consul general, Lord Cromer, “who was exceedingly kind. He expressed the wish that I should be presented to him.” The fact that the most powerful man in Egypt was so intrigued by Schechter was more than flattering: it was useful. The customs officials had the right to confiscate all antiquities marked for export, but the British authorities—working, it seems, on Cromer’s orders—were quick to arrange all the papers Schechter needed to make his removal of the Geniza’s contents legal.
For all his hobnobbing Schechter missed his family deeply: “Could you manage,” he wrote Mathilde early on, “to have yourself and the children photographed and surprise me with it[?]” Later, his pangs grew more acute: “I sympathize with Baby [possibly their younger daughter, Amy]. I also feel homesick and cry sometimes in the night. I want my wife and children.” Especially his wife, it seems, to whom he proclaimed a few weeks before he returned home, “never again on a Journey without you. I cannot stand it any longer.”
( Photo Credit 4.6 )
They were no substitute for his Liebe Mathilde, but when Agnes and Margaret arrived in Cairo on January 20, he was very happy to see them. The original plan had been for them to travel with him in the first place, but Agnes’s severe arthritis detained them; she joked that her rheumatism had flared up when she’d inhaled “the microbe of Ecclesiasticus, a creature that may have come into existence in the ninth century, and fattened on the very dirty paper whereon [the fragment they’d shown Schechter] was written.” They did eventually set out, bound again for Sinai, but eager to stop in the Egyptian capital. “Our movements were greatly stimulated,” as Agnes put it, “by the news of Dr. Schechter’s having obtained access to the Genizah synagogue and having dived into a hole filled with Hebrew fragments.” Besidesfamiliar faces, they came bearing gifts from home: quinine, a magnifying glass, and—best of all—a respirator, which the good doctor Donald MacAlister had thought to send along to help Schechter breathe while inside the Geniza. (“An inspiration” Schechter dubbed “this saving thing.”) Agnes reported in immediately to Mathilde about “your dear Husband” and described how “Mr. Schechter is rather tired of and tired with the work he has been at. He has found a few good things amongst heaps of, well, I won’t say rubbish but unimportant stuff. This is the way in all Eastern libraries. But in this case he has been choked with dust and bad air and has worked like a horse.… Mr. Schechter was disappointed that we had not brought ‘Tommy’ [the 1896 novel Sentimental Tommy by the Scotsman and Peter Pan author J. M. Barrie, about a young man with an overactive imagination; Mathilde promptly sent him a copy] but we are going to lend him Robert Louis Stevenson’s last book, ‘Weir of Hermiston’ to make up for it. And really he has enough to see and study in Cairo without distracting his mind with novels.”
The twins meant, as usual, to do more than socialize when they were in Cairo. They had come to work, and a few days after their arrival, Schechter took them to see the Geniza. Agnes’s aching joints kept her from ascending that “roughest of rude ladders,” which led to the room, but both Margaret and one Miss de Witt, a student from Girton (Cambridge’s first college for women) who had accompanied them on their journey, climbed up and peered in. Much to Agnes’s regret, they had forgotten their small Frena camera back in the hotel. Had they brought it along, we might have some visual record of the “heterogeneous mass of confusion … [that] filled the loft of the Genizah.” As it is, only such verbal portraits remain: there is no photograph of the Geniza before its contents were carted away.
Agnes and Margaret understood that they could best help Schechter by visiting the various antiquities shops around town and buying whatever
For all his hobnobbing Schechter missed his family deeply: “Could you manage,” he wrote Mathilde early on, “to have yourself and the children photographed and surprise me with it[?]” Later, his pangs grew more acute: “I sympathize with Baby [possibly their younger daughter, Amy]. I also feel homesick and cry sometimes in the night. I want my wife and children.” Especially his wife, it seems, to whom he proclaimed a few weeks before he returned home, “never again on a Journey without you. I cannot stand it any longer.”
( Photo Credit 4.6 )
They were no substitute for his Liebe Mathilde, but when Agnes and Margaret arrived in Cairo on January 20, he was very happy to see them. The original plan had been for them to travel with him in the first place, but Agnes’s severe arthritis detained them; she joked that her rheumatism had flared up when she’d inhaled “the microbe of Ecclesiasticus, a creature that may have come into existence in the ninth century, and fattened on the very dirty paper whereon [the fragment they’d shown Schechter] was written.” They did eventually set out, bound again for Sinai, but eager to stop in the Egyptian capital. “Our movements were greatly stimulated,” as Agnes put it, “by the news of Dr. Schechter’s having obtained access to the Genizah synagogue and having dived into a hole filled with Hebrew fragments.” Besidesfamiliar faces, they came bearing gifts from home: quinine, a magnifying glass, and—best of all—a respirator, which the good doctor Donald MacAlister had thought to send along to help Schechter breathe while inside the Geniza. (“An inspiration” Schechter dubbed “this saving thing.”) Agnes reported in immediately to Mathilde about “your dear Husband” and described how “Mr. Schechter is rather tired of and tired with the work he has been at. He has found a few good things amongst heaps of, well, I won’t say rubbish but unimportant stuff. This is the way in all Eastern libraries. But in this case he has been choked with dust and bad air and has worked like a horse.… Mr. Schechter was disappointed that we had not brought ‘Tommy’ [the 1896 novel Sentimental Tommy by the Scotsman and Peter Pan author J. M. Barrie, about a young man with an overactive imagination; Mathilde promptly sent him a copy] but we are going to lend him Robert Louis Stevenson’s last book, ‘Weir of Hermiston’ to make up for it. And really he has enough to see and study in Cairo without distracting his mind with novels.”
The twins meant, as usual, to do more than socialize when they were in Cairo. They had come to work, and a few days after their arrival, Schechter took them to see the Geniza. Agnes’s aching joints kept her from ascending that “roughest of rude ladders,” which led to the room, but both Margaret and one Miss de Witt, a student from Girton (Cambridge’s first college for women) who had accompanied them on their journey, climbed up and peered in. Much to Agnes’s regret, they had forgotten their small Frena camera back in the hotel. Had they brought it along, we might have some visual record of the “heterogeneous mass of confusion … [that] filled the loft of the Genizah.” As it is, only such verbal portraits remain: there is no photograph of the Geniza before its contents were carted away.
Agnes and Margaret understood that they could best help Schechter by visiting the various antiquities shops around town and buying whatever
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