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The final anguish of these exiles, caught between the promises of the New World and the curses of the Old, was in belonging to neither. Nonetheless, the refugees, living out of their spiritual suitcases, made significant contributions to their adopted country. If American innocence has been tempered into something less isolated and naive, these tough teachers can be thanked in part. But they paid an awful price in their torn lives. Popular among the emigres was a story of two refugees crossing the Atlantic, one headed for America, one headed back to Europe. As their two ships pass, the old friends shout simultaneously, "Are you crazy?" With their cursed gift for awareness, the refugees understood better than anyone on either continent the black joke that history had played upon them.
—By Melvin Maddocks
Excerpt "Painter Richard Lindner said of himself, 'I am a tourist everywhere, which means an "observer." ' Once the emigre rec onciled himself or herself to this position as observer, life became too interesting to lament that if one was a tourist everywhere, one was at home nowhere. Erich Kahler did not learn English until he was close to 50, yet he wrote many works in that language. In 1954 Kahler received a note from his fellow Princetonian the matchlessly resilient Einstein about the persecution of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Einstein understood the American's predicament, but as an outsider. 'Such a person rooted in the social community is incomparably more vulnerable,' he told Kahler, 'than a gypsy like you or me for whom the saying "Go to hell" is not a mere figure of speech, but a natural attitude.'"