Sister Mary Ignatius, Vanessa Redgrave, & Roger Baldwin

National Review, Sept 6, 1985 by Nathan Perlmutter

SISTER MARY IGNATIUS, VANESSA REDGRAVE, & ROGER BALDWIN

IN YIDDISH to call a person prust is to say that he looks at things plainly and simply--in effect, to characterize him as a philistine. I suppose the Anti-Defamation League's attitude about many matters close to the hearts of prominent civil libertarians and intellectuals has at times been viewed as prust. Again and again we've been compelled to play philistine, not the happiest role for a Jewish organization, a goodly number of whose members are card-carriers in the intelligentsia.

We Jews are, after all, the people of the Book--even if the book is sometimes by Al Goldstein. We've been brought up to believe that the book and the printed word are sacred, even wondrous, and that scribes are the bearers of higher truths.

I remember my despair when I found out otherwise.

As a young man, I felt warmly about Voltaire. But my true love, my true American hero, was Jack London. I saw him as I did Voltaire, brilliant, a great read, and a derring-doer on the side of social justice. (I was at that stage when causes supplant box scores as the things that really matter.) But my love was spurned. It turned out that Voltaire and London had more than social justice in common. Voltaire was a part-time anti-Semite, and so was London.

And then there was Nikos Kazantzakis. I loved London and Voltaire, but I worshipped him. As one remembers a first love, that first sight of the Grand Canyon, I remember the summer my wife and I read aloud to each other Kazantzakis's The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel.

Alas, it was only a summer romance. For after The Odyssey, after Zorba the Greek, The Greek Passion, Freedom or Death, and The Last Temptation of Christ, came his autobiography, Report to Greco. I rushed to buy, to possess and treasure the final legacy of the then dying master. And it was a single, simply written sentence as swift and as sudden as a karate blow that snapped my adoration--a line about a winding Jerusalem street casually glimpsed a lifetime ago and called back to memory by the old man. On this street were "the Jews, with their long greasy sideburns, [who] slunk along the walls of the houses, their hooked noses dripping venom.'

I don't mean to make too much of the "greasy sideburns' or the "hooked noses dripping venom.' But for me, Report to Greco provided a flash of insight into anti-Semitism. Earlier in the book, recalling his boyhood, Kazantzakis wrote: The sound of certain words excited me terribly--it was far I felt most often, not joy. Especially Hebrew words, for I knew from my grandmother than on Good Friday the Jews took Christian children and tossed them into a tough lined with spikes and drank their blood. Ofentimes it seemed to me that a Hebrew word from the Old Testament was a spikelined trough and that someone wanted to throw me in.

Kazantzakis, London, Percival Wren in Beau Geste, H. Rider Haggard in Allan Quatermain, Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, all those unexpected places in which the young reader I was, was ambushed, slapped, shamed.

I once asked my favorite junior-high-school English teacher why these writers didn't like Jews. He pointed out that writers are products of their society, their social class. This social class has in common certain attiudes. The writer mirrors these attitudes. Although I nodded, feigning understanding, I wondered where it was written that they had to mirror these attitudes quite so well. And why, if they must mirror attitudes, did they have to mirror the very worst ones?

As an adult I think I understand. If you're part of Western culture, how can you fail to respond to the tale of Hugh of Lincoln, to Barabas, the Jew of Malta, to Shylock and Fagin, to Dostoyevsky's obsessed, demonic people and their obsessed, demonic ravings about "the satanic tribe of Abraham'?

Nevertheless, if you're Jewish, conditioned by two thousand years to expect the worst, can you afford the luxury of an exclusively literary response? Let me put it the prust, the philistine, way: How far is it possible for even the most supremely gifted virtuoso to transform vicious and ugly matter into literature? Into beauty?

When Ezra Pound received the prestigious Bollingen prize for poetry in 1949 for The Pisan Cantos, the committee, sententiously I thought, declared: "To permit other considerations than that of poetic achievement to sway the decision would be unthinkable . . . We are aware of the objections that may be raised concerning Pound's carrer as a Fascist and anti-Semite, but we have confined our judgment to his poetry . . .'

The judges, however, were making a public award, and a public award carries certain public responsibilities. It is one thing to celebrate Pound's masterly rhythms and impeccable diction; it is quite another to ignore the fact that the masterly rhythms and impeccable diction went into such toxic lines as:

the yidd is a stimulant, and the goyim are cattle

in gt/proportion and go to saleable slaughter

with the maximum of docility