Volume 28, Number 14 · September 24, 1981
Timerman and His Enemies
By Michael Walzer
Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number
by Jacobo Timerman, translated by Toby Talbot
Knopf, 164 pp., $10.95
'No one had to impose my enemies on me. I selected them myself. I didn't avoid them: I pointed them out, marked them, attacked them.' Jacobo Timerman is, by all accounts, a brave, irascible, and combative man. It is nevertheless not entirely true that he selected his enemies himself. As he learned in the prisons of Argentina, Jews don't yet have that historic privilege. His eloquent book reminds us again of how awful it is to be 'chosen'—by left-wing terrorists and right-wing policemen, by revolutionaries and generals. But it is true that Timerman embraced the battles that were imposed upon him, promptly and passionately, and then sought out others. He is a man whom we are likely to know best, whose political and moral stature we will most accurately estimate, if we consider the list of his enemies.
Review, 4526 words
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