December 17, 2021

Dear Donald,

Please permit me to apologize for importuning you with a supplementary letter close on the heels of my initial reply, but, as I probably mentioned earlier, I'm afflicted with "staircase wit", and what I really wanted to say occurs to me only as I am on the stairs, on my way home after the end of the party.

What is challenging me is an attempt to reconcile your inclination to be "proud" of our family, with the sadness that permeates my imagination when I try to reconstruct the lives of Antonie, Johanna and Elfriede Rosenthal and the families into which they married. Perhaps my profession as a physician has distorted my understanding of human relationships and has made me overly sensitive to the ills of body, of soul and of society.  Consciously, at least, I have felt that my family relationships are meaningful primarily, and perhaps only, as recurring occasions of mutual assistance, reciprocal help for which with respect to my ancestors, it is now too late, since I have survived them all.  My son, my daugher-in-law and my grandchildren now constitute that "nuclear" family whom I try to help as best I can. 

Please forgive the presumptuousness of my construing your pride of our family, as an expression of your affection for relationships which the passage of time has removed far beyond the horizon, relationships which are now inaccesible except in imagination or in dreams, and to which you can pay conventionally acceptable homage only by denominating your feelings for them as pride.

My very best wishes to yourself and Jan.

Jochen