Something Thoughtful

 Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

UNEXPECTED BOOK  

I am sorry that I do not have any words of wisdom for you. Instead, I am going to tell you a little anecdote about something that disturbed me.

Before doing some shopping in the local town centre, I was killing time by browsing though the shelves of the local library, in the hope that there was something I really wanted to read. My eye was caught by the colourful cover of a book called, intriguingly, Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil. When I scanned the back cover, the blurb told me in very general terms that it was about how future wars could be avoided and how some past wars need never have happened. The author had a very Jewish name. This piqued my interest so I checked the book out and took it home.

But here was the first shock. When I opened the book and read the first few pages, I discovered that it was violently anti-semitic. I scanned quickly through the book, reading a page here and a page there of its 450-odd pages. It claimed that the world was in thrall to a vast Jewish conspiracy, that the Holocaust never happened, that Hitler was a progressive leader who was only doing what was best for the German people and that Jews were responsible for the outbreak of both the First and the Second World Wars, not to mention every major war in Europe for the last four centuries. The text was thick with long quotations from authors of similar views, and long quotations, taken out of context, from more credible people.

Looking at the author’s very Jewish name – Gerard Menuhin – I now assumed that the name must be the pseudonym of somebody trying to mislead potential readers. But here came my second shock. Looking up “Gerard Menuhin” on the internet, I discovered he is indeed Jewish and – horrible to contemplate – he is one of the sons of the revered violinist Yehudi Menuhin. Apparently he is well-known as “a self-hating Jew” or “a Jewish anti-semite”, and he has frequently contributed to far-right German nationalist publications.

What formed such a man? He was Eton College and Stanford University-educated. His father was Jewish but his mother an English Gentile.  Did this create in him some unresolved tension or resentment of his father? I don’t know. But whatever happened, a twisted bitterness was the result.

Finding this book, respectably bound, coded and covered, in a public library disturbs me in a number of ways. I am not somebody who wants to censor or remove from library shelves books that I personally find objectionable. Libraries would lose many volumes if it was up to my personal taste alone. Doubtless, too, there are many books I admire which other people might find positively cranky or weird. Even so, I seriously wonder how Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil even made it onto the shelves in the first place. Did the library system’s purchasers not examine it beyond its vague and misleading cover blurb? Couldn’t they be bothered reviewing the contents? Did they think it something that only historians or sociologists would read as an example of reprehensible extremist talk?

Once again, I don’t know. I returned the book to our local head librarian and had a little chat with her about the contents. She was mortified, pointing out that obviously local libraries do not review every book, accepting them from the national library service and relying on the recommendations of readers and publishers. As I chatted with her, her assistant looked up the book in her computer and discovered only two copies are held in New Zealand libraries. Meanwhile, they have removed the book from their shelves pending further investigation.