To the Editor:
I should like to comment on Chandler Brossard’s “Plaint of a Gentile Intellectual” (August) not as a Gentile (which I am, but excuse the expression) nor as an intellectual (which I may be) but as a native New Yorker who has been around for forty-five years.
I am surprised, and I must confess, disturbed that a competent writer living in New York City should have so limited a knowledge of people as Mr. Brossard displays. Now I don’t doubt that his description of his Jewish friends is accurate; and that they should be a problem to him at times I can understand. What is absurd, however, is his belief that he is describing “Jewish” people or types.
I know well, for instance, the non-Jewish counterpart of his “Jewish poet” and of his “young Jewish writer under thirty.” I have observed (with fascination) the Italian, and the Irish, and the Czech, and the Syrian counterparts of his hovering Jewish mother. God save us! The man speaks of cauls. He has certainly never observed the white-haired boy in an Irish home. . . . Mr. Brossard is simply describing personality types equally disconcerting, if not actually distasteful, to Jew and non-Jew.
I’m afraid, too, that I find the author provincial. I do not speak contemptuously, but offer the diagnosis as one likely to be helpful. I know, of course, that Mr. Brossard uses the term “Gentile intellectual” in contrast to the often used “Jewish intellectual,” but I cannot imagine a genuine intellectual using either term. . . . How can an intellectual speak of being “outnumbered by his Jewish friends”? Were I to find myself in a group practically all of whom insisted the poetry of Dylan Thomas to be much like that of Tennyson I think I would feel myself outnumbered. Surely “outnumbered” implies an issue? Such a remark sounds like a vestige of a life in a region where the Jew is still “the stranger.”
I could write some distinctly rougher comments, but I shall not, for Mr. Brossard sounds to me like a man of good will. I shall instead implore him to get out to meet hordes of people. It’s only when he has met an extremely large, representative sampling of humanity that he can dare draw general conclusions about them.
Elizabeth Sheridan
New York City
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To the Editor:
Chandler Brossard’s article should by his standards receive a sympathetic reaction from the writer. For I am a Gentile intellectual in Strawberry Mansion, Philadelphia; but, unlike Mr. Brossard, I went to school and grew up with Jews, and have gotten over the shock that Jews exist.
Mr. Brossard has met a conglomeration of Jewish intellectuals who are eccentric and unrepresentative. In the same way, after meeting some small-town Gentiles in The Big City, one has to rub his hands through his hair to shake out the spiritual hayseed. However, there are genuine Gentile intellectuals, as well as the pretenders and the insincere. . . .
I cannot agree that most Gentiles keep their opinions to themselves, and only Jews make private thoughts communal. As an occasional “visiting fireman” at the Friends’ school for adults, Pendle Hill—an international center attracting members of many religions—I find there is a sharing of personal interests and experiences among Christian and other intellectuals. Clergymen and religious workers of my own denomination, the Episcopal Church, can wax confidential and discuss personal views, stimulated by a good dinner and cocktails. As for the Buchmanites, pre-World War II vintage especially, there are few Jews capable of discussing their intimate lives in such an organized fashion.
Mr. Brossard should meet such philistines as the non-intellectual Jews. Then he would appreciate his friends. There is a Jewish tradition of respect for learning and learned people, just as there are several Gentile traditions. Let’s respect these efforts to find self-expression and realize freedom of inquiry in this materialist, intolerant world, while recognizing our personality problems or the poseurs of any group for what they are.
Walter R. Storey
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
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To the Editor:
As a Gentile of intelligence, and yet without presuming to be an intellectual, I feel compelled to protest Mr. Brossard’s article on the plight of the Gentile intellectual minority in New York City. The article is to me the plaintive, self-conscious wail of an immature, insecure, lonely individual indulging in an orgy of self-pity, but blaming his Jewish confreres for his own weaknesses. I even find myself wondering if Mr. Brossard is a true intellectual, for among such there is a rapport which knows no barriers of race or religion. The truly intellectual man is thus because of his natural endowments, his education, and his sensitivity to the influences of the social and physical environment in which he finds himself. To create from a web of neurotic self-pity an artificial schism between the Jewish intellectual and his Gentile counterpart is an affront to both.
Doha E. Young
The Helen Hay Whitney Foundation
New York City
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To the Editor:
Chandler Brossard’s article on the sparseness of Gentiles among New York’s intelligentsia actually is but a part of the whole strangeness of Gentile-Jewish relationship in the metropolis.
New York is not one city, but rather a concentration of scores of sections and neighborhoods. So, though but a quarter of the city’s inhabitants are Jews, there are dozens of these neighborhoods which are veritable voluntary ghettos.
Last year, I was invited to speak before the youth group of a church in Bensonhurst. Just a few fine-looking youngsters were present, but they were practically all the youth of that once flourishing church. And, it seems, they had invited me to ask: Just how does a minority behave? They were the four or five per cent minority in a sea of Jews and Italians.
Mr.’ Brossard might feel grateful that his worries over being an outsider began as late as they did. He might have been brought up in the Bronx instead of Idaho.
Rabbi M. D. Bial
Free Synagogue of Westchester
Mount Vernon, New York
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