Volume 12, Number 9 · May 8, 1969
Under Eastern Eyes
By Neal Ascherson
Native Realm
by Czeslaw Milosz
Doubleday, 300 pp., $5.95
Seesaw: Cultural Life in Eastern Europe
by Yorick Blumenfeld
Harcourt, Brace & World, 276 pp., $5.95
Polish Writing Today
edited by Celina Wieniawska
Penguin, 206 pp., $1.45
New Writing of East Europe
edited by George Gömöri, edited by Charles Newman
Quadrangle, 263 pp., $6.95
Poland, Eagle in the East
by William Woods
Hill & Wang, 272 pp., $6.50
Soviet-East European Dialogue: International Relations of a New Type?
by Nish Jamgotch Jr.
Hoover Institution Studies, 165 pp., $4.00
If one could get back to Wilno, one would perhaps understand everything. If only—and this thought must afflict many others who now write about Eastern Europe—one could be transported to that brilliant, polyglot little city as it was, say, thirty-five years ago, how much of the mystery which both swaddles and envenoms the relations of Poles and Lithuanians and Russians and Byelorussians and Jews would make sense at last! Europe, and in fact the world, is littered with puzzling fragments of that entity which was smashed and scattered from 1939 onward. There persists, of course, the city of Vilnius, capital of a Soviet republic, ruled by a very-muchless than independent Communist Party of Lithuania. Some Poles and some Jews still live there. Perhaps its citizens feel qualified relief that the decades of alarming uncertainty about whom the town belonged to have been settled, even if in such a glum manner. But 'Wilno,' the meeting-place where the attitudes of all these peoples to each other found such vivid expression, has gone.
Review, 2733 words
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