268
DANIEL BELL
I had known from E., a German journalist who had met L. in
Berlin, and who had given me his address and a letter of introduc–
tion.) I liked L.-we could talk a common political language de–
spite our political disagreements. He had an agility of mind that
quickened the flow of debate and made me feel I was back twenty
years in the alcoves of City College, arguing the question of the
inevitability of oligarchy in radical-party politics.
L.'s name, I thought, was Jewish, and after a while, I asked
him about this. His parents had been Jews, he replied, though he
himself had had no religious or Jewish upbringing. I asked him
whether he had been in Warsaw during the ghetto uprising, and
he replied that he had grown up in Lemberg, but had escaped with
his mother to Cracow. For a moment he was quiet, and I decided
not to press him. But he continued, "In Cracow, we bought some
forged papers from a priest, and managed to escape over the border
into Hungary in 1943. We spent the rest of the war in an intern–
ment camp." He was lost in
his
thoughts, and then, in a toneless
voice, as
if
starting off on another topic, he said, "I never really
knew my father. He was a Communist Party member and a func–
tionary, and he used to travel abroad on missions. In the late thir–
ties he disappeared, and I was brought up by my mother, who
was
also a Communist. As Communists, they were both militant atheists,
and opposed to religious Judaism, which they considered medieval.
So you see, I was never circumcised. That was why I could cross
the border."
This is how a Jew survives! This is how a remnant is saved.
"When did you break with the Party?" I asked. "Was it after
Khrushchev's speech in '56?"
"No, the ideological break came much earlier," he replied. "It
came after the death of Stalin, when people began coming back
from Russia with stories of the doctors' plot, and the anti-Semitism,
and the concentration camps."
"Did you know anyone who came back from Russia?" I asked.
"Yes," he said wryly, "my father. He had been in Siberia for
more than fifteen years. He was arrested
in
the late 'thirties, and
charged with being a member of Petlura's band."
And this was how a Jew suffers-to be charged with being a
member of a Ukrainian anti-Semitic organization!
