Jewish World Review Oct. 26, 2010 / 18 Mar-Cheshvan, 5771
Don't Give Up on the Brits
By Paul Greenberg
A letter to the editor struck a chord the other day. It was from a reader who'd just returned from
Naturally my fellow American took super-sized umbrage, though he managed to bite his tongue, Instead of replying, say, that that if it hadn't been for this country, his new acquaintance might be conversing in German. A cheap shot, maybe, but a tempting one when provoked.
You know how it is. A visit abroad brings out the American in all of us. The sight of Old Glory flying in a foreign land may move us as it might never do at home, where it tends to fade into the landscape. But let some foreigner say something critical about the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, and we rise to the bait.
If an Englishman were to repeat some of the same criticisms I've made of our president, I'd probably rise instinctively to Mr. Obama's defense. Call it solidarity, national feeling, group loyalty. How dare some foreigner criticize our president? That's our prerogative. It doesn't take a sociologist to explain it. Anyone who belongs to a family does. Within the family circle, all are fair game. Each of us feels free to grouse about the others, but, boy, just let some outsider try it, and we bare our teeth.
Lest we forget, the Brits weren't all that high on themselves before they rose to their Finest Hour. As the first war clouds began to gather in the 1930s, the
But as the character of the enemy and the nature of the threat began to fully emerge, just as it crystallized for many an American after
Then there's the kind of intellectual manqué a visiting American might run into on the Tube. It's enough to shake the once widespread assumption that there'll always be an
But then, day after day, the obituaries appear of the last of that generation who rallied to their country's cause in
--An old woman is found dead of a heart attack at 89, alone and untended, in her cluttered home in a seaside town 190 miles southwest of
A pauper's grave is being arranged when a search of her belongings reveals a
Always good at being nondescript, and with her excellent French, she had faded into the general population as just another shopgirl, all the while collecting, transmitting and coordinating intelligence with the French resistance. When caught, she played dumb, said she was just a simple French girl relaying some messages she didn't understand, and refused to crack under questioning.
She was sent first to Ravensbruck and then to one concentration camp after another in the Nazi archipelago of slave labor. She survived somehow, managing to escape in the chaos at the end of the war. And live quietly thereafter with her cats, a model of British reserve.
When her wartime identity made the papers, Eilene Nearne would be given a state funeral, and all
As he would later write in his memoirs: "My mix of ignorance, blindness and semi-criminal benevolence turned me into a dupe." Ignorance, blindness and semi-criminal benevolence sounds like a pretty good summation of this era's utopian fancies, too. Or any era's.
By 1937, the scales had lifted from his eyes and
Yes, there'll always be an
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