Broken Necks/Melancholia Preceding Seduction
"I wonder whether the pleasure of confessing to this creature my actual opinions of her is a sufficient recompense for the loss of her favors which would result. It is always curiously satisfying to disillusion a woman concerning herself.
"Yet I find a certain exhilaration in pretending to be deceived by the mask she wears. It is indeed unchivalrous to demand of a married woman of forty that she abandon the pretenses by which she manages to be interesting to herself and to conceal her shames and defeats from her world.
"How charming she would be, however, if she collapsed under the influence of such reality as is left in her passion and revealed to me for a moment the secret which cowers behind the architecture of her poise. She will, however, remain an inspired Zionist, even while going through the bewildering ritual of removing her corset.
"Alas, it becomes almost necessary to destroy the poor woman before facing her. I dislike secret preoccupations. Thus by thinking of her now and satisfying myself concerning my intelligent penetration of her masks, I will be able with a clear intellectual conscience to admire and flatter her later.
"She belongs to that type of Jewess whom the consciousness of race has stamped with a pathetic inferiority. She is ashamed of Jews, and in her mind the word Jews is secretly a synonym for social ostracism, loudness, vulgarity and things looked down upon by the world. Her being ashamed of her Jewishness has plunged her into her present Zionist fanaticism.
"Her egoism has from the beginning cowered before her shame. She has been unable to bear the knowledge that she was ashamed. And this has inspired her not to hide the fact that she is a Jewess, as so many bounders try to do, but to create for herself and others a concept of Jewishness of which she could make a public boast.
"The result is that she spends most of her time informing others that the Jews are a beautiful, poetical and poignantly historical race. She is continually denouncing her fellow countrymen for not succumbing to the high dream of Zionism—for not unfurling their Jewishness to the world. She finds a certain revenge in reminding others, whom she fancies to be suffering from the same secret shame as herself, that they are Jews.
"Also, it is easy to detect that her fanatic romanticizing of her race is no more than an oblique effort to make herself socially presentable. Every boast she makes of Jewish history, Jewish art and Jewish morality is a plea for her 'social fitness.' And, in the same manner, she is able to conceal her unworthy and inhospitable shame from herself by keeping up an. interminable boasting. Her egoistic fear is not that she will be taken for a Jewess, but that people may sense that she is ashamed of being one.
"It is curious how strong characters such as she build up an entire artificial life for the sole purpose of concealing what in the beginning was no more than a minor weakness. The false architecture of this life has now completely devoured her. She will remain lost until her death within a labyrinth of pretenses and evasions. Yes, it would be exhilarating, in a way, to plunge through the concealments she offers me and place my hands upon the dwindling thing that lives somewhere inside her—the little germ from which this loud and confused structure she calls herself has grown.
"Undoubtedly I would find—nothing. Her defenses are too strong. Her ruses have been powerful enough to destroy her secret. And she exists today as a psychological monstrosity—like some fungus without root that feeds on itself and is proud of its swollen and unreal proportions.
"Ah—she has on the shawl I brought back from Jerusalem. And she is alight with excitement. She has obviously been attending a Zionist meeting and making speeches. And now she feels herself a historical figure—what with the talismanic shawl she wears. In the bedroom when I embrace her she will murmur of Ruth and Rachel and ask me to recite the Song of Solomon . . . I was right. It is easier now to flatter her.
"Good evening, Esther. You are, of course, late. Nevertheless, I will make my offering. A volume of poems by Bialek, the Hebrew poet. I am preparing a paper on him—an amazing genius. Come, we will read some of them in my apartment . . ."