6 Friday, October 21, 1983
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CHAR POOLE (964-6310)
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
Harsh Sentence for Refusnik Blasted by Reagan, Israel
Begun's release.
(Continued from Page 1)
Soviet government to
overturn the sentence
and to allow Begun and
other Jews to leave the
Soviet Union for Israel.
The Foreign Ministry in
Jerusalem instructed Is-
raeli embassies abroad to
urge their host govern-
ments to bring pressure
to bear on Moscow for
Education Minister Zevu-
lun Hammer issued a sepa-
rate appeal to his counter-
parts in other countries and
to teachers and aca-
demicians everywhere to
protest the sentence. He
also instructed teachers in
Israel to talk to their pupils
about Begun and his strug-
gle to emigrate to Israel and
his efforts to teach Hebrew
in the Soviet Union.
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Fourteen former Pris-
oners of Conscience who had
been jailed in the USSR and
now reside in Israel staged a
protest outside the Russian
Church in Jerusalem. A
major protest demonstra-
tion was held Tuesday out-
side the Knesset building.
Legal circles in Israel and
the Bar Association called
on lawyers abroad to protest
"this travesty of justice."
Begun, who had long
sought in vain for permis-
sion to emigrate, has been a
special target of the Soviet
authorities and KGB
harassment. He was first
arrested on March 3, 1977,
charged with "parasitism,"
having lost his job at the
Moscow Central Research
Institute years before when
he first applied for an exit
visa.
He was tried in June
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1977 and sentenced to
two years of internal
exile which he spent in
the remote city of Maga-
dan. He completed his
sentence in February
1978 but was arrested in
June and sentenced to
three more years in
Magadan. He returned in
August 1980.
On Nov. 6, 1982, he was
arrested a third time and
charged with "anti-Soviet
agitation and propaganda."
He was reportedly held in
solitary confinement for
most of the time until his
trial opened last Wednes-
day.
Avraham
Harman,
chairman of the Israel Pub-
lic Committee for Soviet
Jewry, said, "The Soviet
Union is making a grave
mistake if it thinks that by
this verdict Iosif Begun will
be forgotten. We vow that
we will protest on his behalf
every single day" against
this "malicious and evil"
sentence.
Histadrut Secretary Gen-
eral Yeruham Meshel asked
the International Federa-
tion of Free Trade Unions to
intervene on Begun's be-
half. Leon Dulzin, chairman
of the Jewish Agency and
World Zionist Organization
Executives, called the sen-
tence "vile."
Begun was guilty only
of teaching Hebrew and
seeking to return to his
ancenstral homeland,
Dulzin said. Science
Minister Yuval Neeman
appealed to Amnesty In-
ternational, the organiza-
tion that seeks to help
political prisoners
everywhere, to help seek
Begun's release.
Only two Knesset mem-
bers, Meir Wilner and Char-
lie Biton of the Hadash
(Communist) Party, refused
to join the protest and re-
peatedly interrupted the
proceedings. Biton termed
the attack on the Soviet
Union a "circus."
Speaker
. Knesset
Menahem Savidor said the
Soviet authorities could not
be compared to the Nazis,
but in the Soviet Union only
one language — Hebrew —
is officially banned. He said
the Nazis had burned Jews
in the ovens, while the Rus-
sians sought to "burn the
spirit."
Uzzi Baram, chairman of
the Knesset Immigration
and Absorption Committee,
said the Soviets sought to
sever the link between Rus-
sian Jewry and Israel — the
Hebrew language. He spoke
scathingly of the Knesset
Communists, saying it was
a pity they were not like the
Communists in Italy and
France, who sometimes
took an independent line
and criticized Kremlin
policies.
Public Trial
for Russia
JERUSALEM (JTA) —
The Soviet Union will be
put on public "trial" at a
European capital yet to be
named, for "violations" of
its own laws by the persis-
tent persecution of Jewish
culture and the Hebrew
language.
An international com-
mission, headed by former
Israeli Attorney General
Gideon Hausner, will as-
semble the evidence.
In addition to Hausner,
the man who prosecuted
Adolf Eichmann, the inter-
national commission con-
sists of Telford Taylor, the
American prosecutor at the
Nuremburg war crimes
trial; Prof. Alan Dershowitz
of the Harvard Law School;
Rita Hauser, former head of
the U.S. delegation to the
United Nations Commis-
sion on Human Rights; and
Arthur Goldberg, a former
Justice of the U.S. Supreme
Court and former U.S. Am-
bassador to the UN.
'Uncompleted Past': Holocaust Fiction
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This year, the 50th an-
niversary of Hitler's
takeover in Germany,
should be a time for special
reflection. In looking anew
at the way postwar German
writers have come to terms
with the Third Reich,
Judith Ryan suggests, in
her book The Uncompleted
Past (Wayne State Univer-
sity Press), that some im-
portant implications of our
thinking about the Nazi
period remain unresolved.
Her book is at once a
critique of familiar views on
Holocaust literature and a
provocative pointer to new
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ways of looking at the issues
it raises.
There can be no question
that we must not forget
what happened in 1933 and
thereafter, but the problem
is what form this remembr-
ance should take. Elie
Wiesel has recently shown
the impossibility of com-
municating the full extent
of the Nazi atrocities; only
those who experienced them
can really comprehend
them. Is there no way, then,
that a recurrence can be
prevented? And in particu-
lar, should we give upon lit-
erature as an instrument in
our attempt to prevent a re-
currence? Can fiction really
be of any help?
These are some of the
questions Judith Ryan
addresses in her study of
German novelists as they
try to come to grips with
the German past. Her
thesis is, in essence, that
fiction on this theme must
necessarily go beyond
realism. Merely re-
creating in words the ex-
perience of Nazism does
not suffice; it is also im-
portant, she argues, that
literature raise questions
in the minds of its
readers.
Only when readers begin
to ask, "Must German poli-
tics have developed the way
they did? Were there any
steps that could have been
taken to stop it effectively?"
can a real re-thinking of the
problem of Nazism begin.
The vital issues, then, are
the power of free will and
the role of individual re-
sponsibility. The average
German citizen during the
Third Reich may well have
JUDITH RYAN
felt that there was no real
possibility of resistance to
Hitler, but Ryan contends
that it is dangerous for
writers of fiction to rest con-
tent with that view. Novels
should not leave the reader
with the feeling that all
paths of action are closed
off. At the same time, novels
need not portray exemplary
figures, resistance heroes
who might seem so unreal
as to have no relevance for
our own actions.
Instead, fiction should be
what Ryan calls open-
ended. By this she means
novels that do not actually
present solutions but
suggest instead that there
may be alternatives un-
explored by their char-
acters.
The author's method
for discovering these
hints of potential alter-
nate solutions is an un-
usual and provocative
one. She shows us how to
read the novels "against
the grain" — her term for
revealing the ironies that
lie beneath the surface.
What emerges is a re-
evaluation and re-
interpretation of a
number of German
novelists, most of them
well-known (like Thomas
Mann, Gunter Grass, and
Christa Wolf), others less
so (Alfred Andersch and
Johannes Bobrowski).
Not every reader will
agree with the severity of
her moral stance: she takes
Thomas Mann to task, for
example, for his dependence
on the myth of evil as an
explanation for the genesis
of Nazism in his "Doctor
Faustus." Altogether, the
mythic novels of the early
postwar period do not fare
well in Ryan's analysis.
This is a direct result of her
insistence that it is mislead-
ing to see Nazism in terms
of "fate."
In several instances, her
"against the grain"
readings turn up totally
new interpretations of
well-known works. Thus,
Gunter Grass' "Cat and
Mouse" is seen in a radically
new light once the purpose
of its unreliable narrator is
uncovered. Ryan uses the
image of a missing figure in
a sculptural frieze to de-
scribe the technique she
uses with this novel and
with others: she shows us
how to fill the blanks that
are left in the deliberately
incomplete fabric of Grass'
narration.
In her study of the post-
war German novel, Ryan
urges us to take another
look at the role fiction can
play in re-examining the
horror of the Nazi period.
Thus Wiesel's question,
"Does the Holocaust lie be-
yond the reach of art?" can
be answered "no."
—B.R.