Virginia Woolf (3 page)

While in Wisconsin, I applied for a second grant, this time to travel to Germany, given by the Institute of International Education, known by the letters IIE.

The letter telling me I had won the fellowship and could study in Germany from 1931 to 1932 arrived during Easter vacation. I decided the news was too good to tell my parents by phone, so I hitchhiked home. Impatient after a full day, I decided to take a train from Albany to Manhattan’s Penn Station. I telephoned our housekeeper, telling her to ask my parents to meet me.

I learned later that in the Studebaker, driving from our house in Brooklyn to Manhattan, Mama asked suspiciously, “Dave, why is she coming home now? She didn’t even come home for Christmas. I tell you, she must be pregnant.”

Papa, who never lost faith in me, tried to reassure her. “Wait. We’ll find out soon enough.”

At the station, I flung my arms around them. “Guess what,” I could hardly control my excitement, “I’m going to Germany!”

Mama shook her head. “I wish she was pregnant.”

Unlike their pride in the Wisconsin fellowship, this exchange fellowship to Germany was a nightmare for them. They did their best to prevent me from going. They offered me a car. They offered me the equivalent in money. Mama was sure that Adolf Hitler, who was not yet in power in 1931 but was in the news almost every day, would come off a stage and shoot me.

“He won’t shoot me, Mom,” I told her. “I’ll wear a pin with an American flag on my lapel and I’ll carry my American passport in my blouse.”

Mama, sharp-eyed and sharp-tongued, said, “And Hitler can’t shoot through a passport?”

I told my father, “Papa, you knew at sixteen it was time for you to leave Odessa. You knew you had to get out of Czarist Russia. I know it’s time for me to go to Germany. I want to find out what Hitler is up to.”

Though I knew how anxious they were, I had the money in my pocket. Restless to get out of Brooklyn and begin my journey, I gave myself the whole summer to travel through Europe. The classes in Cologne would start in late September.

Seeing me off on the S.S.
Milwaukee
of the Hamburg-Amerika Line, Mama wept. “I don’t know if we’ll ever see you again.”

“You will, Mama. It’s only for one year.”

She acted as if she were already sitting in mourning.

It was June 1931 when I arrived in Paris and spent a month taking morning classes at the Sorbonne and whiling away my afternoons sipping tea at the Metropol Café, hoping to see some of the American writers in exile, especially Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. I never saw them, but I was thrilled, telling myself the world was opening up for me.

London was next. I took my first airplane ride from Paris to London. I felt like an adventurer. I was exploring two cities I had grown to love from books. I was also exploring myself, a nineteen-year-old who had grown up in the cocoon of a loving Jewish family,
yearning to break free, yearning to embrace the world. I was happy to travel alone so that no one diverted me from meeting new people and marveling at the beauty of these two cities. Elsewhere in England, I wandered through Oxford, visited Stratford where Shakespeare had lived, and breathed the literary air of England so that Charles Dickens’s novels and Wordsworth’s poetry came alive to me as never before.

From London I took a train and ferry to Holland, sat on its beautiful beach at Scheveningen, watched Dutch women walk in wooden clogs, and finally arrived in Cologne on a balmy September day in 1931.

Dr. Hugo Gabriel, thirtyish and effervescent, representing the IIE at the University, had found a Jewish home for me with Papa Otto and Mama Frieda Herz and their daughter Luisa, my age. They treated me as if I were their second daughter.

For some reason, as soon as we met, Dr. Gabriel told me that his parents were Jewish, but he was Protestant. Hitler was not yet in power, but some Jews, fearing his virulent anti-Semitic threats, sought to save themselves by converting. I did not feel that I had the right to ask him why he had abandoned his Jewishness.

He helped me choose the courses I would take. We agreed that I would attend classes in German Philosophy with the renowned Nietzsche scholar Ernst Bertram; “Englisches Seminar”; and art history.

I had been at the university for about a month when Professor Herbert Schöffler, a round, fatherly-looking, middle-aged man, head of the “Englisches Seminar,” called me to his office.

“We have been watching you,” he said. “We would like you to stay and work for a Ph.D.”

A Ph.D.!

I shook my head. “My parents would never give me money to stay for another two or three years—or however long it takes to get a Ph.D. in Germany.”

“Nobody,” Professor Schöffler was smiling, “nobody in Germany has ever gotten a doctorate in one year. But maybe you can do it. I have a special reason. I love Virginia Woolf’s writing. None of my students knows English well enough to analyze her writing. You are the only American student here. I would like you to write a dissertation—in English—analyzing her work, her style, her language.”

I managed to say “I’ll try,” shook his hand, and rushed downtown to my favorite bookstore. There they were, all of her novels published to that point, including her latest,
The Waves
, all in English, all in paperback, all published by the Tauchnitz Press.

I was soon mesmerized by Virginia Woolf’s writing. I hung her picture on my bedroom wall.
A Room of One’s Own
became my Bible. It gave me the courage to later dispense with the objective journalist’s voice and write from my heart and soul. I was fascinated by her will to write as a woman, and distraught by her anxiety and fear that male critics would tear her books apart. She was on the side of the creators, the dreamers, the poets, the women. On the other side were the critics, the predators, the destroyers, the angry, hostile, women-loathing men.

She wrote
Orlando
, my favorite of her novels, as an ode to Vita Sackville-West, one of the women she loved. In a sense, the character “Orlando” was physically bipolar—a charming and heroic man who metamorphoses into a charming and beautiful woman.

In one of my sessions with Professor Schöffler, I told him how much I was enjoying Woolf’s writing and how much more I wanted to know about her.

“Very good,” he said. “Why don’t you write to her, care of the Hogarth Press?”

He checked his files and gave me the address, “52 Tavistock Square, London,
W.C
.1, and here is her telephone number, Museum 3488.”

I wrote a letter which included some questions about her work and, a few weeks later, received an answer from her secretary, Peggy Bolsher.

16th Dec 1931

Dear Madam,

… Mrs Woolf has always preferred to let her readers decide for themselves as to the meaning of her books, and therefore can not reply to your questions as to the autobiographical elemkent [sic] in Orlando; but it is generally known that the story is based, so far as it is
based on reality, on the life of Miss Sackville West; and the house is underatood [sic] to be Knole, the home of Miss Wests [sic] ancestors in Kent.

Yours faithfully P. Bolsher (Secretary)

During the Christmas vacation, I took some of Virginia Woolf’s books with me on the train to Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s favorite vacation town. I was with four other American exchange students, each of us invited by the U.S. State Department to spend the holiday together at a ski lodge. A State Department official greeted us as we entered the lodge, told us he was in charge and that if we had any problems, we were to come to him.

He told us to meet for dinner at 6 P.M. in the ski lodge. Five townspeople were our hosts, all jovial-looking, the women in brightly colored dirndl skirts and starched white blouses, the men in knee-high leather pants, leather vests, plaid shirts, and green felt hats with feathers darting up from the brim. I was placed next to a robust, red-faced peasant in his mid-twenties. After he had drunk several beers, he became a little too friendly, putting his arm around my waist.

“You’re different, even though you’re an American,” he said to me in German. “I don’t like Americans, and I hate Jews.”

I pulled his arm away, stood up, and said, “I am an American, I am a Jew, and I will not listen to anyone denouncing my country and my people.” I stalked out.

The State Department official rushed after me. “You insulted him. I want you to go back and apologize.”

“I apologize to someone who denounces America and Jews?
He
should apologize to
me
.”

The State Department official’s face flushed with anger. “This is no way to treat our host.”

“Then I will leave here in the morning.”

Back in my bedroom, freezing with cold, I asked for hot bricks for my feet. They were poor comfort for the anger I felt that a U.S. governmental official would defend an obvious Nazi. True, I was his guest, but I did not have to submit to a Nazi insult. I was
angry too that the official was more concerned with proper manners than with racial slurs.

I packed my clothes and my Virginia Woolf books the next morning and took a train to Vienna, where a friend of my sister Betty was studying medicine.

“What would you like to see today?” he asked me.

“I’d like to the see the university where you’re studying.”

“I don’t think you’re going to like what I have to show you.”

“Why?”

“You’ll see.”

We entered the lab; broken glass lay strewn on long tables and on the floor.

“Nazis came in here yesterday,” he told me, “and broke every one of our experiments. Months of work ruined.”

“It’s horrible,” I said. “How can you go on studying here?”

“I have no choice. I couldn’t get into a medical school in the States. They all have quotas limiting the number of Jewish students. I was lucky to be accepted here, and I’m going to stay.”

I left Vienna, rushed back to Cologne, and continued working on the dissertation while attending courses on Nietszche, modern English literature, and Albrecht Durer in art history. At the same time, I followed the results of the German elections that were taking place every few months. The greatest lesson I learned in Germany was how one can become a dictator
legally.
Hitler entered every election and won nearly all of them until he reached the top and overthrew the government.

In the summer of 1932, I handed Professor Schöffler my thesis, “Virginia Woolf: A Study.” A few days later, I would take the oral examinations. Three examiners—Professor Bertram, Professor Schöffler, and a professor from the art department—sat on chairs in a circle in Bertram’s office, like inquisitors in an interrogation chamber. One of my Jewish friends in the university had told me that Professor Bertram hated Jews, hated Americans, and hated women. But he was a charismatic teacher who had taught us enthusiastically about what a great philosopher Nietzsche was.

Stories of how many students Professor Bertram had failed in their orals flashed through my brain. German students could take them over and over, but if I failed, it was the end for me.

I stood before the three men, my hands cold as ice. Professor
Bertram, speaking in German, began the ordeal with questions about Nietzsche and his philosophy.

“What stands out most for you in Nietzsche’s philosophy?” he asked.

I tried to control my teeth from chattering,

“His search to lead the German people to new heights, to help Germany rise above even the evils we see confronting her today.”

What if he’s a Nazi? I thought. How will he react to my talking about evil today?

But he went on, asking more questions, until I startled myself by shouting my favorite Nietzsche line,
“Nacht bin ich, ach dass ich Licht ware
[Night am I; ah, that I were light].”

Professor Schöffler took over. Beads of sweat ran into my eyes.

“In your thesis,” Professor Schöffler began, “you describe how much more sympathetic Virginia Woolf’s women are than most of her men. Please explain this.”

“For Virginia Woolf,” I said, “woman is the creator, man is the destroyer. Many of her women are heroic, her men often weak, with no heart, no mind.”

Now why did I say that, I wondered. I saw Bertram and the art professor sitting straight, listening hard, their faces frozen.

“You call her novel
The Waves
a ‘rhythm of conflicts,’ ” Professor Schöffler said. “What did you mean?”

I managed to pull out of my brain sentences still fresh from my thesis. “It’s the struggle between light and darkness. It is the law of polarity, of conflicts as irreconcilable as night and day, of poets versus critics, that reverberates through all her writing.”

The third inquisitor, the art professor, interrogated me about Albrecht Dürer.

The inquisition lasted half an hour. The three men rose, and Professor Schöffler led me to the door, telling me to wait outside.

A few minutes later, he came toward me. “I am proud to tell you, Fräulein Gruber, you have won your doctorate
mit sehr gut.
It’s the German equivalent of your American ‘magna cum laude.’ ”

I was speechless.

Professor Bertram came out to shake my hand.
“Schicken Sie uns recht viel Jugend genau wie Sie.
” (“Send us many more young people just like you.”)

I was still dazed when Professor Schöffler handed me two sheets of paper. “These are Professor Bertram’s and my critiques of your dissertation on Virginia Woolf.”

I read Schöffler’s first: “It is a critical study of a woman by a woman. A man could never have written this work. It possesses deep critical powers and a profound knowledge of English and world literature.”

Still disbelieving, I read Bertram’s page: “This work could be a model for modern criticism. The struggle of the poet with the critic is seen very sharply, very clearly. The work shows amazing maturity and originality.”

I ran all the way home to share the news with my German family.

“
Fräulein Doktor
,” Mama Herz embraced me.

The next day, I traveled to Frankfurt, determined to see Goethe’s house before I left Germany. I stood in awe at the desk where Germany’s greatest poet, playwright, and novelist had written his masterpieces, some with a quill pen. In the ladies’ room, I listened in shock as an attendant with a bosom projecting like a bulwark screamed at a small elderly woman. “You pig. You asshole. You dog manure. I clean these stinking toilets and you give me one pfennig.”