The Privileged and the Pillaged:Changing History, 2

by George Salzman

Taking oneself seriously is a hell of an impediment to having fun, supposedly necessary for one's mental health. I believe it is important. At the very least one needs some diversion. So I thought I'd try some light reading. As it happens, Nancy was a student of literature at Swarthmore College. Her ancient copy of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra's Don Quixote de la Mancha was at hand, a bit of classical literary culture for a change of pace, I thought. At the beginning I thoroughly enjoyed the absurdities Cervantes dreamt up to satisfy Don Quixote's lust for righteous adventures. Could it be that I too, in my passion for 'straightening out the world' am but one more possessed fool devoted to tilting with windmills? Of course I don't believe that for a minute. No possessed fool sees himself or herself in the caricature that may ring true for objective outside observers.

It happened that Israel Shamir came into my life a few months ago, and with him came some light heartedness. I've joked about him, both to him and some mutual friends, claiming I know what's ‘wrong’ with him: he's just having too much fun doing what he's doing. Since I became 'entangled' with this charming but Oh! so ideologically difficult-to-pin-down artist of the written word, and a body of his uncritical admirers who gasp in admiration at his every pronouncement, mistaking art and audacity for raw truth, in fact my life too has been enlivened with fun. Is he an anti-Semite, as some friends have cautioned me? I doubt it, but I don't care. I don't think he is a Jew-hater (the common but arguable meaning of the term anti-Semite), but that he wants to think of himself not as the Russian Jew of his upbringing but as the Eastern Orthodox Catholic to which he converted. When he chooses, Shamir can be as immune to rationality as was the Don Quixote of Cervantes' imagination. But he can also be wonderfully, shockingly rational. Incidentally, I got fed up with all the violence and mayhem of Don Quixote and quit in Chapter XXI at page 231, leaving not quite 3/4 of the volume unread. Enough is enough.