| s-301
| I have been hearing conversations like this one for half a century. |
| s-302
| I well remember what intelligent, informed people were saying in the last years of the Weimar Republic, what they told one another in the first days after Hindenburg had brought in Hitler. |
| s-303
| I recall table talk from the times of Leon Blum and Edouard Daladier. |
| s-304
| I remember what people said about the Italian adventure in Ethiopia and about the Spanish Civil War and the Battle of Britain. |
| s-305
| Such intelligent discussion hasn't always been wrong. |
| s-306
| What is wrong with it is that the discussants invariably impart their own intelligence to what they are discussing. |
| s-307
| Later, historical studies show that what actually happened was devoid of anything like such intelligence. |
| s-308
| It was absent from Flanders Field and from Versailles, absent when the Ruhr was taken, absent from Teheran, Yalta, Potsdam, absent from British policy at the time of the Palestine Mandate, absent before, during, and after the Holocaust. |
| s-309
| History and politics are not at all like the notions developed by intelligent, informed people. |
| s-310
| Tolstoi made this clear in the opening pages of War and Peace. |
| s-311
| In Anna Scherer's salon, the elegant guests are discussing the scandal of Napoleon and the Duc d'Enghien, and Prince Andrei says that after all there is a great difference between Napoleon the Emperor and Napoleon the private person. |
| s-312
| There are raisons d'etat and there are private crimes. |
| s-313
| And the talk goes on. |
| s-314
| What is still being perpetuated in all civilized discussion is the ritual of civilized discussion itself. |
| s-315
| Tatu agrees with the Archbishop about the Russians. |
| s-316
| So that, as they say in Chicago, is where the smart money is. |
| s-317
| The Vatican is the next topic and receives similar treatment. |
| s-318
| Some Armenian prelates have joined us for coffee and take part in the discussion. |
| s-319
| Someone observes that the Church is a worshiper of success and always follows the majorities. |
| s-320
| See what it is doing now in the Warsaw Pact countries, it is making deals with the Communists. |
| s-321
| Should communism sweep Italy, would the Pope move to Jerusalem? |
| s-322
| Rather, says one of the prelates, he would stay in Rome and become Party secretary. |
| s-323
| And there we are, Kissinger has entirely wrecked Russia's Middle East policy and the Pope is about to swap the Vatican for the Kremlin. |
| s-324
| Dessert is served. |
| s-325
| In my letter to Le Monde I had said that in the French tradition there were two attitudes toward the Jews: a revolutionary attitude which had resulted in their enfranchisement, and an anti-Semitic one. |
| s-326
| The intellectual leaders of the Enlightenment were decidedly anti-Semitic. |
| s-327
| I asked which of the two attitudes would prevail in twentieth-century France the century of the Dreyfus affair and of the Vichy government. |
| s-328
| The position taken by Foreign Minister Maurice Jobert in the October War of 1973 was that the Palestinian Arabs had a natural and justified desire to 'go home.' |
| s-329
| I expressed, politely, the hope that the other attitude, the revolutionary one, would not be abandoned. |
| s-330
| I made sure that my letter would be delivered. |
| s-331
| Eugene Ionescu gave the editors one copy of it; another was handed to them by Manes Sperber, the novelist. |
| s-332
| The letter was never acknowledged. |
| s-333
| Since 1973, Le Monde has openly taken the side of the Arabs in their struggle with Israel. |
| s-334
| It supports terrorists. |
| s-335
| It is friendlier to Amin than to Rabin. |
| s-336
| A recent review of the autobiography of a fedayeen speaks of the Israelis as colonialists. |
| s-337
| On July 3, 1976, before Israel had freed the hostages at Entebbe, the paper observed with some satisfaction that Amin, 'the disquieting Marshal,' maligned by everyone, had now become the support and the hope of his foolish detractors. |
| s-338
| The great Golden Gate that will open when the Redeemer appears stands sealed. |
| s-339
| Just beyond, the Garden of Gethsemane. |
| s-340
| As its name indicates, it was an olive grove. |
| s-341
| Now pines, cypresses, and eucalyptus trees grow there below the domes of the Russian Orthodox church. |
| s-342
| Opposite it there are olives still, which Arabs are harvesting with long poles. |
| s-343
| They hit the branches, they thresh the leaves with their sticks, and the fruit rains down. |
| s-344
| As we go up into the Via Dolorosa, we hear an exciting jingle. |
| s-345
| Arab boys are racing their donkeys down the hill. |
| s-346
| You look for sleighs and frost when you hear this jingle-belling. |
| s-347
| Instead, there are boys stern and joyous, galloping hell-bent on their donkeys toward the Lions' Gate. |
| s-348
| 'Rode from Ramlah to Lydda,' Herman Melville wrote in his travel journal of 1857. |
| s-349
| A mounted escort of some 30 men, all armed. |
| s-350
| Fine riding. |
| s-351
| Musket-shooting. |
| s-352
| Curvetting & caracoling of the horsemen. |
| s-353
| Outriders. |
| s-354
| Horsemen riding to one side, scorning the perils.' |
| s-355
| And a few days later, on the barrenness of Judea, 'whitish mildew pervading whole tracts of landscape. |
| s-356
| Village of Lepers houses facing the wall Zion. |
| s-357
| Their park, a dung-heap. |
| s-358
| They sit by the gates asking alms, then whine avoidance of them & horror. |
| s-359
| Wandering among the tombs till I began to think myself one of the possessed with devils.' |
| s-360
| Anwar Sadat's American visit. |
| s-361
| You have to discuss this with Israelis before they will consent to talk about anything else. |
| s-362
| An indignant librarian, a middle-aged woman whose face is so hot it is almost fragrant with indignation, demands of me in a superdistinguished all but Oxonian accent, 'How do you account for it!' |
| s-363
| I shrug. |
| s-364
| This is what I would say if I did answer her: |
| s-365
| Americans love to open their hearts to foreign visitors. |
| s-366
| These visitors are sometimes treated as if they were the heroes of an Arabian Nights' tale. |
| s-367
| We'll show them how good we all are and well-meaning and generous and open-minded and evenhanded. |
| s-368
| We will be full of emotion and the visitors will be correspondingly full of emotion, and after they have been wined and feted and dined and toasted and televised and paraded and clapped and the supplying of loans and atomic plants and military hardware has been discussed they will love us. |
| s-369
| I trust that they will give us better love than they are getting from us, for ours is a very low-quality upward-seeping vegetable-sap sort of love, as short-lived as it is spontaneous. |
| s-370
| As soon as they leave they are forgotten. |
| s-371
| An old Mormon missionary in Nauvoo once gripped my knee hard as we sat side by side, and he put his arm about me and called me 'Brother.' |
| s-372
| We'd only met ten minutes before. |
| s-373
| He took me to his good bosom. |
| s-374
| His eyes began to mist. |
| s-375
| I was a prospect, an exotic prospect in old tennis shoes and a sweatshirt. |
| s-376
| His heart opened to me. |
| s-377
| It opened like a cuckoo clock. |
| s-378
| But it did not give me the time of day. |
| s-379
| 'But don't Americans know that Sadat was a Nazi?' the librarian says. |
| s-380
| Well, yes, well-informed people do have this information in their files. |
| s-381
| The New York Times is sure to have it, but the Times as I see it is a government within a government It has a state department of its own, and its high councils have probably decided that it would be impolitic at this moment to call attention to Sadat's admiration for Hitler. |
| s-382
| I tell the lady that I have sent a copy of a eulogy of Hitler written by Sadat in 1953 to Sydney Gruson of the Times and also to Katharine Graham of The Washington Post. |
| s-383
| 'Will they print it?' she asked. |
| s-384
| 'Difficult to guess,' I tell her. |
| s-385
| 'The Times ought to be stronger in politics than it is in literature, but who knows. |
| s-386
| Of course it must do financial news and sports well enough. |
| s-387
| If it covered ball games as badly as it reviews books, the fans would storm it like the Bastille. |
| s-388
| Book readers evidently haven't got the passionate intensity of sports fans.' |
| s-389
| What disturbs is whether Americans understand the world at all, whether they are a match for the Russians the Sadats are in themselves comparatively unimportant. |
| s-390
| To dissident Russian writers like Lev Navrozov, the Americans can never be a match for the Russians. |
| s-391
| He quotes from Dostoevski's The House of the Dead a conversation between the writer and a brutal murderer, one of those criminals who fascinated him. |
| s-392
| I haven't the book handy, so I paraphrase. |
| s-393
| 'Why are you so kind to me?' Dostoevski asks. |
| s-394
| And the murderer, speaking to one of the geniuses of the nineteenth century, answers, 'Because you are so simple that one can not help feeling sorry for you.' |
| s-395
| Even when he robbed Dostoevski, he pitied him as one might 'a little cherub-like child.' |
| s-396
| Navrozov, exceedingly intelligent but, to a Westerner, curiously deformed (how could an independent intellectual in the Soviet Union escape deformity?), sees us, the Americans, as children at whom the Stalins smile through their mustachios. |
| s-397
| Perhaps there is a certain Vautrin-admiring romanticism in this. |
| s-398
| People were arriving, and the younger one was walking back and forth introducing them. |
| s-399
| The old one sat on her chair. |
| s-400
| Her flat cloth slippers were propped up on a foot-warmer, and a cat reposed on her lap. |