Dear Editor
Dear Editor USSR Notes Having recently returned from a brief visit to Leningrad, 1 read with special interest Harold Ticktin's account of his Moscow encounters in search of the...
...It is the loss of a man whose political insight is needed in this time of complex issues...
...Dutch...
...I'm sure they will want to hear it...
...One of the best-informed of contemporary journalists, he was also a hero of the Dutch Resistance during World War II...
...Sal left behind him a number of books in his own language...
...The book is replete with political lessons and contains a remarkably clear account of the process of decolonization...
...Without membership, the lower and middle ranks in fields requiring a college education ("and this includes most physicians) cannot rise above jobs that pay little more than half of what a skilled worker earns...
...New York City James T. Farrell...
...Great Neck, N.Y...
...Indonesia: An Underdeveloped Freedom, was published in this country (Bobbs Merrill...
...For his highest loyalty was to the truth...
...Neither material considerations nor a need to be a "popular" journalist could sway him from this devotion...
...at the same time...
...He worked with total energy in his quest for the essentials of serious problems and situations...
...My own impressions, more concerned with the present, are necessarily haphazard, yet they complement Ticktin's in several respects...
...Dear Editor USSR Notes Having recently returned from a brief visit to Leningrad, 1 read with special interest Harold Ticktin's account of his Moscow encounters in search of the Bolshevik Revolution's traditional figures ("A Guide to the USSR for Ex-Marxists," NL, August 16), and his discovery of varying degrees of historical banishment...
...He paid for his honesty with an isolation that he bore with humor, understanding and an undiminished application of time and energv to his work...
...One of our Tntourist guides remembered a trip to Prague and East Berlin as a rare chance to see the outside world...
...His lifetime was devoted to a search for truth and justice...
...The Party, though it still feeds on the old myths, seems to have become primarily a vehicle for personal economic advancement...
...I got the feeling that the leaders of the Revolution exist today as legends rather than as part of a living past...
...The loss of Sal Tas is not merely the loss of a friend and comrade...
...One of his works...
...with a keen political mind and a moral courage that matched his great talents...
...My final glimpse of the USSR, in fact, was the grateful smile of a customs official to whom I had given my last English paperback...
...I also found it interesting that much care and money had been expended toward the faithful restoration of Leningrad's magnificent Tsarist palaces and monuments, thoroughly destroyed during the German seige...
...As a journalist, he wrote with astonishing insight and knowledge of the politics and problems of the entire world...
...Their only competition as sites of Russian pilgrimage comes from the old Smolny Institute (Lenin's headquarters during the October putsch and now a Lenin museum), and the cemetery mausoleum for the one million Leningradians who perished during World War II...
...Western books and magazines are unobtainable and make most welcome gifts...
...His beloved wife, Judith, writes that up until the end, Sal was making plans for future work...
...for many years the NL's correspondent in France, died in Paris at the end of August...
...George C. Eckstein Sal Tas Readers of The New Leader over the years will be saddened by the news I convey here...
...He was one of the most loyal of friends, yet this never prevented him from speaking with total frankness...
...The resulting dissatisfaction of these groups is only partially compensated by peergroup status and an ill-concealed disdain for the lower orders...
...A final impression was the extent to which the educated suffer from an almost hermetic separation, both physical and intellectual, from Western culture...
...Sal Tas was a brilliant man...
...1974), but it still awaits the attention it deserves...
...Sal Tas...
Vol. 59 • September 1976 • No. 19
