Kahn & Engelmann






























Biblioasis International Translation Series

General Editor: Stephen Henighan

I Wrote Stone: The Selected Poems of Ryszard Kapuśćinski (Poland)
Translated by Diana Kuprel and Marek Kusiba

Good Morning Comrades by Ondjaki (Angola)
Translated by Stephen Henighan

Kahn & Engelmann by Hans Eichner (Austria-Canada)
Translated by Jean M. Snook









































KAHN & ENGELMANN

By

Hans Eichner













Translated from the German by Jean M. Snook





















Chapter One



Sidonie



1.

In the summer of 1938, a Jewish refugee is going for a walk on Carmel Beach (Is he from Cologne? from Berlin? from Vienna? It doesn't matter). Twenty metres out from shore, a man is fighting against the waves and yelling for help in Hebrew. The refugee stops to listen, takes his jacket off, folds it neatly (one should never act too hastily); and while taking off his tie and shoes as well, before jumping into the sea to help the yelling man, he exclaims indignantly: "What a fool! Hebrew he has learned. Swimming he should have learned!"
That's a travelling joke. It was told much the same way in 1789 in Mainz, when the first émigrés arrived there and went for walks along the Rhine in their elegant clothes. But precisely because it is a travelling joke, it is also a Jewish joke; for who has travelled (or, as is mostly the case, has fled) more often than the Jews? From Egypt, from Babylonia, from Canaan, from Spain, from Galicia, from the Third Reich. For me, though, this joke is situated once and for all at the foot of Mount Carmel, because I live a hundred metres above the beach and look out at the sea every morning with ever renewed delight, much as people in Weimar used to be able to look at the Ettersberg before the concentration camp was built there. (To be sure, there are inhabitants of Weimar again now who can look with delight at the Ettersberg; human memory is short.)
How did I get here, where I bathe poodles during the day so that I can walk along the beach in the evening? I will reconstruct it, although I am actually not very interested in myself. In one of Thomas Mann's early stories he writes that Schiller occasionally needed "only to look at his hand in order to be filled with an enthusiastic tenderness for himself." He could afford to do that. For the likes of us, interest in oneself, to say nothing of tenderness, is usually a sign of immaturity. At any rate, on my way to Haifa (Jews travel), there was one thing or another that may be worth mentioning as typical of the experiences of my generation; and because I am usually too tired in the evenings to undertake anything more sensible (I am getting old!), it may be worth my while to make the attempt.
I'll begin by rummaging through a shoebox full of old photographs that I inherited from my mother, along with a pile of yellowed letters and the princely sum of 15 pounds sterling. The oldest of these photographs - dating from about 1880, but technically quite good - shows a middle-aged woman and a girl of about seventeen years. The woman, with her straight hair combed back, her high forehead and dark eyes, reminds me of my grandmother; but of course she isn't my grandmother, but rather her mother, my great-grandmother. Like her mother, the girl herself - my grandmother - is wearing a heavy black cotton dress that fastens closely around her neck, is belted at the waist and falls below her ankles. On her feet she wears a pair of high-buttoned boots, to which I will return shortly. The only jewellery she is wearing is a cameo brooch, and if you take the difference in their ages into account, her face is astonishingly similar to her mother's.
But what was the story of those boots? In shoe stores when I was sixteen, you tried on the shoe - in my case an inexpensive mass-produced shoe - by putting your foot into an X-ray machine to see if it fitted. After the Second World War, these machines were abolished because they might cause cancer; that wasn't a step backwards, because the X-rayed shoes usually didn't fit anyway. In my grandmother's day, there were still proper shoemakers. Such a shoemaker would sit in his store on a stool, the customer would sit down facing him, put his foot on a piece of brown paper, and the shoemaker would trace the outline, measure the height of the instep with a tape measure, ask about corns and similar troubles, determine the price depending on the design, the type of leather to be used and the ability of the customer to pay, and a week later the shoes were ready.