PURELY COMMENTARY G.B. Shaw's Cynicism: Was It Anti-Semitism? PHILIP SLOMOVITZ Editor Emeritus G eorge Bernard Shaw was often quoted about one particular statement he made about Jews. These are the lines from Shaw's dramatic play "Saint Joan." "The Jews generally give value. They make us pay, make you pay, but they deliver the goods. In my ex- perience, the men who want something for nothing are invariably Christian." But the true character of the famous Britisher was revealed in the July 27, 1988, New York Times Book Notes, under the title "A Shaw Letter on Display: Shaw and Dictators," as follows: The fourth installment of let- ters by George Bernard Shaw, edited by Dan H. Laurence and recently published by Viking, shows the wide range of Shaw's interests. The letters also show his penchant for dictators of various stripes. As John Gross has noted in these pages, "In the 1920s and 1930s, Shaw spoke respectfully about Mussolini; in the 1930s, he spoke respectfully about Hitler; in the 1930s and 1940s, he spoke more than respectfully about Stalin?' When Henry Fairlie's review of the Shaw letters came into The New Republic recently, the magazine's editors wondered how best to illustrate it. They decided to reproduce portions of the Feb. 12, 1936, letter from Shaw to their own magazine. The first two paragraphs of the letter, handwritten in bright red ink, say: "I hold with Adolph Hitler, that our political democracy is a lie. Its 'waning' means presumably it's being found out. The faster it 'wanes' in this sense the better I shall be pleased. "There is no antithesis bet- ween authoritarian government and democracy. All government is authoritarian; and the more democratic a government is the more authoritarian it is; for with the people behind it it can push its authority farther than any Tsar or foreign despot dare do." An early indictment of Shaw came from Rabbi Louis I. Newman. He was in our militant Zionist ranks. He was an associate of Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, held pulpits in New York and San Fran- cisco and, in the 1930s, he wrote a newspaper column entitled "Telling It In Gath." It was a fearless expression of his views containing many criticisms of irresponsible occurrences. Rabbi Newman was amng the most prominent associates of Vladmir Jabotinsky in Zionist revisionism. He never permitted an insult to the Jewish people to go unchallenged. In a column devoted to Shaw, he stated: George Bernard Shaw has found an opportunity to insult the Jewish people. When asked to attend a meeting com- memorating the 10th anniver- sary of the death of Israel Zangwill, he said: "The meeting will inevitably end in a discsus- sion of the Jewish question. I am not a Jew and do not see how I could be of any help if I were to make a speech. In any case, I am too old to attend any more public meetings. I have had enough of them. I am ap- proaching a doddering, senile condition, and prefer to stay away?' In view of Mr. Shaw's self- analysis, perhaps we should treat the entire matter as another jest. A few years ago an American-Jewish periodical asked Shaw for a New Year greeting. He recommended, among other things, "that Jews go to Palestine to stew in their own juice," and after making other uncomplimentary state- ments, declared, in effect, "You asked for this, and now I've given it to you:' Jews should be careful about approaching gentiles, for greetings or messages, unless they are certain that the answer will be favorable. And if they are rebuffed, they should not give publicity to the incident. We wonder who erred in this latest Shaw episode. In the light of previous occurrences, he should not have been asked, but, hav- ing been asked, and having responded with another nasty retort, no newspaper attention should have been given him. But there was something much more devastating under Shaw's own by- line. In the now defunct Liberty Magazine he published an article, "The Palestinian Muddle." Here is what he wrote to introduce his bias: The whole trouble arose through Balfour giving Palestine to Dr. Weizmann, when it wasn't his to give. He might as well have handed him Madagascar. The thing was that Dr. Weiz- mann had just supplied the British government with a cheap way of making cordite. Naturally, the government was very grateful, and Balfour said: "How much do you want?" "I don't want money," said Weizmann. "Quite so," said Balfour. "Then what shall it be? Baronet- cy, earldom, or what?" "I don't want a title," said Weizmann. "I don't want anything for myself?' "You, a Jew, don't want Continued on Page 38 Perle Hessing's Soul-Stirring Art Mirrors Her Life erle Hessing, who began to paint when she was in her 50s, gathered a lifetime inspiration which she injected in the many results of her artistic endeavors. A native of Galicia, now in the Soviet Union, she was brought up in Canada. After World War II she lived with her family in Australia, where she produced many of her works that had begun to gain wide recognition. Her notable achievements are in her very large book "A Mirror to My Life" (Henry Holt Co.), into which are packed her impressive impressions. Every aspect in her experience, which included wanderings from birth- place to many lands — including Bri- tain where she now lives with her philosopher husband and son — left their marks on the sensitive artist. She gained much from the tragedies of the holocaust whose narrations were a chief influence upon her. Her impressions are deeply moving both as art and as explanatory essays in her book. In fact, in every instance her il- lumination as art gains emphasis in a literary accompaniment. She gained immensely from the storytelling of her father, a printer and bookbinder who had Chasidic inspira- tion with which he narrated Bible tales and the legends he acquired as a Jewish scholar. It is in her impressions of what had p 2 FRIDAY, AUGUST 12, 1988 occurred in the era of Nazi horrors that Perle Hessing shares with the admirers she has created with her depth of feel- ing and interpretation. She had heard much about the murder camps, Terec- zin and the children who were crative and whose artistic works have been re- tained in some fashion. Therefore, she painted the accompanying and wrote the following essay about it in "A Mir- ror to My Life": Some years after the war, I visited Prague and went to the Jewish museum, which had an exhibition of paintings by children who had been in the concentration camp at Tereczin. They had become orphans when their parents were taken away. Whenever the authorities knew that the Red Cross was making a visit, they would clean the place up and give better food rations to the children. But at least the Red Cross sent paper and pencils and things to do. Among the pictures were bright, happy scenes of things the children remembered from their home lives — they seem to have been more able than the adults to ignore the horrors go- ing on around them, even though death hovered all around. My visits to this small exhibition in the old ghetto were Perle Hessing's "Tereczin." quite a shattering experience, and I have tried to put my im- pressions together in this pain- ting, which now hangs in the Holocaust Museum, Jerusalem. Art and the well related essays lend importance to the creativity of Perle Hessing. Her: "A Mirror to My Life"merits the acclaim it already received.