From page 391 of the new biography:
In reality David had felt sympathetic towards Jews from an early age, and had consistently portrayed Jewish characters such as Fiedler or the Fennans sympathetically in his novels. Like many of his contemporaries, he supported the creation of a Jewish national home and admired the energy and courage with which the Israelis had built a modern state. But his visits to Palestinian refugee camps showed him the other side of the story. He came to believe that “a great injustice” had been done, to salve the conscience of Europeans for their own crimes against the Jews. “We gave them a country that was not ours to give,” he would say later.
From pages 518-521:
In the New York Times Book Review, the novelist Norman Rush praised The Tailor of Panama as a ‘tour de force’, though he found the American characters ‘rather sketchily delineated’, which he thought might be ascribed to ‘Mr. le Carre’s famous ambivalence towards Americanity’. For Rush, a more substantial defect lay in a troubling aspect of Pendel’s character: ‘here we have, however little Mr. le Carre intended it, yet another literary avator of Judas’. The detail of Pendel’s background added to his unease. ‘As you read, the phrase ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ scratches at the door of your mind.’
Rush’s review caused dismay at Knopf. The suggestion of anti-Semitism, in America’s greatest newspaper, was extremely damaging. After several anguished telephone conversations, David went into his publishers’ offices to discuss how he should respond. ‘The atmosphere was of near catastrophe and collective funk,’ David would write later. He was ‘deeply wounded’ by what he saw as a ‘smear’; he wanted to react strongly by writing a letter of protest to the New York Times, but as he offered one text after another for collective consideration, he discovered that he was only compounding his offence: ‘David, if you write that, your career in the United States will be ruined’; ‘David, are you trying to tell us that this city is full of Jews?’; ‘David, are you suggesting that the New York Times is Jewish-controlled?’
…David was unwilling to leave it at that, and another letter of his appeared in a subsequent issue of the New York Times. He was delighted, he wrote, to learn from Norman Rush’s reply “that he doesn’t think I’m an anti-Semite, because he could have fooled me. Not one of the whole army of literary agents, editors, publishers and friends who commented on my novel ‘The Tailor of Panama’ on its way to publication expressed a whisper of discomfort about my treatment of Pendel’s Jewishness. No other reviewer in Britain or America has referred to it. As to your wisdom in giving currency to such non-accusations, I trust your readers will form their own opinions. Mine is unprintable.”
In an interview with George Plimpton of the Paris Review, conducted in front of an audience while David was still in New York promoting The Tailor of Panama, he was asked about the charge of anti-Semitism. ‘I have had some pretty big tomatoes thrown at me in my time, but this one missed,’ he told Plimpton. ‘All my life… I have been fascinated, enchanted, drawn to and horrified by the plight of middle European Jews… It is the one issue in my own life on which I may say I have a clean record.’ An article in the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz dismissed the accusation of anti-Semitism as ‘rubbish’.
In 1997 David was invited to speak at the annual dinner of the Anglo-Israel Association. It was suggested, perhaps mischievously, that he might care to say something about ‘the oversensitivity of the Jews of the diaspora.’ David took the opportunity to examine ‘the mystery of what I may call my Jewish conscience’, tracing his experience of Jewish people from childhood, and the portrayal of Jews in his work. Norman Rush’s review of The Tailor of Panama formed his starting-point. The implied charge of anti-Semitism, he said, ‘hurt me more deeply than any other brickbat that has been tossed my way in forty-odd years before the literary mast’. As someone who felt himself to be ‘an outsider in his country’, David claimed ‘a spiritual kinship’ with Jews, ‘that embraces what is creative in me, and forgives what is despicable, and shares with me the dignity and solitude and anger that are born of alienation.’ In his conclusion, David hit back at ‘the whole oppressive weight of political correctness, a form of modern McCarthyism in reverse’. He insisted on his right, as a non-Jew but as a convinced supporter of the nation state of Israel, to condemn Israeli actions without being branded an anti-Semite. He vigorously asserted his right to depict Jewish characters in his novels with as many flaws as any other. His talk was a plea for tolerance and openness, with respect but without inhibition. His closing exhortation encapsulated his message: ‘Take me back to Israel, where people are free to speak their minds!’
