Ben Hecht (Jewish Lives) by Adina Hoffman

Author:Adina Hoffman [Hoffman, Adina]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2019-02-11T16:00:00+00:00

Peter Bergson

This was of course all news to Hecht, who sipped his drink and listened as the brash, mustachioed twenty-six-year-old Bergson and one of his Palestinian comrades enthused in grand terms about his PM columns and told him about Jabotinsky. Hecht claimed he’d never heard of the recently deceased novelist, journalist, and founder of the hard-line nationalistic movement known as Revisionism. Buying them several rounds of drinks, “unaware that neither had eaten that day,” Hecht explained that he had no interest in Palestine and that his main concern was the cowardice of those influential American Jews who took pains to avoid speaking out about what was happening to their kinsmen in Europe. As Hecht remembered it, “both men smiled politely at my irritation with their Palestine talk, and their sudden silence on the subject impressed me as something more than good manners.” He was struck, too, by “a pride in them, as if these two stray ‘fans’ who had sought to meet me were somehow men of importance.” Perhaps it was because of this pride, this perceived importance, that Hecht didn’t just say goodbye then and there, but agreed to meet them again, at the Algonquin suite where he was staying while Rose was off on one of her Hollywood stints.

Bergson himself later confirmed the substance of this meeting, calling it “all true except the part where we were hungry—physically hungry. That was also true, but not on that day. You know, a writer fuses things.”

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