Roald Dahl is a name that nearly everyone should know. After all, he “only” wrote some of the most memorable children’s books ever and was basically the author of the entire childhoods of you and millions of people around the world.
But for those who idolised the late Dahl (and still do) due to his work or whatever reason, he’s an example of why you need to pick your heroes carefully. That’s because the man was an outright awful human being who was a fierce antisemite.
During the 1980’s, Dahl said some truly abhorrent things in interviews and articles about the Jews, such as “There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews. I mean there is always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.”
Hell, just before he died in 1990, he said in an interview, “I am certainly anti-Israel, and I have become antisemitic.” Yeah. There’s absolutely no defending that.
And it’s not something that you can blame on him being an offensive old grandpa either (he was in his 60’s when he said the aforementioned quote) as his early work is sprinkled with antisemitic hints.
In his 1945 short story, Madame Rosette, he described the title character as “a filthy old Syrian Jewess”; his 1948 novel, Sometime Never, had a cowardly pawnbroker who encompassed several Jewish stereotypes; and for his Chitty Chitty Bang Bang screenplay he created the Child Catcher character, who was basically a Jew with Nazi tendencies.
It’s perhaps no surprise that Dahl was able to entertain children with his work as no “nice” author could possible infuse such dark and unsentimental themes into their work like he did. In the words of the late Christopher Hitchens, “How else could Dahl have kept children enthralled and agreeably disgusted and pleasurably afraid? By being Enid Blyton?“.
And it’s not like the world isn’t aware of Dahl’s antisemitism either as the UK Royal Mint rejected a commemorative coin of the author in 2018 because of his views.
If there is a silver lining to all of this, it’s that his children’s books are relatively free from his more horrid views and young readers will continue to be delighted without being tainted for generations to come.
So the next time you read one of his stories or watch an adaptation of his work, just remember that Roald Dahl was a great writer but an utter bastard in real life and people need to be very careful how they memoralise him.