| s-2
| Do you recognize the name of Einstein?' |
| s-3
| 'Never. |
| s-4
| Who is he?' |
| s-5
| This is too much for me. |
| s-6
| Silent, I give his case some thought. |
| s-7
| Busy-minded people, with their head-culture that touches all surfaces, have heard of Einstein. |
| s-8
| But do they know what they have heard? |
| s-9
| A majority do not. |
| s-10
| These Hasidim choose not to know. |
| s-11
| By and by I open a paperback and try to lose myself in mere politics. |
| s-12
| A dozen Hasidim in the lavatory queue stare down at us. |
| s-13
| We land and spill out and go our separate ways. |
| s-14
| At the baggage carousel I see my youthful Hasid again and we take a final look at each other. |
| s-15
| In me he sees what deformities the modern age can produce in the seed of Abraham. |
| s-16
| In him I see a piece of history, an antiquity. |
| s-17
| It is rather as if Puritans in seventeenth-century dress and observing seventeenth-century customs were to be found still living in Boston or Plymouth. |
| s-18
| Israel, which receives us impartially, is accustomed to strange arrivals. |
| s-19
| But then Israel is something else again. |
| s-20
| We are staying in Jerusalem as guests of the Mishkenot Sha'ananim, the dwellings of serenity. |
| s-21
| Mayor Teddy Kollek, irrepressible organizer of wonderful events (some of them too rich for my blood), takes us to dinner with one of the Armenian Archbishops in the Old City. |
| s-22
| On the rooftop patio of the opulent apartment are tubs of fragrant flowers. |
| s-23
| The moon is nearly full. |
| s-24
| Below is the church, portions of which go back to the fourth century. |
| s-25
| The Archbishop is, to use an old word, a portly man. |
| s-26
| His cassock, dark red, swells with the body. |
| s-27
| On his breast two ball-point pens are clipped between the buttons. |
| s-28
| He has a full youthful clever face; a black beard, small and tidy. |
| s-29
| The eyes are green. |
| s-30
| Present are Isaac Stern; Alexander Schneider, formerly of the Budapest String Quartet; Kollek's son, Amos; two Israeli couples whom I can not identify; and the foreign-news editor of Le Monde, Michel Tatu. |
| s-31
| In the Archbishop's drawing room are golden icons. |
| s-32
| In illuminated cases are ancient objects. |
| s-33
| I can seldom get up much interest in such cases and objects. |
| s-34
| Middle-aged Armenians serve drinks and wait on us. |
| s-35
| They wear extremely loud shirts, blue-green sprigged with red berries, but they strike me as good fellows and are neat and nimble about the table. |
| s-36
| The conversation is quick and superknowledgeable. |
| s-37
| In French, in English, in Hebrew, and occasionally in Russian. |
| s-38
| (Tatu, who lived for years in Moscow, chats in Russian with Stern and Schneider.) |
| s-39
| The Archbishop, who has himself cooked the eggplant and the leg of lamb, tells the company his recipes. |
| s-40
| He and Kollek discuss seasonings. |
| s-41
| Schneider recalls a great Armenian musician and teacher (his own teacher) named Dirian Alexanian, editor of Bach's Suites for Cello Unaccompanied and the most intolerant perfectionist |
| s-42
| 'Just as particular about music as other people are about seasonings. |
| s-43
| Alexanian said to Pablo Casals after a performance of some of the suites, You made three bad mistakes. |
| s-44
| Terrible. |
| s-45
| Casals did not answer. |
| s-46
| He knew Alexanian was right.' |
| s-47
| Pale, with black hair in abundance, Tatu is one of those short men who have learned to hold their ground against big ones. |
| s-48
| He sits with the ease that disguises this sort of tension. |
| s-49
| His paper is not friendly to Israel. |
| s-50
| Two or three times I consider whether to mention to him a letter I sent Le Monde during the 1973 war about the position being taken by France. |
| s-51
| I want to ask him why it wasn't printed. |
| s-52
| But I succeed in suppressing this a triumph over myself. |
| s-53
| Besides, Tatu does not have the look of a man whose life is easy and I don't see why I should spoil his Jerusalem dinner for him in his diary it would probably be entered as 'An enchanted evening in Le Proche Orient with an Armenian archbishop.' |
| s-54
| I decide to let him enjoy his dinner. |
| s-55
| Seeking common ground with my wife (a laudable desire), he tells her that he too is Rumanian by origin. |
| s-56
| He can safely say this, for his family came to France in the seventeenth century. |
| s-57
| What is all important is to be French, or to have been French for a good long time. |
| s-58
| And French he definitely is. |
| s-59
| But I can see that the Archbishop gives him bad marks for lighting up after the main course. |
| s-60
| People of real culture do not smoke at dinner tables. |
| s-61
| You never know whom you have asked to your palace. |
| s-62
| Dostoevski, no mean judge of such matters, thought there was much to be said for the murderer's point of view. |
| s-63
| Navrozov extends the position. |
| s-64
| Liberal democracy is as brief as a bubble. |
| s-65
| Now-and-then history treats us to an interval of freedom and civilization and we make much of it. |
| s-66
| We forget, he seems to think, that as a species we are generally close to the 'state of nature,' as Thomas Hobbes described it a nasty, brutish, pitiless condition in which men are too fearful of death to give much thought to freedom. |
| s-67
| If Hobbes is too nifty an authority, let us think of the social views of Jimmy Hoffa. |
| s-68
| Or of the Godfather. |
| s-69
| Or of Lenin, as Navrozov accurately characterizes him. |
| s-70
| And this is what America, bubbling with political illusions, is up against. |
| s-71
| So, at least, Navrozov thinks. |
| s-72
| Perhaps Alexander Solzhenitsyn agrees with him in part. |
| s-73
| Apparently Russians are all inclined to see us in this way. |
| s-74
| My own cousin, Nota Gordon, two years out of the Soviet Union, says to me, 'You are no match for them. |
| s-75
| You do not understand with whom you are dealing. ' |
| s-76
| Nota held the rank of captain in the Russian army and fought the Germans until 1945. |
| s-77
| He was three times seriously wounded. |
| s-78
| He has the family look the brown eyes, arched brows, dark coloring, and white hair. |
| s-79
| He has, besides, the gold crowns of Russian dental art. |
| s-80
| Criminals released from prison during the war served in his company. |
| s-81
| Nota has no swagger but he is war-hardened. |
| s-82
| There was no food sent to the front lines. |
| s-83
| You ate frozen potatoes, you foraged, and you stole. |
| s-84
| You could depend on your criminal soldiers to bring in provisions. |
| s-85
| 'I myself had absolute authority to kill anyone in my command. |
| s-86
| At my discretion. |
| s-87
| No explanations necessary,' says Nota. |
| s-88
| We are first cousins but he is Russian, I am an American, and in his Russian eyes an American is amiable, good-natured, attractive perhaps, but undeveloped, helpless: all that Dostoevski was to his fellow convict the murderer. |
| s-89
| Nevertheless, I see that in a book called Things to Come two Americans who think themselves anything but undeveloped and helpless, Herman Kahn and B Bruce-Briggs, are not impressed by Russian achievements. |
| s-90
| 'Most striking is the disappointing performance of Soviet foreign and domestic policy since the late 1950s, 'they wrote in 1972. |
| s-91
| 'In the foreign policy field the Soviets have had an almost uninterrupted series of defeats and disappointments. |
| s-92
| They have failed to extend their influence in Europe. |
| s-93
| Their attempts to ingratiate themselves with India and other neutralist nations have gained them little. |
| s-94
| For fifteen years the Soviet Union has been supporting the Arabs against Israel in the Middle East and all they have to show for it is the humiliation of their proteges and the capture and destruction of their equipment by Israel. |
| s-95
| The Arabs have shown no inclination toward Communist ideology and their oil continues to flow to the West. |
| s-96
| (The only other choice for the Arabs is to leave their oil in the ground.) ' |
| s-97
| I copy this out for my own entertainment a specimen of illusionless American political analysis. |
| s-98
| These views, no substitute for common sense, are based upon careful staff work at the Hudson Institute. |
| s-99
| The Messrs. Kahn and Bruce Briggs say in a prefatory note that their book is 'basically an organizational product. |
| s-100
| All of the staff at Hudson have contributed in some way to this work, as have the thousands of people with whom we have discussed these issues at meetings, seminars, and briefings at the Institute and other locations around the world. ' |
| s-101
| What the literary imagination faces in these political times. |