40
PARTISAN REVIEW
Frick and Guggenheim Museums, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As
we crossed 110th Street to the West side, we had a glimpse of the
Cathedral of St. John the Divine and, beyond it, Columbia University.
Goronwy visited alone with Lionel for a few minutes at our apart–
ment and then I exchanged places with our son - he took over as
Goronwy's guide for the afternoon. I never again saw or heard from
Goronwy though he lived for another four years. On Lionel's death,
Jenny Rees wrote me an affectionate letter. Goronwy's expression of
condolence was his piece in
Encounter.
From this memorial I learn that Goronwy spent the next morning
after his visit with us at the United Nations. His arrival in New York
had happened to coincide with a crisis in the city's financial history; its
bonds were careening into worthlessness, and financial stability had had
to be restored by a major injection of funds from the Teachers' Union.
The improbable seemed to accompany Goronwy. The remainder of his
column, following his tribute to Lionel, is devoted to an account of the
debate and affirmative vote in the Third Committee in the General
Assembly of the United Nations on the condemnation of Zionism as
racism. He writes:
It is difficult to convey the sense of mingled horror and incredulity
with which I listened to the debate in the Third Committee. One
knows of course that there are real and genuine grounds for conflict
between the state of Israel and its Arab neighbors, and that this con–
flict provokes acute and bitter dissension, in which right is not en–
tirely on Israel's side. And one would concede that the United
Nations provides the only public forum in which such a conflict
might become the subject of rational discussion, out of which, how–
ever improbably, some fruitful result might possibly arise. But what
was shameful and disgraceful was that the discussion should be con–
ducted, as it was in the Third Committee, in terms, not of a political
conflict between states, but of a squalid and brutal anti-Semitism of a
kind, one had thought, the world would no longer tolerate.
He continues:
There were ghosts haunting the Third Committee that day: the ghosts
of Hitler and Goebbels and Julius Streicher, grinning with delight to
hear, not only Israel, but Jews as such denounced in language which
would have provoked hysterical applause at any Nuremberg rally and
justify a special edition of
Der StUrmer.
And there were other ghosts
