I did not think there’d be two sides to this story…Russia versus Ukraine.
I think that’s because of my American upbringing…y’know…good guys, bad guys…cowboys versus Indians.
The cowboys were the good guys…until it turned out just the opposite.
A thousand history books had to be re-written. Movie scripts had to be revised.
Nobody knows the future, and the past keeps changing.
Depends who you talk to, but the people talking to me, tell me I am wrong for cheering the Ukrainians in their conflict with Russia.
Those who share my view…I can’t hear you!
Don’t I know? Yes, I know the Ukrainians are historically anti-Semitic. I know what they did before, during and after World War Two.
So what am I supposed to do about those images showing children clutching their dolls and toys as their tiny legs try to keep up with their mothers fleeing into Poland?
That reminds me of me.
Am I supposed to feel nothing…and Poland, you want to talk about Poland? I know about Poland, and Latvia, and Hungary, and Lithuania, never mind Germany, and all the rest of them that had a hand in the Holocaust, and who collaborated willingly and enthusiastically when it came to the Jews.
Often enough my relatives, and yours, too.
I know what it’s like being a refugee. I don’t need the history books. I wrote one or two of those history books.
But I am always ready to live and learn, especially from people who are so much wiser than me, and are therefore so quick to correct me.
These tell me that President Zelensky is no hero. If so, I’ll need to know more. He should have capitulated, they say, and thus spared his nation the agony.
He should have cut and run, like that president of Afghanistan who knew when his time was up.
Where I come from, that is called chicken.
Good enough, I guess, if you take King Solomon at his word… better a live dog than a dead lion.
That is still yellow.
Putin is no villain, they tell me.
I’m listening.
So happens I do know that Putin is a friend to the Jews. He has outlawed anti-Semitism throughout Russia. I have written about this with gratitude.
He wept bitterly at the funeral of his Jewish judo master.
He may even have learned Krav Maga from the system’s originator, Imi Lichtenfeld, whom I met in Netanya for my black belt and for my book which includes Imi and Krav Maga.
So yes, he’s got his good side, and so much of our literary culture is Russian…think Boris Pasternak, Isaac Babel, Tolstoy!
If you read Tolstoy, you know the Russian upper-class think westward, and pretend themselves to be French. The Russians, under the Soviets, liberated Auschwitz, and also granted forms of equality to its Jews, and also murdered its Jews. See, “Night of the Murdered Poets” …and doctors…and others.
Back at the Philly newspaper, the Russian man next door used to spit every time he walked past me, uttering, “Yid.”
So Russian anti-Semitism is no secret, either.
We are talking Europe, remember? One day Beethoven; next day, Hitler.
Frankly, I do not think much has changed. Given the chance, they’d do it again. There would be only Israel to stop them.
The United States would be no help. Look how helpless we are even now; a lion that can only roar.
Because we cannot get entangled into something that can lead to bombs away and as predicted, we are already at a nuclear stare-down.
Anyway, I am still open to both sides of the argument. Meanwhile, still I hurt for those children. This did not need to happen.
New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.
He wrote the worldwide book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal,” the authoritative newsroom epic, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” followed by his coming-of-age classics, “The Girls of Cincinnati,” and, the Holocaust-to-Montreal memoir, “Escape from Mount Moriah.” For that and his 1960s epic “The Days of the Bitter End,” contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Website: www.jackengelhard.com
