SUCH, SUCH WERE THE GOYS

The Jew is everywhere, but you have to go far down the backstairs to find him […] A little white-faced Jew in a bath-chair with an eye like a rattlesnake. Yes, sir, he is the man who is ruling the world just now.
— John Buchan, The 39 Steps (1915)

RELAX: THIS IS NOT A PIECE ABOUT ANTISEMITISM. Nor, though it certainly qualifies, is it plucked from yesterday’s Twitter. It is about one Jew, myself, aged around 12 (1960) and his encounter, life-saving in the context, with the popular literature of the British 1920s and 30s in a prep school library deep in the Lincolnshire fens. And, in a world of “woke” (that doubtless misapplied but convenient shorthand) and its appetite for a censorship that those of us born in the late ’40s would try hard to overturn, the question of just how much such juvenile reading — approved by the new censors or otherwise — matters.

The school was named for the local saint, “little Saint Hugh” by rote