not Martin but Mircea

[Mark Kohut]

Matthew,

Looking forward. yes, when I studied Eliot at a good uni---U of
Toronto----no one mentioned, I did not find in library books, any mention
of his anti-Semitism. Only later, maybe 80's, did I encounter this
perspective. A younger-then-me woman asked--to my surprise--and then I saw
reviews of books about him talking about it.

Cheers,
Mark

On Sat, May 21, 2016 at 5:56 AM, matthew cissell <mccissell at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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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