East of Time Read Online Free PDF

the great masters who gazed down upon me questioningly from the brown shelves brimming with books.
    On one occasion I had the good fortune, due to the scarcity of space around the little tables, to sit and overhear a hushed conversation between two well-read men, perhaps scholars, one as thin as a reed with a voice as soft as a mouse’s whisper, the other on the corpulent side and rather huskily spoken.
    â€˜Sense and simplicity are the most essential thing about writing,’ the thin one remarked. ‘As Chekhov said, one should write so that no reader needs any explanation from the author.’
    â€˜Yes, but we cannot reject intricacy and ambiguity out of hand,’ his husky companion replied. This was more to my liking.
    â€˜Of course we can’t. The way I see it, however, a book written with simple clarity exemplifies a greater virtue, and therefore makes a more valuable contribution to the restoration of the human spirit—’
    â€˜Speaking of restoration,’ the other man interrupted, ‘I just purchased, from an antiquarian dealer, a book of short stories published in the late eighteenth century. Its title-page is torn out, so I don’t know who the author was. One of the stories concerns a Christian mission somewhere in the north of South America. Several of its members encounter, in the Amazon jungle, a hungry, injured savage who has never heard of God. They take him in, feed him, and, after restoring his health, teach him civility and the Bible and instruct him in the ways of their God. But one night, as the moonlight spears the savage’sface, he awakens and without a word sets about slaying all the people within reach, screaming: “A curse on you for giving me this god!”’
    â€˜Wait a minute!’ the thin scholar exclaimed. ‘Isn’t that just a version of the Caliban myth?’
    â€˜I doubt it. Shakespeare’s message is all about language, not God. Anyway, my friend, we need to allow for a certain ambiguity on the part of the master, wouldn’t you say?...’
    Back home at dinnertime I sat in a daze, my head spinning, for I had understood only half of what the scholars had been debating. But when mother placed an extra slice of meat on each of our plates, I came to, and quickly realized that something festive was afoot. ‘What’s going on?’ I asked.
    â€˜We are honouring our new acquisition,’ father announced, and he produced the object in question — a hefty book with solid green covers and lettering embossed in gold. It was the Yiddish translation of Ignazio Silone’s Fascism .
    After reading out the introduction, father slid the volume into place on the improvised shelf of our modest library and, turning to me, said something I shall remember to the end of my days: ‘A slave to books,’ he said, ‘is a free man.’

    Â 
    Â  Comrade Tsap  
    Director of the well-known Scheibler & Groman textile factory and a prominent Communist in our town, Heinrich Tsap was a generous and likeable man. Tall, broad-shouldered, cleanshaven always, and dressed in a grey suit, white shirt and darkgrey tie, there was something summery about him, a lightness even in winter. His wife Friedl, a slender brunette, wore a white silk blouse, with a string of pearls around her swanlike neck. Their intelligent sixteen-year-old daughter Gretchen,with whom I often played, was like a thin green twig a head taller than I, and to my great disappointment had no breasts.
    Tsap wrote a column for one of the leading papers, in which he depicted Hitler as a silly huckster of evil. He was twenty years younger than my parents yet did everything possible to keep the friendship alive, not just out of fondness for my father, with whom he liked to sharpen his wits, but because he was in love with his own secretary Sarah, daughter of a neighbour of ours known as White Haskel. Sarah was a young woman who, in my opinion, would have been