The Secret Cellar | Ep. 25 | The Horrid Situation
In which Leah and Dorothy respond to Dr. Muche-Albrecht.
The Horrid Situation
Two months after Dr. Muche-Albrecht sent her email, Leah and Dorothy, the two surviving daughters of Jacob Josephson and the only surviving grandchildren of Josef Konrad Josefsohn, met to discuss the horrid situation privately and in detail. Their nightmare had come true: it turned out that their own grandfather had indeed consorted with Nazis. Or to be exact, with an anti-Semite, whose writings would later be used by the Nazis. The “Chest of Nazi Papers” that they had whispered about as children, the locked chest in the forbidden attic of their childhood home, had in fact contained this venom. And they had permitted a man like Roger McAllister to publish and profit from this trash.
By the time Leah welcomed Dorothy to her winter home in Naples, Florida, things had spun out of control. The executive director of the foundation had forwarded the email to one of their nephews, who understandably had sought to squelch the entire story. Less understandably, he had tried to do so with copyright infringement lawsuits directed against McAllister’s two publishers and the Goethe and Schiller Archive. The legal claims had no chance of success but quickly earned the affair long articles in the Globe and Mail, the Guardian, and Der Spiegel, which in turn awakened a bizarre campaign among European neo-Nazi groups, led by an Estonian thug with scholarly affectations, to “open the secret vault at Grüssau.”
Dorothy and Leah agreed on a new strategy. They would drop the lawsuits quietly. There would be no public announcement, but rather a new legal team, who would let each process sputter to a halt at the slightest obstacle. They also agreed to write a letter to Dr. Muche-Albrecht. They would apologize to her for the behavior of their nephew and his incompetent lawyers. They would explain that they could not help her with her historical investigations. They would make it clear that they had no desire to suppress the truth, but that they simply could not be active participants in that line of inquiry.
“We understand,” said Leah, reading from a draft of the letter, “that our Grandfather considered himself to be more a German than a Jew; we ask you to understand that for us this fact provokes not curiosity but rather sadness and regret.”
“That’s perfect,” said Dorothy. “There isn’t much we can do about the publicity that’s already out there. At least no one is claiming that Grandfather was a Kapo at Auschwitz.”
“Of course not!” said Leah sharply. “He died in 1925. In Canada. Even Der Spiegel says that he was just a socialist who turned a blind eye to the anti-Semitism of his friends.”
“Our problem was never that German woman,” said Dorothy. “It’s Roger McAllister.”
Leah looked at her sister. Dorothy said nothing.
“You said something about that man once. During his book tour.”
“Yes. I said I had slept with him.”
“You said he was a fucking pervert. What did you mean by that?”
Dorothy sat silently for a while, then told her older sister everything she knew about Roger McAllister.
Continue reading: The next episode is Dapper and Sensitive, part of The Secret Cellar, on MyWayToCanossa.com.
Originally published at www.daveomeara.com on May 29, 2018.
