Written in 2004

"At a dinner celebrating the engagement of an American friend and his German girlfriend in her L-shaped Berlin apartment, the guests included a rare-book seller who piqued my curiosity when he spoke of traveling each year to Israel in order to purchase German libraries brought there by Jews who had fled Germany. It occurred to me, as he expressed regret about the general poor condition of many of the bindings, that in place of the now dead German Jewish owners, their most prized possessions, the lovingly acquired complete editions of Heine, Goethe, Schiller, would be returning to their place of origin--their Heimat." -- Walter Abish, in his out-of-print memoir Double Vision