JOURNEYS THROUGH VANISHING WORLDS. Abraham Brumberg. 208pp. Scarith. Paperback, Pounds 16. 978 0 9794488 7 4
Daddy, I am now class-conscious." This is how the eleven-year-old Abraham Brumberg greeted his father, after joining the youth group of the Jewish socialist party, the Bund, in Poland in 1937. The boy was using two languages in that single sentence: the Hebrew "Aba" for "daddy", and Yiddish for the rest. In associating himself with the Bund, Brumberg was following his parents into an intellectual world where class was the key to everything. The Poland of his childhood might be a land of national strife, but a future Revolution would somehow cast anti-Semitism, and nationalism more generally, into the dustbin of history.
The stance was universalist, but the life was provincial. In a country where the majority of the population was Polish, and the largest minority Ukrainian, the young Brumberg had no Gentile friends. Though the vast majority of Poland's Jews were religious, he had his first conversation with an Orthodox boy only after the German invasion of 1939. The Bund was a world unto itself, anchoring Jewish socialism in a warm network of human contact that Brumberg compares to an extended family. Without the help of fellow Bundists, Brumberg's father could not have rescued the family from the German invasion of Poland, leading them from Warsaw to Vladivostok and thence to Japan. The Bund even played a part in Brumberg's first sexual experience. Crossing the Pacific Ocean in a ship bound from Japan to the United States, his main preoccupation was getting a young lady he fancied into a swimming pool. The girl, of course, was also a Bundist.
Brumberg, who died in Washington DC earlier this year, rebelled against the USA when he first arrived, but it was America that made him the intellectual he became - a scholar of Soviet politics and of Jewish history. As he learned English, he idealized Poland, as a European country with a superior civilization. He read the Polish classics in New York, and spoke better Polish as an adult than as a child. The Poland of his mind was divided between a tradition of Romantic literature, tolerant in its politics, and the anti Semitism that, he believed, was characteristic of the country as a whole.
His American education of the late 1940s and early 50s reproduced, on a higher level, the socialist idealism of his boyhood. At City College, he was drawn to the Trotskyite politics of a friend who bore Trotsky's Jewish name and who knew how to talk about fellatio. In New York, and then at Yale, Brumberg was among left-wing Russian emigres, often Mensheviks or their children. Mensheviks and Trotskyites alike believed that the idea of a Communist Revolution was fundamentally sound, but that the wrong people had been in charge. It is a mystery unresolved by this memoir why a young emigre with leftist politics was, in 1952, named Editor of Problems of Communism. To this important US government publication, which Brumberg edited for two decades, he brought a certain belief that the Soviet Union could evolve in the direction of social democracy.
Several of the best students of Soviet Communism were, like Brumberg, Americans of Polish or Polish Jewish origin. They were not all men of the Left: Richard Pipes, the conservative historian of the Russian Revolution, appears here in an unflattering light. Zbigniew Brzezinski, who believed that the Soviet Union would collapse rather than evolve, represented another opposing school. All three of them, though, were sons of Warsaw. Though all have now written their memoirs, interwar Poland remains an obscure but powerful source of inspiration.
After Brumberg's Poland was destroyed by the Second World War and the Holocaust, its survivors, the gifted men and women who flit through this memoir, sought to interpret the Cold War. This is Brumberg's story, and in the end it is a very American one. In 1961, in Moscow, he visited Ilya Ehrenburg, the Soviet Jewish poet and chronicler of the Holocaust; he sought wisdom from the great man about Jews in Europe, about Stalin and Hitler and their great confrontation during the Second World War. He got instead a book inscribed "to a young American", which is what he had become. When this memoir draws to a close, Abraham Brumberg is still a bit wet behind the ears from the swimming pool of the Bund, but playing a part in the political history of a global superpower.
