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PARTISAN REVIEW
courted Hemingway, Salinger, Faulkner. Then, towards the end of
the sixties, clutching his weak and torn-up heart, he greedily rustled
through typewritten pages of Sakharov's treatise on intellectual free–
dom which I brought home. Oh father, father, why have you, nailed
like a galley slave to your editor's desk, never tried to write at least a
few words of truth, since you so loved Tolstoy and Faulkner for their
ability to speak the truth?
Maybe this is cruel of me, but I cannot find any other word
except "betrayal" when I think of those who were adults during my
childhood and adolescence. I felt myself betrayed by my own par–
ents, regardless of the fact that I love them. At least for the sake of
their sons, if only at home, they could have assumed some human
dignity and honesty. Already a young man, I heard about my
mother's father, who was murdered in Stalin's camps outside of
Rybinsk. They told me about the arrest of my uncle, my father's
brother, when I'd already finished school. I remember only one
timid attempt on my father's part to straighten out his spine. In the
fifties he received a severe party reprimand for intentionally masking
the reactionary nature of Tito's regime in Yugoslavia in an editorial
he wrote. Afterwards when the party membership of the newspaper
unanimously voted in support of the reprimand, my father, violating
the party statute, wrote a letter to the newspaper
Pravda,
trying to
justify his "liberal" editorial. Of course, there was no answer from
this
Pravda.
I felt betrayed by my teachers. In the ten years that I spent in
school, not one teacher ever spoke a single word of truth about that
which was most important, about the tragedy of my fatherland.
They raised us exclusively on examples of the bravery and courage
of the legendary heroes of our glorious revolution. These peda–
gogues, like the worst kind of cowards, were affirming their own
oppression and were teaching us this most pathetic trade of being lit–
tle conformists.
I feel as if I even betrayed myself. Why did I believe the teach–
ers and the newspapers? Why did I earn myself the reputation of
being the best political informer in my school? Why did I take such a
long time, up until my twenty-ninth year, and why did I so painfully
approach my first public outcry in defense of my fellow citizens, mis–
laid behind bars, behind barbed wire, behind walls of psychiatric
hospitals, for their ability to think and to express their thoughts
aloud?
