Now–editorial Notes

The Atlantic Monthly for March contains an anonymous article on “The Stavisky Scandal,” in which Stavisky is described as “a Polish Jew but a French citizen.”

“Who and what was Serge Stavisky?” asks the anonymous observer in The Atlantic Monthly, and his answer is this:

“By origin, a nonentity; by nature, a pathological crook; by his perseverance, audacity, and long success, a romantic and sinister figure behind the scenes of French finance and politics. Serge Alexandre Stavisky was the son of a Polish Jew dentist, Emmanuel Stavisky. He was born at Sobodka, near Kief, in 1886. His father came to France in 1890 (he was naturalized later) and settled in the Ghetto of Paris, a maze of crooked little streets behind the City Hall. There, with the pertinacity of his race, he worked and saved, first at the artisanship and mechanics of dentistry, later as a dental surgeon with premises of his own.

Meanwhile little Serge–or Sacha, as they called him–was growing up in Paris By saving and scraping, his parents gave him a college education, first at the school of the quarter, then (triumph of paternal devotion!) at one of the big colleges of Paris, the Lycee Condorcet. Sacha’s people wanted him to be a doctor; but his early ambitions outran their dream. Clever with the precocious intelligence of the Jews, filled with the unheroically adventurous spirit of a nomadic but unmartial race, the school boy Sacha knew the underworld of Paris and learned its lessons….”

The Observer also relates that when Stavisky was charged with fraud, in 1926, “the poor old dentist of the Jewish colony gave way to despair at the repeated disgraces of his son; he was found dead on a railroad track a few days later.”

The Atlantic Monthly article on the Stavisky affair may or may not be accurate. But the references to Serge or Alexander Stavisky as a “Polish Jew,” is “the Jew boy,” or to “the unheroically adventurous spirit of a nomadic but unmartiai race” are inexcusable. First of all the author is wrong of speaking of Stavisky as a “Polish Jew,” if his birthplace, as given in that article, was “Sobodka, near Kief.” Anyone at all familiar with geography knows that Kiev is in South Western Russia. Thus The Atlantic Monthly description if Stavisky as a Polish Jew is false.

We have pointed out on several occasions before that on the oasis of an investigation by a French weekly, Je suis partout, it was established that Stavisky’s mother had been converted to Catholicism from the Greek Orthodox faith, which some of the French newspapers mistook for conversion from Judaism.

Whether she was a Jewess before embracing the Greek Orthodox faith we do not know. Further inquiry revealed that Alexander Stavisky’s father and grandfather were buried in Paris, in a Protestant cemetery, under a cross. Whether Stavisky was of Jewish origin or not, we do not know definitely. If his parents and grandparents became converted to Christianity, the Jews do not have to defend themselves because the offspring of Jewish renegades turned out to be a swindler. And even if Alexander Stavisky himself had been a Jew, it is inexcusible to offend the race or religion into which he was born, because of his criminal record.

The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Herald Tribune and other American publications have published references to Alexander Stavisky’s Jewishness. We do not recall that these publications, in commenting on the Insull and Kreuger scandals, have referred to their religious or racial origin. At any rate, we have never seen it mentioned that Insull is an American Christian or that Kreuger was a Swedish Christian. It was right not to classify them thus. It would have been wrong to classify Stavisky as a Christian because his parents and grandparents had become converted to Christianity. But it is decidedly unwarranted to describe Stavisky as a Polish Jew, or any other kind of a Jew. The Atlantic Monthly, one of the foremost literary magazines, with a fine record of great American traditions, should have displayed a sense of responsibility and fairness and should not have permitted its pages to be stained with these offensive references to Stavisky’s “Jewish-ness.”