Books: Judgment from Limbo

GREEN WINTER by Jan Carew. 192 pages. Stein & Day. $4.95.

The recommendation to Moscow was typically blunt: “Robertson is 25, the son of a worker. His standard of political education is low, but studying in Moscow should remedy this defect. He is not a Party member but he should be ready to join in a year or two.”

Just the opposite, says Negro Novelist Carew, who was the first British Guianese ever to study behind the Iron Curtain. His hero in this novel is Jojo Robertson, a Guianese like Carew, and he has scarcely set foot in Moscow before another Guianese student gives him the word: “Let me put it this way, all the foreign students I talk to would prefer to study somewhere else.”

“Black Monkey.” Each foreign student shares a room with a Russian in former. His mail goes through so many censors that “the letters get worn out.” The level of instruction is disappointing, the lessons ruled by dogma. Bureaucracy is so dismayingly dominant in Soviet life that Kafka seems to have replaced Marx and Lenin as the prophet of Communism.

But for Jojo and his fellow Negroes, who “must judge all systems from the limbo of our skin,” the greatest shock of all is the strident racial prejudice of a nation whose leaders deny that prejudice exists. The Negroes’ white girl friends are suddenly shipped away from Moscow—to “Keep Russia Red.” On the streets, they are always stared at, occasionally attacked, and often taunted with the Russian equivalent of “nigger” —”black monkey.”

Red Envy. Unlike most disillusioned repatriates from behind the Iron Curtain, Author Carew understands that Negroes are tough for the Russians to accept. “Strangers are new to all of us—black strangers and white ones,” Jojo’s Russian roommate admits painfully. “We have never had them living in our midst since the Revolution, and now, all of a sudden, we have young people from the four corners of the earth among us. You must try to understand our confusion. We have been told again and again that your people are hungry and illiterate, victims of imperialist greed and oppression. We were never told that some of you had traveled to New York, Rome, London, Paris, and that we would envy you your clothes, your way of talking freely about things we don’t dare to mention.”

This is not a great novel. Dialogue and characterization are heavy; the plot is a loose ball of incidents that probably really happened. It is, however, a revelation. “Our former colonial masters used to tell us that communism was a disease to which we were particularly susceptible,” says a once-radical Somali student. “Well, is it? Fewer of us have become communists than if we had stayed in the West.”