MORRIS COHEN'S TESTAMENT
KOHN, HANS
WRITERS and WRITING THE NEW LEADER LITERARY SECTION Morris Cohen's Testament Reviewed fry HANS KOHN A DREAMER'S JOURNEY. By Morris Raphael Cohen. Boston: The Beacon Press. 318 pages....
...Similarly, Duranty follows the retroactive revision of the past so characteristic of contemporary Russian historiography, in making Voroshilov "creator of the modern Red Army" and "the leader'" of the attack on Kronstadt in 1921...
...He accepted his Jewish descent and background as a matter of fact, comparable to the background and descent of other Americans, and he knew that "Jews are people first, and only Jews incidentally...
...From tlie beginning of Leninism lie feared "that the dictatorship of the proletarian would become a bureaucracy different in ideology, but not differing much from the method by which the old bureaucracy ruled Russia...
...They are portrayed as liking the "re-establishment of the semi-divine supreme autocracy" which they tried so hard to overthrow from 1801 to 1917...
...Nobody can lay aside this rewarding book without the feeling that in its pages a great American and a rare man has revealed himself with simplicity and strength...
...Similar words could be written today by Cohen's disciples about him...
...They give dates of birth, present ages, prior position held, record of past performance, good close-up photographs, his own personal impressions...
...By Walter Duranty...
...FOR THE THIRTEEN crucial years while the Soviet Union was changing from a revolutionary to a totalitarian state, Walter Duranty was the correspondent of the New York Times there, and one of the ablest Interpreters of that terra incognita...
...As an American liberal he distrusted all panaceas and all total solutions, and waj confident mat the spirit of inquiry, motivated by reason and good will, will always be needed in meeting our social problems...
...He was brought up as a Jew in the ghetto, Yiddish was his mother tongue, Hebrew was the first language in which he read, and his first attitude towards non-Jews—ignorant peasants and oppressive officials—was that they were not fully human beings...
...They are pictured as being happy that they are "compelled to vote" and have only one party to "choose...
...Selling the Russians Short Reviewed by BERTRAM D. WOLFE STALIN ¦& CO...
...and what group of human beings is not a minority in one situation or another...
...They suffer from only one defect, namely that the author has done little to check the official accounts of these men's merits and services against earlier documentary records, easily available to him...
...Actually, Russia had a multi-party system with universal, secret suffrage from 1907 to 1917...
...His life started in the Jewish ghetto in the Russia of the early '80s...
...Kohn is a Professor of History at Smith College...
...WHEN PROFESSOR COHEN DIED IN January 1947 he left unfinished his autobiography, which his son, Felix S. Cohen, has now published, and though the book remains in an unfinished state, it will stand out as one of the most valuable documents of contemporary American life...
...In the opinion of the reviewer, since the Russian people have not the power to recall officials, voice criticism of their leaders or determine policies, they must be exonerated of responsibility fpr the policies pursued by the Kremlin...
...None who were touched by his spirit can ever forget his heroic devotion to the pursuit and expression of truth as he saw it 'in scorn of consequences' or his magnificent disdain for worldly goods whenever he might serve the spiritual needs of those with whom he came into contact...
...He has since returned on various shorter assignments, and written a number of books in which he attempts the difficult change-over from current reporter to historian-interpreter...
...He knew very well that most problems are unanswerable, though some people believe themselves endowed by God or by Lenin with authority to solve all human problems...
...Duranty was currently reporting in Russia at the time, and would hardly have had to do more than go over his own notes, in order to put the American reader on fair notice of this strange work of historical revision...
...The Scotch Presbyterian and the Russian Jew met in common ideas ift the common homeland and found a common response by living philosophically on a truly large scale...
...This hope has not been fulfilled, but the book will be read and cherished by many as a vehicle which expresses what the author's life has meant to the thousands who were his students, or friends, or readers...
...It was not an easy road to success...
...Thus Mr...
...That indeed there is a great volume of silent dissent is shown by the steady stream of army deserters, the mass of voluntarily displaced persons, the millions in concentration camps...
...We helped to build our American homeland...
...and a biographical profile of each of the thirteen members of the Politburo...
...The profiles are the new and interesting in Duranty's book...
...We are assured that "Stalin is giving the Russian people something they can understand and like" which is as "acceptable to them as It is repugnant to the average Westerner...
...His autobiography is part of the history of the college, and certainly a most distinguished part...
...But these problems, traced to their ultimate roots, in reality arc also the problems of other minority groups...
...The book pays him a glowing tribute: "To all of us Davidson had brought standards more subtle yet more lasting than those of worldly success...
...3.00...
...He himself was a faithful guardian of this most delicate and most sacred plant of liberty, which has grown in the soil of western civilization...
...He regarded the cultivation of such liberalism, v. ith its taming of fanatical group intolerance, as the most enduring contribution which he could make "to the cause of human liberty and human tolerance in the native land of my children and my grandchildren...
...WaUer Duranty's book, it seems to the reviewer, Writes the Russian people too small, even as it writes the men in the Kremlin too large...
...Behind these polemical apologetics is an attitude defined by the author himself in his foreword...
...IF THIS BOOK is to be a useful guide to the average American reader, is its attitude towards the Russian people...
...A generation of pioneers, "a heroic generation that tore up their roots in their old homeland, and unaided with no equipment other than their indomitable faith and courage, made new homes in this land," as Cohen writes of his parents, they found their hopes fulfilled here...
...His philosophy guided him also in all the issues with which life confronts us...
...I have chosen these few examples out of many because in each case Mr...
...From there his father and mother emigrated to what was to all of them the truly Promised Land...
...For forty years, as a student and later on as one of its most brilliant professors who helped to make an international reputation for his college, Cohen's life was part of the growth and the struggle of City College...
...I do not believe that there is a Jewish Question, or a Jewish Problem, any more than there is a Christian Question...
...And as we have seen one after another oT outnumbers testify to the impermanence of man's life and the fruits of his work, we have come to prize ever more highly something that Davidson embodied in his own life and kindled in the lives' of so many others...
...The Politburo — the Men Who Run Russia...
...In the present one he has chosen an important theme: Stalin and his Politburo, the "Men Who Run Russia...
...It is on this account that the theme of this book is the Politburo...
...OUT OF HIS STRENUOUS AND heroic life dedicated to values and vcri^es, Professor Cohen in his last years looked with serenity and confidence on the world...
...261pp...
...The dynamic principle of American Jewish life is to Ih- found neither in the wiping out of special gifts nor in a withdrawal to the desert, but rather in the fruitful bringing together of Jewish and non-Jewish cultural values in the common enterprises of liberal democracy...
...it is very probable that this book will gain for Professor Cohen many friends and readers who had not the good fortune to know him alive, nor the training to approach his philosophical writings...
...The work falls into two parts: an attempt to explain, and in large measure, to justify Stalin's rise to personal powor...
...With the same breadth of *spii it and depth of perspective, he faced all other problems and rejected all easy or absolute solutions, including those of Marx...
...IN THE DREAMER'S JOURNEY, which to many will seem in reality the journey of a man widely awake in consciousness and conscience, the figure of Thomas Davidson, a Scotchman, plays the role of the true teacher...
...For though this autobiography lacks the splendor and the thrill to which we have been accustomed when recent prominent figures have written about their lives, it is full of sincerity, of inner warmth, and of that faith in perennial values and in human liberty which are so rarely found in similar books...
...There are, of course, many human problems, of which Jews, as human beings, have perhaps more than their share...
...When Professor Cohen began the writing of the book in 1940 he hoped that it would become "the vehicle by which almost all that my life has meant can be expressed—even all that my philosophic reading and reflection have meant to me...
...It is, he says, a serious "error to try to distinguish between those leaders and the Russian people...
...4.00...
...For him as a father and grandfather, the question was: "What can we, with our age old heritage, contribute to the fullness of American life...
...Bertram D. Wolfe is the author of the recently published "Three Who Made a Revolution...
...No one can write the difficult history of Russia t(>day who is unwilling to undertake this task...
...As an American Jew, as one of those "who face life here and now in this land of ours," he believed that "Zionism is a distraction, not a solution of American problems...
...Similarly, he makes Politburo member Andreyev "leader of the Workers Opposition" of 1921, though the actual leaders in all contemporary accounts were Shliapnikov, Medvedyev and Kollontay...
...New York: William Sloane Associates...
...We are not a homeless people...
...MORE SERIOUS...
...He valued the fact that Jews in the ghetto had always admired scholarship and subordinated material to spiritual values...
...Duranty makes Kaganovich "the builder of the great Dnieper Dam," a claim which no Russian paper thought of making while it was actually being built...
...Of course, no Russian writer can mention them today because the first two were purged by Stalin and Kollontay, by Lenin's gentler purge-methods, was sent »ut of Russian politics as an Ambassador abroad...
...It is understandable that no Russian today would dare to go behind the official statement, but harder to explain Is how a historian biographer writing under conditions of free research should accept the official hagiography that passes for history in Russia today, without some crosschecking against earlier (and no less official) versions...
...Indeed, the major problem of democratic statesmanship today is that of reaching the Russian people, both through their leaders and over the heads of their leaders, with the message that wc mean them and their country well and that our intentions are peaceful and friendly...
Vol. 32 • March 1949 • No. 13
