Manès Sperber

Acclaimed as one of the most vivid and evocative autobiographies of the century, Manes Sperber’s trilogy All Our Yesterdays concludes in this final volume, whose narrative spans four decades - beginning in 1934 with his release from Nazi imprisonment in Berlin to his creative literary and political life in Paris, where he was a leading cultural figure until his death in 1984. Psychologist, storyteller, and essayist, Sperber illuminates many events and ideologies that shattered Europe before and after the outbreak of World War II. Through the eyes of this eminent European intellectual and activist we witness the hostility between Croats and Serbs in Yugoslavia, the abortive workers’ uprising in Vienna, and Stalin’s show trials. We also see Sperber’s increasing disillusionment and eventual break with the Communist party. Alongside first-hand accounts of those dark days in Europe, and his painful postwar visits to his former homes in Germany and Austria, Sperber includes intriguing portraits of numerous friends who include Raymond Aron, Alfred Doblin, Arthur Koestler, Andre Malraux, and Anna Seghers.

A picture of the Communist underground in Europe is woven around three leaders, who have begun to doubt.

Originally written in German, this trilogy is described in Whittaker Chambers: A Biography by Sam Tanenhaus: "The high point in Paris was meeting the novelist Manès Sperber, one of the great survivors of Europe's terrible recent decades. His travail had taken him from a tiny Jewish village in Galicia to secret Comintern work in the 1920s, to arrest and solitary confinement in a Nazi prison cell after the Reichstag fire of 1933, thence to Paris. In his thousand-page trilogy, Like a Tear in the Ocean, written during the occupation, Sperber memorialized torments endured, not imagined. He was now as dogmatically anti-Communist as Chambers." Sperber was born on 12 December 1905 in Zabłotów near Kolomea, in the Austrian Galicia (today Zabolotiv, Ukraine). Sperber grew up in the shtetl of Zabłotów in a Hasidic family. He was the son of David Mechel Sperberand the older brother of Milo Sperber born 1911, who was to become an actor in Britain. In the summer of 1916 the family fled from war to Vienna, where Sperber who, having lost faith, at 13 had refused to do his bar mitzvah, joined the Jewish Hashomer Hatzair youth movement. There he met Alfred Adler, the founder of individual psychology, and became a student and co-worker. Adler broke with him in 1932 because of differences in opinion about the connection of individual psychology and Marxism. In 1927 Sperber had moved to Berlin and joined the Communist Party. He lectured at the Berliner Gesellschaft für Individualpsychologie, an institute for individual psychology in Berlin. After Hitler had taken power Sperber was taken to jail, but was released after a few weeks on the grounds that he was an Austrian citizen. He emigrated first to Yugoslavia and then in 1934 to Paris where he worked for the Communist International with Willi Münzenberg. In 1938 he left the party because of the Stalinist purges within the party. In his writing he started to deal with totalitarianism and the role of the individual within society (Zur Analyse der Tyrannis). In 1939 Sperber volunteered for the French Army. After the defeat, he took refuge in Cagnes, in the so-called "zone libre" (free zone) of France, and had to flee with his family to Switzerland in 1942, when the deportation of Jews started in that zone too. Manès Sperber is the author of a novel trilogy: Like a Tear in the Ocean: A Trilogy, (1949–1955) mirroring his life. The three books making up the trilogy: The Burned Brumble (Vol. 1) The Abyss (Vol. 2) Journey Without End (Vol. 3)