did it matter to him that the father was Gentile if the mother was Jewish? And my father hit upon a plan.
He packed up our household and off we went to a small city in the Rhineland where there were scholars who knew of my father, but no kindred we could call our own.
There an elderly rabbi, who had much admired my father's writing about the great Jewish teacher Rashi, agreed to marry me and to give out that the child born to me was his. He did this really from great generosity. He said, "I have seen so much suffering in this world. I will be father to this child, if you want it, and never claim a husband's privileges as I am far too old for that."
There I bore not one child by Godwin, but twins, two beautiful girls, both of exactly the same stamp, so alike that even I could not always tell one from the other, but had to tie a blue ribbon on the ankle of Rosa so that I could know her from Lea.
Now I know you would interrupt me if you could, and I know what you are thinking, but let me go on.
The old rabbi died before the children were a year old. As for my father, he loved these two baby girls, and he thanked Heaven that he still had some sight left to see their beautiful faces before he became completely blind.
Only as we returned to Oxford did he confess to me that he had hoped to place the babies with an aged matron in the Rhineland and had had to disappoint her because of his love for me and for the baby girls.
Now all the while I had been in the Rhineland, I had written to Godwin, but I had told him not one word about these baby girls. Indeed, I had given him vague reasons for the trip--that it had to do with the acquisition of books which were now hard to come by in France and England, and that my father was dictating quite a lot to me, and needed these books for the treatises that occupied his every thought.
The treatises, his every thought, and the books--all that was simple and true.
We settled into our old house in the Jewry of Oxford in the parish of St. Aldate, and my father commenced taking pupils again.
Since the secret of my love for Godwin had been crucial to all parties, no one knew of it, and they believed my elderly husband to have died abroad.
Now while I was traveling I hadn't received Godwin's letters, so there were many of them waiting for me when I came home. I set about opening them and reading them when the nurses had the children, and I argued with myself frantically as to whether I should tell Godwin about his daughters or not.
Was I to tell a Christian man that he had two daughters who would be brought up as Jewesses? What might his response have been? Of course he could have bastards aplenty in the Rome he described to me and among his worldly companions for whom he had nothing but undisguised contempt.
In truth, I didn't want to cause him misery, and I did not want to confess to him the sufferings I had endured myself. Our letters were filled with poetry, and the depths of our thoughts, undetached perhaps from realities, and I wanted to keep things this way because, in truth, this way was more real to me than day-to-day life itself. Even the miracle of these baby girls did not diminish my belief in the world we sustained in our letters. Nothing could.
But just as I weighed my decision to keep quiet with the greatest scrupulosity, there came a very surprising letter from Godwin, which I want to relate to you from memory as best I can. I have the letter here, in fact, but securely hidden among my things, and Meir has never seen it, and I cannot bear to take it out and read it so let me give you the substance of it in my own words.
I think my own words now are Godwin's words, anyway. So let me explain.
He began again with his usual excursions of life in the Holy City.
"If I had converted to your faith," he wrote, "and we were righteous man and wife, poor and happy, surely, that would be better in the eyes of the Lord--if the Lord exists--than a life