of its form, but I never dare estimate how far that which I have aimed at has really taken shape) and so your sympathetic understanding seems to me like the first indication that I have succeeded in carrying along with me the most exacting of my readers and my incorruptible friend. The ‘day residue’ is quickly told, especially if you refer to the essay I published a few days ago in the Jüdische Rundschau. My de Vriendt has many features in common with the Dutch poet and journalist, Jacob Israel de Haan, who was murdered by an unknown hand in Jerusalem in 1924. His last work was called Kwatrijnen and I have known five of these quatrains in a journalistic prose