Mowery, William Byron "Keep of the Light"
A Caribbean / Central American lighthouse keeper rescues and hides a woman who had been aboard a northern European liner packed with Jewish refugees attempting to find asylum in the New World. The keeper himself soon falls victim to persecution when henchmen of his own country’s dictator attempt to beat out of him the whereabouts of the hidden Jew. He soon becomes the touchstone for a local revolution and, ultimately, the humble lighthouse keeper is proclaimed the republic’s new president. All too late, though, for the young woman, who had returned to her ship of exiles – and probable death in Europe.
Mowery’s anger at anti-Jewish prejudice is palpable, and there is no doubt that the infamous ST. LOUIS affair of May 1939 inspired his tale. Indeed, he opens with a stirring denunciation of the New World’s refusal to admit religious and political refugees to its shores that ties his “novelette” to the ST. LOUIS tragedy:
“‘There is a ship,’ wrote the late Heywood Broun in the New York World-Telegram. ‘It is called the ST. LOUIS. If suddenly the vessel flashed an S.O.S. to indicate that the crew and the 900 passengers were in danger, every other steamer within call would go hurrying to the rescue . That is the rule of the sea.
‘But there is a ship. It carries 900 passengers – men, women and small children. And they are in peril ... which threatens not only their lives but their very souls and spiritual freedom. It would be better for them by far if the ST. LOUIS had ripped its plates in a collision with some other craft, or if an impersonal iceberg had slashed the hull below the water-line.
‘Then there would be not the slightest hesitation in a moment of all the allied fleets to save these members of the human race in deep and immediate distress.
‘But this is not an iceberg, or a plate which has been ripped away. It is not an accident of nature but an inhuman equation which has put them in deadly peril.
‘And so the whole world stuffs its ears and pays no attention to any wireless.
‘There is a ship. And almost two thousand years have elapsed since the message of universal brotherhood was brought to earth.
‘What have we done with that message? What price civilization?’”