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at all festive departure of the carriages? For a long while the cloud over the lazy river found no rest: for a time it hovered over Bohnsack, for a time it hung long and narrow over the woods and dunes, then broad and fluid over the opposite shore, dropping an old crow into a marshy meadow, where it stood out gray and stiff. Only when landaus and four-in-hand drove into Schiewenhorst did the cloud disperse into its various species, which found their way back to the square outside the church, to cemetery, gardens, barns, rushes, lilac bushes, and pines; but until evening, when the christening party, having eaten and drunk its fill, sat weighing down the long table with elbows, anguish darkened numerous bird hearts of varying sizes; for as Eduard lay on his baptismal cushion, his scarecrow-inventing spirit had made itself known to all the birds. From that moment on they knew all about him.

TENTH MORNING SHIFT
    Who can tell whether Albrecht Amsel, merchant and reserve lieutenant, wasn’t a Jew after all? The people of Schiewenhorst, Einlage, and Neufahr would hardly have called him a rich Jew for no reason at all. And what about the name? Isn’t it typical? You say he’s of Dutch descent, because in the early Middle Ages Dutch settlers drained the Vistula delta, having brought with them linguistic peculiarities, windmills, and their names?
    Now that Brauksel has insisted in the course of past morning shifts that A. Amsel is not a Jew and declared in so many words: “Of course Amsel was not a Jew,” he can now, with equal justification—for all origins are what we choose to make of them—try to convince you that of course Albrecht Amsel was a Jew. He came of a family of tailors long resident in Preussisch-Stargard and had been obliged—because his father’s house was full of children—to leave Preussisch-Stargard at the age of sixteen for Schneidemühl, Frankfurt on the Oder, and Berlin. Fourteen years later he had come—metamorphosed, Protestant, and wealthy—to the Vistula estuary by way of Schneidemühl, Neustadt, and Dirschau. The cut which had made Schiewenhorst a village on the river was not yet a year old when Albrecht Amsel purchased his property on favorable terms.
    And so he went into business. What else should he have gone into? And so he sang in the church choir. Why shouldn’t he, a baritone, have sung in the church choir? And so he helped to found an athletic club, and among all the inhabitants of the village it was he who most staunchly believed that he Albrecht Amsel was not a Jew, that the name of Amsel came from Holland: lots of people go by the name of Specht (woodpecker), a famous African explorer was even called Nachtigal (nightingale), only Adler (eagle) is a typically Jewish name, and certainly not Amsel (blackbird). The tailor’s son had devoted fourteen years to forgetting his origins and only as a sideline, though with equal success, to amassing a good-Protestant fortune.
    And then in 1903 a precocious young man by the name of Otto Weininger wrote a book. This extraordinary book was named Sex and Character; published in Vienna and Leipzig, it labored for six hundred pages to demonstrate that women have no soul. Because the topic proved timely in those years of feminist agitation, and particularly because the thirteenth chapter, entitled “The Jewish Character,” showed that the Jews, being a feminine race, also have no soul, the extraordinary book ran into an incredible number of editions and found its way into households where otherwise only the Bible was read. And so Weininger’s brain child was also taken into the house of Albrecht Amsel.
    Perhaps the merchant would not have opened the thick book if he had known that a certain Herr Pfennig was engaged in denouncing Otto Weininger as a plagiarist. In 1906 there appeared a vicious pamphlet attacking the late Weininger—the young man had meanwhile taken his own life—in the crudest terms. Much as he deplored the tone of the vicious