TERRORISM IN ARGENTINA
Timerman, Jacobo
BOOKS TERRORISM IN ARGENTINA PRISONER WITHOUT A NAME, CELL WITHOUT A NUMBER by Jacobo Timerman Alfred A. Knopf. 164 pp. $10.95. This is a book of dread, the Argentine Book of the Dead, a...
...His third "crime...
...Though nearly overwhelmed, Timer-man was sustained by his belief in Zionism as the liberation movement of the Jewish people...
...13.95...
...Torture, insult, deprivation became the norm...
...In the statistical vision of atomic war, which is the most that many of us ever contemplate, we learn that as a result of a single blast, 80,000 to 100,000 people were killed at Hiroshima and an equal number wounded...
...In September 1979, stripped of his citizenship and property, he was taken to an airport and exiled to Israel...
...In stark yet powerful prose, it tells the story of a journalist whose very work was grounds for imprisonment...
...Chocolates from his wife enraged him...
...By the 1960s, Timerman was an influential journalist in both print and electronic media...
...No charges were ever brought, but the Argentine Supreme Court and the President had to threaten resignation before he was freed...
...Lawrence University in New York and a visiting fellow in philosophy at Princeton...
...They're—we're—that conspiratorial, you see...
...Timerman spoke out, and as a result was imprisoned by a government opposed to anything but the sound of silence—a government convinced that it was already HENRIK DRESCHER fighting World War III against communism, Zionism, the unknown, the different...
...More importantly we should all own the vision which it embodies, and act with the knowledge which it demands...
...Guerrillas of the Left, death squads of the Right, were in combat...
...Government officials withheld newsprint and advertising, told distributors to over-order newspapers, suspended its publication...
...His only power was his captors' fear of his "premature" death...
...Baylor L. Johnson (Baylor L. Johnson is associate professor of philosophy at St...
...What .were Timerman's "crimes...
...Most of those killed were not Jews, and if we continue to feel sorry for ourselves as Jews, we will end up being hated by the non-Jewish victims, by the families...
...a Jew whose very religion was anathema to many of his compatriots...
...but interrogating Jews was a pleasure or a curse...
...But this response comes just as the Reagan Administration seems intent on rubber-stamping authoritarianism around the world so long as it leans to the Right...
...At the risk of falling into the trap Timer-man warns against, this book is most powerfully upsetting in its meticulous tracing of how a society can argue against a people's right to exist...
...The answer lies in the acts of courage and kindness amidst incomprehensible suffering which are narrated here, and in the fact that humans could create beauty—for some of the pictures are beautiful despite their subject—even from this horror...
...Yet though Timerman has compassion for his co-religionists, he also feels rage...
...Decrying terrorism at both ends of the political spectrum, inquiring after political prisoners, supporting human rights and humanism, La Opinion made important enemies...
...Like his fellow humorist Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut attains his main strength as a writer in his grasp of persona...
...7.95 paperback...
...Nearly all had never been tried...
...SURVIVORS UNFORGETTABLE FIRE edited by Japan Broadcasting Company Pantheon Books...
...Bile, venom leak from the mouths of Timerman's jailers—and from the society of the "better" Argentines...
...better to imagine a new newspaper, a bookstore, a Bergman film on solitude...
...Timerman recognizes the trap in comparing atrocities...
...110 pp...
...This choice had consequences...
...He is a contributing editor for Rolling Stone...
...He was born in the Ukraine in 1923, and his family emigrated to Argentina five years later...
...The drawings in this book are primitive, for none was made by a professional artist...
...Most are crude...
...Critics are disarmed by this approach, not knowing...
...More specifically, Timerman was a citizen with a printing press...
...Co-opting, supporting, winking at, or resigning themselves to it, successive military governments allowed terror to become an instrument of state policy...
...These pictures leave no doubt that those who survived were seared indelibly by the events, in mind if not in body...
...Fifteen minutes later, kidnappers appeared at his now-empty house...
...More than 20,000 Argentinians "disappeared...
...Together with its drawings, Unforgettable Fire contains a brief narrative account of the bombing of Hiroshima and of a still unsuccessful attempt to ban nuclear weapons which was founded there...
...But in the long run, the battle had to be fought, so that at least there was a battle , embryonic as it might be...
...VONNEGUT'S MASKS PALM SUNDAY by Kurt Vonnegut Delacorte Press...
...This book, which draws on the resources of art, and embodies the terrible testament of individual souls, restores some sense of the concrete reality of atomic war...
...These numbers are beyond our comprehension and produce in us only the numbness that infects and shames our civilization...
...a nation in which the politics of paranoia have ruled...
...How horrible for a rational Jewish writer to learn the truth: that the thousands of books and films and testaments to the nightmare of the Holocaust have gone unheard...
...World War III, they say, is about repealing the values of the Jew Marx, the Jew Freud, the Jew Einstein, the Jew Suss, as well as the Jews behind a Soviet regime that hates Jews too...
...that bombs have since been tested which have more than 2,800 times the explosive force of the "toy" used on Hiroshima, and that today the United States and the Soviet Union have managed to deploy weapons whose total destructive force is more than 550,000 times that of the Hiroshima bomb...
...15.95 hardcover...
...All are powerful...
...Stunned by the power of the picture— not by its aesthetic merit, but by the inescapable force of a memory revealed directly—NHK Hiroshima broadcast an appeal for other pictures by survivors...
...I had not been humiliated by torture, by electric shocks of my genitals," he told an Israeli official, "but had been profoundly humiliated by the silent complicity of Jewish leaders...
...they were an impingement from a sane—and therefore unbearable—world...
...Then, on April 15, 1977, when you and I thought that the worst thing in the world was rushing to mail our tax returns, Timerman was kidnapped by fascist elements within the army...
...that 4.4 square miles of the city were completely destroyed...
...So should you...
...n May 1974, Iwakichi Kobayashi, an old man of seventy-seven, brought to the studios of Japan Broadcasting Company (NHK) in Hiroshima a drawing which recorded something of his experience as a survivor of the atomic inferno at Hiroshima, August 6, 1945...
...We should all own Unforgettable Fire...
...Abe Peck (Abe Peck is writing a book on protest media and the 1960s...
...Ronald Reagan, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Jeremiah Denton, and Ernest Lefever should make this book of political shards required reading...
...The reason is that Unforgettable Fire simultaneously asks and answers, with the directness that only individual experience can have, a great philosophical question: "What can be worth preserving in a species that spawned Hiroshima and still ignores its lessons...
...The man who can recount a genealogy of flight and death stretching from the Spanish Inquisition takes pride in being able to write after the birth of the first Israeli Timerman that "we have completed our voyage...
...The scenes of beatings, electric shocks, solitary confinement, cold baths in winter, combine themselves into the final image, and the result is always the same: the shout with which' my interrogators used to insult me when they were really furious—Jew...
...Before my death I wanted to draw it and leave it for others...
...Nearly all were guilty only by affiliation, innuendo, or family ties...
...Often this power is enhanced by the nature of the work, reminding us simultaneously that simple, innocent people were the victims of this abomination, and how they have struggled to make tKeir passionate appeal to the world...
...Seen via flashbacks, Timerman's experience is both intensely personal and a metaphor for Argentina's topsy-turvy reality...
...Unions and factions within the Argentine government have begun to respond— to the marching mothers, to progressive priests, to international pressure, even to Timerman and other lonely voices...
...Argentina, however, has not, and Timerman's book fails to posit any progressive alternatives to the status quo he knew...
...Argentina was embarking upon a period of ferment...
...Even now I cannot erase the scene from my memory," he told those to whom he brought his work...
...Bombings intimidated staff members...
...Often the latter are translations of text which appears in Japanese on the pictures themselves...
...The first was exercising citizenship...
...Wear the right mask, he knows, and you can say anything...
...the story behind the collection of these pictures is told in an afterword, and the pictures are accompanied by captions written by their creators...
...But even if we place less faith in Zionism or liberalism than Timerman does, Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number remains a call to action...
...Analyzing the situation was the path to madness or suicide...
...Surely not all on the Left were mad bombers or Peronist goons...
...Again, silence is a crime...
...Blindfolded, covered with a blanket, he began two-and-one-half years of imprisonment and house arrest...
...Welcome to the dark side of Evita, a performance the Reagan Administration seems inclined to review all too favorably...
...What he calls his "original sin": being a Jew in a country riven by anti-Semitism...
...Almost 1,000 were received in the next two months, and Unforgettable Fire contains 104 of them in color...
...Interrogating enemies was a job...
...Timerman saw the struggle as being less between democracy and extremism than between civilization and barbarism...
...Slim yet searing-, Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number is the autobi-ography/odyssey of a man who is once again known as Jacobo Timerman...
...In 1971, he became editor and publisher of La Opinion, a progressive but not radical newspaper...
...Why should anyone buy such a book, entailing, as the purchase does, the contemplation of something so horrible and terrifying...
...330 pp...
...Timerman's warning is not just for Argentina, but for wherever collective hatred threatens to become the official order...
...He and his colleagues rejected the official tongue, euphemism, in which the murdered had been "cooled out" or had "gone away forever...
...This is a book of dread, the Argentine Book of the Dead, a dispatch from a south-of-the-border Gulag...
...I know that I saved the lives of some, and believe others were killed merely because La Opinion demanded knowledge of their whereabouts...
...And yet, he maintains, there was a significant difference...
Vol. 45 • August 1981 • No. 8
