by Harold Strauss
After years of reporting eventas, Vincent Sheean now in “Personal History” reports himself. From 1922 to 1929 he trotted round the globe, describing war, revolution, floods and riots for the North American Newspaper Alliance and other agencies. He had a genius for scenting trouble, and somehow always managed to beat other foreign correspondents to the scene. He was the only reporter to penetrate the Arab lines and the boycott during the Riff War, and to gain the confidence of the Riff# and a series of frank interviews from that remarkable dreamer – adventurer, Abdel-Krim. This made his reputation, and when he announced that he wished to go to China, his employers consented, although there seemed to be nothing but routine news of minor disturbances in the offing.
As a matter of fact Sheean headed straight for Hankow, and got there just in time to witness the great rift in the Kuomintang, in which the fate of the world hung in the balance. For if Borodin’s radical Hankow government had triumphed instead of Chiang Kai – shek’s reactionary Nanking Government, it would have been regarded as a vindication of Trotsky’s policy of world revolution, and not he but Stalin would be in exile and Germany might well be Communist today. Before the fall of Hankow which Sheean witnessed, he became intimate with Borodin, and with his red-haired American assistant, Rayna Prohme, who was destined to exert a great influence over him.
He went to Moscow to meet her again, and with his usual luck arrived there just as the underground duel between Trotsky and Stalin was coming to a head. He remained in Moscow, save for brief dashes to London, New York and Paris, until Rayna Prohme’s death, which nearly broke him. After a period of recuperation in America, and a lecture tour, he obtained a commission from “The New Palestine,” to write a series of articles on life in the Jewish colonies of a descriptive and non-political nature.
But it was too much to expect that Sheean could visit any foreign country and find it in a state of peace. Sure enough, he was not in Jerusalem two weeks when the frightful rioting of August, 1929, broke out.
Sheean had always been friendly to the Jews, and it seemed that the people to whom he turned in the crises of his life — Rayna Prohme, Mrs. Moskowitz and others—were all Jews.
But in Palestine he came to three conclusions: that it was an inhabited country which could not be colonized like so much wasteland; that Jerusalem was a city that had been holy to the Arabs for 1,300 years; and that certain important Arab traditions clung to the region of the Wailing Wall which were just as demonstrable as the Jewish claim that it was the site of the Temple.
Furthermore, the preliminary incidents that he happened to witness, as luck would have it, were ones in which there was some culpability in the behavior of the Jews in Sheean’s eyes. For instance, he observed that the mourners at the Wall were not troubled by the Arabs until the Chalutzim, who certainly were not massed at the Wall for religious purposes, began to threaten Moslems who insisted upon using the offensive new door into the Haram esh-Sherif at the end of the Wall.
He also claims that the Jews out-numbered the Arabs two to one in Jerusalem, that they were armed and the Arabs not, and that the Chalutzim staged an organized concentration in Jerusalem on the eve of the rioting, marching in from all over the country. The Jews, of course, had come to Palestine under the Impression that the world had handed over Palestine to them; they did not take due consideration of the famous double-edged clause in the Balfour Declaration; and they did little if anything to treat the Arabs tactfully, whom they regarded, with short memory, as an inferior race.
Sheean pains#akingly presents the incidents which forced him to these conclusions. I feel that the last chapter of “Personal History” is really an apology and an explanation to the Jews for his subsequent behavior. For once Sheean had taken this slant on the situation, it was impossible for him to continue writing for Jewish papers.
The fact remains, however, that Sheean does not explain everything. Why, when the facts in his own eyes pointed to joint culpability, did he file such violently anti-Jewish cables to the N. A. N. A.? Why was he, who was hardened to riots and bloodshed, reduced to an appalling state of hysteria by the two or three casualties he actually witnessed ? Why, if he makes the charge against the Chalutzim of provocative Fascist activities, does he not dare to document and substantiate his case better than by the idle chatter of an irresponsible girl? As a newspaperman he should know how to check up his facts, if such facts exist.
I think that Sheean was a sick man that August in Palestine, that he was still suffering from a profound shock and that if he has not been able completely to explain his actions to us, it is because he has not been able to explain them satisfactorily to himself.
Right or wrong in this last chapter, “Personal History” is a magnificent book. Sheean has a great ability to see issues clearly and to see them whole. His method of acquiring knowledge and a point of view is that of Lincoln Steffens, whose “Autobiography” is the most important book as yet written in America. Sheean’s genius is of the kind, though not of the quality of Steffens’. Where Steffens has drawn from his experience with men and events a new concept of the structure of society, Sheean, using the same process, merely draws a confirmation of principles already formulated. But it is a living confirmation of principles we only recognize in the abstract.
Sheean has the ability to imbue with excitement the adventures of the mind as well as those of the body. I challenge any reader who starts this book to lay it aside unfinished. It is one of those books that shakes the feathers out of your mind and makes the world look fresh and real again.
Eugene Lyons, internationally known foreign correspondent and Bulletin columnist, is the author of “Moscow Carrousel,” to be published by Alfred Knopf March 4. Lyons spent six years in the Soviet city as the chief of the United Press Bureau there.
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.
