Mr. Monday and other tales of Jewish Amsterdam

GENERAL EISENHOWER CALLED HIM 14 7

׳THE GREATEST LIVING EXPERT ON SECURITY׳

The first part of that record is a sort of dialogue. Oreste used to listen intently. When Sophie Tucker relates that her mother always had a child to breastfeed ("Und immer ein kind gewickelt") tears would come streaming down his cheeks. He'd play that sentimental record three or four times in a row, and he'd cry as if his heart would break...

No, I will not venture to bring Freud and Jung and the other psychiatrists into it, but sometime, somewhere in the psychological clockwork of this strange man, something must have gone wrong. Something perhaps caused by an event, a word, an incident—G-d knows what—in that family on Weesperzijde Street in Amsterdam. Something that had to do with his mother...