Fred Sparks’s Bequest

As peripatetic​ as he was, Fred Sparks, who was then a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, didn’t cover the Arab-Israeli War in 1948. He was too busy reporting on the civil war in Greece. But on repeated trips over the next decade to what reporters and cartographers still called the Levant, one thing Sparks always came back to was the plight of the Palestinian refugees. He never devoted entire stories to them, maybe because he sensed that in the euphoria over the creation and survival of the new Jewish state, there was no appetite for such stories, that his editors and readers wouldn’t have wanted them. But references to the refugees popped up regularly in his dispatches, always with sympathy (for them) and rage and disgust for those (Israelis, Americans, the UN) he blamed for their predicament.

It was still early in the history of Israel, when stories about making deserts bloom and ‘a land without a people for a people without a land’ dominated, before the Holocaust that was often cited to justify Israel’s existence was even called that, before Palestinians were called Palestinians (they were always the ‘Arabs’ to Sparks), before those Palestinians called their mass exodus, or expulsion, or both, from their homes the ‘Nakba’, or catastrophe. But Sparks kept bringing them up, with the credibility that the fresh and contemporaneous, rather than the smug and revisionist, can confer.

‘An Arab can’t help hating Israel because he can’t stop seeing the 800,000 refugees who lost their Palestine homes during the conflict,’ he wrote in July 1953. ‘Israel won’t let them return, fearing a fifth column, and dirt-poor Arab nations can’t spare land or jobs. The US feeds 70 per cent their 1500 calories daily – barely enough to keep an active man slightly alive.’ ‘Drive around Jordan, Lebanon, Syria or Egypt,’ he went on, ‘and you’ll pass their filthy tent cities, where the dead are buried in shallow graves without the final dignity of coffin or canvas wrapping.’ He described the refugees as people ‘who have vegetated on UN crumbs for five years, ignored by a world concerned elsewhere’, and wrote of ‘babies [who] sleep tight on their bellies to ease hunger pains’.

Sparks had lots of readers. While he was never retained by the more prestigious outlets of the day – the New York Times and Herald Tribune, the Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore Sun, the St Louis Post-Dispatch – wire services bragged when they bagged him, and dispatched his dispatches to dozens of papers. He was opinionated – outspoken – in a way that a world traveller writing for largely provincial Americans could be. He even won a Pulitzer. But by the time he died in 1981, he had largely disappeared, only to spring back to notice thanks to one last, posthumous declaration: his will. In it, he bequeathed a tenth of his estate – some $30,000, roughly $100,000 today – to the PLO.

The bequest was the third of thirteen listed in his will of 7 May 1975, after another, larger one to the Catholic Missions Society of America, Maryknoll Fathers. There was no ringing oratory: he simply directed the money to go to the Palestine Liberation Organisation, 101 Park Avenue in New York, or if they had relocated, to the PLO in Beirut. This was in keeping with the modesty of the three-page document, which also ordered his executor to have his remains cremated, with no funeral service of any kind.

Leaving money to what was widely seen as a terrorist organisation was weird enough, but Sparks was also a Jew, from a prominent New York Jewish family. People argued about whether his gift was an act of self-hatred or a wise guy’s last laugh. Judging from the reaction at the time, it didn’t occur to anyone that it was a matter of principle. And that included me. Sparks’s will, filed in New York County Surrogate’s Court, became a cause célèbre. The judge handling the case – an Italian-American elected on a stridently pro-Zionist platform (one wouldn’t have expected Middle Eastern politics to enter the discussion, but, hey, this was New York City) – moved to block it, and two prominent Jewish groups stepped in to back her up, while the New York Civil Liberties Union took her on.

It was a great story, and I, then a young law writer for the New York Times, jumped on it. The case raised an important legal question: whether a person was free to leave his or her money to anyone he or she desired. But more intriguing was a cultural and even a psychological question: what kind of Jew would make so freakish and perverted a bequest, funding people intent on destroying the Jewish state? Such a person, I assumed, needed to have his head examined. So examine it I – and many others – did.

Sparks was born Fred Siegelstein in New York in 1915. His father, Bennett Siegelstein, who had grown up (alongside Eddie Cantor and David Sarnoff) on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, was a prominent lawyer, as well as the founder and former chairman of the Menorah Home and Hospital for the Aged in Brooklyn. He had championed Romanian Jews, held seders, and sent the poor Jewish children of the Lower East Side to summer camp. When Fred’s sister got married, the much esteemed founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, performed the ceremony.

Fred entered journalism early, as a gofer for the legendary Arthur Brisbane of the Hearst papers. By his late twenties, when he was at Parade magazine, he’d become ‘Sparks’. Apart from no longer sounding Jewish, the name was almost onomatopoeic, perfectly suited to his charged personality. By 1946 he’d left Parade – where throughout the Second World War his column had featured a ‘Hitler Rumour of the Week’ – for the Chicago Daily News, which sent him overseas. He became an old-fashioned roving reporter, a one-man foreign desk for papers unable to afford correspondents of their own, parachuting into hot spots (and cold ones: he accompanied Admiral Byrd to Antarctica in 1947, somehow typing his dispatches wearing gloves) and talking ex cathedra on whatever he saw wherever he saw it, whether it was the Berlin airlift, the campaign to free Marshal Pétain or the fighting in French Indochina. He was O. Henry’s proverbial ‘citizen of the world’, never in one place for long: for fifteen straight years, he claimed, he circumnavigated the globe; in one of those years, by his count, he slept in 97 different hotels. And his wasn’t soft duty: he left Greece only a couple of days before the bullet-ridden body of his pal George Polk, he of the other eponymous journalism award, was found in Salonika Bay.

‘Mile for mile, cablegram for cablegram, there probably isn’t a foreign correspondent in the business who covers a wider beat, and covers it harder,’ Newsweek wrote of Sparks in August 1953, shortly after he’d moved to NEA, the Scripps Howard wire service. When he learned of his Pulitzer – in 1951, for articles describing the Stalinisation of East Germany – he was covering a Chinese artillery barrage in Korea.

Sparks didn’t write in the Olympian tones of Dorothy Thompson, Walter Lippmann or C.L. Sulzberger. He was a man of the people who could bond with street-sellers in Cairo and GIs in Pyongyang. He was unabashedly partisan, fluent in the Cold War patois of ‘Commies’ and ‘Reds’ and ‘us’ and ‘them’. He remained a bit of a cut-up, pleading once in an open letter to Mao Zedong to please let him into Red China, if only in order to justify the expenses he’d racked up getting there. Not everyone liked his thick-skinned, world-weary style: for one reader of the New York Post, no battle (this one was in the Greek civil war) could properly be called ‘nifty’. Not all his stories were of high-stakes war and diplomacy; in 1950, he tracked down Lucky Luciano, the exiled co-founder of the National Crime Syndicate, and interviewed him at a Neapolitan hotel.

But in the way more staid reporters enjoy (and envy) rascals, Sparks’s more august colleagues liked him. ‘A delightful and kindly companion of the road’ was the way Murray Kempton, an inveterate connoisseur of rogues, described him. Sparks left his family behind – he missed his father’s funeral – and, for all his surface conviviality, he shunned close ties of any kind, never marrying and working largely by himself, learning how to take his own pictures to avoid having to spend time with photographers. ‘Sort of an introverted extrovert,’ said Stan Swinton of the Associated Press, who covered the Korean War with him.

Sparks once confessed to a Jewish colleague that he hated hiding his Jewish origins, ‘but he could not stand being mistaken by his Gentile friends for a strident Jew who could “think of nothing but Israel”.’ During that trip to the Middle East in July 1953, he toured North Africa, Egypt and Jordan, speaking, as he put it, ‘to Sheiks, fellahs and bubble pipe salesmen’ along the way. It doesn’t seem, at least from the written record, that he talked to any Israelis. Israel had taken in hundreds of thousands of refugees from Hitler’s Europe, but he paid them no mind. Ditto the even larger numbers of Jews from Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and other Arab countries who fled to Israel following the 1948 war, though he did blame Zionism for their flight and plight.

He largely accepted what a Moroccan rabbi had told him in June 1948, in the wake of the anti-Jewish riots that took place there after Truman’s recognition of Israel. Zionism, the rabbi said, was the work of Jews from Poland, a place where assimilation was impossible – something that had never been true of Morocco: ‘It was only when Zionist agitators began their worldwide campaign to establish a Jewish state in an ancient Arab land area that the first signs of trouble with our Arab brothers became visible.’

Whenever he was in the area, Sparks was drawn back to the Arabs in their camps. Invariably, what they talked to him about was ‘home’, where they vowed one day to return. There was the man peddling what Sparks called ‘flat Arab breadcakes shaped like victrola records’ (pitta, too, had yet to be named, at least for American readers) in East Jerusalem. ‘I can see my old home from here,’ the man told him, looking west to the Israeli half of the city. ‘I live only to fight for it again.’ In a shabby tent camp near the Old City, he encountered two other men – ‘with red fezzes, sluggish from a meagre diet’ – who had posted a sign in shaky Arabic: ‘Remember the UN – it helped steal your home.’ ‘A young man from United Nations relief shows me through the refugee town, a cluster of soiled white huts on an arid hill,’ he wrote from Jordan in 1957. ‘Barefoot women balancing biblical water jugs on their heads line up before the only well. Men listlessly converse in a coffee house of naked walls.’ ‘They fled what is now Israel nine years ago,’ his guide tells him. ‘Nine years of rotting on meagre rations. What do they live for? Another war that might send them home.’

When Sparks did acknowledge the state of Israel, it was to denounce it as a pampered American protectorate. ‘Israel has kept itself well heeled with the latest model military machines, even though it depends on endless US handouts for a slim living,’ he wrote in 1953. His anti-communism only heightened his animus. Speaking to the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism in April 1957, he warned that US favouritism threatened to drive Arab countries otherwise unsympathetic to the Soviets ‘in a kind of insane fury to Moscow’.

In the same speech, Sparks praised moderates on both sides who urged compromise: Arabs who realised that the Jews couldn’t all be thrown into the sea, Jews who pushed for humane treatment of Palestinian refugees and territorial compromise, thereby allaying Arab fears the Jews would gobble up still more of their land. ‘There must be a feeling that Israel is not going to expand all over the map of the world like bubble gum expanding over the map of a 12-year-old,’ he said. One way or another, the two peoples had to learn to coexist. For all his estrangement from Jews and Jewish groups, it’s noteworthy that Sparks affiliated himself with the council, which, while marginalised by 1957, represented a hearty and formerly respectable strand of American Jewish thought. But while its opposition to a Jewish state was based largely on concerns for American Jews – the fear that by giving fuel to canards about Jewish dual loyalty, support for a Jewish state would threaten their still fragile acceptance into the American mainstream – Sparks’s concerns were different. His thoughts, always, were with the refugees.

Sparks’s career eventually faltered – as print journalism matured, swashbuckling fell into disfavour – and from omniscient pronouncements about geopolitics he regressed to gossip about the ‘golden’ Rockefeller women and the ‘wild, wild’ Kennedy boys. He wrote an entire book about Jacqueline Kennedy’s marriage to Aristotle Onassis, The $20,000,000 Honeymoon (1970), which the Times dismissed as a ‘piece of garbage’. He died, aged 65, of cancer in February 1981, six years after he’d made his will. Though he left a brother and sister, his obituary – a fourteen-liner – said no one survived him, and that seemed right.

Apart from the Maryknoll Fathers, who got 15 per cent of his estate, there were bequests to the New York Public Library, the Overseas Press Club and Somerset Maugham’s nephew (5 per cent apiece). Kempton, for one, hadn’t known he’d died until the will reached the chambers of Surrogate Marie Lambert of Manhattan, where testamentary matters were heard, then hit the papers. Though pretty broad-minded, even Kempton assumed from the PLO bequest that Sparks had lost his mind. ‘Growing old without wife or child must have been lonely enough to do a certain disservice to his judgment,’ he speculated. Still, he insisted, a man had a right to be foolish.

Judge Lambert was itching for a fight. And she knew her constituency. Campaigning for the post a few years earlier, in radio spots on the news-and-classical-music stations favoured by elderly Jewish listeners, she had pledged not to deposit court funds with banks participating in the Arab boycott of Israel – or as she put it, financial institutions ‘whose greed aligns them with ARAB murderers’. Not on her watch would ‘the HITLERS of this generation’ get their hands on ‘the monies of widows, widowers and orphans’.

So she froze Sparks’s bequest, pending hearings into the nature and purpose of the PLO. ‘I talked to the State Department, but was promptly told, “It’s your baby. Do with it what you want,”’ she later explained. (In the meantime, she doubled down on her security.) The American Jewish Congress and the Anti-Defamation League filed friend-of-the-court briefs opposing Sparks’s wishes. Then, in May 1982, Lambert held a hearing. The PLO’s permanent observer at the UN, Zehdi Terzi, was summoned: ‘In the country I come from, Palestine, the wills of Jews, Christians and Muslims are sacrosanct in their entirety,’ he said. But Lambert grew frustrated dealing with underlings. ‘Is Mr Arafat within the United States?’ she asked at one point. ‘Cheap grandstanding,’ the Times called the proceedings; to Ken Auletta, then of the Daily News, they were ‘a cross between a Marx Brothers movie and a Joseph McCarthy inquiry’.

The case brought Sparks in death a level of attention from the prestige press he had never enjoyed while alive. Reporting for the Washington Post, Joyce Wadler got conflicting appraisals of the man. ‘The PLO, as he saw it and told me several times, were the only ones who were educating the children,’ recalled Moana Tregaskis, the widow of the war correspondent Richard Tregaskis, and another beneficiary (5 per cent) of the will. Sparks, she said, ‘was a man with a very good heart’. On the other side was someone like John Groth, an artist who’d known Sparks at Parade: ‘He was probably the most antisemitic guy I ever met in my life. He was Jewish, but he despised all Jews. He was always making cracks about the Jews; worried when a guy came to be hired with a name like North, South, West if they were Jewish guys who had changed their names.’

As for me, rather than trying to learn more about Sparks – say, by examining what he’d written about the Middle East at the time, harder work in the days before digitisation – I tracked down his sister, the woman over whose wedding Mordecai Kaplan had presided, and then, using that classic ploy of reporters either lacking a point of view or looking for someone else to express it, I gave her the last word on her brother. ‘We all grew up in a very fine middle-class Jewish family,’ she told me. ‘The only thing I can think of is that my brother was beset with self-hatred.’

The case eventually migrated to the Federal Court in New York, and was settled before it was decided. Under the agreement (said to have been approved by Arafat himself), Sparks’s money wound up with the International Red Cross, to be used for medical care, food and housing for Palestinian civilians. Having little truck with politicians of any stripe, Sparks would surely have approved. So would anyone who has ever been to Gaza.

Whatever prompted Sparks’s rejection of his Jewish past, it wasn’t complete. His will, like his dispatches, honoured the tenets of the faith – the beliefs in charity, justice and equality, sympathy for outcasts and strangers, the principle of tikkun olam, or healing the world. It was a reminder that the Palestinians had been treated unjustly, and that amends must be made, sooner rather than later. Thanks to an Israeli government far more extreme than even he could have imagined, many Jews in the diaspora now feel the way Sparks once did, and are raising the same questions. Fifty years after he made his last will, Fred Sparks seems less like a crank than a seer.