126
PARTISAN rl..EVIEW
of his material is at work here.
After the war Sperber chose Paris as his home, though as he puts it,
an emigrant is forever without a homeland and yet ca n feel at home in
many places. He had loved Paris ever since he first went there in 1929 for
"its unmistakable rhythm of a world-class city," even though he contin–
ued to maintain an intimate - but decidedly distant - relationship with
Vienna and Berlin .
Throughout all of his writing, Sperber illustrates the exorbitant
conflicts of the writers and intellectuals who were his contemporaries,
most of whom, in one way or another, first were drawn and then be–
came dedicated to the Communists' promises. Sooner or later they had
to abandon their ideals - along with their close friends, their way of life ,
and often the core of their being. It seems to me that European intellec–
tuals who were living through these times more closely - that is, who
did not have the luxury of theorizing while being separated by an ocean
- could not fool themselves as much as many of our own did. But many
who remained faithful to the cause, notes Sperber, such as Bertold
Brecht and Lion Feuchtwanger, took refuge from the war in the far–
away and much maligned capitalist United States rather than in the
Soviet Union.
When [ met Sperber in Paris, in the late 1970s, I first was conscious
of being sized up by his piercing glance . He was friendly and helpful, and
he was totally honest, sharp and clever. On and off, he kept marveling at
the ability of intelligent people to hold on to the Communist ideals in
spite of the incontrovertible evidence of Russian imperialism and the
Gulag. He was particularly upset that in France, Jean-Paul Sartre had so
effectively linked Marxism to the national faith - to equality, fraternity
and liberty - and that his philosophy had been so influential. Sperber did
not fail to criticize some aspects of capitalism. But he maintained that
despite its faults capitalism ultimately respects human values. Once he told
me that in spite of all that went wrong in our century, of the extermi–
nations in Hitler's and Stalin's camps, humanity had progressed, because
at least no one any longer had to perform physical labor from morning
through night. Only after reading this memoir did I understand that he
was recalling the inhuman conditions of the water-carriers in distant
Zablotov.
He often told of more recent events, of his experiences after the war
when he joined Malraux as charge de mission in de Gaulle's cultural
ministry, his work as an editor at the publishing house Calmann-Levi,
and as an official of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Then and later,
Sperber neither set aside his convictions nor stopped speaking up. Shortly
before his death, in his acceptance speech upon receiving the prestigious
Peace Prize from the German Book Trade Association, he took a strong
