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By Root 22657 0

“superfluous Jews,” and he scribbled away at length about the matter of “population transfer” and “expatriation.” He was a member of a government mission sent to Madagascar to explore the possibility of Jewish settlements. (He brought Sophie an African mask—she recalled his sunburn.) Though still abstaining from suggestions of violence, he began to waver and his insistence upon the necessity of an immediate practical answer to the problem was more and more resolute. A certain franticness entered the Professor’s life. He became a leading activist in the movement toward segregation, and was one of the fathers of the idea of separate “ghetto benches” for Jewish students. He was a piercing analyst of the economic crisis. He gave rabble-rousing speeches in Warsaw. In a depressed economy, he raged, what right had alien ghetto Jews to compete for jobs with honest Poles flooding into the city from everywhere? Toward the end of 1938, in the full flood of his passion, he began working on his magnum opus, the aforementioned pamphlet, in which for the first time he broached the idea—very cautiously, backing and filling with a circumspection bordering on the ambiguous—of “total abolishment.” Ambiguous, tentative—but there. Abolishment. Not brutality. Total abolishment. By this time, indeed for several years, Sophie had been transcribing some of her father’s dictation, and humble and subservient as any peonness, had taken on every secretarial chore he demanded. Her submissive labor, which she had executed patiently, like practically all dutiful Polish daughters trapped in a tradition of absolute obeisance to Daddyhood, culminated one week in the winter of 1938 with the typing and editing of the manuscript of Poland’s Jewish Problem: Does National Socialism Have the Answer? At that moment she understood or, I should say, began to understand just what it was her father was up to.

Despite my badgering inquisitiveness as Sophie related these things, it was difficult for me to gain a thorough picture of her childhood and youth, though some things became very clear. Her subservience to her father, for example, was complete, as complete as in any neopaleolithic pigmy culture of the rain forest, demanding utter fealty from the helpless offspring. She never questioned this fealty, she told me; it was part of her bloodstream, so much so that as a little girl growing up she rarely even resented it. It was all bound up in her Polish Catholicism, in which veneration of a father seemed appropriate and necessary anyway. In fact, she admitted that she may have even rather relished her virtually menial submission, the “Yes, Papa’s” and “No, thank you, Papa’s” she was compelled to say daily, the favors and attentions she had to pay, the ritual respect, the enforced obsequiousness that she shared with her mother. She may have been, she admitted, truly masochistic. After all, even in her most miserable recollections, she had to concede that he was not actually cruel to either of them; he had a playful if crude sense of humor and was, despite all his aloofness and majesty, not above bestowing, on rare occasions, small rewards. In order to remain happy, a household tyrant cannot be totally unbenign.

Perhaps it was such mitigating qualities (permitting Sophie to perfect her French, which he considered a decadent language; allowing her mother to indulge her love for composers other than Wagner, triflers like Faure and Debussy and Scarlatti) that caused Sophie to accept without any conscious resentment his complete domination of her life even after she was married. Beyond this, as the daughter of a distinguished though colorfully controversial member of the faculty (many but by no means all of his colleagues shared the Professor’s extreme ethnic views) Sophie was only vaguely aware of her father’s political beliefs, of his governing rage. He kept that apart from his family, though obviously through the early years of her adolescence she could not remain completely oblivious of his animosity toward Jews. But it could scarcely have been an unprecedented thing in Poland to have an anti-Semitic parent. As for herself