not Martin but Mircea

[matthew cissell]

Mark,

It's a subject that deserves some discussion. Young Pynchon was probably
not aware of TSE's anti-semitism, afterall when you read Pound's "Cantos"
the Prof likely doesn't start off with Ezra's fascism, and in the late
1950's less so. We should remember that in the post war period in the US
there was institutional anti-semitism (and racism of course).

  Pynchon, growing up where he did, was likley to encounter anti-semitism.
"Jewish population of Nassau County grew from 18,000 in 1940 to 110,000 in
1950" and the population in Nassau really started to grow from the late
50's to 70's - by which time Pynchon was long gone.

  So Pynchon goes to Uni and starts to meet people that are jewish, even
dates a jewish girl apparently. But what about that couple, the Meyerhofs,
who used to entertain Pynchon and the whole sick crew in the late 50's? How
does all that inform the young writer, especially after he reads more and
finds out about his dear TSE. And the camps. How does that affect his
position-taking as he enters the literary field? Is it not interesting that
Oedipa is WASP and young republican, but by the time we get to BE his
heroine has become Jewish and clearly left leaning? What does this say
about his trajectory as an author?

  In the near future I hope to be able to present some information about
the Meyerhofs and what his experiences with them might have meant for the
budding writer.

ciao
mc otis



On Fri, May 20, 2016 at 11:03 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> Here's a little grenade into ...things. Henry Adams & T.S. Eliot were
> also, in an on-paper opinion-mongering way, --don't
> know of any real life examples--- said to be anti-Semitic.
>
> Din't bother our genius who plundered for intellectual influences...?
>
> On Thu, May 19, 2016 at 1:31 AM, Jochen Stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> In the annals of anti-Semitism, Romania holds a particularly egregious
>> position. For example, it is estimated that 130,000 local Jews were
>> slaughtered in Romanian-occupied Ukraine, and that Romanian forces
>> massacred 150,000 Jews in the area of Odessa and Golta. In a pogrom in
>> 1941, as Sebastian records in his *Journal*, Jews were herded into an
>> abattoir and hanged by the neck on meat hooks. “A sheet of paper was stuck
>> to each corpse: ‘Kosher Meat.’”
>>
>> Of course, Romania was not unique in this regard. In the early years of
>> Nazi conquests in Eastern Europe the ravening enthusiasm for pogroms among
>> the indigenous populations of countries such as Poland, Lithuania, and
>> Estonia startled even the SS. However, the detestation of Jews among all
>> levels of Romanian society, particularly intellectuals, was unrelenting.
>> Here is a typical outburst, recorded in the *Journal* in September 1939:
>>
>> The Poles’ resistance in Warsaw is a Jewish resistance. Only yids are
>> capable of the blackmail of putting women and children in the front line,
>> to take advantage of the Germans’ sense of scruple…. What is happening on
>> the frontier with Bukovina is a scandal, because new waves of Jews are
>> flooding into the country. Rather than a Romania again invaded by kikes, it
>> would be better to have a German protectorate.
>>
>> Who might the speaker be? Some embittered partisan, perhaps, or a
>> street-corner orator? No: the speaker is Mircea Eliade, one of Romania’s
>> leading scholars and writers of the time, who after the war slipped away to
>> America and there became a highly respected and influential thinker and
>> historian of religions. In 1937 Eliade says of a left-wing student flogged
>> by Iron Guardists that personally he would have put his eyes out as well.
>> Sebastian writes, “Perhaps one day things will have calmed down enough for
>> me to read this page to Mircea and to see him blush with shame.”
>>
>>
>>
>> http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/05/26/surrounded-by-jew-haters/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR%20Prisons%20Uganda%20anti-Semitism&utm_content=NYR%20Prisons%20Uganda%20anti-Semitism+CID_ab89f8bfb0519728730ad1d09ee20312&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_term=Surrounded%20by%20Jew-Haters
>>
>>
>>
>
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