Paper Love [antikvár]

Introduction In the Beginning In my father's eulogy for my grandfather, he quoted Field Marshal Ferdinand Foch: "Hard pressed on my right; center is yielding; impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent, i shall attack." We called my grandfather saba, the modern, muscular Hebrew appellation, rather than the Old World Yiddish, zeyde—or German, Opa— let alone the (far too) American grandpa. Born Chaim, he went by Karl. My grandfather, in my memory and in the hagiography of my family, was a bon vivant, a multilingual, well-traveled émigré doctor who lived with the joie de vivre of a man who had never been oppressed by hardship. Or maybe that's not right: with the joie de vivre of a man who had known only hardship, and then emerged from it, phoenixlike, into a problemless promised land. He was dashing, a character out of (Jewish) film noir, with the perfect suit, a jaunty hat, a top note of expensive European aftershave, a bottom whiff of Odol, the German minty mouthwash he imported in bulk for himself each time he returned to the Continent. His appeal was not simply aesthetic—his hair, as his friends teased him, was unruly, wildly curly,