> "The Jews"? This is getting awfully close to the fantasy figure of
> anti-Semitism, The Jew, who exists apart from any actual Jewish
> humans.
[-fwd-]
I was lunching with a famous lady, a lady a little lacking in wit but full of very high sounding ideas. If you were in doubt concerning the meanings of freedom and liberty you could ask this lady and receive the most lyrical of answers. I can best describe her by confessing that she was more famous than intelligent—which is one of the hazards of democracy.
In New York you can pick out easily the people of fame. They look and walk like pall bearers. Perhaps this is because they are carrying truth and beauty to their graves. Or perhaps it is because they are merely stiffened with their press notices and as conscious of their fame as if it were a paraffin injected into their veins.
Whenever I met this lady with whom I was lunching, I wondered if Joan of Arc or Semiramis, the one-breasted queen of the Amazons, had been as full of visible importance. I doubt it, for the importance of spiritual and royal leaders is a small thing beside the strut of those who wear the paper crowns of ideas.
This lady and I have known each other for some years and our meetings have been always of an amiable nature. We admired each other but, having ideas more or less alike, there was never much we could talk about. There is nothing as dull as an intellectual ally after a certain age.
Our lunch this time was a bit duller than usual. We gossiped aimlessly for an hour on the stupidity of the movies, the stupidity of the theater, and the stupidity of literature from which it can be seen that we were avoiding any topics of importance. We moved into the library, rather elegantly, to have our coffee.
Here my hostess fell silent and took to regarding me with a rolling and pregnant eye. Her fine brow became full of furrows and, by this and other signs, I knew she was deep in thought, or possibly working around to asking some favor of me.
“I would like you to tell me something, very frankly," she said, finally. "Do you mind talking about Jews?”
"It is one of my favorite topics," I answered, lying gallantly—for at that time, a year ago, it was a topic with which I had hardly more than flirted.
"I am very glad," she said. "Jews are often a little skittish about the subject."
"You don't have to be too tactful," I said. "Jewishness is not a venereal disease.”
“I was sure you'd feel just that way," she said, "because, after all, you are not the kind of a Jew who thinks that any discussion of Jews is intended as a personal slight."
"No, I am not that kind of Jew," I said soothingly.
But I was socially a little surprised. It had never occurred to me that my friend regarded me as a Jew of any kind. I sat up. Here was the little slap that pinks the face of the American Jew. He fancies himself a social, spiritual, and literary ally—an individual colored only by his ideas and achievements—and presto! he hears his true name called over a coffee cup. My hostess was looking at something special— not quite a dinosaur, but a Jew. Her eyes were a trifle defiant and her cheeks flushed. I was aware that after many years of intellectual kinship, a divorce had taken place. We were no longer two Americans in a library, as alike as the stripes on our flag. We were a pair of unrelated and mysterious coffee drinkers.
I beamed at the lady, for it was an important moment in my life—the first in which I had ever been addressed as a Jew—and thus called upon to be one.
“What do you want to know about Jews?" I asked.
"A great deal," she said, "a very great deal."
"My information is a little limited," I said. "Renan is a better authority. There is also a magnificent modern scholar named Klausner. He lives in Palestine."
"That's the whole trouble!" she cried. "Scholars, historians! They can tell us nothing about Jews. But you can. Because you are the greatest sort of authority—the thinking Jew. The Jew who knows himself."
The compliment confused me and I was silent.
"I would like to know," she went on, "how you explain the unpopularity of the Jews. I mean, what do you think it is about the Jew that makes him so constant a victim? What is it in him that attracts so much anger and rouses people everywhere?"
The question embarrassed me. It had too much eagerness in it. It did not seem to ask for an answer so much as to make an unanswerable statement— that the Jews were to blame for their unpopularity. I had the impression that my hostess was accusing me of withholding vital information from the world. She seemed to be asking me, as a Jew, to break down and confess something that would clear up the murder of the three million Jews of Europe and also throw a light on the true secret of anti-Semitism everywhere.
"Don't you see that only a Jew can speak on this subject," she said, "because he is actually inside it? Not outside it."
The picture came to me of an angry policeman badgering a corpse for explanations of the crime committed against it. I am not a corpse, nor do I even feel myself a victim. Nor do I bear the marks of blows that have laid low other Jews. I was not in the picture—but I was there.
“The Jews complain," she spoke on, "they suffer dreadfully. And they accuse. But they never stop to reason or to explain or to figure the thing out and tell the world what they, and only they, know."
The picture of my hostess became clearer. She was policeman intent on solving a crime by arresting the corpse.
“You are asking for introspection from Amos Lasky," I said.
"Who is Amos Lasky?" she demanded.
"Amos is a gentleman who was mugged last week" I said. "He was returning home from a card party and five hoodlums beat him up and took his winnings away. He died in Bellevue Hospital this morning, leaving a wife and three children."
"Nothing of the sort," she said. "Jews are not Amos-victims. They are—how shall I put it?—collaborative victims, a thing they refuse to see. I am asking them only to help clear up a situation that has become too wretched, too horrible to go on in the dark. And I am asking you to use your mind."
She continued to stride and speak, and I did as she requested. I used my mind—but in silence. For my thoughts had a greater fascination for me than they might for her. I thought, as she flung her humanitarian phrases about the library—a library filled with the noblest minds of the modern centuries—that my hostess was suffering from a malady become as common in the world as a head cold. She had picked up some anti-Semitism germs. There was yet no fever, but the sneeze was there. This lady, who had stood for years on the side of the angels, was giving voice to attitudes a trifle short of divine. It was a melancholy thing to hear. I wondered where the germs had come from and how this lapse had happened.
(...)
The above is from Ben Hecht's _A Guide For The Bedevilled_, written in 1944. Hecht's role in this thing we call life is complex and contradictory, but I thought the above was interesting nonetheless...
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/ dave /