“A bitch,” she claimed, “women like that existed before Freud and all this fancy talk with complexes and compulsions. It’s nothing new; a spoiled woman, a vain woman, a selfish woman, using a man, making a fool of him; there’s nothing original about your Kamilla.”
“It’s a sickness,” he pleaded, “I didn’t say she was original. There are thousands of cases. All humanity is sick. She is a classic case.”
“I say she is a bitch.”
“We analysts call it a sickness.”
The family continued to bewail the pity and shame of Rudolf’s childless marriage the more vehemently as he grew more esteemed and prosperous. Divorce her. Let her have a child, they nagged. In due time there was both a child and a divorce.
When Kamilla announced, for the seventh time in the last ten years, that she was in the blessed state, the family was skeptical. Six weeks pregnant and not turning green? In the eighth week of Kamilla’s pregnancy events took a precipitous turn. Rabbi Moses, who had been ailing since the war, was approaching his end. The signs were clear even though it was only a light bronchitis that brought the Rabbi to bed: all male members of the Landsmann clan went wrong in the head shortly before the angel of death called.
“It is very strange,” the Rabbi remarked one day at meal. “I eat and eat and nothing comes out.” For a fortnight now, he claimed it had been thus with him.
The next day his youngest son, a medical student, insisted on accompanying him into the water closet. It was a Sabbath afternoon and the Rabbi’s wife sat with her daughters-in-law; Kamilla in a fashionable maternity garb, although Grandmother Landsmann, feeling boldly her belly, found scarcely a bulge. The ladies saw the door open and the Rabbi pass through the room toward his study sighing, “I eat and eat and nothing comes out,” and young Benji holding a clump of excrement in each hand and crying, “But Papa, Papa, look!”
At the end of the week he came down with a fever and within ten days he died. So it was with all male Landsmanns.
Now everything turned on whether the wife of the favorite son of Rabbi Moses would produce a boy to bear his name.
Five months pregnant, Kamilla was received with excitement by the Rabbi’s widow and her sisters-in-law. The child’s sex was a decided matter. “How is little Moses?” Grandmother would ask, embracing her daughter-in-law with more than usual affection.
By Olga Landsman’s account, a nurse reported that Rudolf Landsmann burst into the hospital crying, “My son! Where is my son!” Shown a swaddled infant, he rushed to the phone booth.
Olga, Rudolf’s sister-in-law, summoned to the scene by the jubilant phone call, looked hard at the bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked infant who was wearing a kerchief on its head, a curious detail, perhaps to protect its ears from the draft; several nurses, and then the aunt, remarked its resemblance to a peasant girl. The sister-in-law raised her eyebrows. “Who said it was a boy?” she asked and proceeded to remove not the infant’s kerchief but its diaper and, after a significant pause, repeated before the abashed father and nurses, “Who said it was a boy?”
According to the same aunt, Rudolf Landsmann turned white then purple. “It’s not possible,” he muttered and ran out of the room. In less than half an hour, however, he returned to his natural color and headed straight to the crib without a glance at his sister-in-law or anyone. He lifted the infant and, pressing it to his bosom, cooed to it and rocked it, oblivious to all. When his sister-in-law was about to leave, he looked up, “Mama knows already—”
Whether Kamilla was more relieved than disappointed by the birth of a daughter must be left to conjecture. The regret she expressed three decades later at not having produced three daughters to her one daughter is difficult to reconcile with fact. If motherhood did not improve Kamilla’s character or, in Rudolf Landsmann’s terminology, cure her of her neurosis, the Landsmann family may have been partly to blame.
“The very image of her father!” “A true Landsmann!” they cooed, gathering around the infant’s crib, and appropriated it by the bent of its nose, the shape of its mouth, and any sound or movement it made. As for Kamilla, she acted the part assigned to her in the family scenario. She delivered a child. Now she was no longer needed. Rudi had his sweetheart. She would have her sweethearts.
The family drama reached its denouement in the spring of 1938: Kamilla announced her decision to marry a young journalist, Zoltan Vithezy; Rudolf agreed to the divorce. On March 12, Hitler marched into Austria. When Isidor and Olga Landsmann saw the Nazi flag waving from the Austrian embassy from their apartment window across the street, they made their decision to emigrate to America and persuaded Rudolf, along with his ten-year-old daughter, to join them.
It was a long journey for Rudolf Landsmann from the orthodox synagogue in Galanta to a three-story frame house in Garfield, New York. The narrator must pause. A wing of the newly erected psychiatric center is to be dedicated to her father, and she must fly to Garfield to attend the unveiling ceremonies and the formal dinner in his honor.
