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to Paris
to
be the "ideological " leader of the Institute for the Study of
Fascism (INFA), founded by German emigrants at the behest of the
Comintern. There, among many others whom he admired, he met Gide,
Koestler, Munzenberg, Gallimard, as well as Malraux (who had just won
the Prix de Goncourt). Sperber became friendly with most of the Party
operatives he met, and thus found it difficult to even mention his early
doubts about the true nature of Stalinism. He championed the cause of
the Party even after his initial forebodings when he heard of the murder
of Kirov, Stalin's comrade-in-arms, by counter-revolutionaries inside
Leningrad's Party headquarters. He defected after the next set of show
trials, unable to fool himself any longer about the treachery of Stalin and
the tactics of the Comintern.
During his ten years in the CP , Sperber met and worked with all of
its important international operatives, with the functionaries and writers,
the fellow travelers and influential sympathizers. Hitler's victory in
Germany served only to convince him (and others) that Communism was
the only means to combat Fascism. Even while waiting for the German
proletariat - and the Austrian Socialists -
to
revolt, Sperber recognized
that "no one calling himself a Communist could deviate by even a hair's
breadth from the line determined by Moscow and [whichJ might com–
pletely change and, even reverse overnight." He had been on the spot
and on the inside track of every portentous event: the fire of the Vienna
Justitzpalast in 1927, the murder of the Austrian Chancellor Engelbert
Dolfuss in 1934, the Nazis ' killing of Hitler's erstwhile henchman,
Captain Rohm, in 1933. On every one of these occasions, Sperber had
been revolted by the disrespect for human lives and by the terror result–
ing from police and anarchic brutality. Still, it would be misleading to
consider this trilogy no more than a political memoir, for Sperber exam–
ines and reexamines his personal feelings toward wives and sons, provides
sharp-eyed descriptions of men and women he met (with some of whom
he had intimate relations,) and interweaves these personal events with
historical occurrences.
Sperber often refers to the fate of emigrants, their struggles to re–
ceive work permits and jobs, and to become licensed in their professions.
Germans and German Jews were the most unpopular foreigners in Paris,
especially those who could not offer a few packs of cigarettes to the ap–
propriate officials. But after the outbreak of the war, everything got
even worse. Sperber depicts the many insuperable dangers, the narrow es–
capes, the cunning required to elude the Nazis, and the death camps after
the fall of France. When he describes his inordinate luck in again meet–
ing up with his wife, Jenka, and their precarious existence in Cagnes-sur–
Mer, he is supremely restrained: anyone aware of the dangers of their
separate escapes to Switzerland will recognize that the novelist's control
