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March 28th, 2007 issue

More than movies

I enjoyed your cinema review very much and colorfully descriptive critique (“War is heck,” Night & Day, March 21–27). Are you a theater critic as well? If not, may I ask who is at your publication? Thank you.
Lastichka Primost
Oakland, California, U.S.A.
Editor’s note: Steffen Silvis is indeed a theater critic and, as it happens, a playwright.
Haunted
Why can’t we let the past be in the past (“No comparison,” Opinion, March 21–27)? I am sure there were a lot of Germans who suffered during World War II and that a lot of Germans died. Russia, for instance, lost 20 million people, yet it is rarely mentioned. Czechoslovakia was not the only country which expelled their German population. Poland did so as well. During (and after) war time there are always innocent people who get affected, whether they are in Czechoslovakia, Kosovo or Iraq.
Peter Zamfir
Sanford, Florida, U.S.A.
A piece like this by Adam Daniel Mezei, and so well-written and sharply documented, will always open up a whole can of anti-Semites, even Jewish anti-Semites. This is a courageous piece, especially now that “get the Jews” is back in vogue. The world is round and so is bigotry. It keeps on going. To those of us outside the sphere of Eastern Europe, this dispute comes as a microcosm of what’s been ailing all of Europe and parts of the West since the Holocaust, and even before, dating, in fact, from the moment Pharaoh declared, “Come, let us deal craftily with this people.”
Europe has taken that as a cue and has been crafty with this people from day one. As I read Mezei’s piece, I kept thinking, heck, this is exactly what France (where I was born, after Vichy came to power) is still grappling with, and onward, ditto, along the rest of the Continent. Europe is still trying to find peace with itself for what it did and continues to do — to no avail. Europe is still trying to find the place, the context, wherein its enlightenment went haywire and embraced bestiality.
How — goes the question — could we have done this to the people who gave us Moses and Jesus? Or, did we do it because they gave us Moses and Jesus? Rather than face up to Europe’s history of coffin-trains, European intellectuals choose to shoot the messenger, in this case, Adam Daniel Mezei, who chooses to fight, rather than to retreat. Mezei (in my reading) is telling European thinkers to stop playing with words and numbers (oh, it wasn’t 6 million but “only” five and a half — does that make you happy enough?), right, wake up and smell the ovens, desist from the academic games and face up to your past, Europe, otherwise you have no future.
Jack Engelhard
New York City


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