It is autumn of 1861, and the thirty-three year old Jewish physician Leopold Auerbach is standing in his study on Agnesstrasse 2 in Breslau, blowing on his hands. It is nine-thirty in the morning, and although there is a fire in the grate, the cold has come early this year and there is a chill in the air of morning that will not dissipate until nearly noon. This part of the house, facing southwest, has windows bearing on the street and will remain in shade until the sun is high enough to clear the four-story building. He has just come in from the street– when he closed the door against the wind several beech leaves swirled into the room and rest in taut curls, their autumn bronze like something smelted. His hands sufficiently warmed, he bends to pick one up and study its form in the pale October light. It is curled inward on itself, the two fan shaped edges tucked in along a twisting spine, a minute body with arms arcing forward to protect itself.
He has no patients this morning, which liberates him for a few hours to his research. Two rooms of the apartment are dedicated to his professional life: a room to treat patients, and a room to study, and it is here that he keeps his microscopes, his staining reagents, here that he keeps tucked away the foul-smelling pickled tissue samples he needs for dissections. He sets down the leaf carefully, almost tenderly, on his desk.
He is trying to swallow down an incipient reaction to the politics of the day, to clear his awareness so that he can get to work. Meeting colleagues at a coffeehouse near his alma mater, the Uniwersytet Wrocławski, proves a mixed proposition because although the conversations are intellectually stimulating, quite, it is not possible for three Jewish scientists in Silesia in 1861 not to speak of politics when they gather. Today conversation has turned to recent events in the Free, Independent, and Strictly Neutral City of Cracow with its Territory, which is what they still call it despite the annexation sixteen years ago. The population of Cracow is nearly forty percent Jewish, many many thousands strong, making it in all probability the largest concentration of Jewry in the world at this time in history. It is a place where, being Jewish, among Jews, you can feel yourself culturally at home. And yet this unaccustomed ease is not without its own dangers.
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