6 Friday, October 21, 1983 • • • • Cheaper than MCI Cheaper than Sprint nationwide calling 24-hour long distance telephone service. 6-second billing lowest rates of any nationwide long distance co. registered with the F.C.C. 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. Wake Up Your Windows - Save up to 60% 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 in a wide selection of decorator colors .& patterns. All at big savings. Fabric Romans • Wallpaper • Decorative Shades • Woven Woods • Table Pads • Horizontal Blinds • Bali • Levolor • Vertical Blinds • Translucent & Blackout Shades • Laminated Shades • Ver- osol Shades • Mylar Shades. Verticals include Free covered headrails - Horizontals include Free va- lance. 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 WALLPAPER 25% OFF plus extra 10% when purchase is for 12 rolls or more from the same book. OLD ORCHARD Shopping Center Orchard Lk. Rd. at 15 Mile Rd. W. Bloomfield 626-2400 WINDOW SHADE CO. Mon. thru Sat. 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday till 8 p.m. offer expires Oct. 29, 1983 N.W. DETROIT No charge for freight or handling on Wallpaper, Horizontals, Verticals & Shades. 15150 W. 7 Mi. Rd. 3 Blks. E. of Greenfield 342-8822 Mon. thru Fri. 8:30 to 5, Sat. 9 to 3 / 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 NOW SHOWING Gandhi Tender Mercies Flash Dance Psycho II Stoker Ace Monty Python The Meaning of Life $35 Membership Fee $2.50 overnight $5 for4 Days VIDEO PLUS VIDEO PLUS AUDIO 19739 W. 12 MILE RD. at EVERGREEN SOUTHFIELD, MI 569-2330 6641 ORCHARD LAKE RD. (Old Orchard Mall) WEST BLOOMFIELD, MI 855-4070 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.