The Human Touch

Here is a New York footnote to the story of Hitler’s rise to power:

An American Jewish business man who has branch offices in Germany was expressing his intention to go to Germany this summer in order to see how his affairs there were prospering. Whereupon the cook, who heretofore had not entered into the conversation, declared:

“If you do not pay me my full salary for the summer while you are away, I shall write to my brother, who is a big Nazi official, and he will fix up your business in Germany good and brown.”

And they say that Chutzpeh is a Jewish quality!

STRADDLING PAINS

The German language press in America is between the horns of a dilemma. Its political and economic business consists in neither being gored nor losing business. It faces the difficulty every day that the local politician faces once a year, and the national politician once in four years; the apparent reconciliation of irreconciliables. In Germany, Hitler has set a sword and a torch between two elements of Teutonic life; his justification as party leader has consisted in creating divisions, and not unity; and then, in intensifying those divisions. The German language press in America is under the unpleasant necessity of asserting that what Hitler has set between the Jews and the non-Jews, the liberal elements and the “tribal” elements, in Germany is neither a sword nor a torch; not even a barbed wire fence. The German American press is under the necessity of advocating Hitler to its non-Jewish German readers, and informing its Jewish, liberal elements that Hitler isn’t so bad, that you mustn’t believe everything the papers say about Nazi persecution. The German-American press frankly cannot afford to be so consistent as Hitler has been. Even Hitler, intellectual flat-foot that he is, may have to take lessons in tight-rope walking; perhaps his recent Reichstag address, directed over the head of Germany to the nations of the world, was a preliminary lesson. Even a blood and thunder rabble rouser has to become a politician some time or other, whether or not admirers returning to New York call him a saint or not.

DATA ON VANITY

The Conversation drifted to the subject of vanity. We had been talking about the deleterious effect on an artist of being a portrait painter, on the ground that it was well-nigh impossible to please the sitter, man or woman, and the painter. Someone recalled that painters, as such, did not have a high regard for portrait painters, regarding them as the pariahs of the graphic arts. And so it was that our conversation anchored on the subject of vanity. I expressed the opinion—without relevance to myself—that men were no less vain than women. The artist present demurred and selected from his lengthy career four examples which point to the contrary.

Two of these four were asked to pose as models; the others commissioned their portraits. The first example cited was that of a ninety-year-old woman, grandmother of a pupil. When the artist was about half-through with his sketching, the nonogenarian laboriously rose from her place and looked over the artists’s shoulder. “No, no, no!” she cried, “that is not me,” hobbled over to an old bureau and extracted from a heap of dusty papers an old snapshot, taken at least thirty years before. She bore it triumphantly to the artist, “See!” she cried, “that is how I look.”

The second example was that of an eighty-year-old Italian peasant, who made weekly trips from her village to the “town”, buying for her fellow-villagers their weekly supplies and living on the commission she exacted for this service. She gladly consented to pose for the few lires she would receive. The artist drew what he saw—an eighty-year-old peasant woman. She asked what she was going to be paid for posing. The artist, knowing how little she earned and wanting to do the right thing, said “Five lires.” She looked at the almost finished portrait and cried, “No, Signor, you have made me so ugly. You must pay me ten lire.”

The third sitter of the anecdote was a seventy-six-year-old Italian fisherwoman who refused to accept a single lire and stormed out of the studio because the artist had made her so ugly. All of these, the artist continued, were peasant women and their reactions predictable. But consider the fourth case, an extremely intelligent woman, a practicing psychoanalyst and therefore a superior and an adjusted human being. She commissioned the portrait and then revoked the commission. The artist, she said, had painted a woman who looked like forty-one. “And I am only thirty-seven.”

REFLEXES ARE SOUND

When Your physician wants to test your reflexes, one of the things he does is to tap you just below the knee with a rubber hammer; if you kick out your foot in almost immediate response, your reflex is supposed to be good, and a good reflex is supposed to be part of a sound health condition. It is the sign of intelligence and a properly functioning nervous system.

It is probably a noble thing to turn the other cheek and, spiritually, a wise thing to return good for evil, but when someone slaps you on one cheek, the manner in which you attest your instinctively sound moral health is to hit back, not to ask for another slap. The normal reaction, when applied on an international scale, causes abnormal wars and abnormal treaties, which cause additional abnormal wars, and the historian tells us that those nations which have been most in the habit of slapping others, and of never arbitrating an insult are those who fail to survive, while it is the non-resisters who live to non-resist another day. The Chinese, for example, one of the oldest races of time, have absorbed conqueror after conqueror, and Jews in bondage have seen their jailers pass away.

But there is a golden mean between turning the other cheek, and turning extinct by taking up the sword by which one is supposed to perish. And it seems to me that the German persecutions of Jews have acted, upon Jews of the world, in the way that a rubber hammer applied below the knee awakens the normal reaction of a kick-back on the part of the patient. When the patient does not kick back, or kicks back too much, something is wrong in either case, and it seems to me that both extremes have their analogies, the first in the type that is fearful of the effect of any kind of protest; the second, in the ranting and windy and meaninglessly violent type of protester.

Generally speaking, I believe the spiritual state of dispersed Jewry is fairly sound; even the wild schemes for retaliation against Germany do not seriously affect that diagnosis. When the Jews of Harbin feel for, say, the Jews of Frankfort, the time has not yet come to say Woe over disunity in Zion. Essentially there has been no break in the system; the reflexes are in excellent working order; debates on methods of procedure show division only on methods of procedure, they do not indicate severing of the nerve cords.