The Pittsburgh Press (November 30, 1946)
I DARE SAY —
A burning book
By Florence Fisher Parry
The most remorseless brain I know is that possessed by Arthur Koestler. The man seems pursued by the furies.
This icy passion is in all of his books: “Darkness at Noon,” “Arrival and Departure,” “Scum of the Earth,” “Dialogue With Death,” and that volume of piercing essays: “The Yogi and the Commissar.” There they stand beside me on this shelf by my bed, accusatory, relentless. And now comes this latest one, “Thieves in the Night,” to put there alongside the others…
If you haven’t read these books, you’d better – you’d better! They’ll riddle your complacency. They’ll shatter your peace. They’ll play fast and loose with your soul.
You must read “Thieves in the Night” if you would understand Palestine.
Yes, the scene of this novel is Palestine; the Palestine of 1937 and 1938 and 1939. The Palestine that was there before Hitler marched, cowering there, waiting, unsurprised, prepared. Prepared, I mean, for the horror of what was to follow.
‘Thieves in the Night’
It is hard for us to believe that all that is contained in this book was happening to human beings before World War II began. What were we made of? What thick skins covered us, that all this and hell, too, was happening there, while we, over here in America, ignored it.
Looking back over the last 10 years and what has been contained in them, we see now that it was monstrous. Why I remember talking with a couple of Jewish refugees as far back as 1935. They told me how the Storm Troopers would knock at the doors of Jewish families and take members away without explanation.
“Where did they take them?” I would ask. And they would reply, “To concentration camps.”
“Concentration camps? Why did they want them there?”
We know now why. Another trial is coming up in Nuernberg, the trial this time of the Nazi doctors and scientists who dealt with the inmates of these camps; vivisection and other prolonged experimentation on living bodies, designed to produce pain and death. Some of these experimenters no doubt will be acquitted just as Von Papen, Schacht and Fritzsche were acquitted.
Arthur Koestler tells you why there is terrorism in Palestine. He explains many other things in this painful book. You find yourself inside the skin of these people.
The other night on the radio I was listening to a Jew telling about what his race had suffered in the last 10 years.
“Six-sevenths of our people,” he said, “have been killed. One-seventh only remain on the face of the earth.”
Six-sevenths! Six persons of every family of seven! How large is your family, say – your family connection, I mean? Thirty – forty? That’s the usual size; brothers, cousins and grandparents; nieces and nephews. Yes, say about 40. That would mean that of these 40 of your family, 34 would have been killed. That gives you a rough idea. How would you feel toward the rest of the world? What hope, what faith, what charity would you have left?
Arthur Koestler isn’t writing about Americans in “Thieves in the Night.” He has a good bit to say about the British – true – and what he says will make them wince. I wish he’d come over here and write about us. It wouldn’t be a flattering book, I assure you. What we need is a man who will give us as true a picture of ourselves as Koestler gives us of the Jew. It would go a long way toward waking us up.
And others
I am very cheered, as a matter of fact, over the season’s books. It isn’t very often that one month will give you two such books as “Thieves in the Night” and “B.F.’s Daughter,” and I was surprised to find myself interested in what Frances Perkins had to say in “The Roosevelt I Knew.”
It’s quite a cool, unidolatrous book, and made me understand the hold she had on the President. He had confidence in her. She was one of the few whom he honestly trusted and so he kept her on hand. She was trustworthy. Surprising, too, to find in her book how she, herself, mistrusted so many of Mr. Roosevelt’s henchmen.
I was surprised, too, to find so much enjoyment in “The Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein,” a strange and intelligible woman, with all her “pigeons-on-the-grass, alas – pigeons-on-the-glass-alas.” It’s funny, but after you read Gertrude Stein a while, you find yourself having more patience with some of those paintings in our recent Exhibitions.