Mary McCarthy
THE HUE AND CRY
When I read
Eichmann in Jerusalem
in the
New Yorker
last
winter I thought it splendid and extraordinary. I still do. But ap–
parently this is because I am a Gentile. As a Gentile, I don't "under–
stand." Neither do any of my Gentile friends and relations, who
speak about it to me in lowered voices. "Did
you
get that out of it?"
"No." The only Gentiles who have "understood" in print have been
rather special cases: Judge Musmanno, who was attacked in the book,
Professor Trevor-Roper, who has a corner on Nazi history in its popular
form, and Richard Crossman, M.P., who has been championing the
state of Israel since 1946 and who winters in Tiberias. So far as I know,
all Miss Arendt's hostile reviews, not counting these, have come from
Jews, and those favorable to her from Gentiles, with four exceptions:
A.
Alvarez, George Lichtheim, Bruno Bettelheim, and Daniel Bell. The
division between Jew and Gentile is even more pronounced in private
conversation, where a Gentile, once the topic is raised in Jewish company
(and it always is), feels like a child with a reading defect in a class
of normal readers--or the reverse. It is as if
Eichmann in Jerusalem
had required a special pair of Jewish spectacles to make its "true
purport" visible. And such propagandists as Lionel Abel, writing in
Partisan Review
(Summer 1963), or Marie Syrkin, writing in
Dissent,
have been eagerly offering their pair to the reader for a peep into Miss
Arendt's mind. "The Clothes of the Empress" Miss Syrkin calls her
review, advertising a display of Miss Arendt seen through, exposed in
all her nakedness. In a cruder way, her antagonists in private "expose"
her as an anti-Semite, and a newspaper story speaks of the wife of an
Israeli official
in
New York who kept calling her "Hannah Eichmann"
-by a slip of the tongue, of course. More moderate parlor critics talk
of "arrogance" or "lack of proportion" in her treatment of the Jewish
Councils while conceding that Miss Arendt is of course not an anti–
Semite nor an admirer of Eichmann's. But this is said in the tone of a
