Books: Kosher Candida

THE STORMY LIFE OF LASIK ROIT-SCHWANTZ (311 pp.)—llya Ehrenburq—Polyg/ot Library ($5.95). llya Ehrenburg has spent half a lifetime as court jester to a regime with no sense of humor. In the Communist world, few have rivaled Ehrenburg’s talent as a journalist-propagandist, but before he donned the chameleon motley of Soviet apologist-in-chief, he had a better story to tell. That story, partly his own. is embedded in an almost unknown novel, unpublished in the Soviet Union, called The Stormy Life of Lasik Roitschwantz, which Ehrenburg wrote in 1927 when he had taken a leave of absence from Communist Russia and was living in Paris. Now available in English for the first time, the book shows, despite uneven translation, what a considerable comic talent has been squandered on the gloomy chores of propaganda.

Roitschwantz is a poor Jewish tailor in Homel, a deeply confused little town in Russia during the confusing early years of the Revolution. His only asset is an epic garrulity and a wild Talmudic talent for splitting the wrong hair. His only crime is. he confesses, “the fact that I am alive”—although he explains in a frenzied bout of surrealist logic that he is not exactly responsible for that. Reading his fabulous and farcical misadventures is an experience like being cornered by a compulsive talker whose merciless spate of words first glazes the eye until a thread of rewarding sense emerges from the gabble. In this respect, he is unlike the typical Chaplin figure, whose weapon was silence, but like Chaplin’s little fellow, he is a reincarnation of the classic non-hero of Jewish folklore—Peter Schlemiel, the man without a shadow, who is the fated enemy of authority, whether commissar or cop. priest or rabbi, and whose talent it is to make a wheezy accordion of all top hats.

In tone, the book resembles that comic masterpiece of World War I. The Good Soldier Schweik: in form, it is a kind of kosher Candide.

Pantaloon Pilgrim. After the revolution, the Jews of Homel had obediently shaved their beards and otherwise tried to behave like loyal members of a godless and classless society. The results were not always happy. One rushed into the synagogue shouting, “Down with that rotten Sabbath! Long live, let us say, Monday!” Some changed their names, but although “it was only a matter of two rubles and the proper enlightenment,” Lasik Roitschwantz passed up the opportunity of becoming Spartacus Rosaluxemburgsky. Adopting two saints’ names in the hagiography of Marxism* was his last chance to stay out of trouble. Instead, he sighs the wrong sort of sigh (“a purely pathological phenomenon”) before a poster mourning the death of a party bigwig; he is denounced for antiSemitism, mysticism and “morbid eroticism”—being in love. Furthermore, he cannot get the Chinese question fixed in his mind. He is jailed but eventually wangles a job in the Department of Animal Breeding supervising the production of purebred rabbits for the entire district. The pair of rabbits assigned to Roitschwantz are dead, but by purely theoretical calculations he reports that the rabbit population has reached 260,784. The episode is a high-spirited and hilarious parody of the statistical romanticism of the five-year plans.

Satirist Ehrenburg also leads his pantaloon pilgrim to some slapstick swipes at Communist literature of the period. Although all he knew about the subject was that “Leo Tolstoy had a handsome beard just like Karl Marx,” the little tailor becomes an “inexorable” Marxist literary critic. As pundit of proletarian literature —which is what Ehrenburg himself became after he ended his Paris stay in 1940 and went home—Lasik writes a preface for a socialist realist novel about romance in a soap factory (“Dunja yielded to the beat of new life, and whispered, blushing slightly: ‘You see. we have surpassed pre-war production figures. Sizzle soap, sizzle!'”).

Biblical Stock Market. A one-day, Soviet-style marriage with a grim giantess (who loved him only for his living space) causes Lasik’s political doom, and he is finally forced to take it on the lam westward, one jump ahead of the secret police. The rest of Lasik’s nonstop global pratfall is something of an anticlimax—but not to Lasik himself. In Germany he is delighted to find that “everyone around him spoke Yiddish, though in a slightly imperfect way.” In his lunatic vision, the Weimar Republic becomes a memorable cartoon—rather as if George Grosz had been a Disney animator. On a diet of zwieback, Lasik sits in a druggist’s window advertising the shocking effects of not drinking cod liver oil; later he understudies for a circus monkey. Small wonder that when he wants to invoke God he swears “in the name of all that is being ridiculed.”

The outrageous odyssey continues in France and Britain, but Author Ehren burg would have been wise to recognize that satire on those countries is best left to natives. He does better in what the Soviets had taught Roitschwantz to call “that criminal country, Palestine.” By now, he is a “miserable leaf chased by a hundred-year-old storm,” his “body a passport,” a palimpsest of bruises, and he is on his way to his 19th jail. In Palestine he finds a people who “wanted to organize a stock market in a Biblical manner,” Jews beat other Jews for smoking on the Sabbath, and he cannot understand the dirty songs in a nightclub because, in a phrase of desperate pathos, “in Hebrew he could only pray.”

By this time the reader is ready to pray with him, and to wonder why a man like Ehrenburg, who could swear so eloquently against everything that is ridiculous in sacred Soviet institutions, should have been a willing Communist straight man for the last 30 years. Perhaps the answer lies in Ehrenburg’s epitaph for his hero: “Rest in peace, poor Roitschwantz! You will not dream any longer of justice, or of a piece of sausage.” Ehrenburg may simply have settled for the piece of sausage.

*The Communists early adopted Spartacus, leader of the Roman slave uprising in 73 B.C.. as one of their own. In the turbulent aftermath of World War I, German Communists were known as Spartacists. Among them was Party Leader Rosa Luxemburg, shot for revolutionary activities by the German republican government in 1919.