indulging them to the full. You can almost feel Cesarani’s relief when Koestler gets too old for extramarital sex and settles into respectable middle age.
Reviewers of the English edition of this book have been much taken with the issue of Koestler’s sideline in rape, and have asked how far this should alter posterity’s view of him. But Koestler’s attitude toward women has never been in doubt—you have only to read his memoirs or some of the novels, notably Arrival and Departure . We now know that he raped the wife of a friend and forced his attentions on some reluctant women. This is deeply unattractive behavior. But Koestler was no moralist. He did not preach about human goodness or pose himself as an exemplar of anything. If it turned out that he was a closet racist, or had remained all his life a secret member of the Communist Party, or had privately financed violent terrorist organizations, then some of his publications would indeed seem very odd, and we should have to ask how far he wrote in good faith. But nothing he wrote about sex is in contradictionwith his actions. And nothing he wrote about politics, or intellectuals, or the death penalty, depends for its credibility upon his sexual behavior. Koestler was a great journalist who exercised great influence; no more, no less. And neither of those claims is hostage to our views about his private life, after the fact.
THE SECOND ANACHRONISM in Cesarani’s book concerns Koestler’s Jewishness. On this score it is easier to sympathize with the biographer. Arthur Koestler was a Jew, born of Jewish parents into early-twentieth-century Budapest’s large and thriving Jewish community. He was drawn into Zionism while at university in Vienna: By 1924, at the age of nineteen, he was chairman of the Association of Jewish Nationalist Students in Austria. He spent much of the late twenties in Mandate Palestine, learning a passable café Hebrew, and he would return there in 1945. In addition to Promise and Fulfillment , his Palestine stints resulted in Thieves in the Night (1946), a novel about a Jewish settlement marked by the writer’s sympathy for the politics of Menachem Begin’s Irgun. Arrival and Departure , published in 1943, was another novel shaped by Koestler’s interest in the fate of the Jews, this time in occupied wartime Europe. After the declaration of the State of Israel, Koestler left the Middle East, never to return; but he remained sufficiently involved with the Jewish dilemma to write The Thirteenth Tribe , which appeared in 1976. It is a bizarre, misguided attempt to demonstrate that the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe are descended from Khazar tribesmen in the Caucasus—and thus need feel no special affinity for, nor obligation toward, Israel and the traditional Jewish heritage.
From all this, it would seem reasonable to infer that being Jewish was rather important to Arthur Koestler. Yet Koestler himself tended to downplay its significance. When he was not writing about Israel, Jews did not figure prominently in his work, and the autobiography goes to some lengths to understate the influence of his Jewish heritage upon his education or his opinions. Cesarani finds this a little odd, and his suspicions are probably justified, if only in part. Koestler’s efforts to be what Isaac Deutscher called “a non-Jewish Jew” only serve to remind us just how very Jewish his story is, not least (for non-practicing Central Europeans of his generation) in the effort to deny that being Jewish did or should matter. Koestler was too intelligent to claim that being Jewish was an elective affinity and that he could just choose not to be: History (that is, Hitler) had deprived him of that choice. In later years, though, he certainly behaved as though he wished it were otherwise.
Cesarani is right to note all this. But in his determination to show that Koestler was in denial, he inverts Koestler’s own emphasis and finds, or claims to find, a Jewish dimension in
Reviewers of the English edition of this book have been much taken with the issue of Koestler’s sideline in rape, and have asked how far this should alter posterity’s view of him. But Koestler’s attitude toward women has never been in doubt—you have only to read his memoirs or some of the novels, notably Arrival and Departure . We now know that he raped the wife of a friend and forced his attentions on some reluctant women. This is deeply unattractive behavior. But Koestler was no moralist. He did not preach about human goodness or pose himself as an exemplar of anything. If it turned out that he was a closet racist, or had remained all his life a secret member of the Communist Party, or had privately financed violent terrorist organizations, then some of his publications would indeed seem very odd, and we should have to ask how far he wrote in good faith. But nothing he wrote about sex is in contradictionwith his actions. And nothing he wrote about politics, or intellectuals, or the death penalty, depends for its credibility upon his sexual behavior. Koestler was a great journalist who exercised great influence; no more, no less. And neither of those claims is hostage to our views about his private life, after the fact.
THE SECOND ANACHRONISM in Cesarani’s book concerns Koestler’s Jewishness. On this score it is easier to sympathize with the biographer. Arthur Koestler was a Jew, born of Jewish parents into early-twentieth-century Budapest’s large and thriving Jewish community. He was drawn into Zionism while at university in Vienna: By 1924, at the age of nineteen, he was chairman of the Association of Jewish Nationalist Students in Austria. He spent much of the late twenties in Mandate Palestine, learning a passable café Hebrew, and he would return there in 1945. In addition to Promise and Fulfillment , his Palestine stints resulted in Thieves in the Night (1946), a novel about a Jewish settlement marked by the writer’s sympathy for the politics of Menachem Begin’s Irgun. Arrival and Departure , published in 1943, was another novel shaped by Koestler’s interest in the fate of the Jews, this time in occupied wartime Europe. After the declaration of the State of Israel, Koestler left the Middle East, never to return; but he remained sufficiently involved with the Jewish dilemma to write The Thirteenth Tribe , which appeared in 1976. It is a bizarre, misguided attempt to demonstrate that the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe are descended from Khazar tribesmen in the Caucasus—and thus need feel no special affinity for, nor obligation toward, Israel and the traditional Jewish heritage.
From all this, it would seem reasonable to infer that being Jewish was rather important to Arthur Koestler. Yet Koestler himself tended to downplay its significance. When he was not writing about Israel, Jews did not figure prominently in his work, and the autobiography goes to some lengths to understate the influence of his Jewish heritage upon his education or his opinions. Cesarani finds this a little odd, and his suspicions are probably justified, if only in part. Koestler’s efforts to be what Isaac Deutscher called “a non-Jewish Jew” only serve to remind us just how very Jewish his story is, not least (for non-practicing Central Europeans of his generation) in the effort to deny that being Jewish did or should matter. Koestler was too intelligent to claim that being Jewish was an elective affinity and that he could just choose not to be: History (that is, Hitler) had deprived him of that choice. In later years, though, he certainly behaved as though he wished it were otherwise.
Cesarani is right to note all this. But in his determination to show that Koestler was in denial, he inverts Koestler’s own emphasis and finds, or claims to find, a Jewish dimension in
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