Thursday, November 23,1989 — THE BULLETIN — 5
By ARNOLD AGES
During the eight years which New York Times reporter Thomas Friedman spent in Lebanon and Israel his dispatches had the rare combination of comprehensiveness, insight and objectivity.
It was Friedman's coverage of the 1982 Israeli incursion into Lebanon and especially the massacre of the Palestinian inhabitants of the refugee camps at Sabra and Shatila that earned him Pulitzer prizes as well as a series of other distinguished aw^ds for journalism.
There is a difference, however, between the journalist who compiled his dispatches for the New York Times and the author of this weighty book on the Middle East. Here the overseas correspondent has become judge, political analyst, moral philosopher and social ethicist.
This identity change is not seen until well into the second half of his opus. In the first part Friedman concentrates on describing the madness of the Lebanese civil war which began in 1975. He monitors for the reader the gratuitous violence that convulsed the city of Beirut during his residence there. During a dinner party his Lebanese hostess asked her guests: ''Should I serve now or wait for the ceasefire?"
In his audit of the-neo-bar-
FROM BEIRUT TO JERUSALEM By Thomas L. Friedman Farrar Straus Giroux. 525 Pages. $22o95(U.S.)
barism that has gripped Lebanon, Friedman also discourses on the ruthless authoritarianism syndrome that led FUfaat Assad, President Assad's brother, to wantonly kill 1,000 imprisoned members of the Moslem brotherhood at the Tadmur facijity in June of 1980. Friedman also deals at length with the destruction at Hama, Syria, where President Assad killed 20,000 citizens of that city in February 1982.
New York Times, and along with him every illusion I ever held about the Jewish State."
The problem with the second half of Friedman's book is that he carried his shattered illusions about Israel along with him when he was posted to Jerusalem in 1984. He should have quietly declined the posting and asked to be sent to Nepal.
The reason? Friedman — a consummately objective reporter in Beirut — became in
Arnold Ages, a professor at the University of Waterloo, writes frequently about the Middle East.
Friedman's most challenging task, however, was to document the June 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. As a Jew who had been a Zionist activist in high school, Friedman saw the Israeli incursion as a repudiation of the positive values with which he had associated Israel.
He was especially appalled at Israel's complicit role in the Phalange attack on Sabra and Shatila and records for the reader his detestation of the Israeli responses he heard from officials like Amir Drori. So the next morning," writes Friedman, "I buried Amir Drori on the front page of The
Israel, a critic, advocate and judge but in those incarnations his vision became seriously flawed. This led Friedman to see Israel as a kind of mirror image of Lebanon with the same potential for internecine strife and violence. The evidence which he furnishes to support this claim is not persuasive.
Friedman's Jewishness, ironically enough, weakens his analytical skills and reporter's power. Because the behaviour of Israel's leaders does not conform to his exalted view of Judaism, Friedman finds them grossly inadequate. He has ungra-
cious things to say about Peres, Rabin and Shamir, suggesting that they might make good governors of Rhode Island or Delaware but that they are insufficient to the task of leading Israel.
Some of the author's most mordant sallies are reserved for former Prime Minister Begin, whom Friedman sees as the man who introduced the rhetoric of the victim into Israeli discourse. Friedman says, with an assertiveness that is puzzling, that victims cannot govern because they lack the moral perspective. Perhaps Friedman's most serious lapse is his comment that "Israel is becoming Yad Vashem (the Holocaust memorial site near Jerusalem) with an air force."
The major portion of Friedman's treatise on Israel deals with the intifada and there is no doubt that his sympathies lie with the Palestinian demonstrators. It is unfortunate, however, that he isolates the events of 1987-1989 in an hermetically sealed container without considering for a moment the context — 40 years of warfare and terrorism against Israel by Arab nations and Palestinians — which has driven Israel to a position of confrontation with the Palestinians.
Friedman even offers the Palestinians advice; they will achieve their independence
THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, from the book jacket photo by Jerry Sauer.
only by making themselves indigestible to Israel. Their freedom will come, he says, when Israel can eject that which is undigestible without committing suicide.
There are many fine insights in this book but they are too often marred by much that is undigestible in the author's tendentious scenar-ious about Israel.'
By ADAM FUERSTENBERG
FIFTH IN A SERIES
Erratic as his life and career was, Hershel Hirsh — the author of a collection of fables in 1915 — exercised a very important influence on the development of Yiddish literature in Canada.
He made it saleable, even if only in the periodical format of newspapers. Applying the journalistic and editing experience he had acquired in the robust Yiddish press in New York, he showed first in Toronto, then in Montreal as editor of the Kanader Adier for eight years (after Brainin's quarrel with Hirsh Wolofsky ih 1914), that lively, well-crafted daily Yiddish newspapers could also prosper in Canada. He thus helped to produce an environment in which serious Yiddish writers and poets could earn something for their work. Although he displayed a certain tendency to sensationalism and even controversy (this obviously helped to sell papers), he did not compromise on style or the quality of language of either the writers he published or in his own writing.
For instance — his own fables are witty and,intelligent, written in a fine Yiddish that is a treat to read and in a refined, highly sophisticated poetic form. His two volumes of fables thus estab-
Moslems from free
According to Israeli law, "Whoever does anything that Is likely to violate freedom of access of the members of the various religions to the places sacred to them or their feelings mXf\ regard to those places shall be liable to imprisonment for a term of five years."
The holy places are administered by the religious bodies to which they belong. When a site is deemed holy to more than one religious group, suitable arrangements assure access to all.
"Israel prevents access to their holy sites."
Reprinted from Myths and Facts a publication of Near East Research, Inc. Complete copies of Myf/is and Facts are available for U.S. $3.95 from Near East Replort, 500 North -,',*^s-v-->>vasassemmme Capitol Street, N.W.,: Washington, * * * -•'^^^^^^^ D.C. 20001. ■ '
4.2T a~i".!5B f'' — 'I'W B«i T!f
THE FIRST AND LABGEST JEWISH DAILY IN THE DOMINION
Tliefiagle
CANADA'S IBWISH MEDIUM
II
VOL. 43 No. 263
MONTREAL, MONDAY. NOVEMBER 14, 1949
Price 5 Cents-
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MASTHEAD off the Kanader Adier {The Jewish Daily Eagie), established In Montreal, 1907.
lish him as a pioneer in one of the most difficult of Yiddish poetic forms. He also seems to have begun a minor literary tradition, as Toronto still has two other talented fabulists, the critic and epigramatist Izhak Goldkorn, and the Yung Vilno poet Peretz Miransky.
The works of Segal, Matenko, and .Miller were followed, in the next 25 years, by a rich stream of poetry and fiction in book form. A significant group of poets, especially after 1930, came to maturity in Canada and formed what might loosely be termed a generation of "native" poets. These poets expressed an authentic Canadian experience in excellent poetry — in contrast to the continuing production of poets who were consciously in transit while in Canada, having arrived here with already established reputations, or hoping to go on to greater literary careers in larger Jewish communities in the U.S. or even in Europe.
The latter wrote much more with a world audience in mind, often publishing more frequently in other countries than in Canada, and thus they were at a distance from their local readers and their reial experience in the new land. The most famous such figure was jjrobably Moshe Leib Halpern, who spent most of 1912 in Montreal, writing for various publications, before moving to New York and fame.
It was there during one of the bitterest strikes in the garment industry that he wrote his famous poem "Zum Strike", which reputedly brought 3,000 workers out into the streets. In a sense, while symbolizing these writers in "transit", Halpern actually provided an example for the "native" poets and he no doubt had an important influence on Segal, as well as on some of the later "proletarian" poets, simply because of his reputation as the most radical of Di Yunge.
Adam Fuerstenberg has been professor of English at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronto since 1964. He is an authority on Canadian Yiddish Literature and on Canadian Jewish writers. A Short History of Yiddish in Canada is a series adapted from Prof. Adam Fuers^n-berg*sfortticomingbopk on Yiddish writers in Canada. The articles were first published in Voice of Radom.
In the early 1920s, Segal became the central figure among a group of poets who had grown up in Canada and began to take advantage of the developing community's growing cultural maturity. They included his brother Nehemia, sister Esther Segal-Shkolnikov, his brother-in-law A.S. Shkolnikov, A. Almi, and later Ida Maze. In three short-lived but excellent literary periodicals Nuancen, Epoche, and Roierd, and in the
joint Toronto-Montreal collection Kanade, they established Montreal as a major
centre of Yiddish poetic
creativity. Although Segal'
moved to New York for
five years, he failed to
establish himself there
and upon his return he
reclaimed his natural
position as the most
im.portant and prolific
of Canada's Yiddish
poets. Through his poetry, journals, long-time
literary editorship at
the Kanader Adier, he
influenced a generation
of Yiddish poets many
of whom — like the
"proletarian" poet
Shabsai Perl — saw
their work published
first as a result of his
urging and encouragement. J.l. Segal published
his first poem in the V
Kanader Adier in 1915, • SEGAL (1898-1954), Canada's VIDDISH IN most Importani "native" Yiddish
CANADA—Pages poeL
