'B-G' Without Glamor
FRANK, M. Z.
WRITERS and WRITING 6B-G' Without Glamour Ben-Gurion of Israel. By Barnett Litvinoff. ( Praeger. 273 pp. $4.00. , Since 1948, David Ben-Gurion has become a spectacular figure. And yet there are...
...On the whole, it is rather overwritten...
...Now if Zvi Arieh Green, in 1854, said such things : about his opponents, who probably made his life miserable, it would be understandable...
...Litvinoff's Reviewed by M. Z. Frank Columnist, "National Jewish Post...
...An interesting biography of Ben-Gurion can still be written...
...But the Soviet leaders mistook this mere voice of Jacob for the voice of Israel...
...But the writer would have to be familiar with modern Jewish history, with the history of the Zionist movement, and, more especially, with the evolution of the Jewish homeland in Palestine...
...They couldn't if they tried—the other side refused to be polite...
...There is nothing in Ben-Gurion's personal life to suggest material for the biography of a Napoleon, a Byron or a Hollywood star...
...Litvinoff never ventures opinions...
...The latter, in Mr...
...Like every early maskil, he had to fight the zealous guardians of the old order...
...But this vehement partisanship in a book written in ! 1954 is just a piece of boorishness...
...Litvinoff seems to be the only Zionist writer who takes the Arab excuse at its face value, saying that the legendary hero was killed "in the mistaken belief . . . that he was a French officer...
...The generation of the maskilim to which Zvi Arieh Green belonged were not social revolutionaries...
...author o\ the forthcoming "Sound the Great Trumpet" i book, are represented as "the object of derision and slander, for in fact they received no more respect than they merited...
...American Jewish leaders, according to Mr...
...He was merely a participant, not a leader, in the Jewish Self-Defense in Russia and Poland during the pogroms of 1903-1905...
...If Ben-Gurion drew any inspiration from Tolstoy, it was not through his grandfather, but by his own reading and through some of his contemporaries, especially his Tolstoy-like fellow-pioneer in Palestine, Aaron David Gordon...
...And the influence was in the direction of making a religious cult of simple peasant life...
...A fraction of this book is inaccurate...
...He did not spend any time in Siberian exile...
...Old-timers who remember New York's East Side in the days when Ben-Gurion lived here during World War I will be amused to learn that the Poale-Zion (Labor Zionists) debated with their opponents "politely...
...Litvinoff, were merely anxious to please the Republican administration and to revitalize the lagging pro-Israel fund-raising movement...
...Ben-Gurion's grandfather, Zvi Arieh Green, was a maskil, a follower of the school of Enlightenment, which sought to introduce modern European concepts into Jewish life...
...Litvinoff says...
...He did not have to fight his father or his grandfather to maintain his Zionist ideology...
...Litvinoff, that Ben-Gurion's grandfather was influenced in his views by none other than Tolstoy—who was ! certainly too young at the time to exert such influence—and that Grandfather Green "was quick to comprehend the dignity of Tolstoy's rebellion against Czarist society and to apply its lessons to the synagogue tyrants of Plonsk...
...Zemach in Jerusalem, never read his book—which is as if a biographer of Shakespeare failed to read Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe...
...Litvinoff possesses few of those qualifications—or, if he does, the book does not show it...
...He came back to Palestine as a corporal in the Jewish Legion fighting under General Allenby, which Trumpeldor and Jabotinsky had played the chief role in forming...
...Mr...
...Every statement is presented as a definite fact...
...It would seem, according to Mr...
...But it shows that the author, who claims he interviewed Mr...
...A somewhat larger part consists of amateurish interpretation...
...It really does not matter whether Shlomo Zemach, the first of the Zionist youngsters to leave Plonsk for Palestine, went via Trieste—as he tells it in his book—or via Odessa —as Mr...
...Trumpeldor was killed in 1920, in a northern outpost, by Arabs who were admitted to the farmyard when they claimed they were looking for French officers...
...The synagogue tyrants of Plonsk could be very nasty at times, but they could not be compared to the Czars...
...His name does not figure among the ten founders of the Hashomer—the first organized Jewish military unit in Palestine...
...One of those "facts" is that the Soviet Government, following the Slansky trial and the "doctors' plot," broke off diplomatic relations with Israel because in America "Jewish leaders charged the governments of Eastern Europe with contemplating a scale of persecutions for which there was hardly a shred of evidence...
...Nor, for that matter, was Tolstoy...
...And yet there are few leaders today about whom it would be more difficult to write a glamour story...
...Yet, it is still of some value as giving a picture of the foremost Jew of this age and the background against which he grew to leadership...
...This minor slip also betrays the author's ignorance of Russian conditions: To leave from Odessa, one had to have a passport, while Zemach left in a hurry, having absconded with his father's three hundred rubles...
...In 1915 he was ordered deported by the Turkish military governor...
Vol. 38 • March 1955 • No. 13
