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Satirist Ehrenburg also leads his pantaloon pilgrim to some slapstick swipes at Communist literature of the period. Although all he knew about the subject was that "Leo Tolstoy had a handsome beard just like Karl Marx," the little tailor becomes an "inexorable" Marxist literary critic. As pundit of proletarian literature —which is what Ehrenburg himself became after he ended his Paris stay in 1940 and went home—Lasik writes a preface for a socialist realist novel about romance in a soap factory ("Dunja yielded to the beat of new life, and whispered, blushing slightly: 'You see. we have surpassed pre-war production figures. Sizzle soap, sizzle!'").
Biblical Stock Market. A one-day, Soviet-style marriage with a grim giantess (who loved him only for his living space) causes Lasik's political doom, and he is finally forced to take it on the lam westward, one jump ahead of the secret police. The rest of Lasik's nonstop global pratfall is something of an anticlimax—but not to Lasik himself. In Germany he is delighted to find that "everyone around him spoke Yiddish, though in a slightly imperfect way." In his lunatic vision, the Weimar Republic becomes a memorable cartoon—rather as if George Grosz had been a Disney animator. On a diet of zwieback, Lasik sits in a druggist's window advertising the shocking effects of not drinking cod liver oil; later he understudies for a circus monkey. Small wonder that when he wants to invoke God he swears "in the name of all that is being ridiculed."
The outrageous odyssey continues in France and Britain, but Author Ehren burg would have been wise to recognize that satire on those countries is best left to natives. He does better in what the Soviets had taught Roitschwantz to call "that criminal country, Palestine." By now, he is a "miserable leaf chased by a hundred-year-old storm," his "body a passport," a palimpsest of bruises, and he is on his way to his 19th jail. In Palestine he finds a people who "wanted to organize a stock market in a Biblical manner," Jews beat other Jews for smoking on the Sabbath, and he cannot understand the dirty songs in a nightclub because, in a phrase of desperate pathos, "in Hebrew he could only pray."
By this time the reader is ready to pray with him, and to wonder why a man like Ehrenburg, who could swear so eloquently against everything that is ridiculous in sacred Soviet institutions, should have been a willing Communist straight man for the last 30 years. Perhaps the answer lies in Ehrenburg's epitaph for his hero: "Rest in peace, poor Roitschwantz! You will not dream any longer of justice, or of a piece of sausage." Ehrenburg may simply have settled for the piece of sausage.
*The Communists early adopted Spartacus, leader of the Roman slave uprising in 73 B.C.. as one of their own. In the turbulent aftermath of World War I, German Communists were known as Spartacists. Among them was Party Leader Rosa Luxemburg, shot for revolutionary activities by the German republican government in 1919.