Newspaper Page Text
P««* 12 THE SOUTHERN ISRAELITE April 14, 197*
Your Best
Buy in X1
Atlanta.!
Have Your Next Wedding.
Bar Mflttzvah, Meeting, Convention
or Special Occasion in Our
ncwiy Heoecoraieo oanroofn
Under the Chandeliers from
the Okf Progressive Club
/^buHn Ant£«aw
MOTOR HOTEL
COMPLETE BANOUET FACILITIES
FROM 10 TO 500
For information caH
Catering Dept 688-8600 Ext 231
International Boulevard
Carnegie Way and Spring Street
■5TEVE SOBELfc-
tmvtttt Tm To TW "CUDS OPKMDrC" of
WESTBURYS EXPRESSWAY
CARPET STORE
featuring 2 divisions
Would you believe?
Mencken was a closet Zionist!
Sid Horn
Soles Monoger
specializing in
remnants and
rolls for
individuals at
discount prices.
Karen Joseph
Contract Soles Monoger
specializing in
carpet for
apartments,
hotels, motels,
and offices.
bi M Hirsh Goldberg
Coaid ■ be true that the famed
AanKii author H.L. Mencken,
the caestK critic of humanity and
the Ataifhli i pft to atheists, was
mb eathiBuUk. supporter of
Zjouud*
Yes. it rs true—as I learned w hen
I recent l> came across a Little
remembered essay Mencken w rote
back in 1934. It might come as a
surprise to most readers of
Mencken, but the man who liked
to shock the religious with words
of venomous wit sieved through a
typewriter ribboo once toured
Palestine and then wrote about his
brief sojourn in the Promised Land
in an essay entitled “Pilgrimage."
TheTengthy article (it comprises 21
pages in the book of essays 1
encountered) emerges as an
admiring look at the Jewish
settlers he found working the l^nd.
H.L wrote he was in his 53rd
year plus five months and 16 days
when he first saw Jerusalem: “By
that time, with Heaven itself
beginning to loom menacingly on
the skyline, my itch to sob at the
holy places was naturally
something less than frantic."
After spending some time
searching for Gomorrah (and
getting nine opinions on where it
was but never finding it), shopping
in the marketplaces of Jerusalem
and visiting both the Church of the
Holy Sepulcher and the Wailing
Wall. Mencken took a walk one
evening and “on encountering a
sort of information bureau run by
the Jewish Agency, dropped in to
pick up some of its literature."
After being asked to sign the
visitors’ book, Mencken left and
was on his way to his room at the
King David Hotel when he was
met by “a couple of smart agents of
the agency” who having
recognized his name as that of a
member of the press asked if he
“cared to make a tour of the Jewish
colonies to the north of
Jerusalem."
“This friendly invitation
sounded so attractive that I
accepted at once. As a result, one
of the agents and I started out in a
car very early the next morning,
and by nightfall had accomplished
one of the most charming trips I
have ever made in this life."
Mencken’s guide was a Mr. A.L.
Fellman, who had family
connections in Baltimore. Fellman
showed Mencken that day “nearly
everything worth seeing in
Palestine" north of Jerusalem (at
the end of the day. the odometer
showed they had covered 350
kilometers)
Mencken even crossed over the
Jordan River to what was then
Transjordan (he found it looking
“like the worst parts of Arizona")
and at noon had “a hearty kosher
lunch at Tiberias" (it consisted of
“two soups, three kinds of meat
and four kinds of pastry").
During the day, Mencken and
his guide stopped at half a dozen of
the Jewish colonies. The visits
impressed Mencken greatly,
especially in contrast to what he
saw of the Arabs. In fact.
Mencken's flippant approach to
h» Promised Land trip suddenly
took a more serious turn
“These colonies interested me
greatly, if only because of the
startling contrast they presented to
the adjacent Arab farms." he
began. “The Arabs of the Holy
Land...are probably the dirtiest,
orneriest and most shiftless people
who regularly make the first pages
of the world’s press: To find a
match for them one must resort to
the Okies , or to the half-simian
hillbillies. They still plow their
miserable fields with the tool of
Abraham, to wit, a bent stick."
Mencken called this “a
preposterous plow" and noted that
the Arabs employed “anything and
everything" as a draft animial — a
milch cow, a camel, a donkey, a
wife, a stallion, a boy ..."
The Arabs' farms were to
Mencken “abject and anemic,”
unlike any he had ever seen. “As
for the towns in which the Arabs
lived, they resembled nothing so
much as cemeteries in an advanced
state of ruin.”
The Arab villages were mostly
on hilltops (“as if the sites had been
chosen for defense"). Sweeping
down from them into the valleys
below were “the lands of the
...Mencken'$ flippant approach
to his Promised Land trip
suddenly took a more serious
turn.
immigrant Jews.”
“The contrast was so striking as
to be almost melodramatic. ..On
one side of a staggering stone
hedge were the bleak, miserable
fields of the Arabs, and on the
other side were the almost tropical
demesnes of the Jews, with long
straight rows of green field crops,
neat orchards of oranges, lemons
and pomegranates, and frequent
wood-lots of young but
flourishing eucalyptus. Fat cows
grazed in the meadows,
there were herds of goats eating
weeds, and every barnyard
swarmed with white Leghorn
chickens. In place of the bent sticks
of the Arabs, the Jews operated
gang-plows drawn by tractors, and
nearly every colony had a
machtneshop. a sawmill and a
cannery."
Mencken \yas also astounded by
the contrast (he termed it
“remarkable") in the way the
Arabs and the Jews lived. The
Arabs “lived in squalid huts...and
their barns were hardly more than
corrals, but the Jews lived in
glistening new stucco houses., and
their animals were housed quite as
elegantly as themselves."
Noting the pride of the Jews he
met and how they wanted to show
him through their homes,
Mencken wrote that they
“appeared to spend but a small
part of their time admiring their
quarters: virtually all their waking
hours were given to hard labor in
the fields."
After discussing the kibbutz
approach to life and child-raising,
Mencken touched on the
hardships these Jewish pioneers
encountered. “It was pleasant
roving about these luxuriant farms
and palavering with the laborious
and earnest men and women who
ran them, but it didn’t take long to
discover that their passion for a
constructive idealism was
accompanied by the usual and
apparently inevitable aches and
pains.
“Much of the land they wrestled
with was fertile enough, once the
poisonous Arabs had been cleared
off it, but there were other tracts
that had suffered so badly by the
misuse of centuries that getting
them back to fecundity was an
appallingly onerous business.”
The Zionist hope had been that
the example of the Jewish colonists
would help lift up the Arab
farmers, but the experience had
shown the Arabs, said Mencken,
as “incapable of competent
farming as so many Florida
crackers."
The result for the Arabs was
inevitable Wrote Mencken, “They
ascribed their congenital unfitness
to the villainy of their betters, and
not Infrequently they tried to cure
it in the ancient Chandala manner.
That is to say. they took to
assassination. Already in 1934 it
was becoming common for a Jew
at work on the slopes making
down to the Jordan to be knocked
off by a shot from the other side of
the river. The British had built
concrete blockhouses all through
that lovely country and armed
them with machineguns, but those
machineguns offered no
protection to Jews on outlying
farms...
“Nor could the poor Jews do
anything effective in defense of
themselves. I saw a number of
them plowing with rifles strapped
to their backs, but it was usually in
the back that the brave Arabs shot
them."
Observing that “there was an air
of dread hanging over the border,”
Mencken noted: “I wonder as I
write what has been the fate of
some of the hopeful and
persevering Jews I met on that
beautiful winter day."
Mencken’s discussion of the
Jewish settlers in Palestine is
remarkable if only because it
constitutes one of the rare times
the acerbic H.L. Mencken
commented favorably on anything
and at such length. Indeed, the
impression is distinct. Old H.L.
Mencken may have been a closet
Zionist.
6466 1-85 Access Road
Norcross Georgia 30093
449*0150
9 - 9 Monday ond Friday
9 - 6 Tuesday, Wednesday
Thursday ond Saturday
12 - 6 Sunday
».A.
MX.
C«»
Russian brain surgeon
makes it to Israel
TEL AVIV, (JTA)—Ilya Glazer, a famous brain surgeon who
spent six years in Soviet prisons and in exile in Siberia after
applying for an emigration permit, arrived in Israel March 22 with
his wife and daughter. He was greeted at Ben Gurion Airport by his
mother who came to Israel several years ago.
“This is a dream come true," he told reporters in Hebrew, a
language he learned, he said, by listening to Kol Israel radio
broadcasts during his exile. Glazer, dismissed from his academic
chair at Moscow University after he applied for a visa, has been
appointed 1o the faculty of Ben Gurion University in Becrsheba.