The Colossus of Rhodes was probably not very appealing as a work of art—no more than the Statue of Liberty, to compare it with a monster of the same class. Like Miss Liberty, the Colossus represented caprice on the grand scale, and, incidentally, the engineering skill and social wealth required to indulge it. When the people of Rhodes thought of raising a statue to Apollo, they decided that one about a hundred and five feet high would make a handsome gesture. Their imagination was unfettered because they had on hand the technical knowledge and the large quantity of bronze that the project called for.

Perhaps because my father was born in Rhodes, the Colossus has always had a special significance for me. By dint of staring, I have come to see in it something more than a heavy-handed compliment to a god. After all, the ancients accounted the Rhodian Apollo one of the Seven Wonders, recognizing that it shared in the outsize dignity of the Pyramids, the perverse splendor of the hanging gardens of Babylon, and the sad mania of King Mausolus, who dedicated a temple to his own dead flesh.

What use did such a little place as Rhodes have for a Colossus? The best explanation is that the Rhodians needed their monumental bronze for the same reason that New Yorkers need theirs. It served to remind them that they were a great maritime power, a forum, a mart, a school of learning and civility. Rhodes, too, was a commercial entrepôt serving a vast hinterland, and concentrating within its boundaries the better part of the wealth, power, and wisdom of the off-islanders with whom it was politically allied. Perhaps the parallel between ancient Rhodes and modern New York is partly the parallel between any pair of islands, no matter how distant from each other in time and space. The insular spirit that regards the rest of the world as off-islanders—the mild paranoia that is still perfectly able to deal with freight rates, market fluctuations, and shifting political currents—is, after all, proper to islands. Islanders are just the sort of practical dreamers to bring off gestures like colossi and skyscrapers, in which a sure knowledge and a questionable taste are heroically bodied forth.

In classical times, Rhodes was a city-state, entire of itself, coiffed with the nationalism that was the characteristic product of those walled towns. The Rhodians of those days planted colonies as freely as the Athenians, far away in Italy and Spain. Like the Athenians, again, they successfully resisted the Persian conquerors, in spite of the fact that Rhodes lies at the western extremity of the Aegean Sea, some fifteen miles from the coast of Asia Minor, which was in Persian hands. When the barbarian threat was past and Greek met Greek instead, the island was leagued against Athens, serving as headquarters for the Spartan fleet in the Peloponnesian War. And long after Greece’s golden age had guttered out, Rhodes was a bastion of the Knights of St. John in Christendom’s wars against Islam. It was a Turkish possession while the Ottoman Empire lasted, and an Italian colony between the world wars. Now it has been restored to Greece—enosis delayed some two thousand years, the time of a Diaspora.

At the end of the last century, when my father was born, Rhodes was the home of three races living in a state of amiable symbiosis. There was the indigenous Greek population, farmers and fishermen for the most part. There was the Turkish colony, representing the slack, mildly corrupt, and generally benevolent Ottoman administration. Lastly, there was the long-established colony of Spanish Jews; for after 1492 Spain had repaid the broad compliment of the earlier Rhodian settlers by dispatching some of its unwanted Jews to the island at the end of the Mediterranean world. That spasm of a nation purifying itself by fire, proscription, and exile sent my father’s people to Rhodes, as it sent other Spanish Jews to Holland or North Africa.

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Sometime after the end of the 15th century, my forefathers settled in Rhodes. They spoke a dialect that Cervantes would have recognized, just as my father finds in Don Quixote saws and proverbs that he heard in his boyhood from the quidnuncs of Rhodes. Some of their characteristic names, Arias, Dueñas, were among the oldest in Spain and occur in the plays of Calderón and Lope de Vega. Others, like Caballero, Córdova, Franco, are still the common coin of Spanish patronymic. But these facts would not have interested the bearers of the names among the Spanish Jews of Rhodes fifty or sixty years ago. A four-century-old tradition of bitterness discouraged any possible Hispanophile nostalgia; the exiles had hardened their hearts against the land of their origin and preferred not to speak of it, unless it were in passing and with a curse. Nevertheless, they were imprisoned in their language, even if spite drove them to write it in Hebrew rather than in Latin characters, and I doubt that they had made much headway in ridding themselves of their Spanish traits. Certainly they never lost the true Iberian contempt for the rest of mankind.

From this contempt, no other varieties of Jews were exempted. Those of Rhodes did not bother to distinguish among national origins and degrees of Orthodoxy. Litvak and Galician were impartially called “the Unclean”—a name intended to identify them as impostors, setting them apart from honest Gentiles like the Turks or the Greeks. To tell the truth, the foreign Jews who visited Rhodes were usually not at their best during their stay. They were almost all refugees from the pogroms of Polish Russia and the Ukraine, coming destitute to the island on their way to Palestine. Their claim of kinship earned them grudging succor in Rhodes; they were passed on with indecent haste to the next Sephardic community, in the hope that the Holy Land would one day swallow them up for good and all. What manner of Jews were these stooped, furtive beggars—some with red hair and blue eyes!—speaking an incomprehensible jargon familiarly, and at their prayers mocking the gracious Hebrew with their vile accent and perfunctory church Latin gabble of formulas? Not to mention that they reeked of fish, that the shaven skulls of their wives were turfed over with greasy red wigs, and that they were said to sell their daughters—and indeed it was their only wealth. Compared to these, the Mohammedan Turk was a kind of aristocrat, while the Christian Greek had the honest virtues and blunt vices that become a sea peasant. And of course neither Turk nor Greek could impeach the image that the Jews of Rhodes had of themselves, as did these poor relations fleeing from the Continent, despoiled, abject, and visibly starving.

Israel is a stiff-necked people, the Bible says, and the Jews of Rhodes did what they could to uphold the authority of Holy Writ in this particular. Grafted upon their tradition of divine election and their cankered Spanish pride was the unrealistic islander’s view of his home as the navel of the world. The cargoes and currencies of so many nations passed through their hands that it was hard to avoid the illusion that the other peoples of the earth were paying a sort of tribute to the Rhodian Jews in recognition of their natural superiority. And what else might have been alien and disquieting in the echoes of far-off lives evoked by the foreign shipping and foreign freights, was effectively exorcized by the gift of tongues. My father’s people were spontaneous polyglots. They had an unreflecting mastery over some half-dozen languages, and since they had no attachment to the cultural lares and penates that those tongues enshrined, they were virtually immune to the mysterious, incantatory elements of language which tend to make prayer out of simple utterance; for them, language was very nearly the pure medium of communication that scholars have tried to construct, the antiseptic Esperanto and Interlingua of the technician’s dream.

Of course, that was not true of Spanish and Hebrew, one the mother tongue and the other the first acquired language, overheard from infancy—for the Jews of Rhodes were steady in the accomplishment of their private devotions as they were in public worship. At any rate, the first letters a child encountered were the Hebrew, in which even the Spanish-language journals were printed. Once in school, from the age of seven, a boy learned to read, write, and speak Turkish; since literary Turkish leans heavily on Persian and Arabic, these latter languages were part of the formal curriculum too. A little later in his course came modern Greek. And in my father’s time a French school was founded in Rhodes, and there the likeliest students enrolled to learn still another speech and get the elements of a lycée education. Indeed, there were two such schools. One was run by Jesuit fathers, and it was not popular with Turks, Jews, or Greeks. Religious bias against the Catholics was the chief impediment, but almost as important was the fact that the fathers followed theories that smacked of progressive education. True to their traditional interest in pedagogical psychology, the priests insisted that the boys play outdoor games during school hours, and were even on hand to give them bonnes notes or mauvaises notes according to the quality of their performance. Such innovations scandalized Mohammedans and Jews, who held to the twelve-hour school day and recitation in chorus, like the Chinese.

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The other French school was run by the Alliance Israelite Universélle, which trained young teachers in metropolitan France and sent them out to endure a thankless apostolate among their co-religionaries in the backwaters of the Mediterranean world. Universal geography, history, Latin, physics, chemistry, perspective drawing, mathematics, philosophy, French—the curriculum of the Alliance school was intended to epitomize European culture and train students in the French state of mind. I mean, of course, that enviable assurance of certain certainties that equips the Frenchman to attack and conquer any problem whatsoever to his own entire satisfaction. The one discordant strain in the symphony of liberty, equality, fraternity presented to the youth of Rhodes was the religious note: the teachers at the Alliance school were all Jews, and there were elements in their temper of Jewish nationalism and racial mysticism that swore at the firmly practical French world view. The school, moreover, was a charitable foundation, supported by Rothschild money. That philosopher-king of commerce, the Baron Edmond de Rothschild, had been stung by the backwardness of his fellow Jews of the Mediterranean, and he had dedicated money and personal enthusiasm to the work of bringing enlightenment to them.

The attitude of the beneficiaries, my father says, was a quite feudal gratitude and fealty. Once, during his own school days, news was received that the Baron himself had come to Rhodes on a tour of inspection. The intelligence arrived, in fact, while class was in session. Hastily, the masters composed a speech of welcome for the Baron’s party, and my father was told to get it by heart. When the Baron was reported to be on his way to the school, the boy was to leave the class, and, after a suitable interval, burst into the room, rush up to the teachers and visiting dignitaries, and manifest a violent desire to speak. Everything went off like clockwork. At the strategic moment, he appeared from nowhere, panting realistically. He waved his hand, he was recognized, he bowed and addressed the visitors:

Monsieur le Baron, Madame la Baronne, qu’il me soit permis, dans un jour si heureux pour nous, de vous souhaiter la bienvenue au nom de tous mes camarades d’école. La présence dans ce local scolaire de correligionaires si éminents fait déborder nos coeurs de joie et stimule certainement notre zèle dans la voie du progrès qui nous est tracée afm de nous rendre digne de I’intérêt paternel qu’on nous porte. Aussi, nous faisons-nous un devoir de vous prier, Monsieur le Baron, Madame la Baronne, de voulois hien agréer les voeux sincères et respectueux que nous tou formons pour votre prospérité, pour vos jours si précieux, et pour ceux de toute votre chère et noble famille.

The visitors were charmed. The French pronunciation taught at the Alliance school was more appropriate to the stage of the Comédie Française than to everyday uses—as my father was to learn—but it seemed quite suitable on this occasion. The Baron murmured a compliment, the Baroness smiled, and their daughter, a slight young woman with a serious face, asked gently, “Jeune homme, portez-vous des phylactères?” It was a polite way of inquiring whether the young man had reached the age of thirteen.

“Oui, Mademoiselle.” For, some months earlier, my father had sat in the synagogue and had heard for the first time in his life the rabbi call him to read from the Scriptures, chanting: “Ya-amod hashem hatov, Eliahu ben Yosef, liq’ra batorah, yishmerehu tsuro!” That ritual summons addressed to the thirteen-year-old in the assembly of grown men had had all the dramatic effect that initiation ceremonies around the world are designed to produce; he remembered it ever after. And yet, it may be that his little set speech before the benevolent baron had even more significant consequences in shaping his life. It was a feudal utterance, and I often think that it sorted ill with the heritage of the Spaniard, the Jew, and the islander, an aes triplex of pride. The Spaniard is nature’s democrat—not in a leveling sense, but (his manners show it) as one whose consideration for others derives from bottomless self-esteem; the Jew has chosen to be God’s; the naivety of the islander lends itself to a kind of clumsy grandeur. So I often think that a seed of restlessness was planted in the boy by his part in welcoming the Rothschilds to Rhodes. At sixteen, he was the commercial correspondent for the local bank, writing in English, French, Italian, Turkish, and Arabic about letters of credit, rates of exchange, bottomry bonds. The post carried with it a modicum of glory and about the highest salary a man could earn in the island then, four louis d’or a month, but he was restless. At seventeen, he paid a visit to Smyrna, where a French newspaper was published, and where one could drink Pilsener on the quays. Compared with Rhodes, the mainland port was alive with intellectual stimulus, but my father rightly divined that it was no Paris, even if the cafés did subscribe to Le Temps, Le Matin, Le Figaro, Le Journal des débats, and Les Annales politiques et littéraires. The next year he went to Paris—and stayed just long enough to send home for money to take him across the ocean. New York detained him three weeks, and then he traveled by rail to Seattle. Presumably, there was no ship in Seattle harbor on the point of sailing for Sydney or Yokohama, for he went no farther. Instead, he rattled around the country like a pea in a bladder, until the energy generated in him by his sense of the disproportion between ideal and actuality had expended itself and could drive him no more. Now, nearly half a century later, he is still a vigorous man, but I can scarcely think of him without nostalgia for the type he represents—stiff-backed, staring men, intensely practical and incurably idealistic, courteous and quick to take offense, grave and choleric with a Latin and Semitic sense of self. In Rhodes the race is now extinct, for during the Second World War the Italians transported men, women, and children—some thousands of them—to Greece, and from there, under a guard of German soldiers, to Auschwitz.

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