482
PARTISAN REVIEW
and Canadians, Israelis and Iranians, as ch ildren, had conquered their
unacknowledged fears by unconsciously displacing their reality in much
the same way I had when fleeing from Hitler's Vienna. For fear and
curiosity, urges to hide and to run, get intermingled in every child that
doesn't understand th e causes of the danger it senses and smells.
When we met at the Hungarian Cu ltura l Center that evening to lis–
ten to the Auer Quartet play Mendelssohn and Bartok, we felt as if we
had known the other participants a ll of our lives . We didn't really want
to say good-bye, and resolved to continue exp loring our multicultural,
unconscious exper iences at the next meeting of multilingual therapists.
I think we were sure that by forming a commun ity of exiles, we were
beginning to replace the displacement and loss of language, emotion,
and cu lture we had left so long ago.
Such experiences might well lessen the "Power of Cu lture" which
many Europeans eq uate with the negative influence of American popu–
lar culture, and thus help restore the strength of individu a ls and of com–
munities.
Edith Kurzweil
COMING SOON IN
PARTISAN
REVIEW:
• Liberty and the Politics of Identity:
David Sidorsky
• Arthur Berger
on Aaton Copland
• "The Necessity of Poetry" by
Kenneth Sherman
• Jan-Werner Muller
on German Intellectuals
• Reviews by
Daniel Hayes , Mark Bauerlein,
&
Robert Leiter
• Fiction by
Sharona Ben-Tov
• Poetry by
Doris Lessing, Mario Luzi ,
&
Venus
Khoury-Ghata
