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vive its end; the U.S. did; countries under Soviet control or influence
reverted to autonomy or independence, including most of the Soviet
nationalities; and official Soviet ideology and institutional arrangements
became further and probably definitively discredited.
A key to understanding Kennan's views might be found in his assess–
ment of American society and culture: his critical sentiments about his
own country, its leaders and culture, are locked, as it were, in a conflict
with his insights into the Soviet system and his knowledge of Russian his–
tory. He remains haunted by apprehensions of American arrogance or a
sense of superiority; most likely what he appreciated in the Soviet Union
were the remnants of a pre-Soviet and pre-modern Russian past, the stur–
dy and simple traditions long extinct in his own country.
In this volume (as in his other writings) one occasionally glimpses his
sense of the outsider, the feeling of being "remote" from the people he
used to observe on the streets of Moscow and, one would suspect, also
from those in the corridors of power in Washington,
D.c.
Perhaps it is this
sense of remoteness and dignified detachment that may in some compli–
cated way account for both the strengths and weaknesses of his view of the
world, including American-Soviet relations of the past.
PAUL HOLLANDER
Poetry After Auschwitz
FUGITIVE PIECES.
By
Anne Michaels.
Knopf.
$23.00
A Jewish boy of seven, his parents murdered
in
their home by the S.S.
perhaps, perhaps only by neighbors, his beautiful sister perhaps taken away to
be raped and murdered, is left alone to flee, hide, starve, despair.
"Perhaps" is pertinent to
Fugitive Pieces,
a work that avoids dwelling on
Holocaust facts-perhaps to spare the reader, perhaps to allow characters their
transcendence of those facts. Perhaps this is the way second-generation writ–
ers (or is it by now third-? or fourth-?) need to construct their Holocaust
fictions . Perhaps they sense that Holocaust words, like Holocaust numbers, no
longer have the power to seize and crush us.
The substance of Anne Michaels' novel is rendered through the sensibil–
ity of the traumatized boy, Jakob, who later records meditations on events in
