The Bulletin’s Day Book

While I have been frittering away valuable time and more valuable space with a contest that seems to be getting me nothing but a galloping case of migraine complicated with common jitters, momentous events have been taking place in the world. Events which I have been shamefully neglecting, I confess contritely.

For example, while I have been dodging the wicked blows aimed at my schnozzle by an unholy alliance of enemies, comprising a certain member of my family, aided and abetted by the Reich Svengali and a host of lesser Nazis, the following big things have slipped by this pillar of the art of pillory without so much as a question mark being thrown at them:

Poland has finally come through for Goebbels, Goering and the be-mustached man who grinds the organ. The Poles have come out flatfooted against letting their papa, the League of Nations, monkey around with how they administer their minorities guarantees. We won’t play hide-and-seek with you nasty mans any more, they cried out loud at Geneva, unless you make the bigger boys play with the same kind of hobble-skirts you’re making us wear.

So far, the bigger boys have unanimously answered “nuts to you, you young squirt.” But Poland evidently doesn’t care for nuts. At the moment of wheezing to press, the bad little boy from Warsaw was still standing flatfooted under a street corner lamp in Geneva and whimpering.

Another momentous event also had its origin in the land of the suppressed Nara and the battling Endek. The incident was the inspiration of the official organ of the latter party. Scanning the New Year’s greeting issued to American Jewry by President Roosevelt through the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the editor (or it might have been only a copy boy) of the Gazeta Warszawaska, accused the American executive of acting like a “Shabes goy.”

The Polish government, which is so concerned every time Germany’s Fuehrer is insulted by a Yiddish newspaper in Warsaw that it confiscates the paper immediately, doesn’t seem to have taken umbrage at that crack. At any rate, our cables have not yet recorded that the Gazeta has been confiscated or so much as reprimanded for that insult to the head of a friendly government.

Or maybe the Poles don’t think calling the President of the United States a “Shabes goy” is an insult? Let it be explained, in the event that the Polish officials are ignorant of the meaning of the phrase, that a “Shabes goy” is usually a ragged lad who goes around on the Jewish Sabbath and, for a small sum of money, performs such chores as lighting the fire, shoveling coal and other menial duties in the homes of orthodox Jews. Maybe, in his boundless good nature, F. D. R. doesn’t feel insulted by that Gazeta characterization, but, by the pin feathers of Oscar Ostrich, the Day Book resents the remark.

Poland wasn’t the only source of big news while I was getting myself a good case of punch-drunk. Good old Julie Streicher, Nuremberg’s indefatigable windbag, again showed why he is so far ahead of the field in the race for the crown as the world’s champion belcher. In a special edition of Der Stuermer he printed the names of more than fifty prominent Jews whom he classified as enemies of the world.

I was a bit muffed to find that neither my picture nor my name was included. Can it be, Julius, that you’ve never heard of H. W. of the Jewish Daily Bulletin, positively the worst enemy the world has ever laid eyes on? Tchk, tchk, Streicher, you’re slipping. If you leave me out of your next issue, I’ll know you’re through and I’ll start preparing your obituary.

And speaking of Germany (or do we do that once great land an injustice by placing Nuremberg in the Reich?) the Dorothy Thompson incident is another of those recent events that the Day Book should have passed over without at least batting an eyelash and shedding an asterisk or two.

Dorothy, or Mrs. Sinclair Lewis, if you will, is the charming newspaper woman and magazine writer who had the honor to become the first American writer to get thrown out on her ear by Hitler. I call her charming because I know she is, not merely from hearsay or because I hope she’ll send me a pretty note thanking me for being so gracious. You see, she was one of the interesting people I met on the Leviathan when it came in Friday afternoon. I sat right next to her as she explained, with prettily flashing eyes and a flourishing cigarette, how the dear Nazis had given her the bounce for something she had written for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency more than a year ago.

As a result of that ungentlemanly action of the Reich Svengali who was probably peeved because he couldn’t hypnotize Dorothy when she interviewed him in 1931, I predict that one of the best novels of the age will be written. I can just hear Dorothy, despite the fact that she says she bears no resentment for what was done to her, talking to her famous novelist husband in their newly shingled home up in Vermont.

“Sinclair,” she is saying, “are you going to sit idly by and let your typewriter go to seed while that dash-dashed so-and-so sits back in Berlin and laughs over what he’s done to the wife of the world’s most famous novelist? You are not, Red, not if I have anything to say about it. You’re going to sit right down this minute and knock off a novel with Adolf as the Babbitt. Even if it doesn’t get you a Nobel prize, it’ll make that monkey’s ears burn as they haven’t burned since the big Reichstag fire.”

Am I right, Dorothy, or am I right?

And while I was running around in circles trying to give my enemies the slip, the Empire of Zoo up in the wilds of the Bronx was also reverberating with great doings. Oscar Ostrich, Slim Skunk, Sammy (Cobra) Snake and the other anti-Semitic boys up there were getting ready to issue an edict like the one recently issued by Rudy Hess. But I’d better not say anything more about that until this contest thing is settled once and for all.

H. W.