August 3, 2021

Dear Donald,

Thank you for your letter. I have not heard from Dr. Busch. As I mentioned previously, I have interrupted my translation into English of "Verstreut über alle fünf Kontinente" because publication of an English text requires both Dr. Busch's endorsement and his cooperation.  If Dr. Busch or someone in his place asked me at some juncture in the future to continue with the translation, I can't anticipate how much I could then still accomplish.  I am getting old and aging is irreversible.

In the context of my translating, I had occasion to think about the meaning of the word "family" which is used by various authors to refer many different constellations. Dr. Busch, as you know, refers to us, the descendants of Isaak and Jakob Rosenthal as "Großfamilie", the German equivalent of "extended family". According to one definition, the members of an "extended family", e.g. grandparents, grandchildren, uncles, aunts and cousins are family members because they are "familiar" and well-known to each other.  Dr. Busch, however, uses the term in a genetic sense: he views us as an extended family by virtue of a common ancestor, even though we may never have met and if we did, could hardly understand one another if only for lack of a common language.

For some years now, I have been thinking about time, about what it means to describe what is happening "now", in the present, and what has happened "in time past". As you perhaps know, in German the same word, "Geschichte", is used to refer on the one hand, to a detailed, precise, "scientific" account of the past, and on the other hand, also to a story that is "only" imagined, a fairy tale, a childrens' story, a legend or a myth. Similarly, the English words "history" and "story" have a single linguistic root.  Recently I have been reading snatches of the writings of one Leopold von Ranke, the scholar credited with inventing modern "scientific" history. These efforts have not disabused me of my prejudice that all history, that all writing about an hypothetical past reality, has the characteristics of myth; and is nothing but an often sophisticated and erudite story-telling which creates only an illusory reality of a past that is, in truth, inaccessible.

When I test my understanding of "history" by considering what I "remember" about my childhood, my youth, the course of my life up to and including your recent visit, and by what I can reconstruct from notes, letters, and other documents, then the fragility of such reality of the past as I am able to "recollect" becomes inescapable, and my thoughts exhibit the evanescence of a dream.

Jochen