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The Southern Israelite
The ChiId of A Long Story
FAMOUS EUROPEAN CORRESPONDENT
OF THE NEW YORK EVENING WORLD
LOOKS AT HIMSELF. . ...
By PIERRE VAN PASSEN
Among the self-portraits which
we have published—and they in
clude such world-renowned fig
ures as Jakob IVassermann,
Lewis Browne, Benjamin l)c-
Casseres—none can compare with
the thrillingly dramatic story
told by Pierre Ian Paassen.
I’pan the invitation of the Seven
Arts Venture Syndicate and The
Southern Israelite the great
blemish-American Journalist has
written this self-portrait, in which
he throws a searching, penetrat
ing and all-revealing light upon
the inner man who is the cele
brated Christian friend of the
Jewish people. It is because of
his intimate and sympathetic con
tact with Jewish affairs that
Pierre Van Paassen’s portrait is
included in the Jewish galletry of
self-portraits.—The Editor.
About two years ago the ghoulish
searchlight of the scandalmongering
section of the Parisian boulevard press
suddenly switched a garish-green glare
in my direction. The consequence was
that soon thereafter 1 found myself in
the unenviable position of defendant
in a newspaper libel action.
The case dragged wearily and expen
sively through the lower tribunals with
out coining to a head for a time, and
finally was submitted to the Supreme
Court of Appeals. And so it came to
pass that one winter afternoon in 1928
in that august pretorimn 1 took my
seat, like a godforsaken outcast, be
tween two gendarmes on the bench of
thieves. The courtroom on that occa
sion was packed with a crowd of vo
ciferous chauvinists and hysterical
kmovie actresses. The action, I should
■old. had something to do with an
^American film. The presiding judge, a
well-preserved gentleman of grandfa-
therly type, reminded me most vividly
of the late William Booth, founder of
the Salvation Army; he glowered and
snarled at me for all the world as if 1
were guilty of looting the Bank of
France or had been caught trying to
fasten a kite to M. Poincare’s eternally
bobbing goatee while he was unveiling
a monument to dead poilus.
Following the President’s opening
speech the barrister representing my
opponents, an eminent Senator of
France, was given the floor. He stood
up with a majestic flourish of his toga,
cleared his throat and, pointing an ac
cusing finger in my direction, shouted
in a voice of thunder: “Messieurs, I
point to a man who was born in Flan
ders; who is a British subject; who
was naturalized in Canada; who rep
resents an American newspaper: who
lives in the city of Paris!” Having said
this he stopped short and looked at the
audience. His reward was instantane
ous. The pretty girls applauded. The
men roared with laughter. The judge
rang a bell to restore silence, while
bis associates on the bench leaned over
to get a better look at the accused be
fore the bar. Then, when the hilarity
bad somewhat subsided, the great law
yer exclaimed with a mournful sigh and
a helpless shrug of his shoulders:
“Messieurs, gue! melange, quelle salade!"
(Gentlemen, what a mixture, what a
salad we have here!)
I was on my feet with a bound, with
my own lawyer and the two gendarmes
hanging onto mv coattails. But the
President bellowed so menacingly that
be would immediately sentence me for
contempt of court if I dared utter a
word that 1 quickly sat down again.
It was probably the wisest thing I
could have done. The learned jurist
thereupon, having been given carte
blanche, so to speak, went to it hammer
and tongs, but did not again refer to
me. lie contented himself with an elo
quent and passionate denunciation of
American films, American banks, so-
called American attempts to colonize
Europe and plumb forgot the matter
under adjudication. 'This proved his
own funeral, as they say on Broadway,
for, after all. salad or not, 1 could not
be held responsible for the policy of
the movie trust or American big busi
ness in Europe. So the judge had no
alternative but to acquit me. When
that lawyer had been at it for a few
hours—for the subject seemed inex
haustible and happens to be the idee
fixe of that particular Senator of
France, as the Senate records will show
—It fell to musing on his opening sen
tences. And 1 had to admit that the
fellow was perfectly right. What a
mixture this Van Paassen is!
What’s more, he hadn’t told the half
of it. Even I. the object of his telling
satire, could not hope to enumerate a
tenth of the ingredients, many of them
hopelessly ill-assorted and devastatingly
contradictory, that have gone into the
making of that hodge-podgian salad.
For I am the child of a long story.
And the story has many chapters. The
heroes of those chapters, my ancestors,
who all sprinkled some of their sauce
into what became the final melange,
were crusaders in the eleventh cen
tury. who drank their liege-lords under
the table in Ghent and rolled “dem
bones” on their naked chests to boot.
One of them bought a woman from a
Turkish white slaver in Constantinople
in 1454. Their eldest son was a mystic,
who went insane at Louvain and came
near being canonized. Another son
killed the Abbot of Paesschendaele in
a drunken brawl and stabbed himself
—to escape hanging. I suppose. An
other forebear—he was the fellow that
manipulated the saltshaker for the
family stew—became a follower of
Cesare Borgia. He was a priest, but
lost his cassock in the scramble of the
Renaissance, and brought to Flanders
that disease which killed his master.
He lies buried in Bruges, next to his
respected boy who exercised the trade
of cloth-merchant, and of whom it is
written in the old chronicles that he
was “a man without stain or crease.”
There was Spanish women and Moor
ish slaves, Austrian wenches and
French cocettes at the humble old
manor of Paesschendaele, which an un-
usulaly accurate English battery pul
verized in 1915 and the following year.
Serving, as 1 did, with a Canadian unit,
1 took a shot or two at the old place
and so helped to blot out the ancestral
home. I got a medal for it. I threw
the medal into an open grave at Douau-
mont last year.
Into the pot in which the salad was
mixed went the blood of Brueghelian
vagabonds; merciless Water-Beggars;
habitues of the world’s bordellos;
saintly women; dreamy Minnesingers;
murderers; friends of Orange and Eg-
inont; rebels; taxpaying and umbrella
carrying bourgeois; horse thieves;
shrewd peasants; Jew-baiters; human
ists; victims of Philip’s auto-da-fes;
religious fanatics and scoffing wine-
bibbers. The pot was on the fire. It
started to boil. It lias been seething
and bubbling and spuming and frothing
and spilling over the sides for centuries.
What was left of the brew is the
salad the eminent jurist pointed at in
the Paris court. That salad marched
with stuck-out chest against Germany
in 1915 and turned conscientious ob
jector in 1917. It trembled like a leaf
at the sight of a veiled woman in the
Damascus bazaar, but pays, as in ex
piation, for a pew in the parish church
of St. Germain in France. It calls itself
a disciple of Remain Holland and
rooted like bell for Mussolini in a New
York newspaper.
I he witch’s kettle boils on. All the
ingredients swim bubbingly to the sur
face in a rotating, endless succession.
I pass a church and an awe-inspiring
choral makes a better man of me. I
agree with the Bolsheviks in their cam
paign to rid humanity of the dead
things of yesterday. And if any one
said: “Thou also wert with Jesus the
Galilean!” he would be right. I like
books and a cheery fire, music and the
company of wise men. Only when in
their presence I am silent and expe
rience the peasant’s awe for learning.
They think me unsociable.
I want to be a Christian, but I can
not forgive my enemies. I want to be
a crusader, but I lack the guts. I am
forever hovering between a mystic
Nirvana and the dawn of action. In my
dreams I have flashes of genius, awak
ened I remember them no more. I love
my home and all that’s in it, and I find
myself wandering in the night over a
country road with a tempest beating
down and drenching me, and my dog
whining that his strength is exhausted.
It took four husky policemen to drag
me out of an evil soukh in Bagdad,
where I had fallen in with a gang of
international cutthroats. I never felt
so much among kindred souls. A pa
ternal French consul persuaded me not
to turn bandit yet. One of my dearest
friends is archivaris of the Monastery
of Montserrat. Whenever I visit his
scholarly retreat I regret bavin
doned the Thomist Fathers and the
brotherhood of Agricola. Once 1 was
sent to describe tbe misery and desti
tution of the Jews of Bessarabia. 1
could not get past Bucharest. The thick
walls of the Doftana immobilized me
with a horrible fascination. 1 roamed
about that gloomy pile of terror, where
the police of Queen Marie are tortur
ing the elite of Rumania’s intellectuals
I would willingly have flung a liberat
ing bomb. Anarchist, then? Nothing
of the sort; although Maurice Wullens
the libertarian tacitician, says there i
a place for me in the final battle when
tbe barricades arrive on the morning
of the blood-red Dawn. Still. I am at
ease with Edouard Herriot, and Yintila
Bratianu calls me “cher ami” in a letter.
The oil won’t mix with the vinegar,
and the pepper fights the nutmeg I
find myself deciding on a course t
action, and then don’t follow it. 1
started out prospecting for gold a
thousand miles from nowhere under
the Arctic sky, and turned to news
paper work for a living. I dynamited
the ore chute at the Big Dome in Por
cupine, and avert my face when two
taxis are going to bump on the Avenue
de l’Opera. I think Trotzky the great
est Jew since Saint Paul, because eac
of them upset an empire, but I can
never pass the Invalides without going
in and growing sentimental over the
tomb of Bonaparte. I wept in Hebron
over a splash of blood on a wall u
Slonim’s house, and I waded in V°r
and pulpy stiffs at the Somme wither
thinking it worth writing home about
Sometimes I wish the war would con
back. Just now I am afraid it will
In the day time every event hoi
my passionate interest, every ge>t
the statesmen, every speech in t
world’s parliaments, every newspaper
article, every book, every murder. e\en
love affair, every court scandal, t' 1
church event, Russia and Rome. J cru
salem and New York, Flander
Rumania, God and man. sciem
literature, Stalin and Grover
D’Annunzio and Andy Gump. ^ oC
feller and Aimee McPherson,
mann and Chone, Babbitt and *
Unamuno and the Prince of
And at night? At night 1 laugi
whole caboodle and say to
“What in the hell is it all to
That English battery at 1
daele may have smashed the
didn’t touch the pot.
(Copyright, 1930, by SAF S>