Frenchman’s Novels Called Anti-Semitic; Exhibition Cancelled

A Rotterdam exhibition on turn-of-the-century French writer Joris Karl Huysmans was cancelled Friday after local newspaper reviews said some of the novelist’s work was anti-Semitic and racist.

The exhibit, which opened last month, was closed two weeks early by a city councilman angered that the writer had been honored at the city’s Stedelijk Museum, museum director Hans Paalman said in a television interview.

A city official told reporters the councilman feared the exhibit would have a “harmful effect.”

The closure comes a month after Jews stormed a theater stage in the city to stop a play by German film maker Werner Fassbinder on grounds that it spurred anti-Semitism.

Huysmans, who lived from 1848 to 1907, was a close associate of writer Emile Zola. He once referred to a Paris restaurant as a “Jew hole” but was also critical of Roman Catholicism, which won him as a convert in late life, according to Dutch experts.