The Human Touch

PERHAPS you know by this time that Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Browne sailed late last Friday afternoon, or perhaps early Friday evening, on the Santa Ana, of the Grace Line, on a circuitous homeward voyage to California. When your eye lights upon this column, they will be well on their way to their first destination, Panama. From Panama, they will go, according to their subject-to-change itinerary, to and through Costa Rica, Guatemala and Mexico, and then on to California. They will consider the Jewish question in Central America, incidentally. There are, Mr. Browne has discovered, considerable clusters of considerable Jews in these Republics and Mr. Browne would like to see a little more of them.

The Brownes will spend just enugh time in the Central Americas to enable them to return in time for the Spring semester at the University of California, where Mr. Browne gives courses on the art of writing and the literature of the Bible, of which he knows considerable. The Human Touch not being a literary column I will only pause here a moment to refer to Mr. Browne’s latest work, “How Odd of God” and the faculty therein shown of making the crooked straight, the faculty, that is, of making complicated bodies of knowledge clear and understandable. But more of that in next Sunday’s book review.

During the last year and a half the Brownes have been traveling on the traveled ways and in remote corners. They were on the Kurfuerstendamm and the Zoo in Berlin last May 1 and in the South Seas–probably for spiritual disinfection–later on, not to mention cross-country lecture tours in these states. So that the Brownes know a thing or two most of us poor stay-at-homes are woefully ignorant about.

SHE DOESN’T LOOK IT

For example, one of the things they’ve learned is that, to at least one typical little Nazi, Myna Browne–Mrs. Browne to you–doesn’t look like a Jewess and Mr. Browne does look like a Jew. They were walking along the Kurfuerstendamm when a ratty little Nazi–the phrase is Mr. Browne’s–with no uniform but with stars on his shoulder to indicate he was a kosher Nazi–stopped in front of them and jabbed a circular at Mrs. Browne. She was about to throw it away, thinking it was only another leaflet, when she examined it idly and was amazed to see in black type the admonition, “Don’t Be-Jew Yourself!” Mrs. Browne is lean and blonde and handsome, a native of Los Angeles and as American as she is Jewish.

Last May 1, the Brownes attended the great Nazi demonstration at the Tempelhof, that occasion on which the leaders of Hitlerism talked unceasingly to no less than 1,000,000 followers. The Brownes, you see, go places, and do not suffer from any sense of racial inferiority. It was on this occasion that Mrs. Browne is declared to have originated that witticism, “Hot Aryan” which, since, bas been so frequently repeated that any individual’s claim to its authorship is instinctively disputed. Mr. Browne is witness to the fact that Mrs. Browne, way back in the Fall of 1929, originated the witticism, or nifty as Broadway would term it, of “Wailing Wall Street.”

Wherever he goes, says Mr. Browne, he finds Jews and evidences of Jewishness. In a tiny village on the island of Bali–a village so tiny that it had only one Chinese shop–he found a copy of The Day, atop a pile of newspapers in all languages, including the Greek and the Scandinavian. In a shop in an island of the South Sea archipelago, an island so remote that only four white men were supposed up to that time to have visited it, he found a copy of the Jewish Daily Bulletin. Almost everywhere else he found Jews. In the town of St. Thomas. of the Virgin Islands, he found a flourishing community of Jews, with the new Poles and Russians competing with the old settlers, the Sephardim. They pray together at one synagogue, the cantor of which is an old inhabitant who conducts the service mostly in Spanish, eked out with the few Hebrew words he still remembers from the lips of his grandfather. But perhaps the fact that most deeply impressed Mr. Browne was that in the Far East and in the Near East, in such towns as Bangkok and Harbin and Singapore, he was met by correspondents of the far-flung Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Three cheers and a tiger!

AMERICAN RESEARCHES

During his lecture tour through the United States, during which he presented the Jewish and the liberal points of view regarding the Nazi terror, he found polite and interested agreement, except at a Kansas university, where a German exchange student, clad in brown uniform, arose to object and to express in clumsy English, his feeling for the heroism of the Storm Troopers. Mr. Browne, being a man of wit as well as of learning, had no difficulty in discomforting the student, even if he didn’t convince him.

It may surprise some of our readers to learn that Mr. Browne’s reputation is not exclusively Jewish. For example, he was invited to a Methodist college in Texas on the assumption that he was a Christian clergyman. His dominant nose and his dark hair, if not his books, gave him away, but he gave his lecture anyway. He has been invited to address clubs which do not allow Jews within their ranks. In one of these clubs he found a curious concession to tolerance. “Do you have any Jews in this club?” asked Mr. Browne. “Oh, yes, indeed, Mr. Browne; we have two.” Or less than one per cent of the total. Afterwards Mr. Browne pursued the subject: “Well, don’t you have two Jews in the club so that you can say that you do not exclude Jews?” The answer was: “That is the situation.”

What is the situation is in the towns and hamlets of these states Mr. Brown might not be the first person to give evidence upon, and he is aware that people who say nice things to him, and treat him kindly, if not generously, may think anti-Semitic, while acting like cultivated men and women. When Mr. Browne arrives home in California he will resume work on the book, which he stored temporarily in mothballs to write “How Odd of God,” the title of which constitutes the first two lines of the four-line limerick ending “To Choose the Jews.”