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living in the tiny , impoverished village of Zablotov, in Poland , where he
was born in 1905, and among whose inhabitants, who " lived on air,"
Sperber's family was relatively well off. There, everyone was observant.
Children were at most four years old when they began learning to read
and translate the Bible and to believe in the imminent arrival of the
Messiah. Sperber keeps coming back to incidents in these formative years,
reassessing them in the light of later ones, evoking feelings of love for his
father and of revulsion at childish digressions, encounters with Polish
neighbors and Ruthenian helpers. One might conclude that these are the
habits of the psychologist, but even more they are those of an intellec–
tual who insists on getting things right, who ever more profoundly ex–
plores the deepest crevices of human existence - the nuanced forces that
prompt individuals to comprehend themselves and the world in all their
complexities.
With the outbreak of World War I, "the mood in the
shfefl
was vir–
tually manic-depressive; optimism rapidly alternated with fear of a Russian
invasion, of pogroms, famine, and epidemics." A year and a half later, af–
ter a sojourn in Tracz, and attempted returns to the
shfefl,
the family
moved to Vienna - the center of Kaiser Franz Josers empire. For
shtetl
Jews throughout the monarchy, Franz Josef was perceived as the guaran–
tor of civil rights, the protector against pogroms. Early on, Sperber had
faced discrimination against Jews (and worse), and the repercussions and
indignities he suffered for being marginal and defenseless. And he had re–
solved that he wouldn't "forget such incidents until [hisJ eyes [were]
closed with shards." His life is testimony that he never did.
In Vienna, the fami ly was plunged into abject poverty, having to live
with bedbugs and insufficient heat, with humiliations and degradations.
Sperber recalls the shooting of Count Sturgkh for his role in the still
ongoing war; his sympathy for the assassin, Friedrich Adler; his having
been less sad at Franz Joseph's death than his elders were; his visits to
movies and the theater; some of the many books he began to bring
home from the library ; and the trial and condemnation of Friedrich
Adler and his pardon by the last Hapsburg emperor, Karl the First. At
the end of this volume, he recollects humiliations at the
Gymnasium,
wearing ill-fitting hand-me-downs, his involvement in Hashomer Hatzair
and Zionism, his ever-growing awareness of politics, and his increasing
sympathy for the Russian revolution.
Between 1918 and 1933, in
The UI7heeded Waming,
Sperber came of
age. That was when he met his first revolutionary and became an activist
Socialist and, in 1927, a member of the Communist Party. Subsequent
emigrations as well - with their own brands of anti-Semitism, the need
to learn new languages, and with living from hand to mouth - only
