HERE IS A PERFECTLY astonishing little book—a short story that was lost then found but never actually recognized for what it was. First published in Story magazine in 1938, “Address Unknown” was so popular that the Reader’s Digest rapidly served up a condensed version to their three million American readers. Britain got interested; the story appeared in translation in several European countries. Then, unfortunately, the Second World War broke out and the story was forgotten. At last, fifty years later (1995), it was reissued in hardcover and blithely described by its editor as “the perfect short story”—the irony being that neither the first nor the second publication made any allusion to the fact that the author’s intent was to warn people about the imminence of the Holocaust.
Kressmann Taylor was an American, married and the mother of three children, who worked in advertising in the 1920s. Using a number of actually existing letters as her starting point, she invented a stunning piece of short fiction in the form of a correspondence, carried on from 1932 to 1934, between two German men—one Jewish (Eisenstein) and the other a Gentile (Schulse)—friends and partners of an art gallery in San Francisco. Schulse, who is married and a father, recently had an affair with Eisenstein’s sister, Griselle, and although he broke it off he still cares deeply for the young woman, now a successful actress in Vienna. Schulse himself has decided to return to Germany with his family, and Eisenstein writes to keep him abreast of the art gallery news.
As the months go by, Schulse, though wary at first, gradually gets caught up in the fervour of the new National Socialist Party in Germany. By 1933, having become a fanatic supporter of Hitler, he asks that Eisenstein cease writing to him completely, as letters from a Jew could be harmful to his image and his position in the municipal government. When Griselle knocks on his door a while later, in hopes of finding refuge and protection from the persecution she’s enduring onstage and off, he turns her away, allows her to be captured and shot to death and drily informs Eisenstein of what has happened. From this point on, Eisenstein undertakes to destroy his former friend by sending him a series of jocular, enthusiastic, coded letters containing numerous references to the affection of his Jewish friends and family; the last of these letters is returned to him with the sinister stamp “Address Unknown”—certain proof that Schulse has been interned if not physically eliminated.
Kressmann Taylor was not clairvoyant, she was just exceptionally attentive to and anxious about what was going on in the world. Her style is strikingly economical: thanks to the “letters” device, the main events of the story are suggested rather than stated. It’s a pity she was unable to get her message across—but then, no one expects fiction to change the course of history, right?