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Giroux Recalls Poet
Pounds' Anti-Semitism
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he worst mistake I
made," confessed poet
Ezra Pound in 1955 to
fellow bard Allen Ginsberg,
"was that stupid suburban
prejudice of anti-Semitism!"
At age 70, Pound was final-
ly repentant after several
decades of dedicated anti-
Semitism and war years
spent in the Italy shilling for
Mussolini.
Pound, who had spent 13
post-war years in St.
Elizabeths, the federal
hospital for the criminal in-
sane in Washington, also told
Ginsberg, "I realized that in-
stead of being a lunatic, I was
a moron:'
Pound's treason and anti-
Semitism are recounted in an
article in the August issue of
the Atlantic, written by
Robert Giroux. Giroux is
chairman of the editorial
board of the publishing house
of Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
"The Poet in the Asylum"
recounts Giroux's 1948
meeting with Pound at St.
Elizabeths. Poet Robert
Lowell asked Giroux to ac-
company him on one of his
regular visits to Pound.
What awaited Giroux was a
"dapper, bearded" — and
virulently anti-Semitic —
Pound. He called Franklin
Roosevelt "the supreme swine
and betrayer, who infected the
whole State Department with
his moral leprosy!' Calling
FDR the then-popular anti-
Semite's nickname of
"Franklin Rosenfeld," Pound
said "there never would have
been a war" if "Americans
had the sense to abandon
Rosenfeld and his Jews."
Pound eventually turned
his attention to world politics
and international finance and
kept repeating a name un-
familiar to Giroux — Weins-
tein Kirschberg. Suddenly,
Giroux realized Kirschberg's
identity — Winston
Churchill.
Pound's anti-Semitism,
writes Giroux, "was not only
childish and inane in itself,
but was also hard to reconcile
with Pound's cultural back-
ground and devotion to
literature!'
Giroux notes that novelist
Katherine Anne Porter once
told him that Pound's "irra-
tionality" about Jews was
related "to his paganism and
hatred of rigid orthodox and
religious fundamentalism!'
But Giroux believes the poet's
prejudices were related "to
•
20
FRIDAY, AUGUST 19, 1988
his bizarre economic theories,
especially his strictures
against usury [i.e, lending
money for interest], which he
acknowledged before his
death to be a mistake: In his
last years, he said what the
world was suffering from was
not usury, but human avarice
and greed!'
K
Revisionists Tackle
Israel's Birth
Three recent studies by
Israeli scholars of the events
surrounding the birth of
Israel place greater blame on
the Jewish state for the
Palestinian problem than did
previous studies by Israelis.
The new works also blame
Israel for the continued
political impasse in the Mid-
dle East.
In the New York Times,
reporter Richard Bernstein
N
The Arab-Israeli
conflict has gone
back to where it
was.
concluded that the three
studies "seem to continue a
trend toward a more self-
critical approach" by Israeli
students of the Middle East
conflict, "an area in which
much previous scholarship
tended to present one side or
the other in the conflict as the
repository of pure good or of
unadulterated evil?'
Middle East scholar Daniel
Pipes, director of the Foreign
Policy Institute, said the cur-
rent interest in the 1948
period stems from "the fact
that the Arab-Israeli conflict
has gone back to where it was
. . primarily between the
Israelis and the Palestinians!'
One of the new books, "The
Birth of Israel: Myths and
Realities" by Simha Flapan
has been viewed by Mideast
specialists in the U.S. as
"militantly anti-Zionist."
Flapan intended his work,
writes Bernstein, to counter
"one of the major Western
perceptions of the Israeli-
Arab conflict — the notion
that Israel has always held
itself to a higher moral stan-
dard than its [Arab] neigh-
bors did!'
Among the "myths"
challenged by Flapan is that
the Palestinian flight from
Israel after its 1948 declara-
tion of independence was
prompted by Arab leaders'
call for them to temporarily
<