certain taboo word from a wall in his sister's school. As of 1951 this word had scarcely ever appeared in print in the United States, and never in a book of such popularity. Within a decade, the novel had been translated into at least seventeen languages (now it is up to thirty-five), of which only the following, in that early period, trans lated the taboo phrase, "Fuck you", into an equally force ful equivalent: Swedish, Danish, French, Spanish (Buenos Aires), Hebrew and Korean. The Czechs compromised with kurvo . The following translations used euphemisms, dashes or initial letters: Dutch, German, Norwegian, Finnish, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, Polish, Russian, Estonian, Georgian and Japanese. I took the trouble to look up this in formation, because I, along with many other American high school teachers, got fired (in my case in 1960) for assigning Catcher to my English classes. It was precisely that one taboo phrase that made the novel unacceptable to school and city authorities. Kolia's sudden awareness of Alesha's discomfort is perhaps an example of Grushen'ka's "little onion", thus linking him to one of the most important motifs in the novel. There is the further echo, perhaps, of Father Zosima's brother who died young. It is of more than incidental interest that the anonymous nineteenth-century Way of a Pilgriim (in the translation of R. M. French) has been continuously in print ever since Salinger gave it a place in "Franny." The additional motif of the ducks in Central Park can be related to