INTRODUCTION

My father once said that he had been neutral about having children, that procreating was my mother’s choice. He did not present us with this information to make us feel unwanted but presented it merely as a fact, a historical fact that we needed to know in order to have the full picture. Rather than feeling unloved or unwanted, I felt privileged to be provided with this access to my father’s thoughts. Furthermore, he provided me with ample evidence that once his children existed and there was no going back, he took his role as a father very seriously and approached the task as he did everything else – with kindness and reason and just a touch of healthy didacticism. In this way, I had in my father, my own private Socrates, who in a completely natural, unpretentious way, was always teaching me something. And he did it with pleasure, for he truly seemed to enjoy being in my presence. He was not impatient with my questions, went to great lengths to cook my favorite meal for my birthday, took me for long walks in the woods and to archaeology lectures at the Metropolitan Museum on Saturday mornings, taught me French and geography, and perhaps most important, told me stories. These stories about his childhood, his time in the army, his grandmother and his parents, the landlady of their apartment in Berlin, the escape from Europe and his first impressions of New York gave me a sense of history and narrative that I could not have gotten merely from reading, though I did my share of that too. (I am, after all, my father’s daughter.)
It is, I believe, largely because of these stories that I began writing, and the characters from my father’s stories inspired me and populate my writing. The following excerpt from my latest novel and indeed the novel itself are inspired by my father and by his personal history. The protagonist of the book is Isaac, an octogenarian whose character (not the details of his life, but his nature) is based on my father. Like my father, Isaac had never intended to have children. Not exactly like my father, Isaac ended up raising the two daughters of his closest friends who, as Isaac tells his adopted daughters, “were not cut out for bringing up children.” In the scene that follows this introduction, Isaac has traveled to Morocco to visit Ulli, the biological mother of his daughters and the woman with whom he has been in love since he met her in Berlin after the war. He is wandering through the medina in Meknes thinking about an ostrich egg that his father had brought back for him from Egypt.
I wish I had been able to finish the book in time for my father to read it. The dedication reads:

In memory of my father Marc Raeff,
who showed me the strength of kindness and reason.

<img src=http://abimperio.net/pics/raeff3.jpg>

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When Isaac was a child, he had wanted more than anything else to go to Egypt. He laughed as he walked in the early afternoon heat, thinking that it had taken him his entire life, over eighty years, to get only this close to Egypt. The sun burnt his scalp through his thin hair. He wended his way slowly past men younger than he but more bent, weighed down by woolen djalabas and hoods, shuffling in backless slippers. He felt young among them, lifting his feet up, standing straight, breathing in dust and summer smells – garbage and exhaust. He supposed that he would have to eat something eventually, but for now he liked feeling hungry. The hunger and the heat combined to make him light-headed as if he were slightly drugged. Noises seemed to come from a distance: car horns, hawkers, music, steps. They surrounded him from afar like mountains circle a valley, protecting him, somehow, from the fact that he had never made it to Egypt, but perhaps this was close enough, even though there were no pyramids and that had always been the attraction, that and the ostrich egg. If he had the ostrich egg still, he would bury it here in Morocco, out in the desert maybe, because he probably would not get to Egypt. One must be realistic. But he did not have it, had not even thought about it since his daughters were young and he told them about it, about how his father had brought the egg to him from Egypt and how it had been a mistake to leave it behind in Lisbon, especially now that he had children who would have liked to say that their grandfather, whom they had never known, had brought an ostrich egg back from Egypt, where he had been building a bridge.
Isaac was ten years old when his father returned with the ostrich egg. It was before he understood that his father didn’t actually build bridges but merely designed them. At the time that he was presented with the ostrich egg, he still thought of his father as a real bridge builder, swinging high up over the water, strapped onto a girder or tight-roping across a cable. When he was ten, he had still wanted to be a bridge builder like his father and dreamed about building a bridge across the Atlantic Ocean. When he was ten, he imagined ostriches running round and round the pyramids, and he used to laugh just thinking about men in white robes and long beards running after them, trying to catch them.
He brought the egg to school and showed it to his class. “This is an ostrich egg from Egypt,” he said, holding it up in the palms of his hands for the class to see.
“There are no ostriches in Egypt,” his teacher said, and the class laughed, but he just smiled, knowing they were stupid and knew nothing about the world because they didn’t have fathers who went to Egypt to build bridges. He did not try to argue with them because he already knew that there were some things one could not argue about. So he put the egg back into its little blue velvet bag and returned to his seat very quietly, and the teacher told everyone to be quiet even though, by that time, they were all silent.
At dinner that night he told his father what his teacher had said.
“He is right,” his father said. “I bought the egg from an African trader in the bazaar in Cairo. He was very tall, and he had a box of ostrich eggs. He wanted me to buy them all, but I told him I only had room for one. We haggled for almost an hour over the price,” his father said very proudly.
After that the egg fell out of favor for a while, and he moved it from its position of honor on his desk to a dresser drawer, but every few weeks or so Isaac checked on it just to see that it was still intact, and slowly he realized that it was childish to blame the egg for not being truly Egyptian and decided that it was neither the egg’s nor the ostrich’s fault because they had done nothing to mislead him, so he stopped being angry with the egg and set it out on his desk every afternoon while he did his homework. When he was bored or having difficulty with a mathematical problem or an especially convoluted passage from Virgil, he would stroke the egg and talk to it, but he did not speak out loud because the egg could not hear.
Isaac never told his daughters that his father had never even gone to see the pyramids, that all he had done was build that bridge and then return to Paris, glad to have been done with that country, where he had no time for pleasure trips to the pyramids, where if he turned around for just a second, somebody would be doing something wrong, somebody would be wreaking havoc with his bridge.
His father’s lack of interest in one of civilization’s greatest achievements was a source of great embarrassment to Isaac, for he had always favored the past, which seemed so much more tangible to him than the future that so interested his parents. “The past is only important because it is what creates the future,” his father always said and, though Isaac never argued with his father, he had disagreed with him about this ever since he could remember. “The past is all that we can know,” he whispered to himself every night before he went to sleep.
While Isaac read about Spartans and Turks, Napoleon’s victories and defeats, the Hapsburgs, the Moguls, Genghis Khan and Catherine the Great, his parents and their small circle of Paris Mensheviks, who were allowed to live in France as stateless, passportless refugees with no right to work, concentrated on the future. They stayed up until all hours of the night, even when they were tired from working the menial, under-the-table jobs that they could find, typing away furiously on crippled typewriters to keep the free Russian press and the “soft” revolutionary principles of the Menshevik cause, what they referred to as the humane path to Socialism, alive, to prove to the world that though they had fled from Stalin’s madness (their deaths would have accomplished nothing), though they lived in dingy apartments in the outer arrondissements of Paris and were forced to build bridges in Egypt, they had not given up, would not give up, until all the betrayers of Socialism had fallen.
Perhaps it was precisely because of his father’s dismissive attitude towards the pyramids, of the entire country of Egypt, that Isaac was so enthralled by them and by the one relic he had, the ostrich egg, that proved that his father had actually been in Egypt, had actually walked through the market in Cairo, breathed the same dry air that the Pharaohs had breathed. Yet he did not take the ostrich egg with him to what his parents referred to as “the New World.” He thought, as he contemplated it for the last time in his room at the pensao in Lisbon where he had spent eight long months waiting for the visa to America that bringing the egg with him would have been a weakness on his part, a cowardly clinging to the past and to Europe, which had so obviously betrayed them. Yet, once he and the other refugees had all boarded the ship in Lisbon, he understood that the opposite was true, that the ostrich egg was the one thing he should have taken with him, that it contained in its fragile shell more certainty than any future.