The Rosa Luxemburg Contracetives Cooperative
Shorey, Kenneth P.
The Rosa Luxemburg Contraceptives Cooperative A Primer on Communist Civilization. by Leopold Tyrmand Macmillan Company, $5.95 From time to time whenever he gets a bit impish or high, a friend of...
...Yet, Tyrmand has done something very worth noticing, for all his bitterness...
...There are wry smiles on almost every page...
...But there is something very worthwhile here, particularly in the chapters "How to be a child" and "How to be a Jew...
...There's more, but as I've said, Tyrmand's translated syntax is just godawful...
...But why in our country, Daddy...
...I laugh every time - but why...
...This is especially true of prominent people...
...The laugh expected should rattle not bubble ). In the chapter on jews...
...Leopold Tyrmand has been living in the United States since 1966 and now has elected to write a witty book about life under communism in the USSR...
...one though I think my sense of humor is as well developed as anybody's...
...came the reply...
...Do I laugh at the whole notion of anyone ever actually having been sent into a compound...
...are moderately funny - but why...
...Do we laugh because we're drunk...
...As we all know, for communism, just as in the Middle Ages they were resDonsible for epidemics, crop failures, earthquakes, and floods...
...In the chapter on "How to use the mails," for example, Tyrmand explains that when a letter is deposited in a mailbox in the Soviet Union, there is no guarantee that the mailbox will ever be emptied...
...His book is not well written...
...Tyrmand's book gives us what might be called a lighter view of Marxism-Leninism, something to laugh at when there isn't anything else...
...Whole chapters (to borrow a phrase from the late Canadian humorist, Stephen Leacock) seem to have been translated out of the original Russian by machinery...
...It is my conviction," he writes, "that every totalitarian doctrine must violently turn against the Jews in its assumptions and rationalizations...
...It is a book written for a special readership...
...In the chapter on children, we are up against a man who perfectly understands young people...
...Passing by it, a boy asked his father, "Daddy, what's that...
...In remote out-of-the-way collective farms," Tyrmand says, the Arnericn used to frighten children Not because an Amarican means anything to people who have never seen one with their own eyes, but precisely be-case he mens nothing and functions as oceast not subiect by an Occasion not subject to control...
...Other chapters "On private initiative.' "How to go through a university without losing faith in life" (he scores' he scores...
...Tyrmand hits one homer after another...
...Most fit into the category of things we laugh at (in the words of the late Robert Benchley) "to keep the blood back...
...How to be a woman," "How to survive a maternity hospital and a state-controlled nursery," "How to take advantage of the invention of the telephone.'' "How to die" (One should arrange to die at a convenient time, inconspicuously if possible...
...Totalitarian ideologies are by nature Utopian and their ultimate goal, theoretical as well as practical, is to create a definitive vision of the world and life, to establish a static model the finality of which is subject to neither criticism nor modification...
...some have actively participated in the persecution of other Jews in Communist countries...
...but there is something in-stinctive in them...
...If you can cope with Tyrmand's godawful style, or if you're the sort of person who thinks "Hogan's Heroes" is an amusing TV series, there are plenty of raisins in this thin cookie...
...the boy asked...
...I've had an opportunity to collect quite a number of East European jokes...
...it is, in fact, quite naive and corny in parts...
...I don't find the jokes tunny, for some reason...
...Do we laugn at the wnoie notion of anyone over actually living under communism...
...When Santa Claus is presented as a figure symbolizing western imperialism, and Grandfather Frost is substituted as a figure drawn from old Russian folk mythology, little Soviet children learn to smile...
...Do we laugh at Tyrmand's performance...
...Or it may simply disappear altogether...
...In a certain Hungarian city, immediately after the suppression of the 1956 insurrec on by Soviet tanks the Commuists - with a tact unique to them -erected a montment to Soviet-Hungarian friendship...
...But then, the author confesses he "did not write this book for Czechs, Poles, or Ukrainians, because they already know how to live under communism...
...they learn very early to observe their parents, to watch for phoniness, cynicism, dishonesty...
...some have been traitors to themselves...
...Children in Russia, we are told, learn very early how to protect themselves...
...When the refugees are asked why they fled, they have so much to say that they are unable to give a simple, clear, and coherent answer...
...Quite frankly, I don't much care tor the bitterness underlying the quotation and the book: unrelieved cynicism really turns me off, and The Rosa Luxemburg Contraceptives Cooperative is the work of a man beside himself with hatred...
...The quotation is featured prominently in a number of advertisements for the book...
...Millions, however, have not...
...He has somehow managed to write a witty tract about life under communism - a tract that asks us to laugh at the indignities and insanities of life in a Marxist society while forgetting about the horrors...
...Some Jews have been important communists...
...That's a monument to Soviet-Hungarian friendship...
...Tyrmand (a Polish emigre, by the way, not a Russian) has learned to "hate communism for the evil it contain(s).And also to fear it for its metaphysical power to hold more and more and more evil...
...Kenneth P. Shorey...
...Do I laugh because I'm drunk...
...This explains why Jews in Russia have approximately the some rights as hamsters...
...The smlles are not ironic, of course, for young children do not understand irony...
...by Leopold Tyrmand Macmillan Company, $5.95 From time to time whenever he gets a bit impish or high, a friend of mine is given to shouting at the top of his voice, in his very worst Werner Klemperer accent, "Into the compound...
...Tyrmand describes the status of Communist Jews in a way calculated to unsettle even the most self-centered, apathetic Americans (or Israelis...
...I wrote it for the people of the democratic West who, when they meet refugees from communism in their countries, are amazed at their bitter, festering, inexpressible, and inarticulate hatred of communism, a hatred which is also full of wisdom...
...Do I laugh at the performance...
...The letter may stay in the mailbox for days, then be removed and opened and re-sealed and stamped "Damaged En Route...
Vol. 6 • February 1973 • No. 5
