The Zealots Who Failed

...He has also written an autobiographical novel, The Itinerant", a novel about Che Guevara, The Last to Die...

...The young " Left fascists," though, are less vividly drawn than the old Leftists: Herrick writes more effectively about the generation he knows first hand...

...In Kill Memory, the elderly Elizabeth roams the streets of Paris waiting for death, contemplating her role on the side of "the lie and the gun...

...She remembers how she, too, betrayed everything: abandoning her sister's children to the Nazis...

...As the terrorists escalate their violence, they reach the logical conclusion of their actions and decide to stage a "Kristallnacht II" against the Jews...

...His insights have aunique impact because they are expressed in both moral and artistic terms...

...Herrick has been a witness as well—to the consolidation of Stalinism as a murderous force in Spain during a period when others viewed it as a beacon of hope...

...the memories of her betrayals cannot be stilled...

...twin coffins, draped in blinding red flags under a blazing African sun, resting on two horse-drawn caissons, behind which were strung four or five red-bannered horse-drawn carriages waiting to carry . . . General Verdad, the Mayor of Murcia in a stiff white shirt and red tie, dignitaries of the city, doctors and nurses off-duty, followed by a long column of hundreds of wounded Interbrigaders...

...Among his crimes was the murder of the poet Garcia Lor-ca...

...It is clear why he could deal with his experience in art, while Chambers, the aspiring novelist and fiction writer, could not...

...One is reminded of what came almost immediately: the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland, betrayal piled upon betrayal...

...Indeed, his elderly veterans of the KGB and the Communist Party underground apparatus (Anton P. and Clara K. in Love and Terror, Elizabeth in Kill Memory), filled with despair because they abetted a movement they now regard as fascist, are like betrayed widows and widowers: Having been wed to a God that failed, they live out their remaining days alone in bitter penitence, regret and sorrow...

...The fates of the young and old Leftists are intertwined when the terrorists hijack a plane the elderly Communists are on and hold them hostage...

...Elements of comedy and near-sur-realism—a fancifulness—lift sections of Hermanos beyond realism, helping to establish its singularity and scope...

...Yet a more fundamental connection between the two generations, Herrick makes clear, is the willingness of ideologues to sacrifice themselves and their victims to an abstraction...

...Herrick, to his credit, cannot safely be placed in this tradition...

...A bizarre, grandiose burial parade is organized by the Communists in Spain for both the Fascist son of a Communist professor and the anti-Fascist whom he has killed...

...Herrick portrays his failed zealots with loving sympathy—a sympathy, one feels, that stems from a spirit of intense generosity and democratic commitment...

...Moral passion and the documenting of past horrors, significant as they are, tend to submerge artistic inventiveness and depth of characterization...

...For Herrick learned early on that the Communists' acceptance of what W.H...

...The Spanish Civil War was a microcosm of what was to come...

...The title of the novel is taken from the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova: So much to do today: kill memory, kill pain, turn heart into a stone, and yet...

...They are not doing this, Viktor X writes in his diary, against "Jews as a people," but out of "revolutionary need" and to undo the Zionist "servants of Ameri-kan imperialism...

...Each night the voices and images revisit Elizabeth...

...In the words of Elizabeth, the 70-year-old former Stalinist who is the protagonist of Kill Memory...

...is asked a straightforward question" when he applies for his pension at the Warsaw District Party office: "Do you think it is fair for Polish workers to be paying a pension to a Jew...

...His accomplishment is an act of faithfulness to his many fallen comrades in Spain...

...Rarely have the Stalinist distortions of history been captured so vividly in fiction, along with their effect on the innocents in the ranks...

...author, "The One-Star Jew" and a forthcoming novel about the Sobell-Rosenberg cases There is a recurrent image in the work of William Herrick: the look of defiant pride and dignity on the face of the innocent victim about to be executed by a true believer of the Left or Right...

...my Jewish mother and sister were murdered by them and my Fascist father by us who became them...

...No better guide can be found to a history of Stalinism in our time, yet Herrick is more than an educator free of Left- or Right-wing ideology...

...AntonP...

...In fact, the tragedy of spilling innocent blood hardly ever comes across so tellingly in fiction...

...In Hermanos, his definitive 1969 novel concerning the Spanish Civil War, and in Kill Memory, his eighth novel and the concluding volume of a political trilogy, the young Communist sees the expression on the face of the victim and after the murder realizes he "had betrayed everything" he had lived and fought for...

...and two nonpolitical, partly surreal novels, Strayhorn and Golcz...

...And as they limped and jerked and slid and marched and sang, the brilliant red-shrouded coffins of murderer and victim squeakily rolled along...

...In Politics and the Novel, Irving Howe observed that one of the goals of the political novelist should be "to make ideas or ideologies come to life, to endow them with the capacity for stirring characters into passionate gestures and sacrifices, and even more, to create the illusion that they have a kind of independent motion so that they themselves—those abstract weights of idea or ideology—seem to become active characters in the political novel...

...the evil means turning into ends...

...informing on her young American lover, who confessed to her his disillusionment at realizing he was being made to murder an innocent man, and thereby bringing about his assassination by the Communists...

...In the first volume of the trilogy, Shadows and Wolves, a retired Fascist general endures a similar fate...

...the wounded on crutch and cane limped and jerked and slid and marched, singing...

...A veteran of the International Brigades, Herrick began his writing career at age 52...

...Love and Terror (1981) traces the links between three old Communists, two of whom have emigrated to Israel after anti-Semitic incidents in Communist Poland near the end of lives spent fighting Nazism, then serving the KGB and Stalinist dictatorship...

...Herrick's inventive gifts rival his political and moral fervor...

...Riveting oral histories of the three are juxtaposed against an account of two young German terrorists, Viktor X and Gabriele, members of the "Red Fraction" (a group reminiscent of the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany or the Red Brigades in Italy...

...Kill Memory can be seen as the coda of the trilogy begun in 1980 with Shadows and Wolves, the author's examination of the conflict between a Fascist father and his terrorist son...

...Auden referred to as the necessary lie, the necessary deception and the necessary murder compromised and poisoned their identities as anti-Fascists from the very beginning...

...The tradition of the 20th-century political novelist (Arthur Koestler, Igna-zio Silone, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Victor Serge, John Dos Passos, George Orwell) is a highly honorable one, yet it is often encased in the limited structures of naturalism and realism...

...For all its virtues, the book was an act of self-concealment under a persona of self-righteousness and baroque religiosity...

...Herrick wholly succeeds at this...

...murdering a young seaman, an unarmed man standing against a wall, because as a Social Democrat he wanted to fight the Nazis...

...His third book, Hermanos, achieved a mature clarity throughout that Hemingway managed only occasionally in For Whorrf the Bell Tolls —as in his characterization of the mad Andre Marty, French chief of the brigades...

...After Whittaker Chambers' Witness appeared, Andre Malraux wrote him, "You have not come back from hell with empty hands...

...But he has been a very different sort of witness from Chambers: uncongealed, free of rancor and moral sanctimony, an adventurous artist open to experience, a proponent of social democracy...

...the individual victim is never obscured...

...No romance accrues to the taking of human life in Herrick's work...

...The son, who was then murdered by the Communists, is turned posthumously into an anti-Fascist murdered by "fascists" (Social Democrats...