The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
A Page of Features Americana Books and Writers Chatter The Home Front By WILLIAM E. BOHN Soldier. Machine-Guns, Home Promt THE following fusilade conies from Harry Roskolenko and is postmarked...
...Some have...
...Because Sandburg appears to have betrayed his Lincoln by writing it in prose instead of in poetry, you hardly have a case against Sandburg, the poet...
...In a Glass House By hi...
...The farmer has since been arrested...
...by the signs...
...Sulamith Schwartz on Zionism in American Jexrish Life and Abraham Duker on the Structure of the Jewish Community have both presented clear and comprehensive pictures, but both are marred by the faults inherent in the book for which the key is set by the awkwardly florid first half of Oscar Janowsky's chapter as the editor...
...Wilson does not know ¦when he is satirizing and when be is being himself...
...He was himself a member of a group he called the rarest in creation, the permanently disinterested men of ability...
...Wilson's 'book is a sell—mildly suggestive in tone of a Walpurgisnacht The proper title—I offer this free—might have been: Some Things I Threw Together Between Thinking of Daisy...
...will come as real news...
...The leftist cause seeks to deny to the common man right to know himself in his strictly human capacity...
...We are sophisticates now, whereas we were the "children of purity' then...
...and "At Laurelwood...
...In 1911...
...Pearson is so armed...
...Again the Learned Librarian THIS is-my week for distinguished guest columnists...
...Eddie is playing (or being played for) pretty big stakes, much too big for just a lonesome ace...
...George Bernard Shaw, sup-posedly descended from Macduff, and not displeased that an ancestor "is a character in one of Shakespeare's plays," was born in Dublin, Ireland, and so started on his extraordinary biography...
...News item...
...Otto Habsburg is still hopping around looking for political openings—he is now seeking the cooperation of the Cuban government to raise volunteers there for the Austrian battalion here...
...whose father recently died and hae in recent issues of the Daily Worker been given a posthumous red card in the Communist Party...
...its cultural, social and educational institutions—these are some of the most important topics for such a study which, if properly handled, could even be made fascinating...
...As you well know, there are sore spots in the Old World, where bitter race antagonisms have been kept up for a thousand years, and modern improvements only heat them up to higher temperatures...
...By Hesketk Pearson...
...Benet—well, he hardly matters, for he is good, if you like that sort of thing, or anything...
...Book reviews, certainly New Leader book reviews, should be informative...
...and second, hi commands the best sentence structure among contemporary biographers...
...Saint and Agitator By ISABELLA FEY G. B. S. A Full Length Portrait...
...A Composite Portrait...
...In somewhat other circles (or are there only arcs left these days...
...I yammer because buried away in the inconse-quental mass are wonderful phrases and lines, rich observations, admirable anger, and some bits of satire that do this young heart good...
...The Nazis have appropriated all the files of the Deuxieme bureau, France's secret service, and now possess complete dossiers on all kinds of men and events i including the Lindbergh trip to Germany ). . . . * * * KJf» Fronts for Old:—Norman Thomas—"long active in liberal ** circles...
...Episcopalians and Catholics think about this notion...
...the relation of American Jews to Jews in other countries and the extent of their mutual influences: the economic structure of American Jewry and the reasons for it...
...is 25...
...What form adds, it also subtracts when the poem is poor...
...Jacob Weinstein's discussion on Anti-Semitism is the best-written chapter in the book...
...Pearson observes, a man of the world...
...The second made him a saint at heart...
...Zionism, like everything else that is Jewish, is in this book presented as a native American product...
...Even his snow-white hairs suggest duration, not age...
...Two weeks later they got the following reply: "Your letter was put up in the hen house, so that the hens themselves could.see it...
...But what do »'l of the good Methodists, Presbyterians...
...Shaw the shrewd business man, the legalistic wizard, the lightening economist, the precise pamphleter4 the street-corner speaker (week after week for thirty years), Shaw the tactful, puckish, omiscient director of plays, the St...
...Pancras vestryman correcting slum conditions, holding inquests on tuberculous cattle, studying drainage, sanitation, housing conditions, shop slavery—it is a swollen list, each new- activity amplifying the scope of his dedicated life...
...You can't sing poetry when there is boogy-woogy unless, of course, it is the business of poets to work with Tin Pan Alley...
...But there is no Christian or democratic sanction for a caste system...
...This is not the fault of our generation for Shaw's contemporaries made the same mistake, and much of the world has preferred to regard Shaw as an annoyingly clever man with not too much meat on his literary bones...
...Underneath each turning wheel Sink and rise the tracks of steel...
...Its growth from a few families in Colonial days to some five million today, the various waves of immigration from the Portuguese Marranos coming from Brazil to escape the Inquisition to the latest refugees from Nazi-dominated countries, and the background and traditions of each element...
...and the following year Henderson tried again...
...it is more in the spirit than in the artificial display of form...
...In a thousand years, most of the white strain will have died out...
...is one of the few recent biographies written with neither folded hands nor debunking forefinger...
...These epics, so named for lack of a definable term, to Lincoln and Washington, current a few years ago, were the results of this sort of collaboration...
...It is hardly news that Shaw is a tremendous wit...
...The recurrent emphasis on the early Portuguese Jewish communities provides the proper Jewish Mayflower and gives the undiscern-ing Jewish reader the feeling that he is somehow the descendant of those Marranos...
...And the war has produced some swell prose, but not one line of decent poetry.' For shame' Again that eternal measure, the memorable line...
...The volume is sponsored by an organization primarily pledged to the promotion of the Zionist idea, yet the impression one gets of Zionism from the pages of the volume is that it is just a "nice thing"—it is "nice" for Jews in America to feel that somewhere other Jews have a Homeland...
...Net Brood Alone WHILE my friend, the librarian, sees little use in applying re-ligion to the race problem, one of my favorite correspondents...
...n Full Length Portrait...
...It may take -less than a thousand years to produce on this continent a unified race combining the colors and forms of Negro and White...
...Milton Steinberg's discussion on Current Philosophies of Jewish Life is intelligent and well-written and occassionally even brilliant, but not sufficiently objective...
...Prophesy is always risky...
...I would like to hear from Father Kernan about this—or even iroma,ny ordinary heathen...
...We know he transformed the modern theatre: he hammered socialism into many an old English skull, and his prefaces are an acknowledged body of literature in themselves...
...the types and divisions among Jews...
...To many Mr...
...leaving the deep Sou* to the colored brethren, who are better adapted to a climate with hot and moist summers.' Maybe...
...Everything he writes must see print...
...I yammer because America's most distinguished critic should be a more capable prosodist and because any man with ten fingers and ditto toes should be able to scan a line of verse accurately...
...It seems to make little difference when they begin or end or how they are played...
...322 pp...
...Indeed, how brandish those formidable yardsticks so dear to the damp souls of sociologists...
...Meanwhile in South America the idea of "Hispar.idad" is more than ever being glorified as against Pan-American solidarity Increasing numbers erf Latin theaters are putting on Spanish things with the line of "ties to Mother Spain...
...Wilson's opus deserves...
...Harpers...
...Sponsored by the Hadassah Organisation of America, Harpers put out what purports to be the first attempt of its kind to give a comprehensive picture of American Jewry...
...John Gassner alone has stood up apparently for ART...
...Now tell me what makes you yammer...
...Charlie CoIIingwood, who has been doing such a great job of North African reporting for CBS...
...Wonder if the Commie hacks aren't going to feel a little sensitive around the neck when the GPU gets around to learning that old Tom Flynn was once a subscription agent for—The New Leader...
...The appropriate non-Jewish endorsement of Zionism comes in this book from George Shuster...
...Pearson took ready-made from his predecessors (and he took a good deal from Henderson), his work is convincing and refreshing for two reasons—first, he allows Shaw to do most of the talking, and all we see of Mr...
...etc...
...Having become the child of science, the poet in his scientific sensorium has a hard time digesting his feast...
...i "Man," she says in her latest carefully written note, "is something more than mammal...
...The New Leader cannot promise to reprint all of the poems, but it is interested in the list of titles and authors...
...as a recent advertisement put it—will speak from the same platform with Herbert Hoover on Food for Europe...
...Perhaps I should only point out that the darkly romantic title of Mr...
...As a distinguished poet, he has a double right to speak up...
...So what...
...Speak and hear on party lines...
...Our language, our implements of war, our ideas are vast sensorrums...
...More than one publisher may be roused from somnolence by the scent of a profitable project...
...We see it happening before our eyes here in New York...
...Pearson's discrimination, civility and love are entirely equal to-the genius of the mas who called their, forth...
...Most of them will lie beside Phones of those who...
...the degree of integration of different types of Jews among each other and with the surrounding non-Jewish world...
...But, if you will allow me a page or a column, I will edit for you a small collection of poetry written during this war by American and British poets, and you will have to re-digest that meal staged in one line...
...for a poem is not a mathematical arrangement...
...The first made him, as Mr...
...Shaw in living up his years has not sagged or run down, and the exhuberance of these pages is but an overflow of Shaw's own inexhaustible energy...
...1 cannot see any solution for the ugly race problem in our South—at least not in our time...
...They can hardly be expected to postpone eating until it is impossible to distinguish between white and colored...
...and his nose-dive when people began to suspect that he was abusing his status to mislead them...
...I freely admit that the attitude of most Southerners toward the Negro is unchristian, unjust, unsocial and everything else unpleasant that you can think of...
...Pearson is an occasional sly elbow digging the Shavian rib where he frankly comments upon some conceit of Shaw's, or interpolates a direct disagreement with the playwright's opinion, as on the subject of Shakespeare...
...While from every hole and chink Streams the smell of printer's ink...
...Yes, I yammer because I too often have the horrible suspicion that Mr...
...It is hardly how long the lines run or how short they are...
...Stalin kept every motion picture theater open 24 hours a day in the vicinity of Leningrad and Stalingrad during the entire time of the siege...
...Thirty freight cars, end to end...
...Saul Mills, and all the other boys...
...There are even two whole pieces in Note-Books of Night which are wholly excellent: "The Three Limperary Cripples," a Joyceian effusian which does to certain critical affectations what should have -been done to them long ago...
...He just couldn't keep the news under his hat, and the censors almost put him out of business' . . Incidentally one newspaperman didn't know about the Conference but wound up right— UP correspondent Walter Logan who...
...Same Mr...
...But he was on Guadalcanal for about 40 hours, and according to correspondent Ira Woifert, who was there through much of the autumn and winter fighting, his conclusions "are wrong and grotes-quely misrepresent the men...
...By Edmund Wilton...
...The following spirited essay comes from my old friend, the librarian, who knows practically all the languages, philosophies and religions: "I read your diatribe in The New Leader impeaching the Christianity of - Southerners who do not share your views on the race question...
...Sophistication has another approach...
...t*«rii Christians I AM NOT the right fellow to answer this...
...Cooghlinite rabble-rouser) dedicated to Rickenbacker, who will be boomed for President (Detroit, Feb...
...A Norwegian farmer who had a flock of hens received one day a threatening letter from the Nazis, ordering him to deliver eggs to the Wehrmacht...
...Yet some among the younger generation, unaware of the divine origin of laughter, are inclined to dismiss Shaw as a chuckle mill...
...and everything that sees print must appear in a book...
...Who has not...
...On the "Victory" Committer are old standby* like Arthur Upham Pope...
...But the matter won't be brought up officially "because of the nature of current relations...
...Sandburg issued a book of poems a few years ago addressed to the \PEOPLE...
...which he does in the following effective fashion: "I have something to pick with you...
...native-fascist mouthpkee...
...A cross the Seas: — Franco* Spanish representatives have been ¦** regularly passing information on to the Axis (via "diplomatic'" exchanges and news dispatches!—and it's no secret to Allied Intelligence...
...CDMUND WILSON is a literary string-saver...
...Our best poets have turned to prose,' you say...
...side by side with AxeVs Castle and The Wound and the Bow—two landmarks in conteroporary criticism—stand The Boys in the Back Room, a purely journalistic compilation, and currently Note-Books of Nigkt, with which this note concerns itself...
...Donald Henderson, Louis Goldblatt...
...a fine long stretch of analytical reminiscence...
...South from Jersey slowly wend...
...An attempt is made in the book to present Louis D. Brandeis and Henrietta Szold—fine "acceptable" Americans—as the leading figures in American Zionism, although neither of them (whatever their individual merits or even greatness) belong to the social strata which forms the backbone of the Zionist movement...
...Two forces governed Shaw—his wit and his purity...
...What my learned friend seems to be Mying is that there is no use in discussing Christian ideals...
...The South is far from being democratic (lower case), but it feels itself to be deeply Christian...
...I iterati & Co.:—Source foi one of those spectaculai Drew Pearson items on North Africa was Andre Raynal's exclusive biography of Marcel Peyrouton in these pages recently...
...Frank Harris entered the running in 1931...
...Sometimes we think—God ami Stalin forbid'—that it's almost like the old days...
...But shouting these epithets at them doesn't get anywhere...
...At no time in the reading is one aware of time lapse...
...The book betrays a labored attempt, on the one hand, to prove how very much a part of America the Jews are, on the other hand, to assure the Jews that there is every reason in the world to feel optimistic about the development of Jewish life in this country...
...The sun shines, the snow melts—and as long as poets and scholars- do my writing for- me, I can take my ease...
...the Commies are setting up a Japanese-American front to cash in on the new benevolent U. S. attitude toward Jap-Americans...
...I hereby advertise vociferously for a reply from some Southern Christian who takes his religion seriously...
...L,'i> nnlandia:—We don't usually go in for this kind of flynn-flam, * but our spies report—from Washington, that it's so qmiet there this week, you could hear o Flynn drop . . . from Hollywood, that the moral of it all is: To Errot's human but to Flyundivine . . . (also: the star will probably be acquitted, and he'll go on a coast-to-coaet hook-up "thanking the American people for their tolerance" and calling the case "a demonstration of American democratic method...
...So, Soldier and Poet Roskolenko, on with the Golden Treasury, or Sub-Treasury, of War Poems...
...phone book from the printer in Jersey City...
...This Roskolenko may be marching to the old one-two rhythm now with a pack on his back, but some of you will recall lines of his that used to march through the pages of Poetry and other favorite journals...
...Shaw, the tireless committee man, whose patience matched his sharpness in organizing dissenting opinions...
...to make it the materials of poetry— and this does not imply a contradiction—is a problem...
...And everyone knows that they .take their religion much more seriously...
...The book does contain some very valuable material and some of it—very little of it—is even well written...
...Thirty freight cars, full of books: Handle gently, use no hooks...
...Weary, for I read it by candle light, being blacked out, sitting in a cold Army tent, hoping that The New Leader would bring me some internal as well as external warmth...
...dead at 83, was a life-long democratic socialist, and was always proud of Debs' boast: "having no Vatican in Moscow to guide me I must be content to use my own good judgment...
...Regardless of what Mr...
...What a subject for a play...
...We incline to liberalism or just straight agnosticism...
...We remember another national hero who took a flyer in politics and "industrial relations...
...f%E Jewish community in America would make an interesting subject of study even * if the problem of anti-Semitism were not so tragically alive today...
...Mammalianly he is very much "> line with a pig, and the pearls of society should not be cast before swine...
...In proportion to income and numbers, the Southern brethren support many more churches, clergymen' and missionaries than do we Northerners...
...Yours faithfully...
...If we have no Wilfred Ow#n or Sassoon, it is solely because we are removed from the patterns of 1914...
...Meanwhile old America First (of which Rickenbacker was a member) announces a new rally (including Gerald L. K. Smith...
...VN July 26th...
...To use it...
...It bears witness to the alarming deterioration of the vigor and courage which characterized the immigrants from Eastern Europe two generations ago...
...It is a Zionism not of this world, not of the world of 1942 and 1943 in which Hitler murders hundreds of thousands of Jews in Europe...
...Neatest cracks of the week (Washington department)—"A committee is a group of men who keep minutes and waste hours,"—"A conference is a slightly organized method of not doing business...
...Education and sanitation only increase the number of Negroes and the resulting economic pressure...
...In ancient India the problem was solved by the institution of a rigid caste system, something like the one now carried out in conquered Poland by the Herrenvolk...
...And here • is the- key to his genius...
...A Yammer on E.Wilson By RALPH Of TOLEDAHO SOTE-BOOKS OF NIGHT...
...Thomson and OHn c Downes are persona non grata to the Sew Masses set . . . the same goes for the drama critics who soaked the Simonov-Odets Russian People...
...There is an inordinate amount of scraping and bowing in the book and there is a dose of stereotyped optimism thrown in with nearly every discussion...
...It is no more than Mr...
...350...
...the hens after two days still had not resumed laying, 1 have""had them all shot for sabotage against the German Wehrmacht...
...Everybody, he seems to imply, just goes along according to the habit of his time, his religion, his set...
...Colt Press, San Francisco...
...Professor Boas long ago pointed out that race fusion is rapidly taking place—and not only in the South...
...G.BJi...
...Aren't the New Dealers pushing Lyndon Johnson young Texas congressman, in the party machinery in preparation for '44...
...The children of the tailors.who fought for their rights in the general strike and built up the first Trade-unions in the world and the children of the self-made against whom the strikes were called—of those David Levinskys who built up the American clothing industry—have grown terribly soft and bourgeois, in mortal fear of what their non-Jewish fellow-citizens may think of them, over-anxious to appear respectable and ashamed of their fathers...
...Z. f. FRANK THE AMERICAS JEW...
...It's a bargain...
...Inches thick and tall and wide...
...Thomas Hardy wrote prose so that he could earn enough to allow him the means and the time to write The Dynasts...
...ObermaieT is behind a German-American Trade-Unionist front, with (of course...
...Abner Green, and Michael J Obermaier...
...Hopper specializes in studio handouts, and the plain fact is that the Hemingway picture (cut and censored) has been distributed for premieres for some time...
...They just meander and meander...
...U/ashington Notes:—DantoiT Walker, Daily Sews gosstpper, al-** most but not quite cooked his goose on the Casablanca Conference...
...The European background and traditions of American Jewry are played down and apparently mentioned only insofar as Louis Adamic has made that sort of thing respectable in America...
...You are impatient, my unfeathered friend...
...Harvard professor (and father of son, Newton Hooton...
...it seems to have no bearing on the fundamental tenets of the founders of modern Zionism—Pinsker and Herzl—that a combination of traditional historic and economic factors has made the position of the Jews as a minority among other nations hopelessly vulnerable and the first and worst victims in any upheaval and that the process of Europe's "spewing out" of her Jews was foreseen by Pinsker and Herzl at the close of the nineteenth century...
...Pearson's portrait of G.B.S...
...It implies a sufficiency of data...
...I promise you enough memorable lines to make you drunk...
...It may be...
...Edited by Oscar Janowsky...
...There is a lot of poetry being written here and abroad...
...The Post-Wsr World Council, which is sponsoring the meeting, has also recently published a pamphlet by a Mr James Wood Johnson, a former pro-Vichyite and "long active in reactionary circles...
...The economic structure of American Jewry and its historic development does not form a subject of a chapter, but is only treated in Oscar Janowsky's chapter on Historic Backgrounds and incidentally in Nathan Reich's Economic Trends which is primarily a discussion of current problem—although it is done with remarkable scientific detachment, in which it is an exception in the book...
...The reports in the Hollywood colums (rr Hedda Hopper) about how the Pars-mount big-wigs are anti-Franco and are making For Whom the Bell Tolls stronger are strictly the bunk...
...Inside and Out By MATTHEW LOW Eddie Takes a Flyer:—While Captain Rickenbacker has been touring the eovntrf with fanfare, telling big-business societies and advertising dubs all about-the virtues of company unionism and how the fox-hole fighters are mad at the labor movement, Sergeant Johnnie Bartek—with Rickenbacker in the Pacific tor 21 days—has been quietly visiting mills and factories hi the East, fraternising once again with old buddies (Bartek was a member of the CIO's Textile Workers...
...Ricken backer's strong point is "what the men out there" are saying and feeling...
...But not until 1942 did Hesketh Pearson pull abreast of the Irish playboy-saint with an unmistakable likeness called G.B.S...
...In writing of Shaw, Mr...
...Since poetry is impoverished sufficiently by the non-readers the world over, and since the bastard-like acceptance by the publishers is really extralegal, I am as shocked as shocked can be at your—did I say snide ?— comment at the end of your weary column...
...and like Howard K. Smith and Russel Hill (24) was a Rhodes scholar when the war broke and made them war correspondents...
...Berlin-aided Madrid hand-outs are growing in influence...
...I cannot imagine anyone approaching the business of Shaw unless armed with an array of exact nouns, sharpened verbs and enlightening adjectiws...
...Note-Books of Night, however, lends itself only to that type of notice which I call the "yammer," a form which infuriates the creative soul and amuses malicious bystanders...
...It so happens that old Tom Flynn...
...But this prospect <Wers little relief to thousands of Negro firemen who are being turown out of their jobs...
...Harpers...
...2.50...
...When in spite of ^his...
...scouting around for a new story, wandered into Casablanca two weeks ago...
...2.50...
...been cooking Dp in the offices of Clare Hoffmann and Burton K. Wheeler?—Wwrt the Dies ghost-writer who put those pooh-pooh sections on aflti-Semitism in the Dies report the well-known Washington anti-Semite?—How come Johannes Steel, Post columnist and radio commentator, wasn't aware when he «poke of "the alleged incarceration" of Ehrlich and Alter in Russian prisons that prominent D.C officials have been trying for months to press Molotoff to release them?—Didn't Martin (Hoarse Opera* Dies remember «hen lie smeared Jay Lovestone's Citizens for Victory that he had once suppoenaed Jay as an anti-Communist witness (following which Earl firowder called him "The Drtiot of America...
...Getting Their Numbers It took thirty freight carx to transport the latest edition of the Washington (D.C...
...For how criticize sagely a collection of small-fry poems, satiric verses, heart-felt yearnings set to rocking horse rhythms, good prose, and acceptable revery...
...Wilson falls between two stools: he lacks the technical equipment for good light verse and the inspiration for "serious" poetry, with {he result that one wobbles and the other maudles...
...Archibald Henderson tried to overtake Shaw with another version of the biography...
...Adviser will be famed anthropologist Ernest Hooton...
...Some things are hest said in words that have a prose formation, which does not remove an essentially poetic approach to a man or to his times...
...JJ«ry Allen Grant, of Sparta, Illinois, writes to me now and then father hopelesslv, suggesting that The New Leader is far too tnaterialistic...
...Machine-Guns, Home Promt THE following fusilade conies from Harry Roskolenko and is postmarked Battery So-and-so, Fort So-and-so, U.S.A...
...The book deserves attentibn perhaps as much in a negative way as it does for its positive contributions...
...The children of the tailor immigrants—the more than one hundred thousand members of the Hadassah who sponsored the book and the rabbis and professors who wrote and edited it—have not seen fit to devote a chapter to the Jewish labor movement in America...
...a little matter of snide home-fronting which you included in your column of January 16th, this year of our Lord and pass the ammunition...
...And on the third Flynn front, there is news of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn...
...If you insist that you will call Christian only those who fully carry out the teaching and example of the Nazarene, tiren there have been precious few Christians in any period or place...
...The Commie reviewer's lead was historic—"The Russian people . . ." he began...
...They take no fundamentalism...
...The Yiddish press in America, which has been such a potent factor in shaping the pysiognomy of American Jewry, is given only an odd paragraph in Marie Syrkin's excellent chapter on The Cultural Scene which is devoted to the discussion of Jews and Jewish subjects in American literature generally...
...He knew nothing, of course, and had no special o k. papers on him, and so wee clapped into custody and almost shot . . . Current capital.queries: —What has Jot Kamp...
...The Commies are getting stung more and more on this business of making political capital out of Shostakovitch'p music Said the Herald-Tribune's sharp-tongued Virgil Thomson on some recent Philharmonic renditions of Shostakovitch symphonies...
...RICHARD ARMOUR...
...He has survived and reached his present state in the exercise of a sense of direction which, because it is «o different from, and marvelous in comparison with, any other ^Pacity of earth's creation, can be said to be not of earth but eodlike...
...It will not do to say that our nigger-hating fellow citizens are not Christians, because they can easily demonstrate the fact that we make a poor showing beside them...
...380 pp...
...They enjoy his humor and miss his exaltation...
...Society should be solicitous concerning each of its constituents Primarily because each is endowed (potentially at least) with the human sense of direction—not because he .needs sustenance and *helter for his mammalian self...
...1856...
...But it has serious faults...
...It did...
...Walt Disney is planning to do • new picture debunking race theories and prejudice...
Vol. 26 • February 1943 • No. 6
