The Question
the deliberate utterance of the still, small voice. I repeat: it is of life I speak, of masses of men and women: of the things they say and do: of their daily selves, as I have known them. It is of life at first hand that I speak: of yourselves as you are in masses and singly, of my own people as I know them. My conviction came first from this contact, and from meditation on its meaning. I learned this belief of mine not in books, not in history, but in Manchester, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, New York. So gentiles, I concluded, have a way of living and thinking, wherever they may be. So Jews have a way of living and thinking. Had no books ever been written, were there no histories to refer to, I would have come to this belief.
I do not believe that this primal difference between gentile and Jew is reconciliable. You and we may come to an understanding, never to a reconciliation. There will be irritation between us as long as we are in intimate contact. For nature and constitution and vision divide us from all of you forever
23
