334
PARTISAN REVIEW
imagine that they had never been imprisoned. Only their new and
shoddy suits bore an unmistakable stamp of having just been issued
to them when, after a bath and a copious breakfast, they were being
let out of Lubianka.
I was already used to the idea that the leaders of the Left had a
much more intellectual bent than the leaders of the Right. But Erlich
and Alter did not fit at all my simplistic notion of what the leaders of
the Bund should have looked like. Their words and movements were
marked by a kind of restraint which in the nineteenth century one
would have attributed to good breeding, and which many of us who
have emigrated learn to associate with British manners. Their self–
assurance was quiet, far from aggressive . Their conversation never
turned into peroration. Their listening was never tinged with indif–
ference; it was careful, friendly, and attentive. They made an
impression of people who were beyond and above themselves and
who looked at everything, including themselves, from some other,
more distant vantage point. Perhaps even during those weeks spent
in a death cell, they looked at their fate as ifit were not their own and
as if what was happening to them was not the most important thing.
Actually, they were not at all alike. Victor Alter was a man of
quick and lively temperament. He was a man of action rather than
of reflection, of argument rather than of contemplation. Even his
memory did not seem impaired by his prison ordeal: he remembered
articles, books, positions taken on this or that issue before the war.
As soon as he would sit down to dinner he would get involved in
polemics and argument.
It
seemed that he derived less satisfaction
from his newly regained freedom or from the outbreak of the war
between Germany and Soviet Russia than from the fact that he , and
the Bund, correctly predicted the course of events. Alter was edu–
cated as a chemical engineer; in prison he wrote a book in that field.
One could sense in him the pleasure of an inventor whose
experiment has gone well and whose calculation has turned out to be
correct. He took this as proof that he did not err in other predictions
either.
Erlich was different. All I said about restraint and the sense of
measure was mainly applicable
to
him. One cou ld even assume that
his presence had a cooling and restraining effect upon Alter. He was
much older than his comrade or at least appeared so. He wa more
quiet, more pensive; he was also sadder.
If
Alter gave the impression
that only a day or two weeks earlier he was equally feisty and com-
