Dear Benjamin,

Thank you for your e-mail wondering how I am. Much, much better than I deserve to be, because at age 87 1/3, I'm supposed to be out of the way either a) in the grave, b) in a nursing home, c) in the intensive care unit, d) in the recovery room, e) in the rehabilitation center, f) on the psychiatric ward, or g) in the penitentiary.  I'm grateful to be spared the indignity of having to live with a family that knows I'm impossible to get along with.

Instead I pass my days thankful for the splendid solitude at 174 School Street, with courteous neighbors on both sides who wave to me with friendly solicitude when they think I have seen them first, but turn the other way so as not to be inconvenienced by me, when they think I'm not looking and they can ignore me with impunity. 

I may or may not have recited you that I have been told that when I was one year old, though physically in good health, I screamed continuously for a whole month after I had been abandoned to the "care" of my grandmother Elfriede Rosenthal. After that, I spent my childhood and youth, crippled with separation anxiety. The difference between being one year old and 87 years old, is that in the course of years you learn that screaming gets you nowhere, but that with meditation, (if you choose to be religious, you call it "prayer"; if you're intellectual, you call it "philosophy") you can delude yourself into thinking that solitude is the greatest. Accordingly, I spend my time talking to myself, telling myself how fortunate and happy I am, and whiling away the hours and days by writing novels, elegies, sonnets and such, indifferent to the circumstance that no one reads them. 

Fort Tryon Park, although I can't remember ever having visited it, has an important role in my imagination. It's across the street from 1781 Riverside Drive, the apartment building on the corner of Staff Street, where my uncle Fritz lived with his wife Margot.

Here's the story as my cousin Marion tells it in an e-mail letter:

"It's a terrible loss that my father (Fritz) was separated from your family for so long.  He harbored unshakeable loyalty and deep love for your family, as well as for my mother.  Since my mother believed she had deep grievances against your parents, and felt totally uncomfortable and disrespected in their presence, this created an insoluble dilemma for my father.  My mother had wonderful qualities, but she was terribily domineering, so my father COULD NOT challenge her views or decisions without unleashing a cauldron of anger and, in the end, he would have had to submit.  It wasn't worth it. 
 
[Who said that history doesn't repeat itself?]
So he went along with the idea that your parents were impossible to deal with.  This view was encouraged by George [Georg was a physician, and Fritz's and my father's cousin] who seemed to feel that your father always had high fallutin' ideas and took himself too seriously, while George viewed himself (and acted as) a man of simple tastes, plain-spoken, who enjoyed talking to ordinary folk who he met at lunch counters, and vacationed in little resorts in New Jersey where the men spent their hours playing cards.  To George it was also laughable that your father chose to practice in the sticks where, he woud say (excuse my pathetic ignorance of German spelling): "Da geht ja garnischts an.  Wenn da eine Kuh sich drei mahl um dreht ehr sie sich hin lehgt, dann schreibt man dass in die Zeitung." [Nothing happens there. If a cow turns around three times before settling down, it gets into the newspaper.]    
 
George, nonetheless, had wonderful qualities and an unshakeable friendship with my father.  They saw each other several times per week.  My father and I would walk to George's house every Sunday morning, buy fresh rolls at the bakery on the way, and eat a second breakfast with them.  It never occurred to me until a couple of days ago that when George would send me out with their dachshound to get him a pack of cigarettes at the corner store,  it was probably sometimes just to get me out of earshot so he could talk more freely with my father.  George also came over to our house an evening or two each week to play chess with my grandmother who lived with us.
 
From seeing George and my father together, I learned that you could have a profound relationship, a deeply satisfying friendship, just by being together, without talking all the time.  I wish your father and mine could have been together like that.
 
My father, with his fierce, unbendable loyalties and commitments, could not get over your father's conversion from Judaism.  He considered it an offense to their parents.  I don't know how he would have handled this if my mother had not been so dead-set against a relationship with your parents. Given other circumstances, I suspect he might have set aside the conversion more easily. 
 
My mother's rupture with your parents, as she envisioned it, occurred in Germany around the time of her marriage.  She discovered that your parents were sending my father lists of expenses they had had (for the children and possibly for other things, I don't know), expecting that my father would chip in for the expenses, as he had been doing before he became involved with my mother.  The idea had been that you and Margrit were my father's children too. He didn't have a family of his own, so he and they considered they were all one family and, since my father had a good job, he was happy to contribute financially.  My mother considered this outrageous and didn't mince words.  I suppose my father might have defended the system, but my mother was having none of it. 
 
My mother, though I think she was plenty intelligent, was always very defensive about not having an intellectual education.  She was a great defender of her dignity and was anxious not to give anyone a chance to look down upon her.  I think this made her feel very uneasy with your parents who seemed to approach life with intellectual worldviews that my mother didn't know how to handle. 

* * * * * *
 
1781 Riverside Drive was the first house into which I entered after arriving in New York at Pier 86 on March 31, 1939. But at 1781 Riverside Drive, there was no room for me. The next two nights, before I was deported to Chappaqua, I slept on the examining table of my father's physician cousin Georg, whose home-office was around the corner, not far away on Broadway.  

Another reference to Fort Tryon Park, again from my cousin's e-mail, 17 Jul 2009:
"George enjoyed talking to people he met around New York, and one guy he met in the early 1940s was a retired German naval officer, a  nice guy who liked to look at ships.  He and George would go around the various waterfronts of New York and see what was to be seen.  He especially liked going up to the top of Fort Tryon Park (opposite our house) where he could look down on the Hudson River and see ships that were built in naval yards north of us come down the river toward New York Harbor.  So when George was working, George's friend would sometimes stop by at George's and offer to take Lumpi [Georg's Dachshund] for a walk, then walk to my house and offer to take me out in the baby carriage for a few hours in Front Tryon park.  I apparently enjoyed this, as did Lumpi.  But after a while, the guy was arrested.  He turned out to be a German spy.  He had a radio transmitter hidden up in Fort Tryon Park and was making reports about the ship traffic on the Hudson River.  I was, unfortunately, no more capable than Lumpi of understanding what was going on and warning the world."

My cousin Marion's story reminds me of the unannounced visit ofthe FBI to our apartment in Konnarock, after my father had been discovered to be a spy when he was seen photographing the waterfalls of "Straight Branch" next to what was then the single lane dirt road between Konnarock and Damascus.  I remember the espionage hysteria during WWII. I interpret the fable relayed by my cousin as the invention intended to divert suspicion from himself, by someone who was suddenly struck with fear for having mistakenly identified a retired German naval office as a "nice guy".

A different experience of Fort Tryon Park:  When Grandma and I were courting, she wrote to me, (on Sunday, January 10, 1950, 10 p.m.,)

"I spent most of the afternoon in the cloisters going carefully through the parts through which I will take my class. I really understood for the first time the beauty of the things there. I hope I will be able to describe it to them. This is a place I would like to go some time with you.

....

I have worked here all day though I intended to go to church tonight. But it was terribly cold outdoors, and I was in the midst of the modern history exam. So I rationalized and explained to myself why I could remain here and read the Bible - and write to you,  a less worthy alternative. So much of the work I meant to do still remains. But I feel beautifully calm and tranquil - as if I were still in the Romanesque cloister with its beautiful capitals and flowers among the moss, and a fountain.

There is a quotation from Bacon which I read Friday that keeps haunting me - as much I think for the language and balance as for the thought: "There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion". I am haunted too by a Pieta, the body of the Christ, stiff, awkward and only about half the size of the Mary. I had not realized before why the Christ was so small - that she was remembering holding him as a child. The statue was not beautiful, but the idea is. Good night."

Grandma and I never did visit the Cloisters together, because in the ensuing months she became more and more alienated from New York, and after she moved to Boston in the following year, she never wanted to return.

So now I've demonstrated to you with this letter, my technique for deriving satisfaction from, or reconciling myself to my solitude. Thank you again for your inquiry.

I wish you well for your studies, and much happiness for what really matters.

Love, Jochen