REFLECTIONS: Umbrella into Cutlass

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League pamphlets slash viciously at the Zionists. One shows a Jewish boy on his knees saying "I want to live." That, says the pamphlet, is "the submissive Jewish Agency way." On another page stands a youth with a Tommy gun: "The fighting Hebrew resistance way!" Hecht on official Zionists: "They gabble . . . they want a sanctuary where the Jews of Europe can all stand on a rock and eat philanthropy-fish till the Messiah arrives. . . . Jewish wealth and respectability are fearlessly rushing sandwiches. . . ."

But the Zionist organs charge that all this talk has not put any refugees ashore in Palestine. The Zionist resistance movement, Haganah, claims that dozens of its ships have reached Palestine waters (where 30 have been seized by the British), whereas only one league-supported ship, referred to in Hecht's press releases as the Ben Hecht, ever got far enough to be seized.

Haganah sponsors hurl their own hot words at Hecht in full-page ads: "There are new playboys in America; they play with Jewish blood. The thrills of Hollywood are no longer sharp enough. They need lustier excitement, bolder showmanship. . . . They egg on the mad children of the Irgun: the distant whiff of bombs is headier than a cocktail. . . ."

A Feeling of Power. Hecht has no feeling that Palestine is the land for him. At his comfortable riverside estate at Nyack, on the Hudson, where a Hollywood "Oscar" is used as a doorstop, he lay on a couch and told Correspondent Evelyn Webber of the London Evening Standard how it felt to be a vicarious terrorist. As the Standard reported it: "I just talk. Arouse and excite the reader, and make him fighting mad. . . . Writing propaganda is like falling in love with yourself and the veiled wonders in your own brain. While I write I grow mystic. A feeling of great power comes over me."

The Standard commented: "Near obscene terms . . . power lusts." Hecht came close to an apology—for him. He sent a "Letter to the People of Britain," later published as another fund-inviting ad in U.S. papers. The "Letter" began: "The

English are, with cavil, the nicest enemies the Jews ever have had. . . ."

Hecht has been interested in psychiatry for many years. Sometimes he thinks, as he wrote in A Guide for the Bedevilled, that the psychoanalysts might remove his real enemy, antiSemitism, from the world altogether, "if there were enough of these fascinating doctors to go around—say one to every anti-Semite. And who knows but that the time may come when half the world will be lying on couches reciting its dreams and early pot-troubles to the other half. . . ."

But that would be a long way in the future. And the future? "The future," he has written, "is an enemy marching. . . . I go out to meet it—with a cutlass in my hand."

More important to Ben Hecht than a cutlass, however, was his Aunt Chasha's umbrella. Once when he was six, Tante Chasha crashed her umbrella down on the head of a theater manager who had asked her to apologize. Outside in the street she told young Ben with a sunny smile: "Remember what I tell you. That's "the right way to apologize." Ben never forgot.