It was May 13, 2003. I was supposed to be on the same platform with the Nobel Laureate for Literature Imre Kertész, a Jew and a Hungarian, the first to win a Nobel Prize for literature. I had only read his novel Fateless. (I have since read another, Kaddish for a Child Not Born.) Even from the one book I had read, a searing fantasy of memory, I was stirred by being in Kertész's presence. Alas, he was sick and he could not come to the dinner at which the YIVO-Institute of Jewish Research would bestow on him and on the Israeli-American architect Moshe Safdie, the great master of light in interior space, its annual award. In Kertész's absence, George Soros would accept the prize for him. This was, at least superficially, a decent choice, since Soros had supported Kertész and his wife during the long nightmare of communism in Hungary. Kol hakavod to Soros. (If he wants to know what it means, let him ask someone who knows a bit of Hebrew. Don't worry: it's not nasty.) But then Soros actually spoke. And he lectured the assembled, many of whom were Holocaust survivors with greater conscience and self-consciousness than he about how victims often become victimizers, a shorthand for his views about Israel. Actually a stupid shorthand for a very intricate problem. He was roundly booed, and he returned to our table with a triumphant grin on his face. He had offended his fine and decent audience. I wondered what Kertész would have made of his benefactor's remarks. Did Soros represent his sentiments? But we actually know Kertész 's views about Israel, and Soros must have known them too. They had appeared, undisguised by pretense and as genuine as the scrupulous seer's, in English in Logos as late as the Spring of 2003 and earlier in the German language Die Zeit and in a Hungarian publication the name of which I forget. In any case, they were no secret. What Kertész had written was a paean of love to Israel, of honor and of historic gratitude. It was actually indecent for Soros to appropriate Kertész's moment for his own arrogant and superficial back-of-the-envelope judgments. But, in fact, they are not superficial. They are the peace that he has made with his own demons. Here were two Hungarian survivors --one a 15-year old internee at Auschwitz, the other a different kind of survivor; one a poet of the tortured body and soul, #64921 at the death camp; the other a genius at making money with a sad but distinctly peculiar story of his own survival. Whose verdict on the Jews would you take? And, by the way, Imre Kertész's opinions on the Iraq war are a bit more complex than Soros's and they reflect a more honest appraisal of the American role in the world. In fact, had Soros not last week coyly taken back his urgent demarche that supporters of the war should undergo "a certain process of de-Nazification," one might have imagined the ruthless Jewish banker presuming to instruct the exquisite Jewish writer in the ways of this cruel world, as if he had anything edifying or improving to teach.