To the Editor:

“The little man had told me a pack of lies. All his yarns about the Balkans and the Jew-anarchists and the Foreign Office conference were eyewash. . . .” This is Hannay talking, Buchan’s hero of The Thirty Nine Steps. He’s talking about Scudder, the spy Mordecai Richler quotes in “James Bond Unmasked” in the July COMMENTARY.

The plotters in The Thirty Nine Steps are Germans; the plotters in Buchan’s Three Hostages are Irish and they sit around a peat fire crooning over what’s going to happen to the world because grandma was violated by a Black and Tan, and grandpa flogged by a member of the R.I.C. In Greenmantle no one ever gets to know who the plotters are. They certainly aren’t the little white-faced Jews of Scudder’s imagination.

Richler lets Ambler and Greene off the anti-Semitic English writer-of-thrillers hook, so I suppose he doesn’t loathe them as he does “Buchan, Fleming, and their sort.” But what about Household (Rogue Male, Watcher in the Shadows) and Childers (The Riddle of the Sands)? Aren’t they pushers of the Protocols of Zion stuff too? Or hasn’t Richler read them? The villains of those books are Germans but maybe Richler can change Germans into scheming rabbis by simply saying “clear progenitors,” as he does for SMERSH and SPECTRE, easy marks that they are.

Fleming is fair game, but a little too easy for real sport. Richler uses a lot of space to say Fleming was no gentleman. Who would argue that? And Bond! Butch-trade, a loser, a man who files down the firing pin of his automatic (it would jam), a slob, just like Fleming. But an anti-Semitic conspirator? A menace?

The editor of a famous monthly journal once said that real sickness, the worst disease, is not being able to identify the enemy. Buchan’s distaste for Jews was unpleasant. Adolph Eichmann was rather fond of us.

Harold Keller
New York City

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To the Editor:

While the first part of Mordecai Richler’s article is interesting and informative, the second part is very largely an exercise in silliness. . . .

Take, for example, Mr. Richler’s citation of the selection from John Buchan. The passage is, to be sure, in poor taste. However, since Buchan was not an anti-Semite in the usual sense of the term (i.e., he did not openly express hostility to Jews, and did not agitate against Jews), we can legitimately criticize only his lapse of taste. We cannot refer to him as “an ignorant, nasty-minded anti-Semite.” While there are writers who have strong anti-Semitic tendencies, to look for anti-Semitism in cases which are nothing more than lapses of good taste is the sort of silliness which Jews should have outgrown by now. . . .

Nor does Ian Fleming’s use of plots which bear certain resemblances to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion make him an anti-Semite. In this case Richler is employing a kind of “guilt by resemblance” which I’m sure he would criticize if it were used on a writer whose politics he happened to like. . . .

[Rabbi] Noah M. Gamze
Downtown Synagogue
Detroit, Michigan

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To the Editor:

Mr. Richler’s unmasking of latent anti-Semitism and xenophobia in Ian Fleming’s James Bond thrillers was extremely informative. It confirmed suspicions I had held ever since I saw the movie, Dr. No.

Both the film and the book have the mad scientist describe himself as “the only son of a German Methodist Missionary and a Chinese girl of good family,” to wit, a Eurasian. The book further elaborates upon his right-hand heart, amputated hands, and megalomania, skillfully blending heredity and environment into the image of a monster. Surrounding this beast, moreover, are other characters of mixed blood whom the book describes as Chinese Negroes or “Chigroes,” a veritable regiment of mestizo wickedness which must have made Kipling and his ilk rest content in their graves. . . .

Fear and distrust of the half-breed is an old device that panders well to the biases of an imperial people. That it should reappear in Fleming’s works firmly supports the hypothesis that James Bond is very much old wine in new—and electronically sterilized—bottles.

Robert P. Sechler
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

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