Some books hit you where you live. So it is with A. E. Hotchner’s “Papa Hemingway,” where Hotchner lovingly tells of his 13 year friendship with Hemingway.
These would be the last years of Hemingway’s life. Hotchner left us the year 2020 at the age of 102.
I wrote the column “Hemingway and a Lost Generation,” back in July 2, 2013, and there it sits as article 102 as part of my collection of essays for the book, “Writings.”
These things happen. How and why, I do not know, except that, no doubt about it, God’s Hand is in everything.
Hemingway, in his own way, believed this, too. “The Sun Also Rises,” was his tribute to King Solomon’s “Ecclesiastes.”
Moreover, his style of writing, he often remarked…those taut, sharp sentences, came less from Gertrude Stein, and more from Hebrew Scriptures.
Was he antisemitic? Noting his dislike of Robert Cohn (the stand-in for Harold Loeb), the consensus is yes, yes, he was.
At the same time, however, two of his best friends were Jewish…Peter Viertel, and Hotchner. People, then, are not so easy to categorize.
Most of us come without labels, and even the best of us are varied and imperfect. King Solomon observes…
“For there is no man so wholly righteous on earth, that he always does good and never sins.”
Yet in this generation, we slouch forward under the heavy hand of DEI, and if you do not comply with its rules of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, consider yourself outcast.
You must obey and conform.
Falling in swiftly were the corporations, which included the Hollywood studios, who were given strict instructions for diversity.
Every movie and TV presentation must include a specific number of blacks, gays, transgenders and Asians.
In any conflict between a black person and a white person, the black person must always come out ahead. He or she gets the girl.
By their book, white people are often sinful, all black people are always virtuous. George Floyd, for example.
Like that it has been over the past 15 years, for all Corporate America as well, where every commercial for any product includes at least one black performer.
In Sports, white players must be careful. They should not get too much attention, as has been happening with Catlin Clark, who is so talented that she overshadows her basketball teammates, and is tops for the entire league, which is the WNBA, the Women’s National Basketball Association.
Trouble is…she is White, and this is causing pain, suffering, anguish, bitching and backbiting from the DEI community. She dares to be the best.
So that’s DEI, which in a way is the revival of the Hays Code, a system of self-censorship that was approved by the Hollywood studios in order to be good citizens.
Thus, from 1934 until 1968, every movie was checked for excessive sex and violence. Plus, there must be “no sympathy for criminals.”
In fact, and most damning for the creative process, at the end of the movie, the bad guy must pay for his misdeeds, often the electric chair. He must never get away with it.
Hence the expression, Crime Doesn’t Pay.
However, the element of surprise is gone. You know, during the Hays period, how the movie will end, so every screenwriter is stymied by that rule of retribution.
Therefore, Israel. During this age of DEI, and the former Hays Code, there can be no surprises…no happy ending for the Jewish State.
Israel must pay for its crime of being Jewish. See the shellacking it gets from the campus Hitler Youth, to the USA Democrats, to the UN, to the ICC, and goons everywhere else.
Goons like Robert De Niro.
Finally, the studios fought back against the Hays Code, and people are getting wise to the bullying of DEI.
The time has come for Israel to flip the script.
Now it is up to Israel to provide a surprise…a surprise happy ending against Hamas, which will come the hour his forces have been obliterated and Sinwar raises the white flag.
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.
NOW AVAILABLE: The collection of Jack Engelhard’s op-eds, Writings, here
Plus, a free sample chapter of his noir gambling thriller, Compulsive, is available from his website, here.