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Vienna XIX, Strassergasse 47
(not much longer!)
September 30, 1934
Dear Arnold Zweig
I am answering under the immediate impact of alarm that your play about Bonaparte1 may have gone astray on the journey. But it may still turn up.
You think you know why I haven't written to you for so long? No, you don't. Perhaps you suspect-and not quite wrongly-that I have decided not to disturb you any more with my continued objection to your Nietzsche project; but the main reason was another one. For, in a time of relative freedom and at a loss to know what to do with my surplus leisure, I have written something2 myself; and this, contrary to my original intention, has taken such a hold of me that everything else has been left undone. Now, don't rejoice, for I bet you won't get a chance to read it. But let me explain what it is all about.
The starting point of my work is known to you; it was the same as that of your Bilanz. Faced with the renewed persecutions, one asks oneself again how the Jew came to be what he is and why he has drawn upon himself this undying hatred. I soon found the formula: Moses created the Jew. And my essay received the title: The Man Moses, a Historical Novel (with more right than your novel about Nietzsche). The material is divided into three parts; the first reads like an interesting novel; the second is laborious and lengthy, the third substantial and exacting. The enterprise foundered