My Friendship with Martin Buber

11. Interrogations and Responses: Letters Following Buber’s Last Visit

131 11 Interrogations and Responses Letters Following Buber’s Last Visit On August 2, 1958, shortly after leaving America for the third time, Buber wrote to me from Venice that his “wife has been taken ill here a few days ago (a thrombosis but seemingly not a very grave one).” Since their ship to Haifa was not scheduled to depart until the end of the month, Paula Buber was checked into a hospital on the Lido. Seven days later, on August 10, Buber wrote to tell me: My wife died two days ago. Her strong heart resisted first to a new hemorrhaging and then to a pulmonitis [pneumonia] for days and days, till it could not resist anymore. We have buried her (I and my children) in the old cemetery of the Jewish community here on the Lido [near a] hill of old trees. Some days before her death she had uttered suddenly, “The grave of Platon [the German poet] in Syracuse.” Paula was very probably unconsciously aware that her own death was approaching and that she, like Platon, a gifted German writer, would be buried abroad. Martin Buber and his children scheduled a return to Israel on August 15. Eugenia and I were “terribly sorry that your wife’s illness turned out, after all, to be fatal and that you are deprived of your lifetime companion.” We were both very touched by the way in which Buber wrote while at the same time deeply grieved by what 132 • MY FRIENDSHIP WITH MARTIN BUBER he wrote. “Your wife knew, I am certain,” I told Buber, “a fullness and wholeness of life such as is given very few women to know. I can imagine how much you must miss her and how hard it is for you to go on without her. I hope that our love and that of many, many friends the world over will be of help to you now.” After he got back to Israel Buber wrote me, “Working now is like walking against the wind.” He felt his life utterly disrupted and gave up all plans for lectures, including the one in Munich he was to share with Martin Heidegger. Buber, meanwhile, was seeking new contributors to the Library of Living Philosophers volume, two of which he wrote to me about, neither of which ever materialized. He wrote in September 1953 that he had spoken to the Israeli novelist S. Y. Agnon, who Buber described as “our greatest novelist,” about adding his “great knowledge of Hasidism” to the book. Agnon offered to revise a “rather short” article he had written that had “the character of an authoritative statement.” Buber also considered contacting Joseph Weiss from Leeds and Manchester, “a former disciple of Scholem, who has a deep knowledge of Hasidism and is an independent thinker.” “It is true he writes slowly,” Buber added, “so you could at best get only a short article from him. But I think Agnon’s and his would go very well together as the statement of a poet and that of a scholar.” No article by either Agnon or Joseph Weiss appeared in the volume. Buber, at the time, was writing his “Responses” to the contributors to the volume, which he intended to publish in a German journal such as Merkur. Buber was also seeking a publisher for a Hebrew translation of The Life of Dialogue, and spoke to “the temporary secretary of the Jerusalem Board of the Leo Baeck Foundation” about the book. “If he sees a chance for it, I will speak to the president of the Board.” He added, “I would like very much to have you and dear Eugenia here,” which would finally happen in 1960, on the eve of Buber’s death. Continuing with his writing, Buber began laying plans “to INTERROGATIONS AND RESPONSES • 133 write down the two anthropology chapters” on the topic of “The Unconscious.” Sadly, these were never written. All we have today on this topic is what Buber said on the subject at the seminars of the Washington School of Psychiatry.1 In the course of the winter and spring of 1958 and 1959, Buber decided, he “must go on with the re-translation of the rest of the last Bible volume from Hebrew to German.” In particular, “Job must be re-translated.” Elucidating a question I had asked him, he let me know that in his book Hasidism and...