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plucked unrelated quotations from the ages to support his preconceived ideas. His popularity is helped, no doubt, by his recent marriage to Wagner’s daughter. Many regard him as the successor to Wagner’s racist legacy.”
    “Crowned by Wagner?”
    “No, they never met. Wagner died before Chamberlain courted his daughter. But Cosima has given him her blessing.”
    The headmaster poured more tea. “Well, our young Rosenberg seems so thoroughly taken in by Chamberlain’s racism that it may not be easy to peel him away from it. But when you think about it, what unpopular, lonely, somewhat inept adolescent would not purr with pleasure to learn that he is of superior stock? That his ancestors founded the great civilizations? Especially a boy who never had a mother to admire him, whose father is on death’s doorstep, whose older brother is sickly, who—”
    “Ah, Karl, I hear the echoes of your visionary, that Viennese doctor Freud, who also writes persuasively and also dives into the classics, never failing to surface without a tasty quote clenched between his teeth.”
    “ Mea culpa . I confess that his ideas seem ever more sensible to me. For instance, you just said a hundred thousand copies of Chamberlain’s anti-Semitic
book have been sold. Of the legions of readers, how many dismiss him like you do? And how many are electrified by him like Rosenberg? Why does the same book elicit such a range of responses? There must be something in the particular reader that leaps out to embrace the book. His life, his psychology, his image of himself. There must be something lurking deep in the mind—or, as this Freud says, the unconscious—that causes a particular reader to fall in love with a particular writer.”
    “A pithy topic for our next dinner discussion! Meanwhile my little student, Rosenberg, is, I suspect, fretting and sweating out there. What shall we do with him?”
    “Yes, we’re avoiding that. We promised him assignments and need to come up with some. Maybe we’re overreaching. Is it even remotely possible to assign a task that could exert a positive influence in just the few more weeks we have? I see so much bitterness in him, so much hatred for anyone but the phantasm of the ‘true German.’ I think we need to get him away from ideas onto something tangible, something that he can touch.”
    “I agree. It’s harder to hate an individual than a race,” said Herr Schäfer. “I have a thought. I know one Jew he must care about. Let’s call him back in, and I’ll start with that.”
    Headmaster Epstein’s secretary removed the tea dishes and fetched Alfred, who resumed his seat at the end of the table.
    Herr Schäfer slowly filled his pipe, lit it, drew in and exhaled a cloud of smoke, and began, “Rosenberg, we have a few more questions. I am aware of your sentiments about Jews in broad racial terms but surely you have crossed the paths of fine Jews. I happen to know that you and I have had the same personal doctor, Herr Apfelbaum. I have heard he delivered you.”
    “Yes,” Alfred said. “He has been my doctor all my life.”
    “And he has also been my close friend all these years. Tell me, is he poisonous? Is he a parasite? No one in Reval works harder. When you were an infant, I saw with my own eyes how he worked day and night trying to save your mother from tuberculosis. And I have been told that he wept at her funeral.”
    “Dr. Apfelbaum is a good man. He always gives us good care. And we always pay him, by the way. But there can be good Jews. I know that. I speak no ill of him as a person, only of the Jewish seed. It is undeniable that all Jews carry the seeds of a hateful race, and that—”

    “Ah, that word again, ‘hateful,’” Headmaster Epstein interrupted, trying hard to restrain himself. “I hear a great deal about hate, Rosenberg, but I hear nothing about love. Do not forget that love is the center of Jesus’s message. Not only loving God but loving your neighbor as