Umbrella into Cutlass

Every time you blow up a British arsenal, or wreck a British jail, or send a British railroad train skyhigh, or rob a British bank, or let go with your guns and bombs at the British betrayers and invaders of your homeland, the Jews of America make a little holiday in their hearts. Not all the Jews, of course. . . .

Those words, addressed "to the Terrorists of Palestine," first appeared in full-page ads in the New York Herald Tribune and other U.S. papers last month. The ad asked millions for "medical relief and humanitarian aid." It concluded: "Hang on, brave friends, our money is on its way."

The American who wrote the ad made front pages on two continents. The British Government protested officially. Britons called it an incentive to murder. U.S. Zionists attacked it. Last week, in the midst of other duties, Harry Truman implored U.S. citizens to shush inflammatory Palestine talk of all kinds "in the interests of this country, of world peace, and of humanity." But it might take more than the President of the U.S. to shush Ben Hecht.

Ego y. Herd-Loneliness. At 53, stocky Ben Hecht could look down the rungs of a long, golden ladder. He had left Racine, Wis. in his teens with the idea of becoming a violinist. He became a boy-wonder newspaperman (Chicago Daily News) instead. In 1921 he wrote an involved but honest novel, Erik Dorn, but soon found his real bent in writing plays (like The Front Page, co-authored with Charles MacArthur) and dashing off lush Hollywood scripts for $5,000 a week. "I was always able to make large sums of money without giving money any thought," Hecht says. But an internal hunger (Hecht calls it "creative egoism") kept gnawing at him. He had a look at himself in A Guide for the Bedevilled, a handbook of Hechtian philosophy written in 1944:

"God knows what the Ego is—and so do I. The Ego is a ferocity for identification that exists in all of us. Deeper than our lusts and all our other good and bad hungers, is this obsession we have, to be Some One. . . . We clamor to acquire a meaning, to participate, however humbly, in the world of ideas and events; to hold opinions that will make us significant. . . to lift ourselves out of a herd-loneliness that eternally engulfs us."

In 1931, when Hecht's ego compelled him to write A Jew in Love, a gargoylized caricature of a Jewish publisher, Hecht was called antiSemitic. But Hecht says: "I lived 40 years in my country without encountering anti-Semitism or concerning myself even remotely with its existence." Then, one day, a luncheon companion asked Hecht, "Do you mind talking about Jews?"

"It had never occurred to me that my friend regarded me as a Jew," Hecht says. "I sat up."

Sandwiches v. Tommy Guns. The official Zionist movement was not stormy enough for Hecht. He preferred the Hebrew Committee of National Liberation, headed by blue-eyed Palestinian Peter Bergson. In the U.S., the Hebrew Committee is backstopped by something called the American League for a Free Palestine, of which Hecht became cochairman.