Dear Marion,

Thank you for your letter which corroborates my comment
of last December 22, "As usual, you hit the nail on the head,
but sometimes with a glancing blow that bends it slightly out
of shape." You are eminently correct to contrast "Georgette's
no-nonsense-yet-humane letter" with my disconcerting reply
which has left you wondering what I was thinking of when I
wrote:
 
"Margrit, as you know, had thought it necessary
to reject the family into which she was born
in order to establish a family of her own.
You know at first hand the extent to which
her efforts were unsuccessful.
She neither found the family she sought,
nor escaped the family of which she was both
victim and beneficiary.  As a result,
her life transpired in an existential limbo."

You may stop wondering. My thoughts, however
faulty and foolish, were exhaustively subsumed in
my words.

You ask:

"What made Margrit think that rejecting her own family
would be conducive to creating her own family?  
Was there anything to this?  Did the Meyers create
obstacles to Margrit's relationship with Izzie?  
I would seriously doubt it, and never heard anything
from Margrit suggesting that this was the case.  
Or have I forgotten something?"
 
Forgotten or perhaps misunderstood. Both my parents
and I were uncompromisingly critical of Margrit's
adulterous relationship with her first lover, her
college theology professor Edward Case in whose
household she had served as a caretaken of the
children.  I remember vividly warning her that if
she married Professor Case, he would betray her as
he had betrayed his first wife.  Ten years later,
when Margrit's relationship with Isidore Fleischer
became acute, I had recognized the error of my
critical stance and deliberately refrained from
all derogatory comments. Not so my parents who
were overtly contemptuous of Izzy who sported a
Hippie appearance, was the father of a mistreated
illegitimate child, and explicitly rejected the
responsibilities of marriage.

That Margrit should have concealed from you the nature
and the degree of her alienation from her family, is
not surprising. Particularly after my parents' deaths
Margrit became progressively ambivalent about her 
relationships to them and overtly prided herself on
possessing "the Meyer genes". Like our mother, Margrit
was an actress whose life was largely determined by
the script that she improvised for herself. Especially
as she recognized in you a beneficiary, like her, of
"the Meyer genes" it's not surprising that in her
reports to you, Margrit understated her conflicts with
her parents and her brother.

I have discovered correspondence with Georgette 
comprising more than fifty letters. These were exchanged
only a year ago, and it is symptomatic of my aging mind
that I should already have forgotten. Meanwhile, these
reminiscences of Margrit's relations to the Fleischers
have distracted me from Buechner's Woyzeck, which I had
intended to reread. Woyzeck might become the topic of a
subsequent letter.

Jochen