Calisch & Silberstein

James H. Calisch was a white-haired, precisely spoken little gentleman of 63. He had lived in Brooklyn for four years since coming from his native Holland. He was a Jew, and by night, as recreation from his daily labors of an expert accountant, he pored over books of philosophy and psychology. These explorations had led him far from the faith of his race, but his Jewish neighbors and landlady found him most kindly, gentle, a patient teacher of any who sought his counsel.

Many a night James Calisch sat until dawn with young Emanuel Silberstein, who would come around from 57th St. to interrogate and dispute upon the writings of Spinoza, the Jew of Amsterdam; of morbid Schopenhauer, neurotic Nietzsche, recondite Kant. Emanuel was regarded by himself and his family, as a mental prodigy. He had made public orations in the Liberty Loan drives at the age of 10. He had finished high school at 16 and, after a nervous breakdown, read long and late at philosophy and psychology, screwed up in a corner with his scrawny shoulders hunched, his lean hooked nose thrust into a book. Mr. Silberstein, a tailor, and his wife, would listen in awe to their son's condescending accounts of long arguments with Mr. Calisch. They looked at one another anxiously when Emanuel devoured every published detail of the murder of a small Jewish boy, Bobbie Franks, by two intellectual, older Jewish boys, Leopold and Loeb, in Chicago.

Some months ago, James Calisch's landlady heard her lodger in an altercation with young Silberstein. "You're a nut!" ejaculated the older man. "What reasons have you for making such a statement?" demanded the youth, with the pedantic inflection of an adolescent philosopher. "Well," began Mr. Calisch, patient once more, "in the first place--" They had been arguing about a newly-published book on Sigmund Freud. Mr. Calisch had genially called psychoanalysis "rot." Neurotic young Emanuel was furious; he took Freud as glorious gospel. After the quarrel, Mr. Calisch, annoyed by his voluble visitor, told the landlady not to admit him to his study any more.

One evening last week, Mr. Calisch sat at his usual table in his usual cafeteria. In came a slender figure in a serge coat and grey "bellbottom" trousers, with a cap pulled so far down over the cadaverous face that only the high hooked nose of Emanuel Silberstein showed out from beneath. Moving up behind his old tutor, the youth raised a squat hammer (a cobbler's) and beat upon the bowed white skull. James Calisch was unconscious, his cranium crushed beyond repair, before other patrons could seize Student Silberstein.

The police asked Emanuel Silberstein his occupation. "Selling wine to Negroes," he answered, smiling. He told them he was glad he had "done the job well." They found cyanide of potassium in his pocket and again he said he was glad that he had killed "the old man" instead of himself.

The judge asked: "Do you think it was funny to murder a man?" "To tell the truth, Judge," said the boy, seriously, "I have lost my mental capacity to explain. . . . I don't want you to think, Judge, that I thought it was funny to kill this man. I thought it was funny for you to ask that question."

On the way to the county hospital, where he was to be held for observation, the prisoner quietly explained that the dead Mr. Calisch was responsible for his mental and physical condition. Later his composure vanished. Doctors watched and listened gravely as he writhed and screeched in a straitjacket.

Along the Silberstein's block in Brooklyn they are saying: "Hmmm, you see what comes of reading too much!" Silberstein relatives have sided against the dead man, a corruptor of youth. Educators made a note of the case, inwardly deploring that a most fruitful field of research had again suffered popular stigma, but at the same time remarking that psychoanalysis is not a safe study for all types of minds: precocious, neurotic minds just emerging from adolescence, in particular.