My Century (New York Review Books Classics)
Published years after Wat's death, this remarkable transcription of his taped memoirs sears the imagination. Like Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn, Wat records the life of a political prisoner with agonizing precision, texturing his recall with comic and compassionate portraits of his fellow prisoners and their guards. But Wat's genius lies beyond memorable evocation of place or even portraiture. His work is subtitled an "odyssey," and its true force transpires through the political and spiritual implications of his journeys among 13 Polish and Russian prisons during the 1930s and 1940s. Wat begins as a Communist and Jew and ends as an anti-Communist and Christian who still affirms his Jewishness. Above all, he defends his inner life against monstrous efforts to reduce it to time and trivia. Arthur Waldhorn, City Coll., CUNYCopyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.