(3 of 4)
I spent three weeks this summer working on Kibbutz Mishmar David, one of the ten kibbutzim that would accept German work groups [Nov. 23]. The Germans seemed less concerned with doing penance than with getting to know Jews. As one explained to me, "You know, there are very few Jews in Germany."
The results of this experiment suggest that the barriers to Israeli-German friendship are high but not insurmountable. The group that came in 1961—"the cream of Cologne youth," as one kibbutznik put it—was a fabulous success. A year later the Israelis were still praising their friendliness, their talent and hard work.
This summer's group, less special, fared less well. The Israelis could never explain precisely what was going wrong; several people said they were just more aware of these students' "German-ness." Perhaps occasional carelessness or tactlessness was partly to blame; I never got over hearing the Germans sing, before an Israeli audience, Let My People Go.
SUSAN J. SEGAL
Radcliffe College
Cambridge, Mass.
Renoir by Picasso
Sir:
Accompanying your review of Renoir, My Father, by Jean Renoir [Nov. 9], was a photograph of the painter made late in life.
It is doubly interesting. The artist's hands are badly twisted by rheumatism, but as your review points out, Renoir persisted in painting and, despite this handicap, produced some of his most significant work in his last years. It was this same photograph that Picasso used as a model for his drawing of Renoir.
VAN DEREN COKE
Director
University of New Mexico Art Gallery
Albuquerque
The Brothers K.
Sir:
Your story about the Kadoorie brothers [Nov. 16] has a special meaning to me. It was Horace Kadoorie who, in the early '40s, built and supported a school in Shanghai for refugee children from Nazi Germany. Shanghai was Japanese-occupied during the war, and the Kadoorie school, as it was known affectionately to some 20,000 European refugees, was the only free schooling available to the youngsters. Even after the Japanese confiscated Kadoorie's marble palace, one of Shanghai's showplace residences, his Rolls-Royce, Buick and Chevy, he continued to visit the school by bicycle.
After the war, many of these youngsters continued their education in America, and are living today scattered from coast to coast. Very few of us have kept in touch, but perhaps your story might help us locate our former schoolmates.
CLAUDE E. SPINGARN
Rochester
Sir:
I spent long months in Chapei internment camp with Lawrence Kadoorie and his wife.
After the Japanese surrender, my wife and I moved our few grey rags, our emaciated selves and sick baby to the Kadoorie home in Shanghai as their guests.
In the upheaval of the times, Horace Kadoorie managed to get not only the medicines our little daughter needed but enough food to feed many hundreds of visiting flight crews and soldiers, both U.S. and British.
Marble Hall became famed for its hospitality and kindness.
ERIC J. SCHMIDT
San Francisco
Dartmouth & Harvard
Sir: