BOOKS
Out of the Past
ALL OUR YESTERDAYS. By Manes Sperber. Vol. I, God's Water
Carriers. $25.95. Vol. II, The Unheeded Warning. $24.50. Vol. III, Until
My Eyes Are Closed with Shards.
Holmes
&
Meier Publishers.
$34.95.
Manes Sperber died in 1984. Had he lived another five years he
would have known that history finally vindicated him: along with no
more than a few dozen intellectuals around the world, among them his
friends Andre Malraux, Arthur Koestler, and Raymond Aron, he coura–
geously stood up against dictatorships, including the Soviet version, and
against the riptide of insidious propaganda that swayed worldwide
opinion and mercilessly assailed its critics in the name of progress.
Sperber, whose friends called him Munju, always stayed away from the
customary dichotomization of issues, and was able to live with the dis–
criminations most people find hard to accommodate : to fight Fascism
without being blinded by Communist cant; to recognize the need to
guide a vanquished Germany without turning the victors into governing
conquerors; and to advocate peace while recognizing the inordinate
dangers of a peace movement that ignores the pitfalls of disarmament
when facing an armed camp .
In this three-volume autobiography, which he wrote in his seventies,
Sperber explains that his experiences taught him "to put everything in
question, especially any certainty cited by those who promise unbounded
freedom and future happiness even as they propagate renunciation, subju–
gation, murder, and death."
Long before then, he had fictionalized many of the personalities and
unforgettable episodes he had known. In his memoir he frequently ex–
plains where and why he had "used" them in his novels. Those who have
died or come out of hiding he now calls by their real names. But he
continues to use pseudonyms if he thinks they may still want to remain
anonymous.
All Our Yesterdays
is the autobiography of a psychologist and a nov–
elist: it incorporates the insights of the former and uses the techniques of
the latter, not consciously or directly, but naturally. The first volume,
Cod's Water Carriers,
covers Sperber's life until 1918 to the end of
World War
l.
The water carriers were the poorest inhabitants of the
shtetl,
unskilled workers who had to perform heavy labor from dawn
until late into the night. Sperber recounts his earliest recollections while
