Against the Current: Simple Chapters from a Complex Life. Edward Alfred Steiner

BEFORE I could speak one language, I cried in three, and the first words I uttered were in a tongue so foreign to my later life, that I have forgotten all but a few phrases which cling to me in spite of my neglect of them.

I played with the children of three distinct races and loved those best who hated my people most.

My soul awakened in the tumult of three alien faiths and grew into maturity in the belief furthest from that of my fathers. My mind struggled first with the mature if stagnant wisdom of Hebrew teachers, who treated children as if they were sages and sages as if they were children; but it escaped from that bondage into the untrammelled wisdom of the Greeks, their successors, then into that of the Germans, and later became reasonably disciplined under Slavic and Anglo-Saxon teachers.

Born in one country, I lived my early boyhood in another, my young manhood elsewhere and my later life on this side of the great sea—crossing and recrossing so often that I am nowhere an alien; although by my love of liberty and my faith in its spirit of fair play, I am a loyal American.

It is my calling to study races and groups, to discover in the individual what these have bequeathed to him, and having done this fairly successfully for others, I am now trying to do it for myself. I am searching the background of this complex life of mine, my childhood and boyhood, trying to discover just how much I owe to race and how much to my varying environments.

I have written this book for four classes of people. First, for those who like myself wish to discover in these informal, yet, I trust, genuine sketches, material for the study of race psychology.

Second, for those who may like to have their faith in the unity of the human race strengthened, by concrete examples.

Third, for those who will find pleasure in reading the story of so complex a child life with all its tragedies and comedies which, at the time they occurred, seemed least significant when they were most full of meaning and most tragic when they were of least consequence.

Lastly, I am writing for those who, like myself, have struggled against the limitations imposed upon their faith and vision by narrow, racial ties, who believe themselves debtors to every race, who believe that their forefathers are all those who bequeathed to the world great thoughts to grapple with and fair visions to realize—whether their dust rests in the cave of the fields of Machpelah, the crowded Père la Chaise or beneath simple headstones in the churchyards of the Puritans.

Without belittling the heritage left them by their race or people, or the obligation to share their lot of shame or ignominy, I trust that what I have written will enable such to ally themselves with the Son of Man and say with the same modesty and the same courage as He said it: “Behold My mother and My brethren!” … “For whosoever shall do the will of My Father which is in heaven, the same is My brother and sister and mother.”

E. A. S.

Grinnell, Iowa.