Though I began to publish fiction in 1959, it was not until 1973,

that I risked my first foray into direct statement, unprotected by

masks of fictional characters and voices. I have left these essays and

short pieces as they originally appeared except for changes to omit

duplications of reference or to clarify the intention of the writing,

but without bringing them up to date with books or opinions that

arrived at a later time. And without, also, mitigating extravagances

of younger days. Did I really want, as in one despairing essay of

twenty years ago, to compare the medieval blood libel against Jews

with Orthodox Judaism s barring and isolating of women from

ritual observance? I might not use such language now, but feel no

better disposed toward either ancient insult carried forward to a

presumed modernity. Sometimes I m as moved to rail against mo-

dernity for truckling to transience as against orthodoxies for in-

transigence.

In 1976 I wrote about a collection of letters of an assi~nilated

German half-Jew, Peter Schwiefert, who, in the hell of the

Holocaust era in which he perished, resolved the wholeness of his

identity. This remarkable act of reclamation of a lost work of poet-

ry and truth was accomplished by its editor, the then-unknown-to-

America Claude Lanzmann. A decade later, Shoah, Lanzmann s

film documentary of surviving Holocaust victims, their tormen-

tors, and their witnesses, burst upon our consciousness. Never

have I seen the works linked, but I believe these two categories of

the murdered--the lonely, fleeing individual and the abandoned,

enslaved multitude--belong together.

Leaving the essays more or less as they are makes it possible to

keep faith with the journey of discovery that nonfiction writing can

be. In that sense, many of the essays make up a memoir as well, an

account of persons, places and ideas visited and lived with in the