Word: ghettos
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Thin, dark-eyed Isaac Allal was the child of a poor tailor in the squalid Tunisian village of La Marsa; he grew up with the pale face and the weak lungs of a ghetto child. Then one day last month a glorious vista opened for him. Relief officials told the Allals that Isaac could go to a convalescent camp in Norway, and from there to Israel...
...audience of almost 100 heard the Catholic clergyman say that "the walls of the spiritual ghetto are crumbling." Father Oesterreicher, himself a convert from Judaism, said that "leading Jewish scholars" are now discussing Christ...
Such an uneasy fugitive from catastrophe is Shmul Weinstock, hero of London physician Alex Comfort's tight little novel, On This Side Nothing. In dry, sparse sentences Weinstock tells the story of his return to his native North African city the night before its ghetto is cordoned off by the Germans. His narrative, laconic and unsentimental, suggests the quality of life during a war: its urgency and tension, its underside of absurdity...
...Weinstock went back he could not say, except that perhaps it was simply because he was tired of running and had decided that, live or die, he might as well be home. When he woke up the next morning, he found the ghetto in turmoil, overflowing with hundreds of supposed Jews who had been driven in from the countryside. Peasants who "knew as much about Jewry as a Polynesian knows about the Vatican" camped in other people's houses and in the streets...
Weinstock's test came when he caught a German deserter slipping into a ghetto tunnel. Should he return the soldier to the Germans or hand him over to the Jewish leader, to certain death in either case? Or should he save the deserter's skin? Weinstock stuck by his belief in the immediate human act; he hid the soldier. Later, when the British came, some former concentration-camp prisoners recognized the German deserter as a guard who had shot helpless men. They killed...