I have a new faithful e-mail correspondent. He started a few
days ago with the subject line on his account, “Hi, I’m from Israel
and I have to tell you something.”
I opened the e-mail. It was the vilest, most obscene hate-filled
e-mail I have ever read. Hitler should have killed all of us Jews.
We were all kike bastards making Americans die to protect Israel
and performing lewd acts on George Bush. It was like acid on the
computer screen, like a stench that made me gag. Naturally, it was
unsigned.
The sad part is that I get this kind of mail — not as vile as
this one — fairly often, always making the same points: that Jews
are not worthy of living, that we’re scum, that we’re in with
George Bush on ruining America for our profit and Israel’s.
Naturally, they are all unsigned, because what they do — they know
— is insane and also against the law and spirit of Amerca. It’s
subversive and sick and they know it.
Always, and I mean always, they link their hatred of Jews and
their hatred of Bush. Always.
Are they Arabs? Nazis? Writing from mental hospitals or prisons?
Obviously, they never say.
Now this fellow writes me every day. I don’t open them, of
course, and soon I’ll get his account shut down, but I don’t like
his insanity (maybe hers!) reaching across the Internet into my
life, my wonderful life.
I thought about this man as I read The New Yorker
review of a new movie of Oliver Twist. The reviewer, an
absolute genius named Anthony Lane, quoted a paragraph from Dickens
about Jews. It was as bad as what the crazy man had sent me this
week, or almost. Jews as inhuman, as vampires, as eaters of corpses
and dung.
It made me shiver. This quote was from one of the great men of
letters of all time. It was from a man who specialized in catering
to cliches. Obviously, his characterization of the Jew was faithful
to the cliche in England of the mid 19th century— a time we think
of as high minded. Dickens did sign his name. So did Goebbels and
Streicher. They were within the currents of propriety of their time
and place.
So, I read this, and I had a sudden access of giddy happiness. I
thought:
“This way Dickens thought was the way mankind treated the Jew
until the last greatest miracle of mankind: the United States in
the modern world. In this world, we get to eat at the same tables
as everyone else, to listen to the same music, to be equal in every
way. In this world, I get to fly on a plane and the man next to me,
named Petersen, treats me courteously. So does the flight
attendant. So do the pilots, who invited me to the cockpit to
gossip about the world. So will the people at DFW and the people at
The Mansion hotel in Dallas.
“In America, we get treated with dignity. We are, as Martin
Luther King’s dream went, judged by the content of our character —
no, better than that — not by the prayers we say at night or who
our ancestors were.
“This is a miracle. In all history, it’s a miracle beyond
telling. This is the central fact of my existence. This is the
central fact of all human existence: that in America, people
respect each other despite race, religion, sex, age, despite all
conditions of birth and heritage. This is a MIRACLE!
“If we don’t realize it, if we are not on our hands and knees
with gratitude about it, we are insane. And if I do not feel
grateful about my life, about the way I live as a Jew and an
American, or as an American and a Jew, I am pitiful and lost.”
I thought that, and of how my beloved father-in-law Colonel
Denman put his life on the line to make it so, and now sleeps at
Arlington next to the tens of thousands of others who did the same,
and I thought that just to be in America is the gift beyond
telling, beyond words, only able to be whispered about in thanks to
God. All thanks to the men and women who have worn the uniform,
their families, their loved ones, who made the miracle happen and
make it happen day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute.
In America, it is the hater, the writer of insane e-mail, who is
the outcast, not I. And a writer who wrote as Dickens did in this
country would be a candidate for prison or a hospital’s locked
ward. Miracle. Oh, happy day.
