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LOX THE FINEST PRODUCE AVAILABLE 40 41 41 41 41 40•41 41 41 41 41 41•41 41•41•41 41 41 41 41 41 • • • • 41 41 41•41 41 41 40 41 41 41 41 41 41 Forty-one years have passed since the death of British movie idol Leslie Howard, whose name became a household word in America after his role in Gone With The Wind. Howard was re- turning from Lisbon to Bristol when the commercial aircraft on which he had booked passage was intercepted over the Bay of Biscay by a Luftwaffe patrol and shot down. I don't recall that any of the 12 other passengers were named. Wilfrid Israel was one of them. He didn't count. Many years later I read Christ- opher Isherwood's Goodbye to Be- rlin and years after that saw both the stage and screen versions of Cabaret based on Isherwood's stories of life in Berlin as the Nazis were coming to power. One of the characters in Goodbye to Berlin in Bernhard Landauer, a young Jewish businessman, a de- licate esthete yet one unafraid of Nazi thugs. Landauer was mod- eled after Wilfrid Israel. The character was cut from Cabaret. He didn't count. The fact is that until now most of the Western world has never heard of Wilfrid Israel. Yet he was well known not only to Isherwood but to Isherwood's fellow- traveler, Stephen Spender, and, most importantly, to ' Martin Buber, Chaim Weizmann and Al- bert Einstein. In a long prose poem, Buber described Israel as "a man of great moral stature," while Einstein said of him after his death that he was "one of the finest and most noble individuals I have ever known." How does one who seemed not to count earn accolades of such mag- nitude? What did Buber, Weiz- mann and Einstein know that we are only just now finding out? They know that Israel, from the earliest days of the Nazis' anti- Semitic provocations until he was shot down at sea, had worked ceaselessly, in great danger and at astronomical personal expense, to save the lives of thousands of German Jews and others in Europe, many of them children, alive today, scattered over the earth, unaware to whom it is that they owe their survival. Israel's story of courage, his quiet determination in the face of devastating odds (Nazi brutality and deceit on the one hand, British and American intransi- gence on the other), and his idealism and compassion, is now for the first time compellingly told by Welsh-born Naomi Shepherd in A Refuge from Darkness; Wil- frid Israel and the Rescue of the Jews (Pantheon). Shepherd was educated at Ox- ford, and has made her home in Jerusalem where for most of the past two decades she has been the political correspondent for the New Statesman and a frequent contributor to the New York Times. She has also done documentary film scripting. In her biography of Israel, she has skillfully blended an astute sense Joseph Cohen is director of the Jewish Studies Program at Tulane University. of timing and suspense with a capacity for organizing succinctly masses of documentary detail. Consequently, her book consti- tutes an unusually valuable con- tribution to Holocaust literature: she has resurrected an heroic, self-sacrificing Jew, and through her careful extrication and piec- ing together of disparate bits of otherwise disconnected evidence from hundreds of archival sources — Israel left no diaries or memoirs and the British Foreign Office, for whom he worked after his escape from Germany, vetted his correspondence and buried his reports — she has written a fas- cinating historical account of the triumphs and failures of the ef- forts to save the Jews of Germany and of Western Europe. Israel's progress a% he operated in the belly of the beast is cast against the dismaying backdrop of the unfortunate factional dis- putes between the Zionists and other organizations involved in resettlement; the duplicitous am- bivalence of the British who paid lip-service to saving the doomed Jews While simultaneously deny- ing them entry visas into Pales- tine, and the astounding refusal of the American government to relax entry quotas even after the existence of the death factories was incontrovertibly established. Israel was able to play his sig- nificant role in these stirring and tragic events by virtue of being a member of a powerful Anglo- German family, the owners of N. Israel Co., Berlin's most prestigi- ous department store. Born in 1899 in England and educated in Germany, his dual citizenship, coupled with the family's influ- ence and its huge wealth, gave him enormous mobility. He wanted to be a sculptor; instead he rose to prominence as the director of a business employing 2,000 people, trading all over the world. Whatever Israel's public image, only a few people knew of his spe- cial private agony. He was a homosexual. Early in his life he learned to devote himself to his duty, to sublimate and rechannel his needs, to remain detached, to read carefully the countenances of others, and to keep his,own coun- sel. Unquestionably, these were valuable assets he used to great advantage whether he was negotiating with Nazi concentra- tion camp commanders or pet- tifogging British bureaucrats. Assets apart, his sexual proclivity brough him only loneliness and despair. His solace was largely in music and art. Knowing he would never father children, he became a surrogate-father to thousands of them. His private shame effaced most of the public esteem history would have given him. When Leslie Howard's plane was shot down that fateful day in •June 1943, more than one sig- nificant world figure was lost. The tragic irony is that the plane was attacked by the Germans because they knew a third world-figure was flying across the Bay of. Bis- cay at about that time. That per- sonage crossed safely three days later. His name was Winston Churchill.