ABSTRACT
I owe to Hemme and Genia that I did not become a novelist. I knew fairly early in my life that writing was one thing I was likely to do well —perhaps the only one. It certainly was one thing I was willing to work on. And the novel has all along been to me the test of the writer. I was always more interested in people than in abstractions, let alone in the categorical straitjackets of the philosopher. People are to me not only more interesting and more varied but more meaningful precisely because they develop, unfold, change, and become. And I knew early that Hemme and Genia—or, to give them their full names, Dr. Hermann Schwarzwald and his wife, Dr. Eugenia Schwarzwald née Nuss- baum—were the most interesting people I was ever likely to meet. If I was to write stories, they would have to be in them.
