The door bell buzzed, again and again; the telephone rang, frequently; interviewers popped questions; a photographer begged for a pose, at first refused and then granted; bellhops appeared bearing flowers and greetings; radio stations asked for appearances, and old friends and acquaintances for luncheon and tea engagements; a high-pressure literary agent who is more often courted than courting requested an early interview; friends emerged to say Hello; the Baroness, a gracious-looking woman of commanding appearance, opened the door from the connecting room, to look in on the commotion. The cause and centre was a woman semi-prone on a touch whose happy lighted features belied the doctor’s orders which prevented her from walking about. Dorothy Thompson had come home.
But with a difference. And an obviously delighted difference which was registered in her manner, albeit somewhat suppressed in her voice. The difference consisted in this—that Dorothy Thompson, in private life Mrs. Sinclair Lewis, came home to receive the delegations, the flowers and the band not as the wife of a Nobel prize-winning novelist, but in her own pre-marital personality. The hubbub and the shouting, the phone-ringing, and door-bell buzzing, the posing and the interviewing were all, exclusively, for Dorothy Thompson.
MRS. LEWIS, INCIDENTALLY
The commotion began Thursday morning when the Italian liner Rex reached Quarantine and the reporters swarmed on to the deck. Photographers and press men made a concerted bee-line in the direction of Dorothy Thompson, who happens, incidentally, to be Mrs. Sinclair Lewis. The rumor of an impending divorce action had to be very strongly denied before Mrs. Lewis could proceed with the expression of her identity as Dorothy Thompson, the returned correspondent who had emerged safely from the wilds of Nazi Germany where she had conducted investigations for the series of articles now appearing in the Jewish Daily Bulletin.
On the day of her arrival she “made”, as it is called, the front pages of the afternoon papers. To one of her colleagues, who “knew her when”, she expressed her delight at having pushed the boys off the front page. “I’m still a feminist,” she said. She declared she was taking part in a little Nazi revolution of her own, referring to the reversal of roles—the interviewer being interviewed, the requester of considered trifles from the lips of the eminent finding herself—certainly for the whole of a week-end—in the class of the eminent.
RADIO TALK, PUBLIC APPEARANCE
By the time this appears, her views on a number of matters will have been more or less summarized in practically every New York paper, not to mention the many provincial newspapers served by the press associations. Her picture will have been reproduced several times, at least. She will have been heard over the radio, and at the Hotel Plaza, where she will have addressed a group of interested listeners on the German situation. Doctor’s orders will have prevented her from doubling or even trebling, the number of speeches and appearances, although she has never felt better in her life. The necessity for lying prone the greater part of the day is the result of the opening of a wound following an operation she underwent in Italy, where the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s cable, asking her to investigate conditions in Germany, reached her.
By tomorrow, or Tuesday, she will be home again—in Barnard, Vt., where her husband and their three-year old son, Michael, await her. There she will spend the summer, not in writing, but in being domestic and digging in the garden where the accompanying photograph was taken. Will she organize the material she has written in the form of a book? She will not, she says, because, she continues, she does not know enough about the German situation—although her articles give a decidedly contrary impression. In all generosity she wants to know why the book-buying public hasn’t done more for Edgar Ansel Mowrer’s “Germany Turns the Clock Back” than it has. At first, she said, she thought Mr. Mowrer, in whose book appears the chapter, “Perish the Jew,” had exaggerated; now she realizes that he understated.
REVOLUTION OF DECLASSED
She summarizes the Hitler revolution as a revolution of the declassed, of the bourgeoisie which has been proletarianized by the inflation, of the students and other sections of German youth who have been robbed of the future—as the Nazis now are trying to rob Jewish youth. “It is a revolution against culture,” “the most fantastic and unreal revolution ever heard of.” “It is an instinct movement,” a movement expressed in the phrase, “thinking with blood.” It is a revolution by the inhibiters and deniers of life—the Nazis—against the affirmers of life—the Jews. So Miss Thompson states it.
Accompanying Dorothy Thompson to the Vermont farm of the Lewises will be the Baroness Hatvany, sculptress and author of the novel from which was created the play from which was made the moving picture we know as “Maedchen in Uniform.”A translation of the Baroness’ novel will be published in the United States this Fall under the title “The Child Manuela.” The Baroness will stay with the Lewises for several months. The Baroness is the daughter of a Scotchman who was a general in the German Army. The Baron, from whom she is divorced, was an Hungarian nobleman, a liberal who helped prepare the liberal revolution; when the Bolsheviks came into power the Hatvanys were held prisoners and when the Horthy reaction set in, they made their way out of the country, to Austria. She is still persona grata in Germany.
JEWISH RIGHTS LEAGUE SETS AFOOT BOYCOTT CONFERENCE
A movement has been set afoot in Europe for an international conference next month on the question of boycotting Nazi Germany, according to the American League for the Defense of Jewish Rights here. Advices to the local organization which is sponsoring a conference at the Hotel Astor this afternoon to coordinate and unify boycott activities here, indicated that the international assembly would be held in Geneva.
United States Senator Royal S. Copeland, former Representative Fiorella H. LaGuardia, Louis Lipsky, Jacob Fishman, managing director of the Jewish Morning Journal, and Dr. S. Margoshes, editor of The Day, will address the meeting. Dr. A. Coralnik is chairman of the league.
ROSENBERG AIDE REPORTED ARRESTED AS BLACKMAILER
Kurt W. Luedecke, former head of the National Socialist (Nazi) Press Bureau at Washington, has been arrested in Berlin on charges of blackmail, the New Yorker Herold, German language daily, reported here Friday in a special dispatch to the paper from Berlin.
Luedecke had been working recently with Dr. Alfred Rosenberg, head of the Nazi party’s foreign affairs bureau. He was supposed to go to Poland in order to spread propaganda among the German population in that country.
POLISH JEWS BEE-KEEPERS
The last year has witnessed a change in Jewish life in Poland, with an increase in the number of Jewish agriculturists, reports the Christian Herald of London. Apiculture is particularly popular among the new Jewish farm settlers after they leave the economically hard-hit villages. “In passing from a town shopkeeper to a farmer,” the journal observes, “the path seems to lie via bee-keeping and gardening.”
TO HONOR NATHAN LASKI
The University of Manchester, England, will bestow the honorary degree of Master of Arts on Nathan Laski, J.P., in July, according to word received here. Mr. Laski is the leader of the Jewish community of the city of Manchester.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
