Barbara Adde’s Reviews > Melting Point: Family, Memory and the Search for a Promised Land > Status Update

Bill Nye, 10 May 1891
If you feel yourself getting conventional and pokey, and stiff and morbid, and the moss is beginning to grow on the north side of your soul, light out for Texas.

“It has transpired that the heat of Mesopotamia is terrific and the population hostile.”

“Australia is Zangwill’s new ITOland.”

“But imagine an Itoland established and Mesopotamia acting as a refuge against the evil days that may come.”

Zangwill, 1909 “We are coming into a period of history when gigantic problems occupy the world’s attention. What time has the world to trouble itself with the Jewish question? And what right have we to expect that the Jewish people will emerge from all these coming frictions any less battered than before? Who shall say what the whirligig of time has yet in store for us?”

Israel Zangwell: A race of some 12 million people has no square inch of land that it can call its own. Just as plants cannot thrive unless they have water, so people cannot thrive unless they have land.

Grover Cleveland: Every American humane sentiment has been shocked by the attack on the Jews in Russia. There is something intensely horrible about the wholesale murder of offending, defenseless men, women and children. Such things give rise to a distressing fear that even the enlightenment of the 20th century has neither destroyed nor subdued the barbarity of human nature.

“… as one character in the book says, ‘It’s never inevitable at the time.’”