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Giving an account of the contents of Simon’s diary to Luis Montt, R. Philippi seemed to build up towards one representative anecdote about Simon in particular that would, in his opinion, deal a decisive blow to the latter’s image. As I read the passage, my mounting expectations—surely this last tidbit would get to the heart of R. Philippi’s disapproval of Simon—met with severe disappointment. I found the crucial part of the sentence, sandwiched between the tantalizing announcement that what was to come next would explain Simon’s character and a suggestive yet unenlightening coda, blacked out: “He describes in detail, and this shall serve to complete the picture of his character…and says that my brother was heartless because during their trip to Punta Arenas he had never told him about any amorous adventures!” (Letter to Luis Montt 4). Like most transcriptions from Emilio Held’s Geschichtliche Sammlung, the letter appeared in the volume without a source statement or any pointers to the whereabouts of the original, and no amount of insistence on my part in holding the thin paper to the light or peering at it through a magnifying glass yielded as much as one letter of the blacked-out phrase. Since my time in Chile was limited, I had little hope of quelling my curiosity—indeed, I never did locate the original letter—and, in the end, I allowed myself a fair measure of quiet frustration, made a xerox, and put the passage out of my mind as a colorful but inconsequential detail. Much later, I found the bound xerox of a handwritten Sütterlin transcription of R. Philippi’s autobiography, which only added to the disenchantment since the blacked-out fragment concerned a trivial romantic adventure of Simon’s. In the autobiography, of which I subsequently also obtained an uncensored but partial typewritten transcription, R. Philippi added to the anecdote that he had kept that part of Simon’s diary from his widow: “I took the liberty of withholding that part of his diary, so it did not come into his widow’s possession”2 (“Auszüge” 187). Learning about this intervention opened up more questions in my mind about the succession of the rightful ownership of Simon’s estate and of the power dynamics that allowed R. Philippi, his fellow immigrant, to censor Simon’s testament to his widow and to control and restrain his voice.