Dear Editor
Dear Editor Dos Passos At a time when many critics waste ink deriding and complaining, it is a pleasure to come across one who makes you want to read a neglected artist. Thanks to Nathan Glick's...
...Oh yes...
...Obviously 1 should have called everybody Kolokol and taken no risks, but the experience in the Levitas salon was so precious to me that 1 went by memory rather than checking with the KGB...
...So maybe David Dallin had Maxim hammered...
...Borkenau left Germany for France in 1934 and came to England just before the War...
...Roche writes that "down the hall," between 1939 and 1942, Raphael Abramovitch was editing the Russian-language Socialist Courier with the help of an exiled German Left-winger, "Louis Clair," who was Lewis Coser...
...Liston Oak was tall, Lenin was short...
...Some Russian emigre made the quoted observation about Litvinov, and I thought it was Nicolaevsky...
...some hesitant German after his Russian...
...My excuse is that of the black storekeeper who, when asked by the cops to identify some hold-up men, observed, "I can't tell one from another...
...until after the fall of France, after May 1940...
...But Coser left after a disagreement because he insisted on running an article by Harold Isaacs which blamed both the U.S...
...Now Maxim will be hammered!' he roared...
...Clearly the man who wrote the article was the boisterous Irish poet Brendan B. Roche, not the sober John P. Roche, the quondam Morris Hillquit Professor at Brandeis...
...Nicolaevsky did predict the Nazi-Soviet Pact in an article in The New Leader based on the trade mission of Kandelaki to Germany in the spring of 1939...
...Unfair to the memory of a decent man...
...Weston, Mass...
...Liston Oak had a great shock of hair, Lenin was bald...
...Both wore beards...
...Coser was replaced by America's Youngest Menshevik, Daniel Bell...
...Kolokol In reply: 1 am sorry if, in trying to describe a unique ambience which was critical to my political development??one which, in fact, made me in my teens an implacable, lifelong antitotalitarian??1 missed a few trivial details...
...NL readers may be pleased to know, however, that the unjustly neglected The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words...
...Liston Oak was blond, Lenin was swarthy...
...Sean Padraic Roche Poet...
...and the USSR equally for the Cold War...
...Roche "recalls vividly that in the spring of 1939 Boris Nicolaevesky...
...On Borkenau 1 reserve my defense: 1 am certain he was shipped out of Britain after internment...
...Perhaps Roche is confusing hearing with reading...
...I recall the following: Stalin made a speech (that I will not look up) in which he said the Soviet Union would pull nobody's "chestnuts out of the fire...
...Coser never co-edited the Courier, he knew no Russian, and since the Courier was a "party journal" he never would have been asked...
...By me all goyim look alike...
...As to who bellowed "Now Maxim will be hammered...
...In 1947-48 Coser (and Travers Clement) edited the Modern Review with Abramovitch...
...I trust that you will make the correction in your annual index...
...Roche describes Liston Oak as "a New Leader editor bearing a remarkable resemblance to Lenin," and says "Oak had been the chief Stalinist censor of reportage on the International Brigade...
...Thanks to Nathan Glick's discussion of John Dos Passos ("The Novelist as Political Traveler," NL, December 15) 1 plan to hole up for a while with U.S.A...
...1 was covering a four-year period in my montage, and Nicolaevsky did turn up after his escape from France...
...Cambridge, Mass...
...Borkenau may have a posthumous renaissance in 1981 when Columbia University Press publishes his Collected Essavs, with an introduction by Richard Lowen-thal...
...He spoke no English...
...Similarly, 1 suspect I confused Louis Clair with Boris Snub??both were around...
...Further: Liston Oak had been editor of Soviet Russia Today, but never the "chief Stalinist censor...
...and he never "roared...
...Los Angeles Ray Larkin For the Record Lest the unwary neophyte take fiction for fact, some corrections need to be made in John P. Roche's "Remembering the Levitas Salon" (NL, December 15, 1980...
...I think much of the difficulty is due to a misattribu-tion on the part of The New Leader about the author...
...He was never in New York during the War since his movements, as an enemy alien in England, were restricted...
...Frequently present, too, was the legendary Franz Borkenau .. . who left Germany for Britain in 1934," says Roche...
...predicted the advent of a Nazi-Soviet Pact on the basis of a Stalin speech...
...Strange: Nicolaevsky did not come to the U.S...
Vol. 64 • January 1981 • No. 2
