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 is embedded in an almost unknown novel, unpublished in the Soviet Union, called The Stormy Life of Lasik Roitschwantz, which Ehrenburg wrote in 1927 when he had taken a leave of absence from Communist Russia and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.