| George Steiner, 2008 Foto de Colin MacPherson |
You Really Need To Read This Terrific Interview With George Steiner
Editor’s note: George Steiner is generally regarded as one of the most significant Jewish thinkers of the 20th century. He has taught at Oxford University, Cambridge, Harvard and Yale, among others, and his books include the classic of criticism, “Tolstoy Or Dostoevsky,” “The Death Of Tragedy” and “In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards The Redefinition Of Culture.” “A Long Saturday,” a book of conversations Steiner had with the French journalist Laure Adler, is being published this month by the University Of Chicago Press. Writing for The Washington Post in 1984, Robert Alter declared, “No one now writing on literature can match him as polymath and polyglot, and few can equal the verve and eloquence of his writing.”
The following conversation between Adler and Steiner has been excerpted from that book.
Laure Adler: The Jewish question, which has haunted your entire life, goes well beyond the existence of Israel, the settling of a people in a nation-state, doesn’t it?
George Steiner: That’s a crucial question. I have great contempt for armchair Zionists, who practice Zionism without ever wanting to set foot over there. The only time I had the huge privilege of meeting Ben-Gurion (very briefly), he said to me, “Only one thing matters: Send me your children.”