MANES SPERBER
69
identify people with their opinions and not to see an opponent auto–
matically as an enemy. However unrelenting my enmity to all dic–
tators and their lying propaganda, I tried - often enough without
success - to see their followers as people who had been led astray,
not necessarily enemies. Absolute negativity has always been an
abomination to me . I would shrink from a world in which there
were only two colors, and these without nuance, as before a dread
disease . .. .
*
*
I spoke not far back of the fall of France in the summer of 1940.
What happened in the years that followed still overshadows my pres–
ent existence. What I have written since then has not been read cor–
rectly if the reader has failed to discover in it my anguish over what
so many innocent people, but especially those of my race, had to
suffer.
No one speaks only with his own voice; generations, whose heir
and successor he is, speak out of him, even when he is reporting on
the banalities of his everyday existence. A person of my race knows
that in the second quarter of this century he fell heir to a misfortune
that made insignificant all that happened to him as one privileged to
survive. No one can decline that heritage, which seizes possession of
one before one has even had time to consider whether one should
accept it.
We are saddened by the death of
RAYMOND ARON,
a friend and contributor.
