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The undated entry, titled "Apology for anti-Semitic comments made by Roald Dahl," never says what his offensive statements were, and it pivots quickly to how "Dahl's stories . . . have positively impacted young people for generations."
As if to say: That old goat may have had some silly ideas, but let's not forget his wonderful books!
Dahl's feelings about the Jews were not complicated or secret. "There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity," he once said. He regretted that Jewish financiers, in his view, "utterly dominated" the U.S. government and figured that "even a stinker like Hitler didn't just pick on them for no reason." That last bit was from 1983, seven years before Dahl died; it's not some recent archival discovery.
What's new here is the debased state of apologies, which at their best repair relationships between people but now often serve a cynical public relations purpose, signaling virtue and fending off the excesses of cancel culture, which can apparently come even for the dead. If a data scientist like David Shor feels forced to apologize for tweeting a scholarly study that makes some people uncomfortable, and if actors are apologizing for the non-crime of playing characters of other races - even in voice-over work, as with Alison Brie, who voiced a Vietnamese American on "BoJack Horseman" - it's not surprising that family members are apologizing for their relatives. The new logic would have us all apologizing all the time.
Sometimes, yes, good can come from reckoning with old crimes. Georgetown University was right to apologize for selling enslaved people and Chase bank for banking for Hitler, exchanging his government's marks for dollars during World War II. In 2008, when a group of Turkish intellectuals expressed contrition for their country's genocide of Armenians during World War I, it was meaningful: Even though these writers had no part in the massacre, their letter had the effect of shaming their government for not doing the same.
But the impulse to apologize can quickly lapse into incoherence. It is pointless for the descendants of an anti-Semite to apologize for comments over which they had no control. Such an apology is worse than silence. It reinforces the ancient idea that somehow sin is personally heritable - an idea that Judaism, Dahl might have liked to know, discarded. And it pushes us further away from a useful understanding of what a good apology is.
To begin, an apology should serve an actual need for repair or reconciliation. It's not evident who needed this apology. Dahl said some vicious things in his lifetime - but with no obvious effect. His views on Jews do not seem to have infected his work. Unlike F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dahl never created a morally ugly Jewish character like Meyer Wolfsheim in "The Great Gatsby," with his cuff links of human molars. For that matter, Jews seldom came off well in Agatha Christie's mysteries, read by millions (although it has been argued that she was merely satirizing her countrymen's bigotry). Dahl never promoted the work of a lunatic anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist, as the beloved American novelist Alice Walker did in an interview with the New York Times just two years ago.
What's more, the apology must come from the person who committed the wrong (matters are a bit different if the culprit is an institution, like a university or government, that exists in perpetuity). When Dahl was alive, he should have been held accountable - shamed, shunned, excoriated. He never was. Now that he is dead, there is no one to attempt atonement but his children and grandchildren.
But why should they apologize? Because they had the bad luck to be descended from an anti-Semite? Almost all Gentiles, if you look far enough up the family tree, are descended from anti-Semites. Is it that he was an anti-Semite who left them a lot of money? Again, that would describe many wealthy Christians. I'm not sure they have to renounce their inheritance because Grandpa was a Jew-hater. (What would inheritance look like in contemporary Germany?) He did not profit from enslaved Jewish labor. The descendants' ongoing enrichment perpetuates no injustice - his books did not steal land belonging to other books or imprison other books' ancestors.
It is true that he did not hide his anti-Semitism, and even advertised it, in particular in a 1983 essay. But he was mainly known as an author of children's books. And even as an anti-Semite, he was more benign than, say, Ezra Pound, who was an actual fascist. Martin Heidegger was an actual Nazi. How many descendants do we want to haul into the dock?
We should not ignore the public ugliness of a public figure, of course. So if we are not to reject Dahl's work (and nobody seems to think we should, thank goodness), what is to be done? What kind of accounting - aside from historical accuracy, from proper attention to this loathsome aspect of Dahl's legacy - can take place? And can the descendants play any role?
While there is a belief in Judaism that children may bear the sins of their fathers - live with them, suffer for them - they cannot atone for their parents, nor be punished for them. "Parents shall not be put to death for children, nor children be put to death for parents," we read in Deuteronomy. "A person shall be put to death only for his own crime." And in Judaism, atonement, done right, is highly specific, from person to person.
It's not a gesture offered to the universe, or G od, but an attempt to right a past wrong, by paying back someone you defrauded, say, or repairing a reputation that your gossip damaged. Because the wronged party, in Dahl's case, was all of world Jewry - actually, all decent, right-minded people - no real atonement is possible. The perpetrator is gone, and there is no specific aggrieved party.
The Dahls' statement may simply have been prophylactic, a guard against the possibility that his work will be canceled. The recent orgy of false regret - over roles actors played, tweets writers composed, etc. - means we have to consider that possibility. In which case the Dahls need not have worried. Dahl's characters, like Michael Jackson's songs, which I still hear on the radio all the time, are eternal. Matilda Wormwood isn't going anywhere.
Perhaps the Dahls are genuinely troubled by old Roald's dark side. If that's the case, there is precedent in Jewish tradition for what they might do: They can recast his legacy and steer the narrative in a new direction. According to one Talmudic legend, the descendants of Haman, the would-be genocidal Jew-killer in the Book of Esther, are learning Torah in the Holy Land. Dahl's estate still generates millions of dollars a year, so perhaps the living Dahls could donate money to promote Jewish study. Jews may "utterly dominate" the government, in Dahl's view, but many of our day schools and yeshivas are nearly broke. Especially during the coronavirus recession, synagogues are struggling.
But really, there's no need for the family to do anything. They should have challenged Dahl's beliefs when he was alive, and perhaps they did. If not, I would happily listen to them apologize for their silence, perhaps while I took a welcome break from listening to my children sing along with "Matilda."
Oppenheimer hosts the podcast "Unorthodox" and is the author of the forthcoming "Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood."
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