The Houseguest Read Online Free PDF Page A

British to let a few more into Palestine legally or heaven forbid into America itself. They could not or would not fight for this because they were Americans. They had been through the chutes and were, at a deep but not too deep level, ashamed of the shtetl folk, even if they were evidently being slaughtered. These were not Americans. Just as they understood the plight of their (distant) kin they understood (distantly) the rantings of Father Coughlin or Reynolds or Holmans or Elmers or any of the other orthodox bigots populating Congress, men who would sooner see America slide into sea and shining sea than let these dirty and rootless characters settle in their towns. Field got that message loud and clear, and it was because of that that he and his American flock operated the way they did.
    But Spiro was not an American. He was born in Russia. He grew up in Palestine. His life had been defined by flight. And he was lucky—some of his flight was by choice rather than the whim of a czar or sultan or whatever potentate you happened to be squirming beneath. Jews moved. They bounced. Sometimes by choice, sometimes not. They could settle. They could make roots, of course. Look at Warsaw or Berlin or Trieste or even Cairo or Istanbul. All cities inhabited by centuries’ worth of Jews who knew no other home. That was fine, said Spiro. But that was not the end of the proposition. The end was Palestine. The end had always been Palestine. Your centuries of history aren’t a lie, they’re just temporary. Shema Yisrael. The absolute beginning of the Torah, for Pete’s sake. Lord, send us to Israel. Lord, now that a very big Wehrmacht is bearing down on us very quickly with its awful fangs and horrific guns, could you send us any quicker? No? Fine. We’ll do it ourselves.
    Field and his ilk found this balls-grabbing an embarrassment, and it was this embarrassment that was incomprehensible to Spiro. He fought Field for attention in the press, for money, for influence in Washington. Mainly, Jews died and Field won, but as the news brought more and more stories of ships filled with refugees with nowhere to go, ships sent across the Mediterranean in unseaworthy condition, marooned off the Port of Haifa, off the coasts of South America, ships turned back, their Jewish passengers returned to the desperate situations they’d fled, Spiro refused to be embarrassed. It was in his nature to move and make noise and turn order into chaos when chaos was what was called for, and from this chaos sprang his Friends of a Jewish Palestine that he’d now changed, was changing, to the less inflammatory Committee for a Jewish Army, an organization dedicated to creating an army of stateless and Palestinian Jews to battle against the Nazis, to defend their own homes and people. It was an idea as unimpeachable as it was audacious. And yet it barely registered in the public consciousness over here. What voice was heard was the harmless, droning sound of Field,reassuring Americans that they weren’t doing anything wrong by turning away steamers full of displaced persons.
    Spiro had scant resources to counter such deluded thinking. In fact, he didn’t have much that he couldn’t see in front of him: a staff of a half-dozen and a dozen more volunteers, mostly unemployed or unemployable Broadway types; the dim, dusty office rooms on Madison Avenue that had been previously occupied by a sect or some sort of free-love movement. But now, for the first time in its history, the office was buzzing. A fire could do that.
    â€œAny idea who did it?”
    â€œDoesn’t have to be arson,” said Metzger. “Could just as easily be electrical.”
    The phone rang and rang.
    Spiro returned to his desk. On the way, he saw Ron Kellman, a former comrade from Irgun, yelling into the phone, and Dick Shoemaker, the bright accounting director Spiro had poached from the Zionist Organization of America, trying to hear over him while