No, said the patient, with a laugh. You. One. It’s not something one associates with Jews, is it?
The therapist paused before answering.
There is the stereotype, she said. Such as those we have talked about. The stereotype of the weak Jew, yes.
Lambs to the slaughter, said the patient. Isn’t that what everyone believes, that the Jews went to the Holocaust like lambs to the slaughter?
The therapist gasped. Then coughed.
Excuse me, she said. No, they did not go to the slaughter, she said in a hard voice. They were taken by force.
Of course, the patient said. What was I thinking?
Patient and doctor sat without speaking for a full minute, the tension between them palpable through the door. This therapist has to reveal her bias! I thought. She must not leave the patient with this sense of being unfeeling and uninformed. Just when the patient was making progress in her self-identification as a Jew—how dare Dr. Schussler presume to lecture the patient about the sufferings of the Jewish people!
But the damage was not complete, thank God. The material I had sent the patient prevailed. I heard the rustling of paper, then the patient saying:
Don’t you think I look like him?
The therapist hummed. Let me see again, she said.
Look at the shape of his head, said the patient. Triangular. Like mine. The same narrow chin. Also the brow: very broad, like mine. And the eyes: deep set.
(Yossele Rosensaft!)
Of course he’s darker than I am, the patient went on. But I keep coming back to that distinctive head. It’s rare. So much like mine. It’s what always made me feel like an alien in my family—nobody but me has this weird triangular head. You can’t imagine how hard it is not to look like anyone. And then I saw this picture and … don’t laugh.
She paused.
It came to me that he could be my father.
When the therapist said nothing immediately, the patient jumped in to say:
Or some relative of his. I mean he may not exactly be my father, but … It seemed to me I was part of this family.
(I was filled with joy. How much better that the session was over and the therapist could do nothing to ruin the moment.)
Ah, but look at the hour, said the doctor. We will have to discuss this next time.
55.
All of this was happening too quickly, I thought when I returned home. I was delighted at the patient’s reaction to Rosensaft. Yet her sudden identification with him—the need to see him as her father, instantly, with the evidence of just one photograph—communicated to me the urgency with which I had to find Maria G. The patient had to know her relatives, have hard information about them, what had happened to them, and soon, or else begin to drift into fantasy; thence, I feared, back into depression.
She had said to Dr. Schussler: You can’t imagine how hard it is not to look like anyone.
And I thought of my dear boyhood friend Paul, whose singularity had been a release from oppressive parents—or so I had always supposed. Now, in light of the patient’s words, I relived that distant summer afternoon with Paul’s clippings from his boot boxes. I now considered what anguished energy had driven him to create that collection of aging family faces, in secret, over the course of years: what hard work had gone into convincing himself that looking like one’s kind was not a comfort but a nightmare.
My motives fell into confusion. I had posited Paul as an icon for the patient, and for myself, an image of the self-created individual, freed from the ownership implied in the inheritance of one’s parents’ genes: You are not of them; they do not own you; you owe them only the normal gratitude for having been raised up and fed by them; you may become what you need to be.
Yet now I wondered: Was I doing the right thing in aiding the patient’s search for her mother? I thought of her twenty-ninth birthday. Celebrated in Puerta Vallarta. Quietly? Privately? Not telling the sexy Dorotea? The patient did not say. On the day of her birthday, December 26th, I had sat alone in my office, pondering her experience of that singular day: the first in which the “birth” portion had acquired flesh.
Now she knew she had come out of the body of a particular woman, a Maria G., in a physical act, at a specific time, in a specific place. Did this fact overwhelm all the