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The Crippled Giant, by Milton Hindus
- Abstract
In the summer of 1948 Milton Hindus, then a young teacher of literature at the University of Chicago, made a strange journey. At some personal sacrifice, he went to Denmark to see Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the French novelist who had written anti-Semitic tracts prior to and early in the war and had been accused by the Resistance of collaborating with the Nazis. For some years Hindus had been Céline’s most vocal American admirer and had helped him in many ways, from writing laudatory essays about his work to sending him food packages. Hindus’ journey was strange not merely because he was a Jew visiting an apparently unrepentant anti-Semite, but because a major reason for his visit was his inability to reconcile himself to the fact that Céline was, in fact, an anti-Semite. In an introduction to an American reprint of Céline’s novel Death on the Installment Plan, Hindus had speculated on the similarity between Céline’s anti-Semitic pamphlets and Swift’s “Modest Proposal,” must as Gide had previously taken Céline’s rantings for satire. (Previously, however, in a tortured article for an Australian magazine, Hindus had written, “I, a Jewish Nationalist, find myself in the position of defending an anti-Semite in his anti-Semitism—that is where the complications of modern society have led us. Society has grown so complicated that we no longer know whom to blame.” The road to certainty was a devious one.)
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