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Page 4 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>