Books

Several Weeks Ago we published an article on the Jews in India, pointing out that the Jews in that rather large peninsula have pride neither in their race nor in their nation. The article was written by Wilfred David, a young English Jew who has lived most of his life in India, except for periods spent at Cambridge and in a tour of the Continent. He happens at the present moment to be in England, where he plans to remain until a certain storm has died down in India.

Mr. David is twenty-six years of age and when you’re twenty-six it is nice to think that you’ve raised a storm in a place so big and so thickly populated as India. Mr. David has some reason to believe—we don’t know how much—that he has twisted the lion’s tail in India—with a book, no less. The book is called “Monsoon” and certainly the least that we can say of it is that it is deuced clever, even if the usually sober-minded Harold J. Laski calls it the finest Indian novel since “A Passage to India.” It is published by Harper’s.

It tells the story of a young English toff whose beloved father dies and who, upon his mother re-marrying, turns from her and goes off on his own. Most of the things he does he does in the spirit of a bitter lark. Thus, he gigolos a vulgar British waitress, who has come into a fortune, through Paris; sets off for Berlin, meets a grotesque creature, Hans von Meldorf, falls in love with the lovely mistress of a wealthy Berlin banker and then has to scoot for India, where the real story unfolds.

In the real story Nationalist India is pitted against Imperialist Britain, through the persons of Mizra Habibullah and Alan Markham. The stories of these two men are chiefly told in the form of action portraits, and these action portraits are the most superb things in the book. Mizra is the Indian young blood who comes to Cambridge, astonishes with his brilliance and his oratory and his lavish mode of life, but at the same time stirs the envy and the contempt of some young Tories who persecute him. His embitterment takes the form of conversion to militant Communism and a curse for the British, so that, at the end, after having lost patrimony and wife, he yields up his life. Markham is the self-righteous bearer of the white man’s burden, who makes speeches and a huge profit. His portrait is etched with acid bitterness; you are made to hate the man while admiring the undeviating drive and forcefulness.

In fact, the more one comes to think of “Monsoon” the more does it resolve itself into a series of brilliant portraits of people and types; it is hardly as good a story as it is a gallery of people, but the story is good just to the extent as it is part of and enriches the portrait sketch. It is entertaining, vivid, brilliant writing, this book, even after we discount the wise-cracking, smart-aleck, boyish weltschmerz and boyish rebellion.

Mr. David is a despising, rather than loving, etcher of people. Almost a literary Nazi might have written the sketch which he has given us of Hans von Meldorf, the son of Nathan Nathanson, Hamburg banker, who changed his name without being able to do anything about his nose, which nose was not much improved after the Nazi taxi-driver—judging him by his nose instead of his name—got through punching it. Von Meldorf is the kind of German Jew—this was before the Revolution, of course—who belonged to exclusive clubs to whose aristocratic members he could lend large sums of money in return for the privilege of being allowed to pretend to be familiar with them. “His best friends” were ardent supporters of Adolf Hitler. But once in a moment of self-abasement and shame, he cries out to Dorian, the chief observer and, in a sense, the “hero” of the story:

” ‘Swine, I am,’ he said, ‘fraud, coward! You’re right. You’re right, I am. Bloody coward! All this running away from being a Jew. But the minute matters, that’s all. Don’t you see?’ … Life’s a dirty, silly minute, and the next minute, if there is one, is probably, certainly, going to be foul, ghastly, unbearable? And then tomorrow a war again. They’ll manage it yet, the Aryan swine’.” We watch Von Meldorf entering his exclusive club and meeting—if that’s the word—the anti-Semitic friends for the sake of whose friendship he had gladly put himself deep in debt—and wonder, long after the book is closed, what has happened to the Von Meldorfs of Germany, the sons of Nathan Nathanson who went to the baptismal font—to so little avail.

“IS THE JEWISH RACE PURE?”

“Is the Jewish Race Pure” is rather a volume in praise of the Jews than a “scientific examination” into the evolution and nature of the race. David Goldblatt, in his attempt to prove the racial purity of the Jew, disavows for the most part the findings of biologists and anthropologists. His claim for the purity of the Jewish race rests solely on the fact that Jews through the centuries have not intermarried with alien races. He dismisses both the biological and anthropological definition of racial purity.

There are six traits, he says, which are more highly developed among the Jews than among any other racial group and entitle them therefore to a feeling of superiority. These traits are: sobriety, idealism, intellect, adaptation, genius and charity. On reading Mr. Goldblatt one is given the impression that these traits belong to the Jews and to no other peoples. His book is of interest insofar as it contains short biographical sketches of such outstanding Jews as Spinoza, Baron Reuter, founder of the first telegraphic agency before there was a cable connection between Europe and America, Dr. Jacques Loeb, Trotsky, Walter Rathenau, Dr. Hugo Preus, framer of the German constitution under the Republic, Otto Lilienthal, inventor of the first dirigible airship, and others.

POPULAR PALESTINE SONGS

The new musical idiom of Palestine as it manifests itself through the folk songs which Palestine is at present singing, appears in “New Palestinian Songs”, Book II, by A. W. Binder, noted Jewish composer and conductor. This book has just been issued by the Bloch Publishing Co. In it are contained twenty of the latest Palestinian folk songs, collected by Mr. Binder during a recent visit to the Jewish homeland, and set to piano accompaniment “so as to give a characteristic setting for the songs as they are sung and felt in Palestine.”

A. W. Binder’s first volume of Palestinian folk songs was published in 1926, and has been greatly instrumental in popularizing Palestinian folk songs in this country, and towards creating a common musical diet for Zionist gatherings everywhere. Book II is divided into two parts: newer Palestinian folk songs, and popular songs.