Dear Editor
Dear Editor Quote Watching I hate to be a gadfly-or maybe I like it-but I must again do my duty as the NL's authorized quote-watcher. In reviewing The Ethnic Myth ("Back to the Melting Pot," NL,...
...This, it seems to me, is what ought to be remembered...
...Timerman] speaks with a frankness that helps illumine a national calamity no less than a personal tragedy...
...What a pleasant surprise to discover that Simon's criticisms were not only just but more than counterbalanced with erudite praise, as well as informative and interesting asides...
...Unfortunately, Dostoyevsky the writer is not easily separable from Dostoyevsky the ideologue...
...But he didn't...
...Forgotten in the shouting has been the reality of Timerman's experience...
...He is just one refutation of our comforting theories about the fundamental sanity and goodness of genius...
...Horowitz, to his credit, did not lose sight of the achievement of Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number: "It is throughout a description of a man's ordeal that at the same time is an accurate representation of a political catastrophe: the failure of Argentina, God's country, to evolve in terms of the great expectations with which it began this century...
...It might well be true, as Singer says, "that his anti-Semitism reflected a dark, irrational-And completely uncontrollable-force within his personality...
...of his political and religious thought...
...The phrase is repeatedly attributed to FDR...
...Also a sound saying, but not as memorable as the one Whitfield and dozens of others generously, but wrongly, bestow on FDR...
...His suggestion is that part of Dostoyevsky, the essence of the great writer, was not an anti-Semite...
...Mamaroneck, N. Y. Richard Hanser Simon I turned to John Simon's review of Gustave Flaubert's The Temptation of Saint Antony ("The Lure of Words," NL, May 18) with trepidation, convinced that the master of vituperation would manage to make me feel ashamed of myself for admiring Flaubert's writing...
...Los Angeles Lawrence Russo...
...but Dostoyevsky himself always insisted that his writings sprang from the nonrational well-springs of his soul...
...His essay on Jews in The Diary of a Writer, alluded to by Singer-And easily up there with the most horrific anti-Semitic documents I've ever read-is convincing evidence that genius has its evil side...
...This is a facet of your overly splenetic reviewer that we glimpse all too rarely...
...New York City Herbert Evans Dostoyevsky David Singer's effort to rescue Dostoyevsky the writer from the charges of anti-Semitism that apply to Dostoyevsky the man strikes me as more than a little far-fetched ("An Anti-Semitic Genius," NL, May 18...
...In reviewing The Ethnic Myth ("Back to the Melting Pot," NL, May 18), Stephen J. Whitfield begins: '"My fellow immigrants,' Franklin Delano Roosevelt once began a speech delivered to the DAR...
...Boston Donald Baker Timerman Irving Louis Horowitz has the distinction of having written the best review I've seen anywhere of Ja-cobo Timerman's Prisoner Without a Name, Ceil Without a Number (" Jewish Soul on Ice," NL, June 1...
...What FDR really said on that occasion was: "Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and 1 especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists...
...In analyzing David Goldstein's Dostoyevsky and the Jews, Singer tries to provide an alternative to Goldstein's "rational approach" in setting Dostoyevsky's virulent hatred of Jews against the background The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words...
...Let's see more of it...
...The role played by the Argentine editor in the withdrawal of Ernest W. Lefever as the nominee for Assistant Secretary for Human Rights has earned Timerman the odium of Reaganauts and transformed him into a controversial figure...
...It sounds like something he would have said, and he should have...
...As with so many famous sayings, somebody else thought it up afterward and it became embedded in history as firmly as if it had actually been uttered at the event...
...Recognizing the inaccuracy of Timerman's comparison of the regime in Argentina to Hitler's Germany, Horowitz did not swing over to the other extreme and become ensnared with the neoconserva-tives in the claim that since Argentina is a useful friend and "merely authoritarian," there are no grounds for Timerman's charges at all...
...For a source confirming that he did not say it, try the librarian of the Hyde Park archives...
Vol. 64 • June 1981 • No. 12
