Excerpt
She
was thirty, he twenty-seven, when they met in Munich in 1906. He was
rather short, with a mop of black curly hair and eyes of a deep brown
that looked around him appraisingly. She was taller, and slender with
the tiny waist of the period and heavy hair piled on top of her head.
They were not immediately sympathetic.
Helen,
whose forebears were colonists in America in the 1660s, came to Munich
as a graduate student to enroll in the drama department of the university.
Elias was in the final year of work there for his Ph.D. in Latin Paleography.
Their backgrounds could not have been more diverse. He, a Russian
Jew by birth and now American through his father’s naturalization,
came to America at the age of twelve. She was the product of a small-town
in rural Pennsylvania, a “lady” and cultivated, but with
rebellion beneath her quiet demeanor.
Initially
Elias had been smitten by Helen’s sister, sweet gentle Fanny,
in Munich a few years earlier to complete her voice training, now
returned to America to marry. He was less drawn to Helen. But after
a few weeks of long walks in the Bavarian hills and fishing expeditions
in Bavarian streams, he became increasingly attracted. They talked
endlessly, of the friendship between Goethe and Schiller, of Shakespeare
and Keats, her special loves, of Childe Harold, which Elias was then
reading, of Lohengrin, which he had seen so many times he almost knew
it by heart - she did not match him there. They talked of George Eliot
and George Sand, of John Stuart Mill, of Beatrice and Sidney Webb,
of George Bernard Shaw - she considered herself a suffragist, she
told him. They read Plato and Browning aloud to each other. They could
not stop talking - as though their entire past had been spent in steeping
themselves in Western culture and now, suddenly, pent up so long,
it all came spilling out, scalding them with the headiness of it all,
the relief of finding someone else like themselves. It was their minds
that fell in love.
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