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2 Friday, August 11, 1979
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
Purely Commentary
Maxwell Geismar's Notable Contribution as a Literary
Critic . . . His Expose of Anti-Semitism of Henry James,
the Point-by-Point Facts About the James' Prejudices
By Philip
Slomovitz
Literary Legacy of Maxwell Geismar: His Expose of Anti-Semitism of Henry James
(Copyright 1979, JTA, Inc.)
Maxwell Geismar left many legacies. The eminent
author and literary critic was a leading authority on Mark
Twain's works and his several volumes on the subject have
added invaluably to the Samuel Clemens-Mark Twain
bookshelves.
Earlier in his career, Geisman frequently criticized the
self-hating tendencies of prominent Jewish authors whose
works were viewed as abominations in Jewish ranks.
His most important literary contribution was his ex-
pose of the anti-Semitism of Henry James. In "Henry
James and the Jacobites (Houghton-Miflin) he delved into
all available sources to prove his point.
Maxwell Geismar, who died July 24 at the age of 70,
was a member of a distinguished American Jewish family.
As son-in-law of the late James N. Rosenberg, the nation-
ally famous attorney, leader in JDC and many national
movements, who gained world fame when he abandoned
law for the arts and had his paintings exhibited in major
world art galleries, he became deeply interested in the
American Jewish Congress and other national movements.
Henry James had become the king of writers, the ac-
cepted ruler in his literary domain. Few dared to expose
him. Geismar accomplished the task, and his five-year ef-
fort in gathering his data, in collecting the facts, in un-
covering the prejudicial tones in James' works, made the
Geismar criticism one of the immensely powerful critical
works in American literature.
Uncovering the central flaw in James' "The Awkward
Age," Geismar charged that "here James bore down more
heavily on what has been only the prevailing and 'polite'
anti-Semitism of his class and his period." It is in this novel
that James referred to "the Jew man, so gigantically rich,"
and Geismar posed the question: "Wasn't the concept of the
Jew-man himself, 'sogigantically rich," another nightmare
symbol?"
Geismar stated, at thi-s point: "This 'Jew man,' who is
also physically deformed, figures in the works of the
American literary imagination increasingly strongly from
Henry James and Edith Wharton to T.S. Eliot and Ezra
Pound — from the dispossessed, alienated side of the 'Old
Republic,' I mean, which is hardly ever mentioned as such
in the criticism of the Jacobite cult; and from a diseased
literary spirit which was projecting its own impotence upon
an obvious scapegoat."
The Genocide Convention:
Remembering Raphael
Lemkin and a Sacred Need
What has happened to the Genocide
Convention Resolution in the U.S. Senate?
Who remembers the historic contribu-
tion to humanity of the proposal to outlaw
mass murders of peoples?
Must the name of Raphael Lemkin be
forgotten?
Leon Ilutovich, the scholar and Zionist
leader, raised the issue anew in a letter to
the New York Times, Aug. 10, which de-
mands widest circulation and is therefore
offered here in its totality:
The Neglected Legacy
of Raphael Lemkin
To the Editor:
A significant anniversary has
just passed unnoticed. Thirty
years ago, on June 16, 1949,
President Truman submitted to
the Senate for ratification the
United Nations Convention for the
Prevention and Punishment of
Genocide — the UN's first human-
rights document, adopted a year
earlier by the General Assembly.
Aug. 28 will mark another' an-
niversary — 20 years since the
death of Dr. Raphael Lemkin, a
prominent jurist from prewar Po-
land, who coined the term
"genocide" and was responsible
for making it part of international
law.
A Jewish refugee from Nazi per-
secution, Dr. Lemkin, by now a
forgotten man, was the prime
mover in winning support of the
Western powers for Genocide
Convenetion and thus succeeded
in having it placed on the agenda of
the UN General Assembly. At the
invitation of the UN Social and
Economic Council, he prepared
the draft of the convention, and
major elements from it were sub-
James' prejudices are reflected again as Geismar indi-
cated, in "Roderick Hudson."
Then dealing with "The Ambassadors," Geismar
charged in a footnote: "In the Jamesian domain of
antique-collecting, it appears that the Jews have all the
valuable pieces, for which the noble Christians must 'Jew
them down.' "
James' "The Golden
Bowl" essay contains the
reference to "the touch of
some mystic rite of old
Jewry," and Geismar con-
demned it as being a "back-
ground of Jewish an-
tiquarianism, or of Oriental
fertility, duplicity and
guile."
Geismar took exception to
James' resort to "the little
swindling Jew" in "The
Golden Bowl."
debunked
Geismar
James' bias in "The Ameri-
can Scene." He showed how
James derided the Jewish
MAXWELL GEISMAR
immigrants and stated that
"by contrast, Theodore Dreiser, as the spokesman for the
new immigrant strains in American culture, would recog-
nize, accept, identify with and celebrate his own 'lowly' and
`alien' and outcast social origins." Geismar proceeded to
state: "Meanwhile, in New York's East Side, Henry James'
worst fears are confirmed, since these new Americans were
not only gross avl greasy, but apparently they were almost
all Jewish. 'There is no swarming like that of Israel when
once Israel has got a start, and the scene here bristled, at
every step, with the signs and sounds immitigable, unmis-
takable, of Jewry that had burst all bounds.' He went on to
describe this 'New Jerusalem' in terms which were even
more lurid. He remembered the 'dark, foul, stifling Ghettos'
of European cities, while the New York whirlpool testified
only to a 'Jerusalem disinfected,' filled everywhere with
`insistent, defiant, unhumorous, exotic faces.' Unhumor-
ous: and here this portly, well-groomed, constrained, fas-
tidious, supersensitive Anglo-American' tourist deprived
sequently incorporated into the
final version passed by the UN.
To a large extent, it was due to
his personal efforts over the years
that the Genocide Convention
came into being. This was an his-
toric accomplishment by a single
individual who did not represent
any government, not even a non-
governmental agency, but whose
relentless struggle for a great idea
has made a dream come true.
Although by the time of Dr. Lem-
kin's death more than 80 countries
had ratified the convention, he
died a bitter man, deeply disil-
lusioned with the one country to
which he looked for moral leader-
ship in the postwar world — the
United States of America, whose
Senate balked at ratification.
Today the convention has still not
won Senate approval.
These lines are not merely an ex-
pression of tribute to the memory
of an old friend who devoted
a lifetime in the defense of human-
ity. They are a reminder to our
government and leaders in Con-
gress that perhaps the coming 20th
anniversary of Dr. Lemkin's death
would be an appropriate occasion
for the United States to take a long
overdue, if only symbolic, step and
ratify the Genocide Convention.
In the days of the new holocaust
on the seas in Southeast Asia and
in the bloody shadow of genocide
in Cambodia, the Senate's vote
would carry our message to the
world.
Leon Ilutovich
Executive Vice Chairman
Zionist Organization of America
New York, July 30, 1979
The emerging issue as outlined here is
self-evident.
A great cause received the endorsement
of 80 nations, but the leader of them all, the
United States, is missing from these ranks.
the immigrants of perhaps their greatest single spiritual
resource: the Jewish humor itself."
It is in such powerful fashion that Geismar tore apart
the bigotry of an author so widely acclaimed. Geismar
continued: "In one of those extended passages of imagery,
so much praised by a later generation of formalist poet-
critics, he compared 'the Hebrew conquest of New York' —
the alien children, the alien old people swarming
everywhere in those streets, all for the purposes of 'race
rather than reason' — to some species of snakes or worms
who, 'when cut into pieces, wriggle away contentedly and
live in the snippet as completely as in the whole.' " Is it ar
wonder that Geismar was so outraged by the bias of "f.
king" who needed to be shorn of his crown of indecency':
There is another devastating condemnation of James'
bigotries, in which Geismar thus showed how "the great
James cult" is rooted in prejudices. To quote Geismar:
"Proceeding south . . . in the later sections of 'The
American Scene,' James delivered, quite majestically from
his own orotund and pontifical presence, his commentary of
the race problem. For he had never before met the 'African
types' that he now began to encounter, such as the group of
`tatterdemalion darkies' who lounged and sunned them-
selves at one of the railroad stations quite within his range
. . . Thus the 'musing moralist' (shades of John Brown) has
become the tactful mind, which feels no 'urgency' — seeing
at a glance the true nature of the Southern Negro, realizing
then the error of the unfortunately deluded Northern mind;
joining perhaps in its own musing way the beastlike Negro
to the slow aliens, the swarming JewS who had taken over
his country: no indeed, James felt no urgency to preach
southward even a sweet reasonableness about the Negro
question. (I translate these Jamesian passages, exactly,
perhaps repetitiously, because the high gloss and delicate
sensitivity of his later prose may sometimes obscure the
real meaning — the vulgar and trite prejudices — of his
modulated sentences.) Shades of the whole Abolitionist
movement! Perhaps this was Henry James' most profound
betrayal of his democratic American heritage — since it
had been also the deepest social experience, presumably, of
his own youth."
Thus we have a devastating portrayal of the mind of a
great writer who turned bigot and hater of men. Geismar
rendered a great service to American culture by exposing ,
the arch-bigot Henry James.
It was under -the leadership of President
Harry S. Truman that the Genocide Con-
vention authored by Raphael Lemkin first
received recognition and endorsement. Yet
it still is being ignored by the U.S. Senate.
It has been charged that the American
Bar Association was responsible for the
shelving of such endorsement by the high-
est legislative body of this country. It is not
too late to rectify a serious error. Let there
be action now, on the anniversaries al-
luded to by Mr. Ilutovich, to assure a great
human act by our legislators.
Arafat is Coming ... With
Poison for the UN, Fortified
by Oil-Tinged Blackmail
Arafat is coming! Get ready for the
poison fumes from the United Nations
General Assembly! Be prepared for the ef-
fects of blackmail at UN Security Council
sessions and even in this nation's D.C. cap-
ital!
These are realities, and prophets of doom
have even predicted that when Arafat
comes he will have the ear of U.S. officials.
Even Secretary of State Cyrus Vance has
been portrayed as the top American official
who will give an ear to Arafat when he
comes here. In view of President Carter's
and Vance's statements in recent days,
with denials of flirting with the PLO, such
speculations should be written off. It'll be a
very miserable day for the U.S. if Vance or
Carter meet with Arafat. Nevertheless, it
is necessary to prepare the decent people
everywhere for the danger stemming from
blackmail from the oil-infected Arab world
and their allies, the undermining of Is-
rael's existence being the price of oil.
It is probably already outdated, in view
of what the President had to say as a reas-
surance of American opposition to deals
with the PLO, yet the letter from Rabbi
Alexander M. Schindler, former chairman
of the Conference of Presidents of Major
American Jewish Organizations, pub-
lished in the New York Times, had much
merit. He wrote in part:
_ A New York Times story (Aug. 2)
reports "an American assessment
that the stalemate in the Palesti-
nian talks must be broken by late
October." No reason is offered for
such a deadline except the
threat that "the Saudis could de-
cide to cut production in the fall if
they were dissatisfied by a lack of
negotiating progress on the Pales-
tinian issue."
This is blackmail, pure and sim-
ple. What is worse, it is being ped-
dled to the country by "high Ad-
ministration officials." What it
means is that the United States
State Department, by lending its
authority to the blackmail and by
even setting the date when the ex-
tortionist's price must be paid, is
sabotaging President Carter's own
goal of energy independence for
our country.
This warning relates to the blackmail
which has been too much in evidence re- /
cently. From Saudi Arabia, from quarters
related to the Arab dynasties, come flatter-
ing offers of oil benefits, provided . .
this is where the rub comes in. The
vision is that the United States must wor
for a Palestinian state, and that means giv-
ing sovereignty to Arafat and the PLO.
Thanks to the American Jewish Com-
mittee's research department, a compila-
tion of Arafat-PLO threats and crimes,
forwarded to the President, exposes the
menace stemming from blackmail. Let it
be heeded! Of major importance is the need
for the Americanpeople to be alerted tothe
growing menace and for what is to be ex-
pected from Arafat and his allies at the
Arab-Communist dominated UN General
Assembly. Indeed, be ready for the poison!
Unfortunately, the terrorists, who do not
hesitate to condone their vile acts, are all-
too-often given ammunition for their tac-
tics. For example, there was that slip-of-
the-tongue — let that stand as an exonera-
tion! — by the President, equating civil
rights with the Palestinians.