Hemingway, and the antisemitism also rises

NOW AVAILABLE: The collection of Jack Engelhard’s op-eds, Writings, here

Like many of you, I’ve got relatives and children of friends in the IDF who are right now risking life and limb for all of us, deep in the tunnels of Gaza.

G-d spare us the details until they return to us safely. We will know later what it must be like in the belly of the beast.

Seldom, if ever before, have our guys, our kids, had to endure anything like this. Oct 7 changed everything, even the way we think, from this distance here in America, where the streets once supposedly paved with gold, are now stomped with antisemites. This is our lot, our portion, through what’s known as the butterfly effect.

What hurts there, hurts us here. We are family.

As I want nothing but the news, and even that gets bitter, tiresome and infuriating when the story is more about our losses, and less about our gains.

Give me the wins! Continue to turn loose the IDF.

Responding affirmatively to Herzl, Mark Twain once said, “Jews are like horses. If they knew their own strength, we should be afraid to ride them.”

For comfort, I turn to Rabbi YY Jacobson, and to the Rebbe who mentored him…and who, way back, warned Israel against giving away Jewish/Biblical territory.

Rabin, Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, and even Begin, “knew better,” and so this is the fix we’re in.

A reader writes, “Dear Mr. Engelhard. I finally got to your novel, Compulsive. Right On, and love your crisp, noir hardboiled minimalist style. I savor every page. Hemingway, Bukowski, James M Cain, you are in good company. But you need to be more careful. I call your attention to a typo on page 16.”

Gevalt.

I needed this? For a writer, besides everything else, it doesn’t take much to ruin your day. A typo, for this he needs my attention.

Some other time I would worry about this, perhaps even spend a sleepless night, but there are bigger worries than…behold, a typo.

Which is what I mean when I say, since Oct 7, every thing is different…and that never again shall we sweat the small stuff.

The small stuff is irksome at a time like this. Only the big picture is what counts.

Another reader writes, “Dear Mr. Engelhard. I enjoy all your columns and so grateful you are in this fight for Israel and against antisemitism. I particularly liked your columns about Writing Louder. But as you are a fan of Hemingway, you must be aware that he was an antisemite. Shouldn’t you be writing louder against him? Can you address this?”

I can try, by saying we live and die with contradictions. Nothing in life is ever fully resolved. Not everything has an answer.

True enough that his biographer, Mary V Dearborn, called him out on this, with reason, largely through his bullying of Robert Cohn in “The Sun Also Rises.”

Note, however, the Biblical reference, taken from King Solomon’s “Ecclesiastes.” This does not fit the Dearborn profile.

Hemingway was a student of Jewish Scriptures, and he frequently mentioned his debt to it for his concise style of writing.

In his quest for “the one true sentence,” he accessed Torah, which consists of one true sentence after another.

He learned from others as well. For the value of simple words and rhythmic repetition, he got schooled in Paris by Gertrude Stein.

That’s another weight in his favor.

Faulkner scoffed, accusing Hemingway of never using a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.

“Poor Faulkner,” snapped Hemingway. “He does not know that small words can carry big emotions.”

Again, the Biblical reference…and on writing about war, he credited as his influence the Russian/Jewish literary icon, Isaac Babel, specifically his “Red Cavalry.”

Babel “rode with the Cossacks” as Hemingway rode with Patton’s Third Army. Babel, superior even to Tolstoy, according to some, was the world’s first or foremost minimalist…before Hemingway, Chekhov and all the rest. This, from Bebel: “No steel can pierce the human heart so chillingly as a period at the right moment.”

That is further proof that Torah is the origin and the inspiration of everything; “You shall not add; you shall not subtract.”

So, was Hemingway an antisemite? Short answer, yes. Long answer…people are complex, and not always the same from one day to another.

Walt Whitman: “Do I contradict myself? Very well. I contradict myself. I contain multitudes.”

Thus Hemingway…and so many more of us.

If he were with us today, my guess is that his stand would be with us, the Jewish people, as he always favored the underdog who put up a fight.

All that said, we are back to the theme of “The Sun Also Rises,” which focuses on “a lost generation,” as it was then, and speaks for us as it is now.

By the way, the real Robert Cohn, Harold Loeb, when asked if Hemingway was an antisemite, quipped…” In those days, weren’t they all?”

Just as these days.

For the past 24 years our culture has been so out of whack, so full of garbage, so that, in frustration, historians will dump this generation onto the cutting room floor.

There is nothing to say that makes any sense.

All that is left is ridicule…A Harvard president can’t find her way to denounce antisemitism. A justice on the Supreme Court cannot define the word Woman, and the hero of the Age, the man for our times, the exemplar of all that is good and just, and no one dare say otherwise…. a criminal, George Floyd.

Yes, the inmates have taken over the asylum.

Is there a typo in any of this?

New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.

He wrote the worldwide book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal,” the authoritative newsroom epic, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” followed by his coming-of-age classics, “The Girls of Cincinnati,” and, the Holocaust-to-Montreal memoir, “Escape from Mount Moriah.” For that and his 1960s epic “The Days of the Bitter End,” contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Contact here. A free sample chapter of his noir gambling thriller, Compulsive, is available from his website, here.