DR. WEIZMANN'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Pinson, Koppel S.
WRITERS AND WRITING THE NEW LEADER LITERARY SECTION Dr. Weizmann's Autobiography Reviewed by KOPPEL S. PINSOH t TRIAL AND ERROR. The autobiography of Chaim V/eizmann. Harpers. 498 pages....
...Plekhanov, Weizmann points out, was just as well versed In this art and was just as cruel and scornful in his disdain for those who disagreed with him...
...accept them...
...Zionism and chemistry became tne sole absorbing interests in his life, as he himself admits...
...A huckster | colonel, a Negro oppressed by "the] problem," MP's and sex-mad doggie...
...Take THE SEX and surrealism out of Henry Miller, and what's left would...
...After, the Arab riots of 1929, we And Lord Passfleld (the former Sidney Webb) commenting: 1 can't understand why the Jews make such, a fuss over a few dozen of their people killed In Palestine...
...Take It, Henry...
...This is also corroborated by Victor Chernov in his chapter on Zhitlovsky in his recently published book on "Jews' in the Socialist Revolutionary Party...
...Masaryk recounted how he had taxed Chamberlain with the deliberate betrayal of Czechoslovakia...
...These are but a few samples of the author's capacity for pithy and biting characterization, in which the volume abounds...
...it is another matter to carry the fight to the men with whom you are negotiating...
...Like Ahad ha-Am, he emphasized the need for slow and organic growth "I did not believe that things could be done in a hurry" and "for me there was never a royal road, a shortcut...
...add...
...His mother is quoted as saying: , "Whatever happens, I shall be well off...
...The cornerstone of his policy has been and still is "close co-operation with Great Britain...
...One is led to a comparison, in this respect with Thomas Masaryk's Making of a State...
...Can it be this that explains the enigma of the British Labour Party and Palestine...
...Russian Jews in the West" that went on in Geneva between Jewish nationalist students, like Weizmann, Ansky, Syrkin and Zhitlovsky on the one hand, and Plekhanov, Lenin and Trotsky on the other...
...The latter group "stamped as unworthy, as intellectually backward, as chauvinistic and immoral, the desire of any Jew to occupy himself with the sufferings and destiny of Jewry...
...Scribners...
...Cancer" can't be| smuggled past customs...
...of the Talmud sharing prominence in his father's houseu^yithVGorkl and Tolstoy...
...WEIZMANN'S ZIONIST philospohy was molded by the influence of Ahad ha-Am, whom he calls his "adviser and teacher," and "my chief source of strength...
...As many are killed every week in Loa> don in traffic accidents, and no one pays any attention.'' This is only matched by the story Jan Masaryk told Weizmann of his encounter with Neville Chamberlain the day Hitler entered Prague in 1939...
...Benes...
...While at the Paris peace conference in 1919 "the whole fight for minority national rights seemed to me to be unreal...
...Even when he comes to the United States after World War I, his sole preoccupation is with the raising of funds for the Zionist .cause...
...He is as invj probable as the story, but just as de...
...For Weizmann, Zionism was "the precipitation into organized form of the survival forces of the Jewish people...
...If Shmuel (the revolutionary son) is right, we shall all be happy in Russiat and If Chaim (myself) is right, then I shall go to live in Palestine.'' But apart from these stray and passing references, his family is discussed only in relation to Palestine...
...THE FREEBOOTERS...
...Incidentally, it is published in its entirety here to demonstrate that Weizmann could also stand up to the British when necessary...
...IS IT TRUE that Snowden, Joslah Wedgewood ancKRamsey MacDonald • were pro-Zionist, But Lord Passfleld and Ernest Bevin still await adequate explanation...
...He was placed betweeii "the hammer and the anvil—between the slow-moving, unimaginative, conservative and often unfriendly British administration, military or civil, and the impatient, dynamic Jewish people...
...Chaim Weizmann, for many years President of the World Zionist Organization and now the first President of Israel...
...I happen to trust Herr Hitler.' ** It is this so oft-recurring British placidity in the face of gross injustice— whether it is Passfleld and Bevin or Halifax and Chamberlain — that has been so exasperating and so hard to swallow for many of us...
...THE WHOLE PARADE of Zionist notables is passed in review...
...be pretty close to this new war novel...
...While the latter, amidst all his active preoccupation with the arduous labors of the Czech national movement, finds time to seek out and comment on philosophical, cultural and artistic trends in all the countries he visits, Weizmann reveals no interests outside his two loves...
...It must be accompanied by solid, constructive achievement . . which in turn would be accompanied by the moral strengthening of the Jewish consciousness, the revival of the Hebrew language, the spread of the knowledge of Jewish-history and the strengthening of the attachment to the permanent...
...For them the return of the Jewish people to Palestine was more than a phase of British imperial policy...
...3.00...
...With all this also came ah idealization of agriculture and the back of the land movement...
...Their home seems to have had that absorbingly-interesting mixture of revolutionary and traditionally Jewish currents...
...One cannot help wondering: What of Shmuel...
...It is only of late...
...Jabotinsky was "utterly un-Jewish in his manner, approach and deportment...
...Orrhaby-Gqre...
...I might say, it is a struggle between those who proclaim that they know how to bring a million and two million Jews into Palestine in three or four years, and those who know the possibilities and...
...This was .the trouble with Herzl, he claimed...
...What Wickham Steed was to Masaryk, W. P. Scott, of the Manchester Guardian, was to Weizmann and Zionism...
...Like his master, too, he reveals now and then a strong anti-Diaspora bias...
...And again, significantly enough, inevitably...
...This is a sad allusion to the rift between Weizmann and Ben Gurion just at the very time of the realization of the Zionist ideal...
...Political activity was not enough for him...
...A novel btf' Robert Wernick...
...It is in the village that the soul of a people . .. springs up from the intimate contact between man an soil...
...to the shambles, but it is 4 character.named Dibby who providesj most of the excitement...
...i It is interesting to note that among the several factors which made England espouse the Zionist cause (and this historical fact should not be forgotten, despite Bevin) the Biblical influence was one of the most powerful...
...Despite this, Weizmann's volume - breathes a spirit of profound admiration for Britain...
...His comment on this is sound: "It is easy to hurl denunciations at a government from the platform at a public meeting...
...In addition, it provides some interesting insights into Weizmann's own personality and character...
...Masaryk...
...5.00...
...From his earliest tidies in Pinsk through his student days in Western Europe, Weizmann resisted Bohemianism and the danger of degenerating into, the Luftmensch existence so characteristic of many of the Russian Jewish intellectuals of his day...
...THE CREATION OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL is inextricably linked up with the life and career of Dr...
...PARIS NEVER ATTRACTED me," writes Weizmann of his student days...
...Weizmann's letter of 1937 to his former friend and then colonial minister, Ormsby-Gore, is one of the most moving documents in the history of international diplomacy...
...other .''British and continental figures are'given their proper due for assistance to the Zionist cause...
...It was part of their tradition and their faith...
...Nordau was a "Heldentenor, a prima donna...
...Balfour, Lloyd George,- Mark Sykes, Robert Cecil, Smuts, Wyndham Deeds...
...Weismann was talking of Palestine," said Lloyd-George, "he kept bringing up place names which were more familiar to me than those on the Western front...
...Chamberlain] sat absolutely unmoved...
...Weizmann speaks of his mother "burying our revolutionary pamphlets...
...When I Had finished, he said: 'Mr...
...by Robert Wernick.Meandering through' Africa and Italy and winding up in Montmartre, Wernick's soldier heroes give a pretty good imitation of Henry' and his friends (bedroom shenanigans excluded, of course...
...Plekhanov said a Bundist was a "Zionist afraid of seasickness...
...To the general reader, however, who* willy-nilly must now accept the Zionist state as a fact, the book is a convenient guide on the history of the movement as seen through the "Ahad ha-Amist" glasses of one of its outstanding leaders...
...When Dr...
...American Jews, as such,' American Jewish life, apart from fund-raising, seems to be nonexistent for him...
...Ussischkin "suggested a, mixture of a Turkish pasha and a Russian governor general...
...As in the case of all struggling national movements, friends had to be found in powerful places...
...he adds, "that a negative relation'has sprung up between a few of the urban labor leaders and my group...
...for the possession of the .soul of the generation of young (Koppel 8. Plnson, professor of history at Queens Colege, Is one of the editors of Jewish Social Studies and of the Encyclopedia of Social Science...
...values of Judaism...
...The towns do no more than 'process' the fruits of the village...
...Wir LEADER READERS will be especially interested in pages dealing with the "struggle...
...The same one-track preoccupation is revealed in his account of his youth and early family life...
...Men like Balfour, Churchill, LloydGeorge, and Wingate were deeply religious...
...Wingate, and a host .of...
...Iightful, Crisply written, artfully told,] "The Freebooters" makes good reading.* when 'Tropic of...
...Herzl's personality was "both powerful and naive...
...He continued to maintain a life of discipline, study, and hard work...
...This accounts for his close affinity to the agricultural labor bloc in Palestine...
...There were twelve children in his father's house...
...you happen to believe in Dr...
...The tragedy of his position was that almost from the very beginning of the Mandate there was "a gap between the promise of the (Balfour) declaration and the performance...
...Mr...
...For.those who have followed cldSely the course of Zionist politics, it must be said that Weizmann's autobiography makes no significant revelations regarding more obscure phases of the movement, or gives new insights into the problems of Palestine and the Jewish people...
...It has often been said that Lenin was responsible for introducing into socialist polemics the use of brutal invective,,and an autocratic bearing in disputes with*"opponents...
...An air of calculated insanity pervades this story of one of the army's numerous vestigial outfits...
...Zionism was in a sense Jewishness itself, set'in motion for .the recreation of a Jewish homeland...
Vol. 32 • April 1949 • No. 18
