REVIEWS
Block, Fred & Rubenstein, Joshua & Koháková, Zuzana & Holdren, John & Holsworth, Robert D. & Geltman, Emanuel
ILYA EHRENBURG: WRITING, POLITICS, AND THE ART OF SURVIVAL, by Anatol Goldberg. With an introduction, postscript, and additional material by Erik de Mauny. New York: Viking. 312 pp. $17.95. This...
...Bourne condensed these insights into the chilling aphorism known to many who do not know its originator: "War is the health of the state...
...They were a warning that the Nazis not be mistaken for the civilized Germans Russia had faced a generation Nadezhda Mande'stem Writes to Ilya Ehrenburg Nadezhda Mandelstam first met Ilya Ehrenburg in 1918 when he came to Kiev during the Civil War that followed the Revolution...
...The closest they get to the stuff of actual politics is to endorse the formation of a new social movement that will be "neither liberal nor conservative" and truly committed to transforming American society...
...The party had a sophisticated understanding of individual and group psychology...
...Ehrenburg temporarily lost the use of her legs and could not move...
...The final difficulty is closely related to these problems...
...the image of the saint or martyr may displace the ideas of the radical...
...He played a major role, pressing for greater freedom of expression and contact with the West...
...Bourne was a "genius" in the Emersonian tradition: "To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men—that is genius...
...or describing the formation of the Municipal Assistance Corporation (MAC), with the unions putting up millions in pension funds to rescue the city (out of which grew a close friendship with Felix Rohatyn, an investment banker from the other side of the tracks)—all these convolutions and complicated proceedings are reported in minute detail...
...If not, such books will soon become as barren as the consumer culture they deplore...
...By way of rounding this out, Lillian Roberts contributed mightily to the achievements of the...
...His numerous contacts among European intellectuals made him a unique and valuable advocate of Soviet interests...
...He was then 18 years old...
...21.95...
...Their insights come from the recognition that the world of the mass-production worker has passed, and that we urgently need new forms of social and economic 500 organization...
...Nostalgia is bittersweet, but it is also a luxury that we can ill afford in the present context...
...First, throughout the book, Piore and Sabel seem to imply that manufacturing is the only thing going on in the economy...
...Council...
...What connections can be traced between our individualistic ethos and social practices...
...To prevent any such spark, the party simply wiped out contemporary Czechoslovak culture...
...For those floor sweepers, night watchmen, and cleaning women who persisted in thinking and writing, the regime upped the scale of terror with tailing, house searches, interrogations, and arrests...
...It addresses significant issues...
...New York: Praeger...
...it is written with more gracefulness than is common in social science...
...In Lazik Roitschwantz (which has never appeared in the Soviet Union), he tells the story of a well-meaning Jewish Candide from Gomel who dies starving on Rachel's Tomb...
...275 pp...
...He ably deflected embarrassing questions about the writer Victor Serge, who was then under arrest in Moscow, and kept the meeting focused on Nazi Germany and its outrages...
...He wrote about his friendship with Bukharin—forbidden...
...Everything is made to sound trivial and cheerful...
...He was well-known to a generation of Soviet citizens for his reasoned, slightly ironic commentaries on Soviet life...
...The elaboration of cybernetic technologies with their systems of control and feedback facilitates more flexible production and the upgrading of worker skill levels...
...Your Nadya Regards to Lyuba...
...It is as if they were writing in 1940 and nobody had yet pointed out that a dramatic shift toward services is taking place...
...Gotbaum, a native New Yorker, had, so to speak, served his "apprenticeship" in Chicago where, before returning to New York, he had been appointed Chicago/Cook County director of AFSCME by Zander...
...For example, the success or failure of a mode of shop-floor regulation can be far more consequential than the factors that economists usu498 ally examine, such as variations in the average wage...
...Bellah also calls for the formation of a social movement that would be dedicated to lessening the disparity between the rich and the poor and would "restore the dignity and legitimacy of democratic politics...
...In a way, the reader may even find it titillating...
...They continued to admire his dedication, but Gotbaum learned that you can't call a strike without realistically weighing its chances of success...
...He could not foresee the grotesque horrors of Stalinism or that many of his beloved friends would perish within six years...
...The political recommendations presented in Habits of the Heart are ultimately enveloped in an atmosphere of unreality, largely because they are described in terms of changing language, reconceptualizing practices, and restoring old meanings...
...The men and women who claim that their marriage is grounded only in the temporary preferences of each partner also speak about the obligations incurred through a history of shared experience with another person...
...this strong and virile insistence that America shall be what the immigrant will have a hand in making it, and not what a ruling class, descendant of those British stocks which were the first permanent immigrants, decides that America shall be made...
...He had just turned 50, he was a Jew, he had lived virtually his entire adult life in the West, and he was primarily a novelist and an intellectual...
...The only point where Simecka's analysis becomes disappointing is in the chapter "Positive Attributes," in which he describes what he sees as the accomplishments of 20 years of social change that might, if things had gone differently in 1968, have made possible the development of a third political system that would be superior to both "socialism" and capitalism...
...Bourne reserved his most scathing invective for his former colleagues, the liberal intellectuals at the New Republic...
...It was Ehrenburg's last attempt to find engaging work as a revolutionary and it did not succeed...
...Several of his novels were banned while he was alive, the memoirs cannot be reissued, his identity as a Jew is ignored...
...In this way they distance themselves from those corporate reformers who see the creation of more flexible organizations as a "quick fix" for the problems of the economy...
...He had welcomed the fall of the Czar, but his years in Paris had made it hard for him to accept the authoritarian mood of the revolution...
...Today she is New York State's labor commissioner, the first woman, and the first black, to hold the post...
...It understood indeed that fear of some clearly defined threat (for instance physical violence) can stimulate effective action, whereas the terror produced by an illdefined, unpredictable disaster tends to shut down thought and action altogether...
...The consequences of American individualism have been a principal subject for observers of this nation since Tocqueville...
...They explored their ideas about love, marriage, personal responsibility, community, social involvement, and political participation...
...But he knew there would be war and he could not abandon his daughter who was living in Moscow...
...Barbara Ehrenreich has suggested that the nostalgia for the world of the mass-production worker is linked to assumptions about traditional family life...
...As the two men talked, Mme...
...Isaac 494 Babel told him, "A man talks candidly only with his wife—at night, with the sheet over their heads...
...33.95 cloth...
...It was an anti-Fascist crowd, and the police spies who had been sent to the funeral in force stood out very conspicuously...
...Nevertheless, Milan Simecka's The Restoration of Order, written eight years ago and circulated by Czechoslovakia's Samizdat, has only recently been translated into English and is a valuable addition...
...Publication of the memoirs almost came to a halt and he was not permitted to travel for nearly a year...
...He preferred to remain in France, which was at war with Germany, than return to Russia, which was now Hitler's ally...
...He was told to wait...
...This lack of specificity threatens to make the concept meaningless...
...Other unions faced similar problems in New York City and overcame them, too—among them, teachers (in the United Federation of Teachers), transit workers (in the TWU), and teamsters...
...We have yet, for example, fully to heed Bourne's argument in "Trans-National America" for "a cultural ideal that transcends nationalism," as Clayton describes it...
...He brought Andre Malraux to Moscow in 1934 for the First Soviet Writers' Congress...
...In recent years, these issues have become part of the controversy about the advantages and liabilities of modernity...
...Ehrenburg's letter to Stalin has long been known to exist, and Anatol Goldberg does a service to history by providing the text...
...It was his first political assignment and it brought him to the attention of Stalin...
...The authors seem to be arguing that flexible specialization makes possible a return to laissez-faire in macroeconomic policy...
...Despite these virtues, I think that few readers will come away very satisfied...
...Mintz wanted Ehrenburg to sign the appeal to save Soviet Jews "from the wrath of the people" by sending them from the large cities of European Russia, where most of them lived, to Central Asia and Birobidjan, along the Chinese border...
...Ehrenburg, meanwhile, tried to think how to deter Stalin from such a monstrous plan...
...it required "a giant leap of the imagination" to encompass what Bourne called the "cosmopolitan vision...
...As Goldberg defines the dilemma, "Either he must accept the regime, or become relegated to the status of an emigre...
...His mother could not afford it...
...By then, he had become too closely identified with the regime and too deeply involved in the struggle against fascism to turn back...
...but they went down to defeat...
...He is not the patriot we knew during the war...
...Henry George's Progress and Poverty, as he later recalled, inspired him with its vision of a "definitely glorious future, toward which all good men might work...
...ANATOL GOLDBERG IS WELL-SUITED to examine Ehrenburg's life...
...Piore and Sabel are arguing that this workplace regime is rigid and wasteful and interferes with the capacity of the American economy to compete in the production of destandardized goods...
...They read and published their verse together, holding back for a few years the still-yawning split in Russian literature between writers who live in the West and those who remain in the Soviet Union...
...What will be the standards of judgment about the good life...
...To cultivate cosmopolitanism would be to transcend "the weary old nationalism—belligerent, exclusive, inbreeding," and thus make possible, Bourne affirmed, "the good life of personality lived in the environment of the Beloved Community...
...Goldberg writes very little about this, but my own interviews with several former Jewish partisans who talked with Ehrenburg in Moscow and later settled in Israel and the United States confirm that Ehrenburg was profoundly shaken by the Holocaust and deeply embittered by the anti-Semitism that Stalin promoted during and after the war...
...Goldberg mentions this episode, but he does not realize how angry Lenin was with Ehrenburg...
...On his trips abroad, he was asked about the Yiddish poets...
...Simecka asks: Abnormal in contrast to what...
...Above all, amid internal rivalries and jealousies—emerging, inevitably, as the Council grew from barely a handful of organizers to a complex organization with lobbyists, educators, experts in virtually every field of operation—the union's tasks required leadership of unusual caliber...
...The Great Purge coincided almost exactly with the Spanish Civil War...
...One cannot be interested in both...
...As GOLDBERG MAKES CLEAR, Paris and art seduced Ehrenburg away from revolutionary politics...
...If we were not in the know we could be forgiven for believing that a Czechoslovak Airlines plane had run over a rabbit as it came down the runway...
...It is not clear from Goldberg's account of these events just how precarious Ehrenburg's position became...
...It is here that the reader begins to sense a bitter aftertaste...
...Since the authors must be aware of the growth of the entertainment, health care, and the fast-food industries, it is as if they take only goods production seriously...
...EHRENBURG KNEW that accepting the regime meant losing his freedom...
...Those expelled from the party were understood to harbor contagion, and thus had to be removed from sensitive positions in the media, schools and universities, clinics and research laboratories...
...She was a student of art and a close friend of Lyuba Kozintseva who married Ehrenburg in 1919...
...The nature of the new order was articulated the next year when the party conducted mass screenings of its rank-and-file membership and expelled some 70,000 "undesirables...
...But the boundary lines or the criteria for what to count as flexible specialization are never clearly established...
...Socialist Review, May–August 1984...
...He could only return home, horrified, and lie on the sofa with his face to the wall...
...This argument has been given its most eloquent expression, I think, in Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982...
...Extreme critics called him a "petty bourgeois" and a "pornographer...
...I was surprised, for instance, that a book advocating the restoration of community would be so inattentive to the experiments with building it that have recently been undertaken...
...Ehrenburg, in his memoirs, described his first days in Moscow...
...The next seven years were the freest of Ehrenburg's life...
...Since mass production is the economic model that has worked most recently, it serves either consciously or unconsciously to constrain our sense of options and choices in responding to the present crisis...
...From the point of view of everyday life it is hard to live in the epicenter of an earthquake...
...The letter is also mistakenly dated "1949" in the biography...
...We struggle to make sense out of our most heartfelt sentiments because the language of radical individualism does not permit us to express the "fullness of being" that we actually possess...
...Goldberg himself was present at a London press conference in 1950 when Ehrenburg lied about their fate...
...But Ehrenburg did manage to include unmistakable references to Bukharin in the Novy Mir version...
...It is hard to estimate the cost at which "order" was restored in Czechoslovakia—in loss of productivity, cultural stagnation, spiritual emptiness...
...How should a movement based on biblical and republican principles try to narrow the gap between the rich and the poor...
...Wurf had become a socialist in his youth, and Gotbaum was, and is, animated by a similar commitment to a social vision that sees the union fighting for security and decent wages while providing, for example, educational opportunities and such other services as legal aid...
...He decried the publicists who express themselves as stunned by the evidence of vigorous nationalistic and cultural movements in this country among Germans, Scandinavians, Bohemians, and Poles, . . . [and who] insist that the alien shall be forcibly assimilated to that Anglo-Saxon tradition which they unquestioningly label "American...
...An official report into the causes will be issued as soon as investigations are complete...
...This is particularly true in his use of the term "capitalism," which I find neither sufficiently subtle nor complex to describe all the failings of the West...
...Clayton states his purpose as "not to glorify but to understand the man and place him and his thinking in context...
...The ring startled them and, as often happened at moments of frightening tension, Mme...
...As we have seen, this confusion culminates in the claim that the shift to flexible specialization will magically restore full employment...
...And I am happy to tell you this and to shake your hand...
...His own position and prestige gave him access to information on the Holocaust and on Jewish partisan resistance...
...The authors argue that a better future is dependent upon increasing the prominence of this second language, reappropriating the "biblical and republican traditions that the small town once embodied . . . in ways that respond to our present need...
...You know there is a tendency to accuse you of not reversing the direction of rivers, of not changing the course of the stars, of not breaking up the moon into honeycake and feeding us the pieces...
...By constantly linking today's new craft workers with those of the 19th century, the authors obscure the significant differences in numbers between the two populations...
...People who were more influential and better informed than I could not stop the crimes," Ehrenburg had concluded...
...This focus on modes of regulation leads to the insight that these institutional factors are critical determinants of economic prosperity...
...Consider that District Council 37 had fewer than 1,000 members when Jerry Wurf took over its leadership in 1952, and that it ultimately embraced a multiethnic, multiracial mix of locals, from laborers (Local 924), to hospital employees (Local 420), Museum of Natural History employees (1559), New York City psychologists (1189), accountants, actuaries, and statisticians (1407), park attendants (1505), Metropolitan Museum of Art employees (1503)—all representing members with varying degrees of education—and you have a "rags to riches" story that is truly remarkable...
...But it was not to be...
...Goldberg pauses over these wartime articles, for they reveal a mature and sensitive writer and deserve to be remembered among the many eloquent testimonies to the carnage of the First World War...
...And third, Ehrenburg's articles were the most viciously anti-German (and not simply anti-Nazi) in the Soviet press...
...Nevertheless, "even in his darkest moments," says Clayton, Bourne maintained "a sustaining faith...
...Yet they never acknowledge that these are service activities and that the industrial transformation that they describe makes services ever more central to economic development...
...Commentators on Bourne, Clayton observes, tend to make him a symbol of the youthful spirit devastated by the Great War...
...This is a provocative thesis, but an adequate defense of it would require a confrontation with Marx's classic argument that the capitalist organization of production was historically necessary to develop the productive forces...
...By now there is a large literature available in English on the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia and its aftermath...
...We trade a half-truth for a half-lie...
...When Ehrenburg arrived home, several friends and relatives were waiting for him...
...167 pp...
...He returned to France, abandoned politics, and threw himself into the life of bohemian Paris...
...Petersburg in 1910, he left Russia after the Revolution and later became the leading figure on the BBC Russian service...
...As Goldberg remarks, Ehrenburg "had seen and heard things which no other Soviet writer had seen or heard, and he was determined to tell as much as he could...
...Despite his objections, Sedgwick, who had published some of Bourne's undergraduate essays, recognized the power of "Trans-National America" and published it in the July 1916 Atlantic...
...In his memoirs, Ehrenburg referred to the final years before Stalin's death "as perhaps the most difficult of my life...
...He had to open the door...
...Stalin's death on March 5, 1953 aborted the plot, but on the eve of his demise, Jewish cultural figures were still being summoned to affix their names to the collective appeal...
...As individuals, we have lost the capacity to see our work as a calling and to understand the basis of our relations with others...
...Cosmopolitanism, he noted, meant not rootlessness or cultural amnesia but a "dual citizenship" in which allegiance and attachment to a particular culture would foster a stable center of self from which one might extend one's sense of kinship to all humankind...
...With the possible exception of Brooks, who lived to write best-selling literary histories, Bourne, who died in 1918 at the age of 32, is perhaps the best remembered among these literary radicals—in part because Bourne lives on as legend...
...16.95...
...Here the category is extended to include the use of more flexible forms of work organization within large factories...
...Like his hero Lazik Roitschwantz, he was running out of places to live...
...After much effort he returned to Western Europe in the spring of 1921, bearing one of the first Soviet passports...
...Ehrenburg, Goldberg asserts, used Spain as a "kind of refuge," a means to stay away from Moscow and immerse himself in a cause he truly supported...
...He and his wife still had no travel visas so he wrote to Stalin, claiming that his place was in Spain where he could be most useful...
...A writer and journalist by profession, Ehrenburg was widely regarded during the Stalin years as Russia's most effective spokesperson in the West, a talented "house Jew," whose evident success and freedom to travel helped camouflage the regime's repression and anti-Semitism...
...ALL THIS WOULD BE EVEN MORE VALUABLE were Piore and Sabel able to provide a satisfactory outline of an alternative regulatory scheme...
...Few people would disagree with the assertion that it is important to reappropriate cultural traditions in order to respond to present needs...
...This condition is said to result not only in disastrous social consequences but in a diminution of the very self that modernity celebrates...
...To press this critique of the conventional wisdom, they elaborate a new conceptual framework...
...But it is also among the most unexpected and hardest to explain...
...355 pp...
...The brilliant life cut tragically short...
...Ehrenburg had flatly refused to sign when Mintz first approached him a few days before...
...Almost immediately, he fell ill...
...Had the intellectuals not mistaken their servitude for influence, they might have worked to create a trans-national America...
...they are able to look unblinkingly at the recent past only by romanticizing the long-departed world of the craft worker.* And this nostalgia for a more distant past has the effect of clouding their vision about some of the most important dimensions of the present...
...He described the influence of the Russian avant-garde on the evolution of 20th-century art...
...The problem was not only how others saw him, but also how he saw himself...
...I did not renounce what I held dear nor did I repudiate anything, but I knew I would have to live with clenched teeth and learn one of the most difficult sciences—silence...
...Nadezhda Mandelstam attended...
...THE BOOK IS AWASH IN DETAIL...
...In 1963, when Nikita Khrushchev publicly denounced Ehrenburg for portions of People, Years, Life, Nadezhda Mande/stam wrote him a letter of support...
...As a result, he does not expect very much of himself...
...But when Stalin wanted him to endorse rounding up the country's Jews, Ehrenburg refused...
...From "Full Employment for Whom...
...q FORGOTTEN PROPHET: THE LIFE OF RANDOLPH BOURNE, by Bruce Clayton...
...There is hardly any effort to portray the internal decision-making procedures, the processes by which participants attempt to maintain their commitment, and the formidable obstacles and tensions they must surmount...
...Ehrenburg and his wife were asleep...
...Here is the principal line of argument...
...What exactly constituted the "normal," to which the Kremlin and the post-1969 regime sought to return...
...THIS EXTRAORDINARY FLOURISHING required, of course, a core of determined and devoted members and leadership, at all levels...
...If this microscopic examination impedes casual reading, it offers a "macroscopic" understanding of how unions and politics interact, and thereby illuminates much we should know about unions in general...
...He was dealing with the most explosive issue in Soviet society, for his admission implicated all the top leaders under Stalin, including Khrushchev, who was now in charge...
...But his chapters on the Khrushchev period fail to convey the full drama of Ehrenburg's final years...
...Ehrenburg's role in World War II is still the most widely recalled chapter of his career in the Soviet Union...
...Khrushchev himself attacked the memoirs, denouncing Ehrenburg for not accepting the Revolution, and most of all for claiming that he had to remain silent out of fear when he knew innocent people were perishing under Stalin...
...This bit of historical repetition provides Simecka with his theme: "normalization" can be decoded as "the restoration of order...
...Anatol Goldberg has examined Ehrenburg's life through the many volumes of prose and the hundreds of articles he wrote for the Soviet press and the emigre press in Paris and Berlin...
...Yet virtually all their current examples of flexible specialization rest on a new technology that makes possible economies of scale despite small-batch production...
...His enthusiasms had always been unstable, shifting from politics to art, to religion and mysticism, from one style of literature to another...
...But as the country's borders tightened and Stalin exerted greater ideological control, it became impossible for Ehrenburg to remain a Soviet writer, with access to his primary audience, and still live in the West on his own terms...
...Thus if we could just figure out how to revive well-paying male jobs then there will be 'trickle down to women and children too,' because women will have the sense to marry these men with the well-paying jobs...
...Alas, there are signs of division, of jockeying for position...
...In 1917 he acutely characterized the "plutocracy" as the maintenance crew for an efficient and profitable war machine: The government of a modern organized plutocracy does not have to ask whether the people want to fight or understand what they are fighting for, but only whether they will tolerate fighting...
...To gain entrance, Bourne had to overcome the obstacles presented by his deformity...
...They advocate a change "in the meaning of work from private aggrandizement to public contribution" and a restoration of the early 19th-century belief that corporations were required to act in a socially responsible manner in return for the authority ceded to them by the public...
...London:Verso...
...He urged Ehrenburg to reconsider...
...In a succession of compactly knit chapters, elegantly written, Simecka examines the way in which "order" was restored in Czechoslovak life...
...14.95 paper...
...This love may well have provided the emotional stamina he needed to challenge Soviet censorship as he did...
...His memoirs, People, Years, Life, began appearing in August 1960 in the liberal journal Novy Mir...
...Since the state is the sole employer, professors, doctors, journalists demoted to sweeping floors knew that one false move would mean losing this last pitiful livelihood available to them...
...This in the 1950s...
...This fault, however, can hardly be held against 'imeCka who had been isolated from the West for nearly 20 years when 502 writing his book, and even this chapter has its valuable insights...
...Supporters of this outlook believe that despite the terrors 507 that can accompany modernity, individuals are left free—freer than ever before—to create an identity of their own choosing and select the community that they will inhabit...
...What physical violence still occurs tends to be carried out in dark alleys, by anonymous assailants...
...When in wartime the truth of his heart went contrary to almost universally received opinion, he suffered the isolation of the soothsayer who speaks what no one wants to hear...
...they also fail to confront the reality of technological conservatism within artisanal modes of work organization...
...Ehrenburg then made a fateful decision...
...But his account of the episode is marred by factual errors...
...THE BREAK became an impassable gap when Bourne, encouraged by friends, took the scholarship examinations at Columbia and received full tuition...
...The Soviet press branded England and France as the aggressors in a "second imperialist war...
...So the therapists who describe their treatment goals as making people feel good about themselves also recommend that their patients involve themselves with a church in order to participate in a living community...
...Her letter to Ehrenburg must be taken into account when evaluating his career...
...Katayev still lives in this dacha...
...There were too many compromises to make him a genuine hero and too many acts of defiant courage to dismiss him as nothing more than an opportunist...
...While he did not publicly denounce the pact, his prolonged stay in Paris was correctly understood in Moscow as a protest...
...He was also ill with cancer and deeply in love with Liselotte Meer, the wife of the mayor of Stockholm, whom he had met on one of 497 his frequent trips abroad...
...He struggled continuously with the censors and sometimes with the Central Committee when his insistence on raising sensitive issues forced a decision by high government officials...
...Born in Kiev in 1891 to a middle-class Jewish family, Ehrenburg grew up in Moscow where he joined an underground Bolshevik organization in high school...
...they are constructed out of political conflicts, but once created, they take on a life of their own...
...While he may have underestimated the difficulty of balancing political and cultural allegiances, he did understand, as Christopher Lasch has succinctly paraphrased him, that "true cosmopolitanism has to be rooted in particularism...
...Especially in this day of a curious "new patriotism," it is good to be reminded of these literary radicals' trenchant critique of American reality and their generous vision of American possibilities...
...In Julio Jurenito, a story of Mephistopheles and his disciples, Ehrenburg foresees the destruction of European Jewry...
...Their differences in personality 506 and conception of how to operate a union without interference from above, and in accord with local needs, developed into a bitter relationship to the point where Gotbaum—who had been brought to "37" by Wurf and became its head when Wurf succeeded Arnold Zander as president of AFSCME—almost challenged Wurf for the national presidency, withdrawing only when some expected support in other regions disintegrated...
...Ehrenburg's outspoken antifascism became a liability and his articles ceased to appear in the Soviet press...
...But they aren't us...
...Had Stalin survived, it is hard to know what would have happened...
...While only about 10 of those who were interviewed are quoted with any frequency, the composite of middle-class life that they developed rang true with me, though it will undoubtedly irritate the promoters of the opportunity society...
...Ehrenburg, too, was often threatened on White territory, and while in Communist Moscow he was detained by the secret police for a few days...
...They might, wrote Bourne, have been occupied...
...Within a few months, he was abusing Lenin and other Marxists in satirical journals...
...who hardly shared the devotion of his famous father, Senator Wagner, to the rights of union organization), to John V. Lindsay (who, at least, learned something from his first week's stupid encounter with a transit workers' strike), to our incumbent mayor, Edward I. Koch (who seems to have learned little but to shoot off his mouth while polarizing the city...
...Ilya Ehrenburg became more than a prominent journalist...
...Russia offered a faith and a utopian future...
...As her memoirs, Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned, reveal, she was a merciless, unsparing critic of Stalinism and all writers and intellectuals who cooperated with the regime at the expense of their colleagues...
...She would visit Moscow occasionally in the final years of Stalin's life...
...J. R. Dear Ilya Grigorevich...
...Equally symptomatic are the political recommendations in the final chapters...
...Rather, they demonstrate that economies always operate within systems of regulation so that questions of political choice are fundamental...
...might have federated the different ethnic groups and traditions...
...The screenings were designed to elevate a particular type of character...
...Throughout, the city's unions have had to deal and negotiate with city administrations from, say, Robert E Wagner, Jr...
...Bourne responded in "The War and the Intellectuals," published in the June 1917 issue of that lamentably short-lived journal, the Seven Arts: "A war deliberately made by the intellectuals...
...He fathered a daughter out of wedlock...
...It suspended publication of most cultural journals of the '60s, banned the works of certain authors, and blacklisted anyone prominent in the media during the Prague Spring...
...While Goldberg's analysis of Ehrenburg's wartime contribution is useful, he fails adequately to assess Ehrenburg's resurgent identity as a Jew, Ehrenburg was a sincere assimilationist, but he deplored anti-Semitism, and even under Stalin and especially later under Khrushchev found means to denounce it...
...The funeral service was held on Christmas eve, 1918...
...They begin the book with the claim that the triumph of mass production over craft production in the 19th century was not inevitable, and that craft production could have been as technologically dynamic as the path that was taken...
...This the authors never do...
...Yet he became the country's most important journalist...
...The first suggests that the general breakdown of cultural norms and the decline in respect for authority contain a genuinely liberating potential...
...But he did not do it cynically or with blind illusions...
...After his release, Ehrenburg fled Czarist Russia, arriving in Paris in December 1908...
...Ehrenburg was the first to write about many of Stalin's victims, to make clear how they were killed and by whom...
...He warned her that she, too, would be arrested if 496 Ehrenburg would not sign and that once in jail no one could be sure of their fate...
...For Ilya Ehrenburg's career resists an easy judgment...
...People, Years, Life restored a significant part of history to the Russian people...
...Old-stock Americans reacted with xenophobic paranoia, forming "protective associations" and anti-immigration leagues...
...In the spring of 1940 the writer Valentin Katayev successfully appealed to the Literary Fund of the Writers' Union, asking for possession of Ehrenburg's dacha because he was not returning to Moscow...
...Radical young intellectuals, fueled by Wells, Shaw, and Whitman, calling themselves socialists and Bergsonians, and scorning all things genteel and "puritan," were impatient with the liberal tendency to define "the promise of American life" in strictly political and economic terms...
...How does individualism contribute to or hinder the democratic process...
...Second, his articles contained fewer references to Stalin and so, to that degree, were not mere exercises in propaganda...
...We extricate ourselves from our principles, and honor becomes a matter of private conscience...
...almost all were published in the Soviet Union and translated into several languages...
...He arranged a propaganda team for the International Brigades and served as a liaison between the Soviet Consulate in Barcelona and the anarchists of Catalonia, and he came to know Hemingway and Dos Passos...
...Julio Jurenito carried a preface by his high-school friend Nikolai Bukharin, who was now editor of Pravda...
...As a society, we find it difficult to speak about shared purposes and to develop standards for judging whether we are meeting them...
...Here Simecka falls victim to the abstractions he so successfully avoids elsewhere in the book...
...His novel The Thaw, his essays on Chekhov and Stendhal, the Picasso exhibit he promoted, his speeches on Tsvetaeva, Meyerhold, Babel, and Mandelstam were all major events in the drama of deStalinization...
...Whatever the leaders' sad, regrettable differences, and they surely had them, they shared a common belief that a union had to do more for its members than bargain for wages...
...After Osip Mandelstam's arrest and death in the 1930s, Nadezhda Mandelstam survived the remainder of the Stalin period in the provinces, moving from town to town, and dedicating her life to preserving the poetry and memory of her husband...
...An intellectual class, gently guiding a nation through sheer force of ideas into what other nations entered only through predatory craft or popular hysteria or militarist madness...
...The deformed man," he wrote in "The Handicapped," "is always conscious that the world does not expect very much from him...
...In his cold New York apartment Bourne fell ill, stricken by that year's worldwide epidemic of influenca...
...Ehrenburg's home was one of the few always open to her, and he helped secure permission for her to live in Moscow once Stalin was dead...
...While Piore and Sabel are not the first to develop these kinds of intermediate concepts, they make a persuasive case by demonstrating the leverage such concepts provide in understanding some of the key areas of difference among the major capitalist countries...
...By day he plinked out popular ditties on a contraption that punched the tunes he played...
...at least we'll have some order now...
...there is no alternative but to take the bitter and the sweet together...
...All our elaborate machinery of settlement and school and union, of social and political naturalization, . . . will move with friction just insofar as it neglects...
...Prominent scholars, in their disquisitions on the evolutionary "superiority" of peoples of Nordic extraction, gave pseudoscientific validation to the prejudices of the mob...
...A generous selection of Bourne's essays remains 505 in print in The Radical Will (New York: Urizen Books, 1977), edited by Olaf Hansen...
...But then he was instructed to call Stalin who assured him he could write as he pleased...
...by night he read...
...THE BOOK'S VALIDITY, eight years after Simecka wrote it, is astonishing...
...He wrote about life in Europe before the Soviet borders were closed...
...Without it, Piore and Sabel might have been able to extend their analytic insights into a volume that persuasively explored new "possibilities for prosperity...
...THE KHRUSHCHEV PERIOD COINCIDED almost exactly with the final years of Ehrenburg's life...
...They wisely view concepts such as "capitalist society" or the "capitalist organization of the labor process" as hopelessly underspecified...
...I kiss you affectionately and want you to be strong as always...
...Is it possible that individualism can proceed too far and begin to rip apart the country's social fabric...
...The regime, as well, can only acknowledge parts of his career...
...Nationalistic sentiments among immigrant groups, far from signaling "the failure of Americanization," afforded Americans the opportunity, Bourne wrote, "to assert a higher ideal than the `meltingpot...
...One remembers that he looked "pale, beaten, and terrified," as she had never seen him before...
...Almost immediately, Ehrenburg began to write about his experiences...
...The "peace movement" was a major factor in the appeal of Western Communist parties, so he emphasized that such an action would disrupt the European Communist movement...
...Their work reflects Goldberg's reputation for balanced and well-informed reporting...
...There has to be a place for him somewhere in labor's councils...
...Once maneuvered, [the conduct of war] takes care of itself, provided only that our industrial rulers see that the end of the war will leave American capital in a strategic position for world-enterprise...
...He explained further that the "fate of a soldier is not the fate of a dreamer, and that one had to take one's place in the fighting ranks...
...Translated by JOSHUA RUBENSTEIN q 495 before...
...But the highest, most horrifying cost is that of demoralization...
...But these are either given scant attention or de508 BOOKS continued from p. 508 scribed almost entirely from the perspective of the individual member...
...And the community activists who cannot specify their vision of a reformed America are clearly groping for a more adequate conception of justice...
...The latter point is also relevant to the macroeconomics of the argument, since Piore and Sabel demonstrate no understanding of the fact that the cybernetic technologies used in contemporary settings of flexible specialization radically reduce industrial employment...
...A little bit later we are told that "it would be possible to maintain full employment largely through monetary policy, without resorting to wage-determination systems linking purchasing power to the rate of increase of productive capacity, the automatic stabilizing features of the welfare state, and discretionary fiscal policy...
...But it is not...
...Ehrenburg stated his sincere belief in assimilation as the "only radical solution to the Jewish Question in our Socialist state," but he feared that a petition signed by "people . . . whose only common link is their origin may strengthen nationalistic tendencies...
...It was clear, in other words, that Ehrenburg had done his work well, difficult and thankless though it was...
...At Stalin's behest, he received a ticket to attend a session of Bukharin's trial, the climax of the Great Purge...
...These literary radicals, as the historian Henry E May has written, "were uninterested in any plan for social improvement which was not also a program for spiritual and artistic liberation...
...New York: Basic Books...
...25.00...
...At these grand tasks, Bourne admitted, the intellectuals "might have failed," but "the point is that they scarcely tried...
...Ehrenburg asked if Stalin already knew about the collective appeal circulated by Mintz...
...The accident of his personal fate freed him to pursue the goal of understanding history as an experience fashioned and suffered by human beings who are resistant to abstract laws and not the product of objective forces...
...Ehrenburg understood that war with Germany was imminent...
...As the 1920s drew to a close, Ehrenburg could not sustain his independence as a writer...
...Bourne began the essay with an attack on Sedgwick's class, the "hard-hearted Old Brahmins virtuously indignant at the spectacle of the immigrant refusing to be melted...
...In 1903 the bright high school graduate hoped to go to Princeton...
...Goldberg's account of this period is especially sensitive and well-informed...
...Bellah and his associates interviewed about 200 middle-class Americans to discover their attitude to private and public life...
...In other words, people always wanted the impossible from you and were angry when you did the possible...
...What specific lessons does the civil rights movement have for us today...
...It was designed primarily to encourage Western Jewish communities to support the Soviet war effort...
...But his late-night visit made clear to Ehrenburg that Mintz had been sent by the Kremlin...
...Enrolling in 1910 at the age of 23, Bourne at last found the intellectual community he needed...
...The emphasis on the continuing relevance of the biblical and republican traditions also provides an interesting perspective from which to view the resurgence of antinuclear politics in the '80s, the proliferation of community action groups, and the sanctuary movement...
...But as Goldberg's close analysis reveals, Ehrenburg felt compelled by several factors, including his own ideological ambivalence, to attach himself to a cause...
...But Ehrenburg was not intimidated...
...Most Americans have adopted a philosophy of radical individualism in which "each self constitutes its own moral universe and there is finally no way to reconcile conflicting claims about what is good in itself...
...Esther and her roommate nursed him, but Bourne succumbed...
...Like generals who are always fighting the last war, political economists are always solving the problems of the previous period's models of economic organization...
...These two qualities are so tightly intertwined that it is not a question of directing readers to the good parts and warning them against the bad...
...On his own initiative, however, Ehrenburg and his wife returned to Moscow in December 1937...
...He now was eased out as his radical antiwar opinions diverged from the editors...
...How do we distinguish between the New Right's version of biblical politics and a more genuine version...
...Ehrenburg joined them and stayed with Mintz while her husband withdrew to his study...
...He was not only consumed with challenging official censorship...
...He was accepted as a poet, met Pasternak, Mayakovsky, and Mandelstam...
...During World War I he became a journalist, covering the Western front for a Petersburg financial paper...
...The Fabian arguments of G. Lowes Dickinson's Justice and Liberty presented him with a Platonic dialogue in which the argument for socialism triumphs...
...These were the people who had doggedly defended the current 501 status quo, whatever it happened to be...
...By its close Ehrenburg was back in France...
...q THE RESTORATION OF ORDER: THE NORMALIZATION OF CZECHOSLOVAKIA, 1969-1976, by Milan Simecka...
...Habits of the Heart is a contribution to this debate that weighs in on the side of the latter perspective...
...Clayton observes that, "however vague," Bourne's incipient socialism "gave him the language and the psychological courage to break from Bloomfield and laissez-faire individualism...
...In particular, they see the system of mass production and the mechanisms of macroregulation coming into crisis as global industrial capacity for mass-produced goods outstrips demand...
...Piore and Sabel are never specific enough about what they mean by flexible specialization...
...For two years he had been a contributing editor to the magazine...
...Consider as well that, although the Council did not have to confront the goons so commonly used by private industry against union organizers, it had to face restrictive and repressive state legislation (first the Condon–Wadlin Act, later the Taylor law...
...While Clayton does not attempt any probing psychological analysis, he does address such troublesome issues as Bourne's deep sexual longings, confused by his Protestant middle-class upbringing, inflamed by his correspondence and friendships with women, and finally unfulfilled because of his appearance...
...In company with other recent analysts (see particularly Robert Kuttner, The Economic Illusion: False Choices between Prosperity and Social Justice, Houghton Mifflin, 1984), they provide data showing the absolute lack of correlation between recent economic performance and levels of social spending among developed capitalist countries...
...At Columbia he began his brief and brilliant literary career, pouring forth his passionate prose in essay after essay, many of which, as Clayton observes, still deserve our attention...
...The sweet part is that Piore and Sabel make a radical and constructive break with the premises that have ruled most recent debates on economic and industrial policy...
...Ehrenburg was a prominent member of the committee...
...During the controversy over People, Years, Life, an adviser to Khrushchev complained that "Ehrenburg has changed...
...Part of the problem here is that Piore and Sabel are continually arguing against pure forms of technological determinism that see the computer as inevitably producing certain consequences...
...By the end of the year, Stalin began his purge of Jewish culture, arresting, then executing the leading Yiddish writers and closing the few remaining Jewish cultural institutions...
...Several years later, when the memoirs appeared in his Selected Works, he was permitted to refer more directly to Bukharin and to include the original text about The Black Book...
...The following year he was among the principal organizers of the International Writers' Congress for the Defense of Culture...
...Three problems with their line of argument are particularly serious...
...There are now some 60 locals, plus a Retirees' Association, for a total membership of 110,000 in District Council 37 (New York City's branch of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees—AFSCME), making it the largest municipal union in the country...
...Add, in more recent years, a municipal fiscal crisis that pressed with particular severity on New York's public employees, and you begin to wonder how a municipal workers' union could survive, grow, and even earn the grudging respect of high-finance circles congenitally antipathetic to unions...
...and it does retain a measure of hope while vigorously indicting American culture...
...Finally, the recent resurgence of interest in formal religion seems to be a direct response to the regime's opposition to the church...
...YET PIORE AND SABEL HAVE SUCCEEDED brilliantly in ridding themselves of this nostalgia...
...These criticisms might not be that crucial if Habits of the Heart were the first book—or even the second, third, or fourth—to detail the problems of contemporary individualism...
...In January 1948, his friend the Yiddish actor Solomon Mikhoels was killed under mysterious circumstances...
...or telling how many of the municipal unions were brought into the Municipal Labor Committee (including Albert Shanker of the UFT, with whom Gotbaum had hardly been on friendly terms...
...This neglect of services means that Piore and Sabel are blocked from adequately conceptualizing the new economy that they advocate...
...One should read the essays first, then, for an even-handed appraisal of Bourne's life and a clear discussion of his ideas in historical context, turn to Clayton's Forgotten Prophet...
...After his death in 1967, an enormous crowd gathered outside the House of Writers for his funeral...
...But Goldberg died in March 1982, having completed only a first draft of this book...
...Piore and Sabel devote a page and a half to "The Macroeconomics of Flexible Specialization" in which they discuss the kinds of macroeconomic mechanisms that would be needed to make a system of flexible specialization work...
...There was even a military order that Ehrenburg's articles had to be clipped from Red Star before the paper could be used for rolling cigarettes...
...Once again, however, Ehrenburg did not sign and asked to express his misgivings in a letter to Stalin...
...Berkeley: University of California Press...
...In these respects, the method of analysis employed by the authors unfortunately duplicates the conditions of the culture they find so disturbing...
...In this second language, individualism is tempered by the concerns for community, by religious commitments, and by a desire to preserve shared meanings...
...But it also takes exception to a knowledge of foreign languages, a sense of humor, any hairstyle but short-back-and sides, and so on...
...Their visitor was Isaac Mintz, a historian and a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences...
...To this day organized dissent sees the nature of the new order as Simecka described it...
...In the "cant of war" that Americans uncritically accepted was, Bourne noted, the idea that America entered the war to make the world safe for democracy...
...Clayton recognizes, without condemning, the paradox of Bourne's life: he defined, practiced, and championed radicalism as a necessary detachment and resistance, even as he yearned to be an insider, "to enter life's larger room where Ellery Sedgwick, . . . Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, and John Dewey sat...
...At times one has the feeling that the authors secretly believe that most social problems can be resolved through the rectification of names...
...As for Gotbaum, he is much too vital and enterprising a person to fade from the scene...
...In 1932, Ehrenburg became Izvestia correspondent in Paris...
...THIS EXPEDIENT NEW "ORDER" appeared in 1969, with the elevation of Gustav Husak, who had always envisioned personal power as the main point of politics, to the post of first secretary of the Central Committee...
...It was a strange, twilight period of tolerance and mutual respect...
...the alienated intellectual who could not but speak the truth as he saw it and thus found himself even more alienated...
...The consequences of this development are uniformly harmful...
...Rumor has it that Gotbaum will have to retire soon, under union regulations...
...He rejected consolatory myths of inevitable progress but maintained a doggedly willed optimism...
...He was arrested and held for several months in solitary confinement...
...Ehrenburg became a popular and prolific writer...
...this time they were permitted to leave...
...It is quite possible that there have been people who protested against injustice, were unwilling to declare that black was white, and risked their skins...
...Stalin's policy was shifting in the spring of 1939...
...The authors seem to have left no stone unturned, which does require the reader's painstaking attention but is eventually rewarding...
...It cannot advance it, however liberals may choose to identify American promise with a league of nations to enforce peace...
...The tone of the media changed, in a direction reminiscent of Candide: When a plane crashes into a lake causing the deaths of seventy people in dreadful circumstances, it is described on the news as an "aircraft accident...
...Simecka's discussion of the West makes clear that the widespread Czechoslovak rejection of Soviet colonization is not an unqualified vote of confidence for the West...
...At the same time, they argue that the unique American system of workplace regulation that evolved with mass production has reached its limits...
...The regime could not forgive him...
...Charter 77, which did not exist at the time Simecka was writing, has protested primarily the disintegration of integrity and the deadly expediency with which the regime has broken the very agreements it has signed (for instance, in Helsinki...
...Ehrenburg was able to publish six sections in serial form, more than 1,200 pages, over the next five years...
...A second point of view insists that the entire project of modernity is fundamentally flawed insofar as it posits an "unencumbered self' that is not integrally attached to tradition, religion, and community...
...It was time, he felt, for Randolph to go to work...
...He wrote two chapters on The Black Book, the volume he and Vasily Grossman edited about the Holocaust...
...That Piore and Sabel can end up with this unpersuasive argument suggests that their continual focus on the choice between mass production and flexible specialization is too constraining...
...In short, Piore and Sabel put the political back into political economy through their determined rejection of arguments based on false necessity— the insistence that things must be a certain way because of "economic logic...
...The names of these literary radicals are now only vaguely familiar: Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, James Oppenheim, Paul Rosenfeld, Randolph Bourne...
...both threatened and, in fact, imposed severe penalties on public employees who dared to resort to a basic union strategy, the strike) and you open a small window on the odds stacked against any union of public employees...
...In Nikolai Kurbov, he explores the morality of a Bolshevik...
...22.50...
...The ideal of a "trans-national America" was in part Bourne's response to the record immigration from 1900 to 1915, when more than 14 million immigrants arrived in America, many of them Italians, Slays, and Russian and Polish Jews...
...In posing this alternative, Piore and Sabel are determined to avoid slipping into forms of economic or technological determinism...
...The party claimed as its own those who had never bothered to think much about any issue— those who had let the political wind blow them where it would and had never taken an initiative, reacted spontaneously, or been too scrupulous about minor ethical considerations...
...it had Stalin's familiar blue pencil markings...
...Bourne's ideal of a "trans-national America," Clayton observes, demanded "something far more vigorous than an acceptance of differences...
...Authors as diverse as Wendell Berry, Jean Elshtain, Christopher Lasch, and Alasdair Maclntyre have published important books upholding variants of this position...
...THE WORD "NORMALIZATION" contains the crux of the matter: the perception prevailing in the Kremlin, not shared by the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist party, that the development that peaked in 1968 represented an abnormal (that is, undesirable) state of affairs...
...Add as well jurisdictional, sometimes fratricidal conflicts with competing unions...
...But that's to miss the large picture, and to overlook all the other principals who contributed to the growth and quality of the union...
...Only Ehrenburg's articles on the occupation of Paris ran counter to the general political line...
...Hence they emphasize that it would take significant kinds of cultural and political realignments to create new regulatory systems that are built around "flexible specialization...
...In 1905 Bourne finally found work with a Bloomfield manufacturer of music rolls for player pianos...
...Should all else fail, the state retains one last trump card—the children...
...He stayed for four years, wandering from Moscow to Kiev, to the Crimea, and to Georgia...
...his father, alcoholic and impecunious, had for some years been banished from the family circle by 503 Halsey Barrett, Randolph's well-to-do uncle...
...In New York, in one shop or office after another, the discouraged boy heard variations on the response: what work could there be for a person who looks like you...
...This biography of Ilya Ehrenburg is the first serious attempt to assess the career of one of the most controversial men of our century...
...Julio Jurenito, The Life and Death of Nikolai Kurbov, and The Stormy Life of Lazik Roitschwantz are first-rate novels, and Goldberg's discussion of them, particularly his analysis of Julio Jurenito, is long overdue...
...For the effect of the war will be to impoverish American promise...
...Ehrenburg expected arrest and there were rumors in Moscow that he had been detained...
...So they propose an intermediate level of analysis—the existence of different regimes of regulation in the economy and in the workplace...
...Countercultural groups like the Plastic People rebel against the regime's attempt to stifle all individuality and spontaneity...
...The authors maintain that these tendencies are most prominent among people involved in what they label the therapeutic culture, but that they are visible in all corners of American society...
...Ehrenburg returned to Russia after the fall of the Czar in 1917...
...In 1916, in the face of Europe driven to war by, among other things, nationalism run rampant, Bourne asked Americans (officially still neutral) to see themselves as "citizen [s] of the world...
...However, the foundation for a vigorous, far-sighted union remains in place...
...But in a certain sense this is important and necessary...
...Anatol Goldberg provides the text of Ehrenburg's letter to Stalin in the appendix of this biography...
...By an effort of will difficult to sustain, Bourne managed to turn these low expectations into "a challenge instead of a firm pressing down to a low level of accomplishment...
...He enjoyed, however, the satisfaction of living true to the principles of radicalism as he had come to define them: a difficult dialectic of commitment and detachment, a "spiritual vagabondage," and a resolution to remain "fiercely and concentratedly intellectual...
...But the authors have not succeeded in making this second language any more specific than the men and women who are described by them as being vague in expressing such sentiments...
...THIS Is, in some ways, an admirable book...
...Ehrenburg was not the only person who refused to sign, as Goldberg claims...
...Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press...
...This attempt to periodize the history of technological development is far more satisfying that' Piore and Sabel's claim that the early 19thcentury Jacquard loom and the numerically controlled machine tool are basically the same...
...With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Ehrenburg hurried to Madrid...
...Everyone understands this now...
...His findings, whether they prove to enhance or diminish Ehrenburg's reputation, confirm the difficulty of reaching a definitive judgment of his personality and career...
...It happened this way: The doorbell rang past midnight in early February 1953...
...It was their only conversation...
...By now, it is certainly time for those who find fault with an untrammeled individualism to be either more specific in their recommendations or more attentive to the ongoing experiments of ordinary men and women in dealing with their dissatisfactions...
...However, even these methods usually stop short of physical violence, being calculated to unnerve and terrorize, through the sheer unpredictability of what might come next...
...Ehrenburg intended to resume his life in Paris, 493 but he was denounced as a Bolshevik agent and deported to Belgium...
...His columns in the army paper Red Star were devoured by ordinary soldiers...
...In a number of places where they describe functioning industrial districts that are based on flexible specialization, they acknowledge the critical role of government in facilitating and organizing research, training, transportation, and communication...
...One possible answer is that much contemporary economic analysis—both on the right and on the left—is written from a standpoint of nostalgia for the world of mass-production workers...
...The letter is a clever political gambit...
...He spent his time writing poetry and sitting in Paris cafés where he befriended Picasso, Leger, Modigliani, and Rivera...
...Moreover, they use this conceptual framework to show that the crisis of the American economy is best understood not as a general crisis of capitalism but as a specific crisis of the modes of regulation that have dominated American society since the 1940s...
...Ehrenburg was criticized for "resurrecting corpses...
...He grew increasingly wary of the Bolsheviks...
...Yet the authors' limited effort to be more specific ends up disappointingly...
...504 BOURNE'S AFFIRMATION QUICKLY GAVE WAY LO denunciation when America betrayed his hopes and, he thought, its own promise by entering the war in April 1917: The war—or American promise: one must choose...
...Second, Piore and Sabel's treatment of technology is highly problematic...
...Put simply, there are two general lines of argument about modern individualism...
...This it had under Jerry Wurf ("charismatic and messianic," also irascible, abrasive), and for the last two decades under Victor Gotbaum (conciliatory, imaginative, yet not beyond "having it out" sharply with other unionists, or with the powers-that-be, while making friends with a few of them...
...Years later Lyuba Ehrenburg described to a family friend how Mintz tried to frighten her...
...Their solution is a form of shop-floor organization they call "flexible specialization," and they associate it with the craft tradition in which worker skill levels and responsibility are broadened and a framework of labor management cooperation facilitates substantive dispute resolution...
...To the many progressive reforms advocated in America shortly before World War I, some intellectuals could give partial sympathy but not wholehearted commitment...
...A week later, Ehrenburg was summoned late at night to Pravda...
...The esteemed novelist Veniamin Kaverin also refused, as did the poet Evgeny Dolmatovsky who insisted he was so assimilated that it made no sense for him to join an "appeal by Jews...
...First, he was more candid than other journalists and often challenged the censorship, which tried to mask the extent of Soviet losses at the outset of the war...
...The Spanish drama lasted another year...
...He wrote 19 books between 1922 and 1931, most of them novels...
...The general climate of paranoia made it easy for envious, insecure persons to rid themselves of potential competitors...
...According to the linguist Roman Jakobson, who saw Ehrenburg in Paris, and Henry Shapiro, the dean of American correspondents in Moscow, Ehrenburg seriously considered going to Palestine...
...Ehrenburg mentioned his own involvement in the Struggle for Peace, a Soviet-inspired campaign to restrain development of nuclear arms in the West...
...The book is unique in its insistence upon preserving the concrete human reality behind the antiseptic concept of "normalization...
...355 pp...
...Yet this is not what the debate now is about...
...the chapters were removed...
...Ehrenburg's early novels combined a fierce irony with extravagant inventiveness...
...Here the reader, after wading through pages of sophisticated critiques of standard economic assumptions, is surprised to learn that "A shift away from mass production would restore the neoclassical equilibrating mechanisms that (to the extent that they have functioned at all) were probably most prominent in the early-nineteenth-century American economy...
...Of all the unions, whether local or regional groupings, none has had to satisfy the needs of so many different elements, many among the lowest paid in the city, yet none has expanded as rapidly as District Council 37, while infusing its members with a sense of dignity and purpose...
...The question revives a memory from 1939: Simecka, then a nine-year old boy, stands on the street, watching German troops move into town...
...Despite their extravagant idealism, their exaggeration of the power of artists and intellectuals to shape American life, we cannot afford to forget them...
...He learned about the Stalin–Hitler pact in Paris...
...Clayton's biography is welcome not least because it ensures that for the moment Bourne will not suffer the fate implied in the book's title...
...the beautiful mind and voice in the dwarfish, hunchbacked body caused by, in his words, "a terribly messy birth" and a childhood case of spinal tuberculosis: such is the dramatic stuff of the Bourne legend...
...Michael Piore and Charles Sabel have written a book that is both enormously insightful and deeply irritating...
...His poems reflected his longings and confusions—about Russia, Zionism, Catholicism...
...Bruce Clayton, Bourne's most recent biographer, avoids this temptation...
...At worst, the category becomes something that extends, from traditional artisanal skills, all the way to relatively limited experiments in job enlargement...
...The result illuminates for the Westerner much that is puzzling about present conditions in Czechoslovakia...
...In our own home-grown dictatorship there's always some way out...
...q HABITS OF THE HEART: INDIVIDUALISM AND COMMITMENT IN AMERICAN LIFE, by Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven Tipton...
...She noted in Hope Abandoned "that the faces were decent and human ones...
...Communities that have had relatively lengthy existences such as Sojourners in Washington, D.C., and Koinonia in Georgia are not mentioned at all...
...496 pp...
...Translated from the Czech by A. G. Brain...
...One of his cousins was pulled off a train and killed by Cossacks who guessed he was a Jew...
...But the problem is that Piore and Sabel have rushed into the breach with a different nostalgia...
...Simecka is candid about his reasons for choosing this approach: in part, his demotion from professor to manual worker left him no access to and little patience with the statistics that are the meat of "positive" histories...
...Randolph appealed to his uncle, who had supported the family since the father's departure, but Barrett refused...
...Obviously, this critique is equally relevant to nostalgia for the world of craft workers...
...A sign in the elevator warned, "It is forbidden to flush books down the toilet...
...To Bourne capitalism and democracy were mutually exclusive...
...Hence their confident prediction that a regime of flexible specialization at the industrial workplace will restore full employment ap499 pears to be written without taking seriously the sharp declines in manufacturing employment as a percentage of total employment...
...They demonstrate in detail the existence of significant differences over time and across countries in patterns of microeconomic and macroeconomic regulation and in techniques of organizing the shop floor...
...However, Hirschhorn insists that it is not inevitable that the possibilities inherent in technological development will actually be realized—and that the uses of technology depend on a multitude of political, economic, and cultural variables...
...They were read to the troops before battle and discussed throughout the country...
...To be sure, the authors do mention the Institute for the Study of Civic Values, the Campaign for Economic Democracy, and a small Episcopal church that is socially active in the Bay area...
...But there was more to Ehrenburg's career than his usefulness to Stalin...
...But the ravages of the Civil War disturbed him...
...in discovering a true Americanism which...
...When he died," wrote Paul Rosenfeld, a Seven Arts colleague who had sat by Bourne on his deathbed, "we knew that perhaps the strongest mind of the entire younger generation in America had gone...
...In fact, Bourne claimed, the intellectuals had placed themselves in the service of powers that they should have resisted at all cost...
...These people were seldom fired outright, but hounded and harassed until, their confidence eroded, they agreed to resign...
...In 1918 Bourne's intellectual isolation was mitigated by the genial company of Esther Cornell, an attractive and intelligent woman who could see beyond Bourne's deformities, respond to his intellectual wooing, say she loved him and that she wanted to marry him...
...They emphasize the contrast between the radiant optimism of Bourne's precocious undergraduate essays, published in 1913 as Youth and Lift, and the dark disillusionment of the antiwar essays published in 1917 in the Seven Arts...
...In his memoirs, Ehrenburg claimed that he "could not find himself" until the age of 40 (in 1931...
...The most sophisticated current view, as advanced by Larry Hirschhorn in Beyond Mechanization (MIT Press, 1984), sees a real historical discontinuity in the development of production technology between mechanical and cybernetic forms...
...They reject the widespread view that there is a fundamental conflict between the logic of capital accumulation and the pursuit of social welfare...
...The legend (while true) can tempt the sympathetic commentator to hagiography...
...1:1 UNION POWER & NEW YORK: VICTOR GOTBAUM AND DISTRICT COUNCIL 37, by Jewel and Bernard Bellush...
...While it is unreasonable to expect a full blueprint, a study that is committed to broadening the sphere of political choice has an obligation to go beyond the general slogan of "flexible specialization...
...Whether recounting how hostile relations with a Teamsters local turned to friendly cooperation when Gotbaum effected an accommodation with Barry Feinstein (when Feinstein became president of Teamsters Local 237...
...At one point they even point to an economic mystery— "why new industries did not emerge to replace the automobile and household-durables industries when the markets for these products in the advanced capitalist countries became saturated...
...When confronted with this peculiar combination of insight and myopia, one has to wonder about its sources...
...Such visitors to Berlin as Pasternak, Mayakovsky, and Esenin mingled with emigres who would never consider returning...
...We have committed what to the republican founders of our nation was the cardinal sin: we have put our own good, as individuals, as groups, as a nation, ahead of the common good...
...The author, by the way, lives to this day in Czechoslovakia...
...He gave his letter to Mintz...
...But they do not bother to mention from where the movement would emerge, who would comprise it, and what connections it would have to those people and movements that are currently defined as liberal or conservative...
...As the narrative drew closer to 1940, Ehrenburg had increasing difficulty with the censors...
...he could not swallow solid food and lost 50 pounds in eight months...
...He carried a petition to Stalin concerning the "doctors' plot" which was to appear in Pravda and be signed by prominent Jews...
...He was then shown a corrected copy of the petition...
...He married a distant cousin, Lyuba Kozintseva...
...For the record, after Wurrs death, Gerald McEntee assumed the presidency...
...He was near suicide...
...The key features of this workplace regime are jobs that are narrowly defined as aggregates of well-specified tasks, a seniority system for distributing those jobs, and an elaborate grievance mechanism that emphasizes procedures over substantive dispute resolution...
...One has a sense," wrote a deeply disappointed Bourne in October 1917, "of having come to a sudden, short stop at the end of an intellectual era," an era of extravagant hope and possibility...
...The description of the relationship between these two, Wurf and Gotbaum, takes up a significant part of the book the Bellushes have written...
...He succeeds, especially in his delineation of the context, the whirl of events and ideas in which Bourne moved...
...He again refused to sign and insisted that his own letter be sent to Stalin...
...While in Chicago, Gotbaum had the painful experience of leading a strike of hospital workers in voluntary hospitals—for a $1-an-hour minimum wage...
...After witnessing the occupation of Paris in June and July 1940, he returned to Moscow by train across Germany...
...The first step was what Simecka calls "occupational persecution...
...That means never...
...None spoke in purer tones, be they of scornful invective or rhapsodic celebration, than Randolph Bourne...
...To Bourne's horror, they published a self-congratulatory piece lauding what they saw as their influence in moving America into the war...
...Thus it avoided the use of overt force wherever possible, developing the bureaucratization of terror to a fine art...
...The purest case is clearly the Italian hightech cottage industry that Sabel popularized in his valuable first book, Work and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1982...
...To make matters worse, Piore and Sabel seem determined to argue that, at present, the growing importance of flexible specialization cannot be explained by technological developments...
...His friend, the journalist Erik de Mauny, prepared the manuscript for publication...
...After the Soviet invasion, Simecka again heard this peculiar apologia, repeated by government officials who "stated with all due manly authority that it was high time things were put in order...
...It is published here for the first time...
...While Clayton remains generally sympathetic, he can be stringently critical of his subject...
...There were several reasons for Ehrenburg's unique stature...
...But Ehrenburg refused to be patient and against the wishes of his family he appealed to Stalin again...
...Now, after the latest events, it is obvious how much you did and are doing to relax our usual ways, how great your role is in our life and how we should be grateful to you...
...q THE SECOND INDUSTRIAL DIVIDE: POSSIBILITIES FOR PROSPERITY, by Michael J. Piore and Charles F Sabel...
...Rather a pity because, in his two decades at the helm of "37," he has demonstrated what can be accomplished...
...Occupational persecution was an effective means of quelling dissent...
...He wrote his first novel there, The Adventures of Julio Jurenito and His Disciples...
...A leading editor told him that he did not want to send his letter to the Kremlin because "he could not predict what the consequences would be...
...One of his personal projects during the war was documenting the mass murder of Jews in occupied Soviet territory...
...I have been thinking about you a good deal (when friends think about someone he doesn't have any pain), and this is what I have finally understood...
...Bellah and associates believe, however, that the redeeming feature of American life is that most people also speak a second language, even if it is voiced with less confidence than the primary vocabulary of egoism...
...With characteristic sweep and vigor he proclaimed, Surely we cannot be certain of our spiritual democracy when, claiming to melt the nations within us to a comprehension of our free and democratic institutions, we fly into panic at the first sign of their own will and tendency...
...The Brahmin Ellery Sedgwick, a powerful cultural arbiter as editor of the Atlantic, asked Bourne, "What have we to learn of the institutions of democracy from the Huns, the Poles, the Slays...
...Again, he did more than cover the war as a journalist...
...But though Ehrenburg's books were widely read in the Soviet Union, he was criticized for their misgivings about Soviet life...
...Yet only then, as Goldberg relates, did Ehrenburg go to Vienna to work with Leon Trotsky...
...The party feared and found suspect any spark of individuality or independent thought, and this fear extended to ludicrous lengths: [The party] rejects most categorically: singularity, independence of mind, generosity, tolerance, excessive education, high moral principles, aversion to officialese, courage...
...His older sister, crying in the background, is admonished by an uncle: "Don't cry, silly girl...
...It was not the police, as they both feared...
...He then settled in Berlin and became a central figure in the growing Russian emigrê community of writers and intellectuals...
...These questions are as enduring in American intellectual life as the ethic of self-reliance in the culture at large...
...The writer Lev Kopelev, who served as a front-line officer, told Ehrenburg during the war that his articles made it harder for Germans to surrender because, knowing of Ehrenburg's hatred for them and popularity among Soviet troops, Germans feared they would be shot outright...
...The particular modes of regulation that they identify do not emerge automatically...
...In a 1915 article he asked, "Do we realize the deep gulf between our own individualistic democracy, which we have proved in America leads only to plutocracy, and genuine social democracy...
...He had maintained his ties to Russia, visiting on occasion and keeping his Soviet passport...
...Those who continue to resist risk not only their own well-being and careers, but their children's education and future...
...Just weeks before, on January 13, the.Soviet press had announced that a group of Kremlin doctors, most of them Jews, had been charged with conspiring to murder Soviet political leaders...
...There was an element of faintheartedness on his part, a resolve not to risk living like other emigre writers whose hatred of the regime left them poor and isolated in Paris...
...We refuse to see the situation into which we are being drawn in such clear-cut terms...
...Born in St...
...He virtually slept on the picket line, and the workers were solid...
...Within weeks after the German invasion, the Kremlin organized the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee...
...Lillian Roberts, for example, who was brought to New York from Chicago by Gotbaum...
...The fact that those who, like Simecka, have been bled dry at the hands of the Soviets are least likely to enthusiastically embrace the West as their model should serve as a sobering reflection...
...The critique of this mode of shop-floor organization is the core of the book...
...He expanded his account into the novel The Fall of Paris...
...They might have spent the time in endeavoring to clear the public mind of the cant of war, to get rid of the old mystical notions that clog our thinking...
...Goldberg provides many useful insights and hitherto unknown information about People, Years, Life...
Vol. 32 • September 1985 • No. 4
