You can’t win them all – but it’s good to win some
It’s always dispiriting to learn that a writer you admired (or at least appreciated) was an anti-Semite. According to a recent New Yorker article and follow-up letters, mystery writer Agatha Christie was contemptuous of Jews.
On the other hand, I was reading some of Anton Chekhov’s letters and discovered that he was a supporter of Alfred Dreyfus, the French Jew whose wrongful imprisonment as a traitor was a cause célèbre in Europe, and also of Emile Zola, the writer whose famous defense of Dreyfus “J’Accuse,” accusing the French army of covering up the facts, caused him to be put on trial and become a fugitive.
I was touched to learn, as well, that Dreyfus, freed after being imprisoned for almost five years, in harsh conditions, on Devil’s Island, attended Zola’s funeral in 1902.
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