Jews, God, and History
by
Max I. Dimont
The Acclaimed book that spans centuries and circles the globe to tell the astounding 4,000-year story of the Jewish people and their triumphant contributions to the history of Asia, Europe, and America
Available on audio - by Blackstone Audiosbooks 1-800-729-2665
The Amazing Adventures of the Jewish People
by
Max I. Dimont
This amazing little book consists of a jam packed and fascinating synopsis of the history of the Jewish people, from the Bible's introduction of Abraham to the wars for survival of the State of Israel.
The Indestructible Jews
by
Max I. Dimont
In this highly cynical, irreverent and philosophical volume, Dimont presents us with a cross between a history and explorative essay on the question as to "Is there a manifest destiny in Jewish history".
The book is divided into three acts attempting to fit Jewish history into a kabbalistic framework.
The Jews in America
by
Max I. Dimont
In this book the concept of the Jewish history as a specialized saga of suffering has be discarded, so that the real Jewish history may emerge -- rich, rebellious, and full of intellectual adventure.
My Derby Hat
Some three months after I sold JG&H TO New American Library and Simon and Schuster, I received a letter from New American Library president, Victor Weybright, asking for a photograph. He could not envision the kind of person the author would be or look like.
I sent an 8x10 copy of that photograph, inscribed: “This is the photograph of Max I. Dimont as he dashed in taxis from night club to nightclub writing the manuscript on the back of menus.
A few months later I call Victor to tell him I would be in New York and he invited my wife, dressed in all her finery, and me for lunch. His receptionist said Mr. Weybright, who looked at us in stoned silence and then exclaimed, “By God, you look just like your picture,” our first personal statement, the first step that led to a deep friendship.
He was a huge fellow, similar in size to Sidney Greentree, impeccably dressed, Oxford suit, Church shoes, and conveying how important his appearance was to him
We had lunch with him and Henry Simon, a partner and publisher of S&S. Mr. Simon looked me like a professor of literature, which he had been, than a publisher. It did not take long before we were on a Max, and Henry basis. I couldn’t resist asking him what made him by a book from a totally unknown author. “Weren’t you taking a chance?”
“It was your style. After reading a few pages I was totally hooked on the book. It read like a novel and puzzled me. How could a man without a college education, without any academic degree, know so much, not only history but literature, philosophy, science? It was authentic enough but perhaps it was your hypnotic style. When I read your two pages on Spinoza, I decided to put you to the test. I asked a professor of English literature at Columbia University, the dean of philosophy, what he thought. I told myself if he told me your pages on Spinoza were correct, and you knew what you were talking about, then I would buy the book.”
“What did he say?”
“I’ll show you the letter. Here, read it” as he pulled it out of his files.
His reply left me no choice. “Dear Henry: l don’t know who Max I. Dimont is, but he has no academic degree, nor has he published anything in the philosophy field. I would not undertake synthesizing anything Spinoza said in two page, but if it had to be done, it could not be done better. Ask him how he came to know so much about Spinoza.”
Simon could not resist asking how he came to know so much about Spinoza.
“I know nothing about him. All I do know is in Will Durant’s book on Western philosophers but I did get this information from Dr. Kimball Plochman, told him I needed two pages of the essence of Spinoza’s philosophy and he helped me. He suggested I write down everything I think Spinoza said, in the way you want him to say it to fit in with the thesis of your book, and come down here and we will work on it.
I drove down to Carbondale, Ill after writing the ten pages he asked for, where we worked two days on whittling down the ten pages to two, but Dr. Plochmann did say, “Max, I would never synthesize Spinoza in two pages, but if it had to be done, it couldn’t be done better. I am sure Varuch Spinoza would have concurred with the extrapolations of his philosophy as you made them.”
Comment in original: I had done the same with every section of the Manuscript dealing in a field that I had no experience, that’s why it has withstood the test of time. The book is still being sold, some 8 to 10 thousand copies a year.
At lunch, Henry Simon said he had a favor to ask of me. He had shown the manuscript to a friend, Dr. Louis Finkelstein, a nationally recognized Jewish theologian in New York. He said he would like to speak to you personally. We met at his Seminary office that afternoon; he looked so much as I would picture Moses and was as impressive. He began straight to the point, “Before we talk of anything further, I would like you to change the title. Your present title offends me . . . Jews, Jehovah and History.”
“The word you use for God offends me. It is not a Jewish word.” I had used the word Jehovah because of the alliteration it achieved. I knew he was right. “What would you suggest?”
Unhesitatingly, he suggested Jews, God, and History.” I liked it. It was short, snappy, and to the point. He did not suggest God, Jews, and History because this was a book not about God’s relation to man, but man’s relation to God. I liked his suggestion and so Jews, God and History became the title.
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Orthodox in Jerusalem
My next celebrities are only celebrities in my eyes. They are people we met on a Friday evening as we wandered into Mea Shearim, the Orthodox section of Jerusalem. We came upon a woman who was readying her apartment for the Sabbath and must have just washed her floors as we watched her pour the water from a bucket into the unpaved street under her porch. We said hello in Yiddish, and asked if we could talk to her, when she invited us into her apartment. A very simple place but sparkling clean, with the same aroma of chicken soup that permeates so many Jewish homes every Friday night, reminding me of the smell in our Bronx living quarters of my youth. I remember sitting around a small table in the center of the kitchen, with my parents always talking with us. When they learned Max was a secular historian, they nevertheless listened attentively to his ideas, very different, of course, from theirs. After a general discussion, with a smile on his face and in a low voice, he said “But you must not forget the Sabbath.”
He then asked Max to join him in the next room where he took a book off his bookshelves, pulled out a photo of a young man in an army uniform with one foot resting on a tank, and proudly said: “This is my son, the tank man.”Max knew why that photograph was hidden. Being Orthodox, our host could not show it to his friends. They did not approve of the State of Israel because it had been created by Secular Zionists, not by the Messiah . . . and they did not want their sons to fight for the state which often did not require it. He must have wanted to show that photo to someone and letting Max see it was his way of showing the respect he had for Max and his ideas in spite of the fact that he was not Orthodox. Meanwhile, I had remained with his wife, a shy, sensitive woman. Not expecting to be in Mea Shearim, I paid no attention to the fact I was wearing a sleeveless blouse, also against their beliefs. In her quiet way, but with respect, pointing to my bare arms, she said, in Yiddish; “It is not nice to dress this way. It tempts men,” as she smiled apologetically, and invited us to stay for Sabbath dinner. Even today, I wish we had been able to.
Outside, we had a short encounter with another woman. Max again said hello, in Yiddish, shook hands with her, and explained why he was interested in seeing her living quarters and she took us upstairs. On her balcony were some very tired looking plants but I knew their names and talked to her about them, telling her I had the same plants at home. She was so pleased I had paid attention to what I think must have been one of the loves of her l brought back memories of my childhood and the warm buttery crumbs I used to pick at when I was a child although this was not allowed in our kosher home, but the temptation was stronger than my resistance. As we were ready to leave, Max tried to shake hand with her again to say goodbye, she refused, and held them behind her back. When Max asked her why, since she had done so when they met, her answer was: “Du hust meir tzutumilt” (you confused me.) Women are not supposed to touch a man’s hand, except their husbands.
These are the orthodox people we hear so many negative stories about and I suppose some are valid. But this experience showed personalities and attitudes we rarely hear or pay any positive attention to and I treasure my memories of them remembering how warm and friendly they were as much as I remember many of the more well-known personalities we met. Once a year, the Jewish Federation holds an international meeting for those whose annual gift exceeds half a million dollars. Each year this meeting is held in the capital city of a different country. In 1974 it was held in Washington, D.C. and I was invited by one of the guest lecturers It was one gala affair after another, with a special session for the United States delegation with a U.S. Senator greeting the distinguished international body. At that reception I was standing next to a tall man, with a genial smile suffusing his suntanned face, staring at each other, both aware of knew each other well in the somewhere distant past…both reacting in the same way at the same time. “Max” he shouted. “Ernest” I responded. Ernest Samson and I met in 1963 when we both were salesmen in a Burt’s Shoe Store in 1938 in downtown Chicago. Ernest had been my protector against the manager whom we both feared because he was a relative of the president of the company and owner of the store. The company had a policy the customers who had not purchased anything had to be turned over, through the manager, to another salesman to avoid losing the sale. Each time a customer did walk out on me, the manager started yelling about having allowed this to happen. Ernest came to my aid by telling the manager that I had turned the customer over to him and he had thrown her out because she wasn’t going to buy anything anyhow. Ernest and I became good friend during the two years we worked together and for our entire lives. En Passant: there is an incident that lingers pleasantly. It is with a salesman named Charles Westbrook from Ocean Springs, Mississippi. One day, as he went to the backroom to get a shoe for his customer, when he returned she was gone. The manager pounced on him like a tiger on a lost piglet. “Charles Westbrook,” screamed. “Where is that customer?” Charles looked at him with his soft, pale, blue eyes, responding in his thick accent, “I reckon she is at Walgreen’s having a coke.” The Manager looked at him askance, and turned away. Charles lasted but six months but before he left, on a jammed store on Easter Saturday, he had four customers in his section carrying four pair of shoes, one for each, one pair in 7 ½ B, brown suede, one black size 8 AAA. What prompted, looking curiously at the third lady, asked “Lady, what am I doing here?” Her obvious answer was “I don’t know.” “Neither do I,” dropped his armful of shoes and walked out of the store, ended up in Ocean Springs, Miss. Opened a gasoline station, hired an attendant, and went fishing every day. In 1950 he went to South Africa, found a job, married a charming owner of one of the largest importing firms, and corresponded regularly until he revisited and then came to live in the states, and it was wonderful renewing our friendship, which ended up in their arranging a lecture and travelling tour for us and a week’s vacation in their magnificent Kruger National Park area. The dash across Germany has been an education for me. After having seen the homeless in England, the starving in England, the starving in Belgium and Holland, the poverty and misery in France, the wrecked homes and general devastation of the V-bombs all over Europe, the sight of devastation in Germany was a source of joy to me. The new architecture of Germany –one wall and no roof – seemed proper and fitting. And, as we passed through one German smashed city after another, seeing the Germans standing in queues from sun-up to sun-down, I exulted, for it was their turn to stand in line, as the rest of Europe had done for six years. The “Herrenfolk” were all over – in the fields, because their homes had been bombed, on the roads because they were fleeing the Russians, and in the country side because they had no cities any more. And here is where Dimont’s indifference to any German misery broke down. At first it was easy enough. The German WAC’s were here. Without children over there. Women with children over there again. Cold, impersonal-like, for were not these the people who had almost enslaved all of Europe. But then, slowly, this mass of humanity broke into individual problems – men, women and children. Here was a woman with a six-month old child which was crying with hunger. I thought of my own Karen when she was six months old and got the child a soft-boiled egg and some milk. Here was another woman with two children throwing a hysterical fit because her husband was being put in the prisoner cage. They were refugees from Berlin. I tried to think of similar instances that must have happened in Russia, Poland, Holland, Belgium – with unrelenting SS men mowing down with their “burp-guns”, but it did no good. I still thought of my Karen, and the condensed milk of misguided human kindness flows all too freely in the American veins, and I found shelter for the woman and her two children in a nearby farmhouse – but the husband went to the prison cage. And so it went. And, after a while the individual problems blended back into just a mass of humanity and all misery disappeared in the welter of general misery. But the lesson was that I didn’t seem capable of being tough where small children were concerned. But I can now. I saw my first concentration camp the next day, and now I am ashamed of my weakness – and softness, for her I saw with my own eyes what the Germans did in similar cases. Concentration Camp….what a beautiful word it is compared to what it actually stands for. One cannot explain a color to a blind man; neither can one make somebody else feel the pain of another man, nor describe horror one has seen to another who has not seen it. Whatever you have read on the subject, multiply the horror, the squalor, the stench, the inhumanity, the barbarity, sadism, degeneracy – multiply it all a hundred fold, and you have come closer to the truth. The living were lying on the same heap of earth or straw as the dead, for the line of demarcation between living and dead here is almost non-existent. But the horror did not lie in the dead bodies – I shouldn’t say bodies, they were bones, covered with skin with a skull on top – nor did the horror lie in the gouged out eyes, smashed noses, split skulls, mutilated genitalia. The horror was that even in death you could read excruciating pain in their faces, for death came to them in agony. That was the first horror. The other horror was the fact that a nation had taken pleasure in all this pain – torturing people already doomed to death from disease and starvation, for these were the people who for some reason or other were not capable anymore of producing sufficiently for the Master Race, and therefore were sent to this “Vernichtungslager” (Extermination Camp). Had they been shot, or simply been left to starve to death from starvation, one could draw up an indictment of murder, and indict the guilty. But these people were not left alone to face death. They were tortured to death – and a natuib sat by and did not protest. The people in Ludwigslust, where the camp was located, all claimed they did not know of the existence of this camp, and that all such stories of brutality and atrocity were mere propaganda. The Commanding General of the town decided to teach them a lesson. He ordered all leading citizens to go out to the camp, bring the bodies to town, dig graves for them, lower them into the graves, and after a burial ceremony, shovel the earth back and erect crosses over the graves. In Hagenow, where we are, just a few miles away, the people claimed similar ignorance. Here the English had buried a score of tortured people in a mass grave. The military issued an order for the citizenry of this town to dig up the bodies, dig decent graves for them. Then the corpses were laid in the graves, clad in white sheets with the upper portions of their bodies exposed, and then still claim that it was all propaganda. Their tune changed. “Ach, Ja.” to be sure, it was the SS, not they. They had cousins in America – they were just like us, surely we didn’t believe they had known anything about it.” But watching their faces as they filed by the open graves, it suddenly struck me how great was the guilt of everyone of these Germans, for on their faces you could not read any horror or shame at what their people had done – rather their faces seemed to say: “What are these American making all this fuss for – these dead are only Russians, Poles, Jews – maybe a few Belgians and Dutch also.” No, I could see no shame or moral guilt on these blue-eyed, blond-haired people with the innocent faces. But they were stamped with a tinge of fear – fear that we would do unto tem what they had done to others. That is why their fear of the Russians has reached such a pathological proportion. For subconsciously they all realized that everything of the rumored atrocities by Germans in Russia are true, and that the Russians will take revenge. They all flock to the Americans, aggravating the problem of displaced persons (polite name for slaves), for they know that American soil has not been damned through German action. Even the English they fear a little, for they know what the V-Bombs have done to England. But the Americans they love – with us they feel safe. I get savage pleasure out of telling all Germans: “Well, the Russians are going to take over this territory, soon.” It is beautiful to behold the fear on their faces. But such pleasure is momentary and of no value. It solves no problems. I’m not much of a bible (man or student) but I remember one passage from Isaiah: “Awake and sing you that dwell in the dust, and the earth shall cast forth their dead.” Well, it seems to me, the dead have risen from their graves and sung their stories. Must they sing in the American patois before we can understand them? I wish the German would fear us as much as they do the Russians – or at least as much as the English. As for me, I’m still committed to the army for a little while longer. 85 points are required for discharge, and I can only muster a total of 61 CBI points required for discharge. It is a choice between Scylla and Charybidies, and the choice isn’t even up to me. P.S. Will write you soon a more cheerful letter. But I had to get this off my chest.
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1974 Meeting In South Africa With Ernest
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May 16, 1945 - WWII
