Introductory Note

Years before he articulated the dichotomy between being and having, Fredy consciously chose to have little. His aspiration to be much was initially expressed either in Faustian terms or using a humanist vocabulary which applauded the self-realization of the individual. Alert to ways in which conventional attitudes and institutional restrictions stifle the individual, Fredy saw himself in a social context and understood that his own self-realization was inseparable from that of his contemporaries. Even while railing against their acceptance of social fetters which gives life to repressive institutions, he had no ambition to be in a position to tell others what to do with their lives. A crucial part of his own vision for a meaningful life was that every individual have the opportunity to realize his or her creative potential.

With a view to changing institutions and the society in which he lived, Fredy devoted a good part of his fifty years to a study of philosophy, economics and history but his desire for change was incompatible with any theory which allowed that an authoritarian regime might be appropriate under certain circumstances or for certain populations. He sought to expose and discredit inhibiting institutions and hoped the collective efforts of his contemporaries would succeed in dismantling the institutions, thereby enlarging everyone’s scope for self-realization.

In the days when we lived in a rooming house near Columbia University in New York City, Fredy used his own words — and spoke in the present tense — to express the sentiments that William Wordsworth put this way:

I began

To meditate with ardour on the rule

And management of nations; what it is

And ought to be; and strove to learn how far

Their power or weakness, wealth or poverty,

Their happiness or misery, depends

Upon their laws, and fashion of the State. O pleasant exercise of hope and joy!

For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood

Upon our side, we who were strong in love!

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very Heaven!

Fredy was too conscious of the recent suffering imposed on millions of human beings to aspire to “bliss” in the contemporary world, but, like the poet, felt that he and the “auxiliars” strong in love would be mighty enough to root out many of society’s fetters. The challenge exhilarated him; his confidence was persuasive to me and to others.

Fredy did not consider generous sentiments toward fellow beings to be unusual; he attributed a comparable goodwill to his associates and assumed their commitment was equal to his. Though not prone to exaggerating his or other individuals’ influence on world events, he nevertheless viewed a person’s chosen activities in a large social context. He scrutinized his own choices closely, wanting them to be exemplary.

My original intent in writing this memoir was to trace Fredy’s intellectual history, his changing views on self-realization. But the events of his life, his chosen activities and his friends had such an enormous influence on his views that I concentrated on biographical facts, convincing myself that this account would contribute to an understanding of Fredy’s intellectual trajectory.

Fredy’s life was not a tragic one. If he had acute disappointments in his 51 years, he did not articulate them; whereas he frequently professed satisfaction with his choices. He never expressed regret about our decision not to have children nor was he envious of successful professionals, either of their activity, possessions or prestige. Fredy liked the role of social critic and saw himself as part of a long and admirable tradition. Since he never admitted the possibility of a society that would not need criticism, he hoped his insights would contribute to the efforts of other dissidents.

The frequent references I make to Fredy’s essays and novels may seem fragmentary to individuals who have not read his works. In general, I have assumed that the reader is familiar with much of Fredy’s writing and I have not attempted t0 analyze or describe texts that are currently available. A list of his written works can be found on page 143.

My thanks to Julia Beard, Geoff Hall and Peter Werbe who read the manuscript and gave me useful comments. My sister, Ruth Nybakken, who, like me, met Fredy in 1957, also read the manuscript. She found a lot to criticize and helped solve numerous problems. I regret that my writing skills do not always satisfy her standards. Ralph Franklin shared his knowledge of the graphic arts and also designed the cover, using a photo fumished by Carl Smith and a woodcut made by John Ricklefs.

I am grateful to Dolores Cherella and William Donovan who gave me loving hospitality and expert advice during many sojourns in the northern suburbs. Marilyn Gilbert and Jeff Gilbert, Fredy’s and my close friends since 1970, offered affection and encouragement on Detroit’s southwest side. The words and deeds of Mary Jane Shoultz and Federico Arcos brightened my life. My admiration and gratitude go to the dozens of creative individuals in “the Fifth Estate circle” with whom I shared, over the years, contestation and enjoyment in the Motor City. Some of the long-term participants are: Alan Franklin, David Watson, Marilyn Werbe, Marilynn Rashid, Peter Werbe and Ralph Franklin. To these six as well as to all the others, I apologize for the reductive label.

I also want to thank the many unnamed friends residing in Detroit, North America, Europe and Africa who lived part of these years with me and Fredy. He treasured their friendship and acknowledged its decisive impact on his life. I recognize it too and in these pages have tried to honor those who offered it. I should point out, nevertheless, that this is my memoir, not theirs.

— L.P.

One: The Family

Fredy, the first child of Martha, née Grünberg, and Henry Perlman, was born on August 20, 1934 in Brno, Czechoslovakia. The infant’s mother was 24, the father, 29; they had been married the previous October. The Hollywood movie star Fred MacMurray apparently was the source of the name given to the child. But “Fred” must have sounded rather ponderous, even alien, in the newly-established home, and “Fredi” became the accepted version of the infant Perlman’s name. (In Bolivia, when he started school, the boy was taught to spell his name “Fredy” and he retained this spelling throughout his life.) On October 30, 1937, in Bratislava, a second son, Peter, was born to Martha and Henry.

Czech was the language spoken in the Perlman home; both parents were equally fluent in German. Martha had attended school when classes were conducted in Czech, while Henry’s schooling had been during the final years of the Austro-Hungarian regime when instruction was in German. Henry also spoke Yiddish. In the decades ahead, when they lived in Bolivia and the United States, both Martha and Henry became fluent in Spanish and English. They spoke to each other and the children in the language of the country in which they lived, although Henry frequently employed German or Czech phrases when he had difficulty in expressing himself.

Fredy was his mother’s son. Both liked and disliked the same foods; he shared her penchant for silly jokes, had similar ailments. From Martha he learned about her youth, what she studied and the prizes she won in “cooking school”; (something like “finishing school”), about her sister and children, Fredy’s cousins. He was interested in the family’s background; while in grade school, he collected and labeled the photographs his parents had brought from Europe.

Martha no doubt also told Fredy about his paternal ancestors who came from a less affluent milieu, Fredy’s patemal grandfather having emigrated to Czechoslovakia from Poland. But Henry was the one who described the poverty of his childhood and his father’s lack of economic skills. The oldest of four children, Henry had been obliged to assume the family responsibilities that his father had refused. Henry had a single explanation for his father’s shortcomings: Fredy’s grandfather had kept his nose in the Talmud and had considered prayers and erudition more important than the family’s well-being. (Before Fredy was twenty, both he and his father recognized that Fredy’s chosen path was closer to the grandfather’s than to the father’s.)

As a youth, Henry rejected all religious affiliations and, as far as I know, avoided connections with Jewish institutions throughout his life. Henry became a businessman, initially a representative for a European firm. He traveled a good deal in Central Europe and became familiar with the region. In the 1930s he opened a business of his own. It was a small clothing factory which employed ten or twelve workers. Economic geography was one of the few subjects on which Fredy and his father had non-controversial discussions. Henry could name the capitals of twentieth-century nation-states, knew the history of Europe and was well informed about resources, languages and religions in many parts of the world.

Unlike Martha who had a sentimental, dreamy side to her character and who was a discerning judge of people, Henry rarely deviated from a businessman’s interpretation of the world. He judged his profession to be fundamental to social harmony and, if challenged, insisted that he was fulfilling an essential function by transferring goods from producer to consumer. All his energy was directed to his commercial enterprise. His inflexibility was sometimes hard for Martha to take and she resisted by being whimsical, complaining about her health, and objecting to the unvaried routine. She was a meticulous housekeeper who spent part of each day cleaning the house or apartment. As the only woman in a household with three males, she sometimes played the role of silly, “ignorant” female. But in fact, she served as an astute business partner to her husband. Although their post-Czechoslovakia enterprises were extremely modest, Martha’s judgments were invaluable to their success.

As I observed the domestic dramas which unfolded during our visits with Fredy’s parents, my sympathy initially lay with Henry. His opinions seemed sensible and I appreciated his firmness and organized approach (since my family home was always quite anarchic, with all activities and schedules called into question each day). But I came to see that the organization was just rigidity and the reasonable approach was nothing more than following long-established precedents. Once, as we were entering a cafeteria for a meal, Henry warned all of us to beware of choosing something unfamiliar, “You can’t be sure what’s in some of the things you see here.” (Fredy proceeded to choose hominy, okra and a dish with a fluorescent sauce.) Another time in a discussion about socialism, Henry sought to clinch his argument by denouncing Lenin who, when he died, didn’t leave his wife so much as a pair of shoes. “Impossible to take seriously the theories of such a man!”

When Fredy came to read Wilhelm Reich’s analysis of the individual armored against his own nature, Fredy saw that his father fit Reich’s prototype. In many of his own texts Fredy debunked his father’s principles, such as: the rule-follower will be rewarded; the non-conformist is a threat to society; all other concerns are secondary to economic security. Rebellion against his father did not preoccupy Fredy or structure his choices, although it was clear to both that the son continued to reject the father’s way of life.

It was less clear to Henry whether his second son, Peter, accepted or rejected the precepts offered him. Pete’s choices fit into no mold that the father understood: He played baseball, was indifferent to books, had numerous, constantly-changing friends, traveled around the country to attend sports events, ridiculed his parents’ grammatical errors and their accent, made jokes about everything. From his youth, Pete was a typical American, a role he took seriously and carried out with gusto and success.

While attending the University of Kentucky, Pete was president of the YMCA and the student governing body. Fredy thought his brother had the personality and the skills to become a professional politician, but Pete did not follow this path. Rather, he concentrated his efforts on becoming a successful and nationally recognized trial lawyer. Martha and Henry were proud of Pete’s achievements, appreciated and loved Pete’s wife Lana and their three daughters, but were conscious that their “old world” background distanced them from the fashionable, consumer-oriented lifestyle practiced by Pete and his family.

Fredy and Pete remained on friendly terms even though they rarely saw each other and didn’t correspond. Fredy was awed by his brother’s abilities to please people and did not judge harshly Pete’s eagerness to be liked. He observed that Pete, in all social exchanges, used his ability to empathize with and please the person he was talking to; his responses seemed automatic. Fredy wondered if Pete had a coherent perspective of his own. Fredy’s views were both fixed and coherent; unlike Pete, he was always eager to propound them.

Neither Fredy nor Pete felt an obligation to make choices their parents would approve of. When he was eighteen, Fredy left his parents’ home and supported himself economically. He proudly returned the occasional gifts of money which they offered him.

Two: Reluctant Emigrés

An affection for Czechoslovakia remained a common bond between Fredy and his parents. Sometimes on visits to Cincinnati the four of us would sing Czech songs, among them the national anthem. The songs and words evoked nostalgic memories. Henry often cried. Although he considered himself an American and praised American “know-how,” I think he had regrets for the life he might have led in Czechoslovakia, the life of the upstanding Central European citizen, fluent in the region’s languages and recognized for his contribution to society.

Martha felt more comfortable in American society than her husband did, but when comparing conventions of everyday life to those in Czechoslovakia, she often judged American ones to be inferior. Martha’s appreciation of European comforts and habits was restrained, however. The people who practiced the ways she approved of also permitted the madness that prevailed for a decade. Martha left Czechoslovakia as a young woman of 28, and never again heard from her mother, sister, nephew or niece, victims of the mass murderers who had been nurtured in a society which prided itself on a superior European culture.

It was Henry who chose emigration. In 1939, with their two children, both under five years of age, he and Martha left Czechoslovakia by train. Taking money out of the country was prohibited, but they did it illegally, sewing it in coat linings.

Later that year, with neither a visa nor a specific destination, the Perlman family took a boat from France to Panama. Henry visited embassies there, but none was issuing immigration visas. Finally, an official at the Ecuadorian embassy, acting as representative for another South American republic, offered to sell Henry an immigration visa to Bolivia.

Fredy liked to describe the arrival of his family at the Bolivian border. The border guards studied the paper Henry handed them. Apparently they couldn’t read what was written on it, but they saw an embossed seal and were satisfied that the bearer was worthy of crossing the border. Henry’s brother and two sisters, heeding their older brother’s advice, emigrated a few weeks later. They and their spouses also made Bolivia their home.

Henry settled his family in the country’s second city, Cochabamba, in those days a small town where chickens were kept in court yards, other animals roamed the streets and the Quechuas came from the highlands to sell produce at the marketplace. Bolivia was not the “America” Henry sought for himself and his family, but since he was unable to get a visa for the United States, he opened a small store in Cochabamba, prepared to wait for the end of the war when he expected his U.S. immigration request to be granted.

Fredy later referred to Spanish as his “first language” but between four and eleven he spoke and understood German and Czech as well. There was a fairly large European community in Cochabamba. It was not exclusively a Jewish group although all shared anti-fascist sentiments. At the frequent picnics and gatherings for festive occasions, people played accordions, sang and danced. Fredy had vivid memories of one such occasion when he was chased by a llama.

In preparation for the hoped-for move to the United States, the parents sent their sons to a school which featured an American teacher. (Fredy remembered the teacher but, except for a few songs, didn’t remember learning much English.) The school was private and secular. While a student there, Fredy won a prize for correctly identifying a number of classical musical themes. He also learned the multiplication tables; the Spanish version always seemed more natural to him.

In 1945, the awaited visas were granted and the four Perlmans took a Grace Line freighter to the United States. They were obliged to disembark at the first U.S. port — an inauspicious one, Mobile, Alabama. The Bolivian peso had been repeatedly devalued, so by 1945 the dollar sum Henry got when he sold his Cochabamba store was a pittance. Henry had begun studying English before their arrival, flirt discovered with dismay that he could understand nothing of the language spoken around him. He succeeded in finding work in Mobile ° but, whether by a local resident’s ignorance or perverse sense of humor, he was hired as a salesman in a downtown department store. When customers approached him to ask where certain items were located, Henry was humiliated to have to admit that he couldn’t even understand the questions. Decades later he could treat the experience with some detachment: “I didn’t know if they were asking for toilet paper or sandpaper.”

Discouraged about career prospects in Mobile, Henry took his family to New York City. Here, especially on the lower east side of Manhattan, he found people with whom he could converse and who willingly helped him get established in American commercial life. His first endeavor was exceedingly modest — a “candy store” in Brooklyn. He and Martha sold comic books, ice cream, soda pop and candy to the neighborhood residents, mostly the youth. Henry called the adolescents “hoodlums” because they teased him, called him familiarly by his first name and laughed at his difficulties with English. Martha was extremely unhappy here, regretting the comforts and more civilized clientele they had known in Europe and Bolivia.

In less than two years, Henry sold the candy store, the family moved to a home in Queens and the parents operated a variety store in the fast-growing suburb of Hollis, Long Island.

Fredy’s companion and closest friend in Queens was a boy Fredy’s parents disapproved of. The principal activity the two youths shared was bicycling down the newly-laid runways of Idlewild — later Kennedy — airport, but Sonny was frequently “in trouble.” There were accusations that he stole bikes from the school parking lot. Many of Sonny’s confidences and escapades found their way into Letters of Insurgents in the character of Ron. Already in the 1940s. Fredy told Sonny he would write a book about him.

Fredy attended public schools in New York City. In the fall of 1948 he became a ninth grade student at Brooklyn Technical High School. To get to and from school, he had to spend two hours a day on the subway and bus.

When Fredy was fifteen, he and his family moved to Lakeside Park, Kentucky, a suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio. Martha and Henry bought a large variety store which they operated from 1949 to 1966. In those years, the high school Fredy attended was a melting-pot for students coming from a Baptist/Christian, essentially rural, background and students from a more urban milieu. The new environment was quite different from metropolitan New York, but Fredy made efforts and was successful at integrating himself. He worked on the school newspaper, played cymbals in the band and won a television set as a prize in a state essay contest (“I speak for democracy”) writing as a refugee from Europe’s racism. Coming from an uppertrack NYC high school, he was scornful of Lakeside Park’s teaching staff. He obviously spoke Spanish better than the Spanish teacher and Fredy claimed that the math teacher (whose more important position was Coach) couldn’t even copy the problems correctly from the book.

Viewed from the 1980s, high school social life in the 1950s was quite innocent. There was almost no alcohol consumption and certainly no drugs. But it was still a time of personal tragedies. One of Fredy’s fellow students committed suicide because his love for a beautiful girl in their class was rejected.

In the Kentucky setting where urban and rural outlooks came together, religious affiliation was a central part of one’s identity. For part of a year Fredy attended meetings of a youth group at a Cincinnati temple. He was the only member of his family to associate with a Jewish organization. In later years he justified his brief affiliation by explaining that the rabbi, leader of the group, was a peace and civil rights activist.

When he was sixteen, Fredy got a car. (Not until several years later did either of his parents learn to drive.) He was part of a circle of friends who drove around in cars and visited each other’s homes where they listened to records; Stan Kenton and Bartok recordings were ones Fredy mentioned as favorites.

Fredy used his car to get to Cincinnati where he worked parttime as stock boy for a wholesale merchant. It was here that Fredy learned the “professional” packing skills that he continued to apply in the Detroit print shop and in sending out Black & Red publications. In this and subsequent jobs, Fredy was a conscientious employee rather than the inherently rebellious worker he admired among his associates and depicted approvingly in his writing. He did not take advantage of opportunities to cheat his employer of time or goods.

Except for the academic job which he held a decade later, Fredy accepted the structure and the rules of the workplace. In fact, he often used techniques learned on the job in his own activities as when, for example, he packed books, washed dishes or organized a routine at a printing press. Fredy nevertheless was no “ideal worker.” He scomed the person whose identity was defined by and limited to his or her work function. Fredy never subordinated his needs to the “needs” of the employer and he refused to tolerate any superior who practiced arbitrary authority. A significant number of Fredy’s jobs ended with abrupt resignations.

Three: Fredy Leaves Home

In 1951, against his parents’ wishes, Fredy went to New York to spend the summer in Queens with Sonny, his “hoodlum” buddy. He worked in a fiberglass factory and discovered the hazards associated with industrial production as well as workers’ acquiescence to their situation.

In the fall he returned to Kentucky and graduated from high school the following spring. His first year in college was at a state school in Morehead, Kentucky. He had a tuition scholarship from the college; to pay living expenses he took part-time jobs as a janitor and as an assistant in the school’s public relations office. Morehead was in backwoods Kentucky and Fredy humorously described his initial difficulties in communicating with some of the local inhabitants.

The professors who influenced him most were Europeans: a dynamic Italian woman who taught French and a German professor of history; the latter provided Fredy with a model of a multi-faceted intellectual. This man invited students to his home; in addition to listening to the professor’s complaints about provincial Morehead, the student guests listened to classical music. Both European teachers found the small-town environment restrictive and Fredy came to share their view. In the summer of 1953 he headed for Los Angeles by car.

Fredy enjoyed telling about his arriving broke in Los Angeles and going to sleep on the beach after spending his last 25 cents on coffee and cigarettes. After finding a gardening job which furnished room and board, he went to the school newspaper office at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). His arrival caused a stir among some of the worldly-wise staff members. They were impressed by the courage and audacity of a naive youth from Kentucky who just showed up in the Daily Bruin office.

Fredy’s two years in Los Angeles had an enormous influence on his future outlook; this dramatic period continued to serve as a point of reference. Within days of his arrival he became a UCLA student and joined the staff of the Daily Bruin. He took courses given by prestigious professors, but whatever he learned in classes was filtered through his experiences on the newspaper.

Los Angeles, and particularly UCLA, was one of the theaters for the McCarthy witch-hunts of the 1950s. The repression threatened the very circles Fredy found stimulating. During the term when Fredy was copy editor, editorials in the Daily Bruin ridiculed the patriots’ paranoia and defended constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties. Interviews with professors under attack by the witch-hunters gave the accused a chance to defend their views. Anti-communist faculty members were also interviewed; one of them attributed all the country’s and the university’s problems to “Baltic Jews.” In the smear campaign mounted by the Los Angeles newspapers, the Daily Bruin was frequently cited as proof that UCLA had become “the little red schoolhouse.” In December 1954 the university regents imposed new regulations on the newspaper; the staff members who refused to accept the directive were fired. All five editors as well as the majority of their co-workers denounced the restrictions and left the paper.

In fact, none of the five Bruin editors were spokesmen for a radical party or ideology. They disagreed on many issues, but they all had a libertarian perspective and were not easily intimidated. They scrupulously adhered to the principles of responsible joumalism while finding it natural to use their wit to debunk the growing anti-communist fervor and their writing skills to warn of its implications. When the directive was imposed, these articulate and intelligent students sought an appropriate response. One response was to organize a large funeral cortege mourning the death of the Daily Bruin, an act which anticipated some of the creative demonstrations of a decade later. Another response was to publish an alternative newspaper which conformed to their principles. This activity created even stronger bonds between the dozen or so individuals who had previously published the Daily Bruin. The months of intense activity in early 1955 remained a decisive juncture for most of the participants in the Observer project. In Letters of Insurgents, written twenty years later, Fredy tried to recreate the anxiety and concerns of this period.

These experiences gave him insights about the gulf that separated him and his comrades from the fraternity and sorority milieu (these students refused to accept the free Observer handed out on street corners facing the campus entrance) and about the potency of established institutions. The formerly respected journalists, providers of information to the student body, abruptly found themselves to be outsiders, criminals to a few, cranks to many. As proud as they were of themselves for being true to their principles, the ousted staff realized that the Observer could not compete with the Daily Bruin. Besides losing their salaries as staff members, they had to subsidize the Observer’s publication and do without the university’s equipment and resources. None of the participants regretted their defiance of the university’s directives but they may not all have drawn the same conclusion as Fredy who thereafter consciously shunned institutional roles — suspicious of those who wielded institutional authority and hostile to those who respected it.

Looking back, Fredy had a few regrets about the Observer experiences. There were five editors — all of them men. The hierarchy of a conventional newspaper staff was never questioned. The women participants may have worked just as hard, but they received less recognition. One of the tasks delegated to non-editors was the distribution of the paper, a task which may not always have been pleasant. The typing of the paper, however, was done by one of the editors — Fredy.

While in Los Angeles, Fredy learned to play the guitar; he was motivated by the folk singing and folk dancing sessions he attended. In his circle of friends there were a number of Communist Party members. The erudition of some of them and the coherence of their arguments impressed him. But he scorned their adherence to a party.

For a time, Fredy shared an apartment with the son of CP members. His roommate’s parents with whom he became well acquainted were quite unlike his own; he was enchanted by their enthusiasm and joyfulness. After associating with them, he considered it essential that a political commitment be combined with enjoyment of life.

To pay the expenses of an apartment and maintain his car, Fredy worked part time as a dishwasher in a Mexican restaurant. He learned to prepare Mexican dishes from the chefs at this restaurant; in future years his cheese enchiladas would be acclaimed by many guests.

During his last year at UCLA Fredy lived in a campus co-op. As editor of the co-op’s mimeographed newspaper, he often vociferously opposed the regulations that the university tried to impose on the autonomous student organization. The majority of the students who shared the facilities worried that their careers could be jeopardized if the group resisted university guidelines, and Fredy’s call to defiance was usually rejected. The compromises and toadyism of some of his fellow co-opers disappointed and distressed him. He already considered himself a “radical”, and his associates did not disagree.

Fredy’s first serious love was a young woman who worked on the Bruin and the Observer. But she never cormnitted herself and Fredy always had rivals. This experience could be the source for the poignant accounts of thwarted love in his stories (Letters of Insurgents, The Strait). Years later, in the 1970s, Fredy’s mother had a photo from Fredy’s UCLA days propped up in her bedroom — a photo she thou ht was of me and Fredy. I was shocked to note my resemblance to Jean Fox.

Unrequited love may have been partially responsible for Fredy’s departure for Mexico City in 1955. Disappointment with the Observer was certainly a factor. He went alone by car and sought new friends. In Mexico City he lived in a pensión and associated principally with South American students. Not having a B.A. degree, he could not enroll at the University of Mexico City. During his months in Mexico, he read Latin American history and fiction, he regained facility in speaking Spanish and got acquainted with Mexico City. Having a car, he had a few contacts with people in villages too.

In December 1955, Fredy returned to the United States and enrolled at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. In one semester and a summer term he completed requirements for a B.A. degree. He had to be a conscientious student since one of the Dean’s conditions for graduating in 1956 was that Fredy get A’s in all his courses. He succeeded.

In the fall of 1956 Fredy went to New York City where he enrolled as a graduate student in English at Columbia University. He had decided to suspend political commitments for a certain time while he explored the offerings of a major university. With his characteristic intensity, Fredy immersed himself in classes and books; when I met him in January 1957 he had no friends in New York.

The ivory tower perspective of the literature professors antagonized him immediately. He had no means of attacking it and his isolation meant that he wasn’t even able to communicate his criticisms to others. William York Tindal, a T.S. Eliot scholar, particularly angered him; Fredy accused him of looking only at the form and not at the content of the poet’s work.

After a few weeks at Columbia, Fredy realized that the literature professors were not providing him with what he was seeking from the ivy-covered walls and he started attending lectures in many other fields. Courses in philosophy and political science were the ones that particularly stimulated him. This was the material he was hoping to find and he expressed a Faustian urge to familiarize himself with the entire corpus of Western thought.

At 23, Fredy knew he had already chosen an unconventional path His judgment of the “mediocrity” of UCLA comrades in a letter to Marty McReynolds, a close friend from the Bruin and Observer projects, elicited a lengthy response. Excerpts from Marty’s self-analytic letter follow.

Dear Fredy, ... ...[I]t disgusts you to hear about the mediocritization of our old friends, but it only makes me a little sad. And partly because I have not yet qualified for their mediocrity and I envy them...I always have been pretty middle-class and provincial in my outlook and it wouldn’t be surprising if I end up more mediocre and middle-class than anybody, if I can make the grade. But right now I am identity-less...I’m not a Fredy with a task before him. And I’m not a mediocrity with his decisions behind him. I’m an indecision hovering between mediocrity and bum. It wouldn’t take too much for my natural lethargy to lead me into a sloth-like existence as some kind of bum, but my middle-class conscience would never let me enjoy myself that way. ... Remember the last Observer eddy board meeting? You said we had done what we could, and now it was up to someone else to do something. And I didn’t like your sad, resigned tone of voice which reminded me of the resignation-to-life which I sensed in the future for myself at least. I said even if we were going to be conformists the rest of our lives, we had stood up once and punched authority in the nose. I seem to see that talk more clearly now. You spoke for yourself, as events have turned out. You left that task to others and went on to something else. I spoke for myself and some of the others, as it now seems. People who spend their lives working to feed and clothe themselves and their hi-fis, but who once at least stood up and did something not in their own self-interest. But just because some people once thought and acted, I don’t think it’s necessarily justifiable to be disgusted when those people seem to “adjust,” “grow up” and knuckle down to conformity. What would you have them do? We are all animals, biological beings, and we respond to stimuli on the basis of what is inside of us. You have responded one way — for which you deserve no credit — and others have responded another way — for which they deserve no censure...Anyway, dammit, I wonder if all the mediocrities don’t represent a challenge to you and your course of action. You are pretty much incapable of being one of them, which is probably good, but it makes your position different from that of a person who could have happy conformity but chooses something else. I speculate that you would be miserable as a conformist, so you have made no choice, you have done only what you had to do. Others find that they would be miserable if they didn’t conform. Each of your positions challenges the other, and maybe that is why you talk about mediocrity in such fierce terms. I know damn well your position challenges mine. And however much I wish you success I will always feel twinges of displeasure as you achieve meaningful goals, even if I am pleased at the same time... “Mediocrity is not something given to us at birth...we choose it because we couldn’t or wouldn’t face the fact that we are not what we could be.” This hits me squarely. I am not what I could be. But, you know, that really means I am not what I could be IF I had drive, or IF I had direction or some other damn thing...If I turn out to be a typical mediocrity (distinguished only by an eccentric interest in Mexicana which is after all not unusual these days anyway), I may be disgusted with myself. But if I turn out to be satisfied that way, maybe I will stop writing to you and talking to people who remind me there is something else in life besides conformity... ... Look, I’m proud of you. I’m glad of you...Maybe in six months I will forget what I said and rationalize in an entirely different way, well, keep writing and find out. Marty

During his three years at Columbia, Fredy did not seek any political activists — on the campus or off. Nor did he reevaluate his political outlook which had evolved at UCLA. It lay dormant. Fredy expected to return to earlier, social, concems but he found this sojourn among the intellectuals to be challenging and engrossing. He admired the philosophers and social analysts whose works he was reading; his appreciation was not uncritical, however, and he constantly tried to pinpoint what in these theories was inadequate for a meaningful interpretation of the contemporary world.

Fredy and I met at the Columbia University Admissions Office in January 1957 where we both had part-time jobs. In February he was obliged to report to the military authorities to have an army physical examination. (In those years, all healthy males were required to serve for two years in the army.) Since his heart had been damaged by rheumatic fever when he was ten years old, Fredy was quite sure he would not pass the physical exam, but in case he should be accepted, he prepared himself to denounce the army and to refuse to sign the loyalty oath required of all recruits. There was no opportunity for the dramatic refusal. The army doctors noted Fredy’s heart condition after just a few minutes and sent him away.

Fredy returned to his job operating the Admission Office’s automatic typewriters. The conversations he and I began at work soon continued after hours. We did not actually share living quarters until January 1958, but nearly every evening and weekend we were together. We prepared and ate our meals at the Yorkshire rooming house on ll3th Street where I lived. Later we both lived there. One morning, before going to our aftemoon jobs at the Admissions Office, we went to the Manhattan City Hall and were legally married. This did not coincide with our move to live together. We both had misgivings about linking our lives in a conventional way; one of the main factors in our decision was a desire to be accepted by our parents. In any case, this change in our legal status was not known to anyone else and it was only after we went to Europe in 1963 that I started using Fredy’s last name.

We had only a handful of friends in the years at Columbia University. One was a musician friend of mine from high school and college days, an artistic and mystical violinist. Another friend was Zigrida Arbatsky who also worked at the Admissions Office. She and her Russian husband were both emigrés. Yury was a brilliant and outrageous man — a composer, religious philosopher, intellectual — who remained a misfit the American environment. He may not have been unique, but when I read Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin, I was certain the author had Yury Arbatsky in mind.

During three years of intensive study at Columbia University Fredy concentrated on the works of Western philosophers. He was particularly impressed by the political philosophers — Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, Hegel, Locke. He also attended courses in Russian intellectual history and Russian literature. A course on the sociology of literature given by Leo Lowenthal was esteemed by Fredy. Outside of classes he read many of the classics of European literature. Influential authors were Thomas Mann, Goethe, Ibsen, Strindberg, Sartre. Sometimes, especially on summer outings to the beach, we read plays aloud; and we went to performances of European plays. The sociology courses given Mills were for undergraduate males but Fredy attentively audited them. He was impressed by Mills’s harangues at the students as well as by the material covered. Mills was an enragé, searching for an outlet to his anger. In those quiescent days, Mills was remarkable for personally building his own home and for coming to class on a motorcycle. Mills clearly was trying to apply holistic principles to his daily life. Bringing his anger and quest to the “lectures” made them remarkable for Fredy, if not for the undergraduates (who didn’t know what to expect on the exams). At the end of the term Fredy approached Mills for advice on meaningful activity in this society. It now seems clear that Mills himself lwas searching for an answer to that question. The answer Fredy received — contact the American Friends’ Service Committee — was disappointing.

Fredy’s identification with the Faustian protagonist of so much literature led him to read many versions of the Faust story. He took a course in modern music and listened to classical music-recorded and live — — whenever possible. His musical tastes were colored to some extent by his political views. For example, he disliked Charles Ives’s compositions, not because of the dissonance or avant-garde techniques (he generally accepted both with an open mind), but because Ives had been a successful businessman. Fredy disapproved of the composer’s acceptance of capitalist society’s priorities and felt that by suspending creative activity while assuring economic security, Ives had put money before art.

He read and admired the novels and plays of Sartre and Camus and took a course in Existentialism given by R.D. Cumming, one of the professors whose course in political philosophy he had found valuable. Czeslaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind and Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon had a sobering impact on any enthusiasm he may have had for a benign regime headed by either a philosopher-king Or an omniscient party.

Fredy included science in his Faustian endeavor to acquaint himself with Western thought. During the months when Sputnik was in the headlines, we were both enrolled in courses in physics and calculus at the City College of New York.

One day Fredy abruptly quit his job at the Admissions Office. The Director, demanding certain tasks of Fredy, had made it clear that as operator of the typing machines, Fredy was no more than an extension of the office equipment. Fredy soon found another job as switchboard operator in a resident hotel. He worked the night shift, three times a week. The job had definite shortcomings, but provided several uninterrupted hours for reading. At his job during these months Fredy read Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History, a work he valued highly. Fredy often referred to the various non-Westem civilizations he had learned about from Toynbee, even though he disagreed with the historian’s Christian interpretation.

Four: The Unattached Intellectual in New York

In the summer of 1959 Fredy felt it was time to leave the university. On a motorscooter we set out on what became a three and a half month trip from New York City to the West Coast and back. We carried tent, sleeping bag, cooking utensils and clothes on the back of our Lambretta 125. Our maximum traveling speed (downhill) was 35 miles per hour. In 1959 the network of freeways had not yet been built but we would have avoided them even if they had been available.

In order to cross the continent twice we obviously had to spend several hours a day on the scooter. On this trip we saw the country, not cities or people; we usually chose secondary roads. Almost every night we slept in the tent and cooked supper over a wood fire at a campground or park. The weather was naturally important to us, and Fredy, the urban intellectual, learned to predict which clouds threatened to dump their contents on us.

Rain slowed us down, but didn’t deter us. In fact, we saw a good part of the Columbia River Valley through the rain. We were practically the only tourists in Yellowstone Park (where we rented a cabin due to the cold temperatures); other travelers avoided it because of an earthquake a week earlier. In two California parks — Yosemite and Sequoia — bears roamed the campgrounds at night. In the latter park, noises outside the tent woke us one October night when we were alone in a campground. It was a bear taking our clothing bag (which, through an oversight, contained an apple) from under a picnic table to the edge of the surrounding woods where he/ she neatly cut the bag along the zipper, took possession of the apple and disappeared.

Heading east out of the Grand Canyon, we drove into a blizzard and were rescued from highway hazards and the cold by a sympathetic man who was traveling to the eastern border of Arizona. He carried us in the cab of his pickup truck and the scooter in the back. In Texas we did not always find campgrounds. One night we stayed in a barn. The caretaker of this isolated ranch readily gave us permission to sleep there and in the morning prepared a generous breakfast for us. To eat it, Fredy and I shared the man’s single fork. Our host was more interested in talking than in eating and didn’t need silverware to drink his beer.

On Thanksgiving Day we arrived at my parents’ home in Iowa City with only pennies left. On a subsequent scooter trip we traveled through Wisconsin, Michigan’s upper peninsula, central Ontario, a corner of Quebec, Maine and rural New England. We retained from these travels an appreciation of the vastness and natural wonders of the continent.

Returning to New York in December 1959, Fredy felt he was ready to synthesize what he had learned from books, travel and experiences. We took an apartment on Henry Street on the lower east side of Manhattan. Residents of New York feel that their city is the center of the world. Fredy felt vital and ready to challenge the American Way of Life from the belly of the monster’s most important city.

Fredy hoped that his analysis of the ideological trappings and inequitable social relations would lead to the downfall of the profit-oriented, racist, militaristic rulers of the country. His project was to transmit a human-centered vision. In these days he counted heavily on the rationality of the individual who, when informed, would choose socially responsible alternatives rather than the selfish, nationalistic ones proposed and imposed by manipulative leaders. Arguments acquired from Erich Fromm and Lewis Mumford, as well as Mary and Charles Beard’s historical analysis of the United States, were incorporated in his critique of post-war American society. I.F. Stone’s Weekly kept him informed about the machinations of contemporary politicians. Fredy may already have read Marx’s Capital but I think any Marxist analysis he had in the years on Henry Street was limited to what came from his reading and assimilating The Communist Manifesto as well as from Monthly Review authors. Fredy had great respect for the books and articles of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy.

He read and saved all the New York Times. Looking back, this astonishes me since after 1963, I think he read no more than one newspaper per year. He listened to most of the United Nations debates. This was the period following the Cuban Revolution and the CIA-instigated coup in the Congo carried out after the radical African nationalist Patrice Lumumba was assassinated. Fredy accepted the U.N. speakers as legitimate spokesmen of their countries’ national interest and considered their debates to have an influence on international politics.

Fredy abandoned the study of science. Other concems were more pressing. He thought that if the political forms could be changed, the aims of science would be directed away from military ends and its integrity restored. He was appalled by the noxious ach1evements of science: nuclear weaponry and the outrages against natural processes documented in Robert Jungk’s Tomorrow is Already Here. Scientists’ subservience to military authority permitted the increasingly efficacious violence to be wielded more impersonally. Fredy read the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (a journal which first appeared in the early 1960s), hoping that scientists who contributed articles might provide a way to counter the baffling renunciation of responsibility. Fredy wanted scientists to retain control over uses to which their research was put. He believed these men and women would use it for less harmful ends.

In the three years we lived on the lower east side of Manhattan Fredy earned a subsistence income doing free-lance mimeographing and typing. This was bélféiéihé proliferation of quick-copy stores and Fredy found customers among the academic, religious and commercial residents in the area. Throughout most of the year he was able to deliver the copies by motorscooter.

We followed cultural events and went to museums, plays, concerts and films. Our modest income made restaurant meals the exception rather than commonplace. Both Fredy and I were content with our material situation, considering it appropriate that artistic and political bohemians live on the fringes.

The biggest change in our lives was that the isolation of the Columbia years ended. We had a growing circle of friends. They were concemed, vigorous individuals; many had creative interests. Besides his interest in printing and literature, Fredy grew to appreciate the efforts of musicians, painters and sculptors as well as practitioners of the theatrical arts.

Our neighbors on Henry Street were a young Swiss couple who had recently arrived in New York. Daily life in lower Manhattan did not conform to the glittering image of America projected abroad, and they had no trouble pointing to ways in which, compared to Europeans, Americans were impoverished. They were surprised that New Yorkers were so tolerant of the poor quality of food, the noise and dirt in the subway and the dismal urban landscapes. But the widespread fear of ideological deviation shocked them more than anything else. Claire worked in an office at the United Nations among people with somewhat cosmopolitan attitudes. But Jean-Jacques’s fellow workers, house painters earning the minimum wage, were afraid that Jean-Jacques, the newcomer who spoke with an accent unlike theirs, might not originate from the “free world.” They were relieved to learn that Switzerland belonged to “our” side.

Jean-Jacques earned money painting walls of apartments. As an artist, he assembled articles he found in trash heaps, juxtaposing inharmonious pieces in “objects” which he hoped would communicate his observations about the society in which they originated. Neither Jean-Jacques nor Claire was “political” when they came to the U.S. in 1961. Their interests were in film, art and literature. After living in New York for five years, their distaste for American society had grown enormously. The “political” statement with which they responded to their almost complete alienation was to emigrate to Cuba.

A friend from UCLA spent a lot of time with us in our first year on Henry Street. He had been a member of the Communist Party’s youth group, but after Khrushchev’s revelations in 1956, Gene had rejected communism and all political activity. This young man of 25 felt he had sacrificed career possibilities to militant activity during his student years, and he harbored deep resentment toward those who had “misled” him. In 1960 he turned from the attempt to overthrow bourgeois society to the study of Eastern religion, and his readings furnished him with arguments to justify his efforts to avoid worldly activities. Thanks to a sympathetic friend, he was eventually able to live as caretaker on a formerly elegant estate in upstate New York. Fredy’s depiction of this dropout-victim in Letters of Insurgents is perhaps unkind, but hardly exaggerated.

For an intense period lasting several weeks, Fredy and two friends, Saul Gottlieb and Frances Witlin, worked together formulating principles for a new political party. In their discussions, which often lasted through the night, they tried to resolve many of the dilemmas which arise when the choices of individuals conflict with an enlightened representative’s understanding of what is best for the society. They also discussed economic questions; their attempt to formulate a coherent program at least partially motivated Fredy’s later study of world resources. As far as I know, no outline or written conclusions remain from this collective undertaking.

Protest actions organized by people around the Living Theatre broadened the circle of friends and provided a sense of community. From 1947 until 1965 when they moved to Europe, the Living Theatre presented the most stimulating and relevant dramatic productions in New York (probably in the U.S.) and introduced works by B. Brecht, J. Gelber and W.C. Williams to a wide audience. The founders of the Living Theatre, Judith Malina and Julian Beck, were militant pacifists and spoke of themselves as anarchists. They were as proficient at civil disobedience actions as they were in theatrical endeavors. In 1955 they had been arrested for refusing to take shelter during an air raid drill. In 1962 the IRS closed their theater because they had withheld federal taxes.

Public demonstrations in the early 1960s focused on the frequent testing of nuclear weapons and the government’s continuing militaristic build-up. Quakers held vigils and called for the public to disavow U.S. policies. The Fair Play for Cuba Committee organized demonstrations; these were usually held at the U.N. and called for American and other national rulers to accept the Cuban leaders as their peers.

The most lively protests were those organized by the Living Theatre group. They raised broader social issues and civil disobedience was often part of the confrontation. Fredy joined Judith, Julian and others in a number of attempts to disrupt bourgeois society’s daily routine at the N.Y. Stock Exchange and in Times Square. Though small in numbers they felt they were communicating their views.

At one Times Square demonstration Fredy and dozens of others were arrested when they sat down in the street and disrupted traffic. After a grim night in jail, they were released on bond. Their trial was postponed a number of times and Fredy resented the time spent worrying about the outcome as well as the time spent in the courtroom — another form of legal harassment, he called it. One result of the delays was that Fredy became well acquainted with the three other defendants who appeared on the same docket. Months after the Times Square demonstration, they were given suspended sentences.

Many of the individuals attracted to Living Theatre activities — the transition generation between the Beats and the hippies — had rejected society’s norms to a much greater extent than Fredy had. Although he liked the people he met at these gatherings, he was not tempted to take them as models. Fredy thought a systematic analysis of the social and economic system was a prerequisite for fundamental change; the apolitical interests of many of these friends caused him to keep his distance.

His critique of the Quaker wing of the anti-war movement was more severe. These middle-class and often affluent professionals demonstrated against U.S. militarism but often defended institutions that Fredy considered repressive. At times they had a condescending attitude toward demonstrators like us who came from outside the Quaker tradition, as if to imply that our anti-military fervor was less genuine than theirs.

It was in Quaker circles that Fredy met John Ricklefs, a man of his age but with an entirely different background and history. From 1960 to 1962 John and Fredy collaborated on projects in New York, and they continued one of them in Belgrade; John and Fredy quickly became close friends and spent manyifhours together every day. They had long, discursive, eclectic discussions about appropriate means of communication and about economic geography, music, food and architecture. When they undertook a study of world resources, their discussions became more focused, but they tried to make the scope of their research all-inclusive.

John had grown up in Kansas. On graduation from the university as an architect, he became an ROTC officer in the air force and was assigned to the Security Air Command base in northern New York state. While there, he became disaffected with the military and realized that he would be unable to carry out his duties in an “emergency.” Communicating his disaffection to his superiors, an early discharge was negotiated.

John and his literary wife Margery, both vegetarians, came to Manhattan in 1960 where they transformed a loft on 24th Street into elegant living quarters. As a job, John prepared landscaping plans for an architect who designed parking lots and freeways. John was an artist too: he painted abstract expressionist canvases and made expressive wood sculptures, often depicting hands.

John and Fredy met at an opportune time for both. John was questioning many of the tenets which underlay his view of the world. Fredy’s articulate formulation of ideas, his knowledge of political philosophy and his intense desire to understand and change society made John want to emulate him. Fredy welcomed John’s insights about creativity and social planning, and he immediately incorporated John’s experiences into his analyses. Both John and Fredy had read and appreciated the books of Lewis Mumford when they met in 1960.

Fredy was a demanding friend, especially in those years. He did not want a disciple, but required consensus on many issues before work on a common project could proceed. He had inexhaustible energy when defending his views. In discussions he could always find apt analogies and cite historical precedents. He rarely used ridicule to argue against someone’s objections, but depended on his conviction that the force of his logic would prevail. Generally it did. Nevertheless, Fredy’s exceptional endurance rarely hindered his cause.

Fredy’s historical essay, The New Freedom: Corporate Capitalism, preceded the study undertaken with John. In it Fredy analyzes contemporary and traces inequities back to explicit intentions of the founding fathers. The essay uses Charles and Mary Beard’s economic history to emphasize the fact that the United States has been a class society from its origins. Fredy denounces Alexander Hamilton and his colleagues for cheating the yeommen and artisans of their share of social wealth. He points out that government and business have always worked together to further the interests of the rich and wellborn who, in the twentieth century, have become increasingly anonymoustheir administrative functions now being carried out by corporations. In The New Freedom, Fredy suggests that one remedy for the inequities, waste and militarism would be for the underclass (workers) to rise and assert their rights to manage the productive facilities and legislative institutions. The Cuban Revolution is offered as a reasonable response to an oppressive government.

John was an enthusiastic collaborator on The New Freedom, furnishing five large woodcuts in two or three colors, as well as dozens of smaller, one-color woodcuts. Once Fredy had mimeographed the 91 copies of the text (201 single-spaced typed pages), he and John imprinted the woodcuts by hand in John’s loft; they hung the pages on clotheslines to dry. Binding the book was another labor-intensive process. First the five sections were stapled, then taped together, and me woodprints attached at the juncture of the sections. Finally the cover and spine (with title) were glued. Binding a single book took a lot of time. My sister, Ruth Nybakken, often came to help us. As we worked, we listened to programs on WBAI, the newly-established non-commercial radio station.

In publishing his first book himself, Fredy intentionally avoided commercial media. He conceived of this work as a gift, not a commodity. In it’s opening pages, John and Fredy challenge the reader to widen the network of non-business communication. Fredy never revised these principles on transmitting written words; over the years he made the challenge in many forms — but usually less judgementally and with less urgency than in The New Freedom. Before the title page, one finds this note:

Reader, At the hazard of being dismissed by you we imprudently ask you to undertake certain obligations on receiving this book. Prudence, we feel, is not the proper response to impednding catastrophe which, if it is to be averted, had better be met with acute foresight, with critical appraisal, with courageous action. The book is addressed to what the author considers the critical problems of all humanity in our time. The problems are the current misery of mankind, and the threat of a genocidal war. The misery cannot be alleviated, nor the destruction averted, by men who are not conscious of thnreat or of its causes. The purpose of this book is to communicate the author’s understanding of these problems to readers. We feel convinced that such communication cannot be accomplished by a publishing network whose primary purpese is not communication but profit. In view of these considerations, we turn to you, reader, and ask you to make yourself responsible for the life or the death, the enjoyment or the misery, of all humanity. We ask this by placing a small task before you, a task which is not intended to be the end of your endeavors, but merely the cue which we hope will inspire you to devise far greater projects of your own. We do not ask you to agree with the analysis contained in this book, in whole or in part; but we do ask you to read the book, and to share at least our concern. We further ask you to share our concern over the lack of unfettered media of communication a land where the press is a business. You and I are, we feel, responsible to devise ways of ciricumventing this lack. We want you to join us in a search for a free press and a free literature whose sole aim is communication. If you share our concern, if not our interpretation, we ask you either to see to it that this book is reproduced again, and yet again, and distributed without charge, or that your own interpretation of the problem is reproduceds and distributed free of charge. If you do this, reader, the business press will have been circumvented. If you feel yourself better suited to different forms of communication, allow us to suggest free plays, free novels, posters, pamphlets; allow us to suggest that you organize your community for lectures, forums, pickets, strikes... If you do none of these things, and if you do not engage yourself in any of the infinite number of projects which have not occurred to us, then know, reader, that in our eyes you will have abdicated your responsibility to all living humanity, and to all the dead who have made you what you are, given you what you have, and taught you what you know. Fredy Perlman John E. Ricklefs

Fredy wrote the play Plunder in 1962. At the time, he was participating in many Living Theatre activities and probably hoped the theater collective would perform it. The work provides an overview of corporate evil in action outside the U.S.: wars, economic distress, racism. An American businessman-imperialist with nintenth-century attitudes and his four more modern sons are the principal characters. Three of the sons carry on their father’s project in southern Africa and Asia: One is a Marine who turns to war when the populace rejects his authority; another is an economic “developer” who ruins the local artisans; the third is a modern bureaucrat whose administrative decrees destroy the very fabric of traditional society. The drama is furnished by the progressive unmasking of the good intentions of these sons of imperialism. The play is “staged” by a fourth son who repudiates any solidarity with his family of devastators. (This son’s name is Bruno, chosen to link Fredy’s fervent denouncer with the sixteenth-century martyr-enlightener.)

In the l970s when printing facilities were readily accessible, Fredy reprinted Plunder, but he never reprinted The New Freedom. By then he had changed many opinions expressed in these two works. I think he valued Plunder as a work which transcends a flat denunciation of imperialism and he still considered Bruno’s eloquent wrath to be an appropriate response to human-induced injustice.

Five: A ‘Definitive’ Departure from the U.S.

In October 1962, nationalism and war hysteria gripped the United States when it was learned that Soviet missiles had been installed in Cuba. Most Americans regarded the installation as an act of war. Newspapers depicted Fidel Castro, Cuba’s prime minister, as an arrogant, vengeful monster, and the Soviet rulers as scheming devils keen to have weapons within ninety miles of the “free world’s” heartland. President Kennedy’s threat to bomb Cuba was greeted with warm approval in the media and by most New Yorkers.

Fredy and I took part in some of the demonstrations which were organized to protest against U.S. intervention in Cuba, but they little effect on either the government or public opinion. Patriotic citizens were all too willing to prove their loyalty by beating up the protestors (largely pacifists) but the police took care to keep the two groups separated. Most passers-by considered us Communist dupes and hurled invective.

The hate-filled atmosphere and the feeling that we were unable to change anything made escape seem an appealing alternative. Comments by subway riders who proposed that “We bomb Cuba off the face of the earth” made Fredy feel he could not continue to live in the belly of the beast, and we made plans to go to Europe.

Although we got our passports right away, almost three months passed before we actually left. Since we thought we were leaving the U.S. for good, we disposed of all our possessions except for those that fit in a large foot locker. For several weeks we both worked full-time jobs; Fredy was employed as a printer; he operated a multilith press in a midtown Manhattan print shop.

John Ricklefs, too, decided to leave the country. The recent breakup of his marriage had been painful for him. After some travels in Sicily, he went to Yugoslavia. In September 1963, several months after our departure from the U.S., when Fredy and I were looking for a European city to live in, we chose Belgrade, largely because of John’s presence and his enthusiasm for the people and culture.

Fredy and I bought passage on a Swedish freighter which took us and our baggage to Copenhagen. We had earlier become friends with a Danish student of literature and we used his home in a Copenhagen suburb as a temporary stopping place before deciding on a more permanent location. We arrived in Denmark at the end of January 1963. We decided to wait for warmer weather before exploring other European cities, so after an initial stay with Poul Andreasen and his parents, we rented a furnished room in Gentofte, a short walk from our friend’s home.

The three months we spent in these comfortable surroundings were a placid introduction to European life. We admired the efficient public transportation, the well-kept streets, the apparent social responsibility of the suburban Danes and the wonderful variety of salads and cakes for sale in the shops. We were an attentive audience for Poul’s and his father’s accounts of Danish resistance to Nazi occupation — a period less peaceful, for Denmark at least, than the early 1960s. The elder Andreasen had been in a concentration camp toward the end of the war.

During our three-month stay in Denmark, Fredy worked on his mid-twentieth century version of the Faust story. He never finished it, but the theme remained central to his conceptions. The two principal characters, Sabina and her father, were already clearly delineated in 1963. Each had a distinct attitude toward contemporary science. Fredy incorporated them as philosophical archetypes in Letters of Insurgents.

Cigarettes were very expensive in Denmark and Fredy tried pipe-smoking as a substitute for some of his cigarette consumption.

Efforts to learn Danish were moderately successful, although we never realized our goal of reading Ibsen in the original. To be sure they were available when we were ready for them, we bought his complete works before leaving Scandinavia.

The stay in Denmark ended on May 1, l963. Helen and Tom Spiro, American friends who were in Europe on a Fulbright exchange, invited us to join them on a trip by car to Greece and Yugoslavia. We took camping gear which we used occasionally during the trip. In Zagreb we stayed with Yugoslav friends of the Spiros and in Belgrade stayed with John Ricklefs. We spent two weeks in Greece and saw many historical sites.

After a brief stay in Vienna, we went with the Spiros to Prague. Fredy was eager to visit the country of his birth. Our traveling companions had two acquaintances in Prague and we got in touch with them. Both spoke excellent English. The younger man was a thirty-year-old Party functionary who had studied in England and who assured us the Communist Parties, including the one in the U.S., provided an accurate analysis and an appropriate program for all who sought to improve social conditions in the world. When this man realized he was speaking to two such individuals, he advised us to return to the U.S. and become members of the Party. Fredy disputed the man’s high opinion of the Party’s qualities but realized that it was unlikely that this person would accept the viewpoint of a non-Party member. At the end of the conversation Fredy touchingly recited, in Czech, some poems and anthems he had learned as a child. The young administrator was undoubtedly baffled by this visitor.

The second man was less dogmatic and his advice was implicit, in the form of example, rather than explicit. He was a British intellectual who had emigrated to Czechoslovakia after World War II; during our conversation he told us his reasons for leaving England and about the post-war economic progress of his adopted country. He was no help, however, in furthering Fredy’s request to stay in Prague as a student. Bureaucratic government officials immediately squelched any hopes of remaining in Czechoslovakia. The fact that Fredy had been born in Brno prompted suspicions rather than a welcome. I wonder if the two “non-official” men we contacted shared these suspicions. If so, they must have been impressed by our disguise: the Spiros having returned to Scandinavia, Fredy and I slept in a campground on the outskirts of the city and trudged around — often in the rain — looking a lot more like gypsies than conventional CIA employees.

The refusal of the Czech government to let us remain in Prague ruled out the only specific destination we had chosen for our new life in Europe. In mid-June 1963 we took an overnight train to Paris.

Having camped in our tent in Greece, Austria and Czechoslovakia, we immediately looked for a campground in or near Paris. And for several nights we slept in the Bois de Boulogne. Our living quarters became more comfortable when we moved our sleeping bag to the studio-loft of Eric Fischer, brother of our New York neighbor, Claire. Eric and his wife Myriam welcomed us to their city and milieu without reservation. We became acquainted with their friends and were often together.

At the beginning of July, Fredy and I moved to a fifth floor studio apartment (sublet for the summer) on rue St. Severin in the Latin Quarter and we enrolled at the Alliance Française. Until the end of August we immersed ourselves in French language and culture. With our friends, and even with each other, we spoke only French.

Eric encouraged us to see the films shown at the Cinémathèque and we became familiar with the “classics” of the cinema. We discussed theories of art with our painter and sculptor friends and took part in a new form of theater — a “happening” at the Au Bon Marché department store.

Political commitment took second place to cultural interests even though outraged chauvinism, an aftermath of the recent independence of Algeria, was agitating French political circles. In the 1960s, German tourists were visiting all parts of Western Europe and we sympathized with the grumbling French who resented them. It seemed unfair that the former occupiers could re-visit and bring their families to see places where, twenty years earlier, their authority had been imposed militarily. Few of the “victorious” French people could afford to travel abroad, and many Parisians had doubts about the assertion that Germany had lost the war.

The economic situation made it difficult for us to continue living in Paris. Wages were low compared to prices, and lodging was scarce and expensive. At the end of the summer we had two hundred dollars left and we knew it would not last long. We decided to go to Yugoslavia. Half our remaining money was spent on the trip from Paris to Belgrade; we rode with a Syrian worker who had spent the wages he had earned in France to buy a new car which he was driving to Damascus. The man had never learned to drive and even before leaving Paris, he had an accident that damaged his car. Fredy was the principal chauffeur during the three-day trip to Belgrade.

Six: Three Years In Yugoslavia

The warm welcome we received from numerous Yugoslavs in September 1963 made our move to Belgrade definitive. Within a few days we had found a room in the home of a bus driver and family on the outskirts of Zemun, a large suburb and extension of Belgrade on the other side of the Sava River. Fredy was hired for a temporary job as “speaker” by a media enterprise which made documentary films about tourist attractions in Yugoslavia. Fredy recorded the texts describing the sites depicted in the films: parks featuring post-war sculpture, monasteries, or coastal villages. For a few hours’ work, he received theequivalent of U.S. wages and this money solved our immediate financial problems.

We enrolled at a language institute and spent every morning attending classes and listening to tapes of Serbo-Croatian. Our fellow students were from central Africa, Western Europe and the U.S.S.R. It was a friendly group and sometimes we got together outside of class. One of the two Soviet students was eager to meet for discussions but it was clear that the other disapproved of this extracurricular contact. We were shocked by Viktor’s suspicious reserve and perhaps did not sufficiently appreciate Dimitri’s courage in coming to visit us on his own.

The Yugoslav innovation of worker self-management was highly regarded in the West and we wanted to get acquainted with its principles and operation. Zemun had a number of factories and we had no trouble finding informed people to answer our questions. We quickly learned that Yugoslavs did not share the Western enthusiasm for worker self-management, considering it largely a public relations gimmick to camouflage conventional worker-vs.-management relations. We were surprised to learn that strikes were frequent. Although never reported in the press, the occurrence of this authentic worker-managed activity was common knowledge. Unions are an arm of the government (the “boss”) so any strike in Yugoslavia necessarily occurs outside an institutional framework.

Even though we lived in their Zemun home for only two months, the Katić family introduced us to many Yugoslav customs and perspectives. The house was one of four or five units around a courtyard. Its design clearly originated in Serbian villages. There were no chickens in our courtyard, but we heard them in nearby enclosures. One outhouse served all the residents. As we had done in Paris, we went te public baths once or twice a week for showers.

When we moved into our room at the Katić’s, our language skills in Serbian were almost none-existent. One of the neighbors, a toothless elderly man, took it upon himself to help us with vocabulary whenever he saw us; he would point to an object and name it. He taught us the numbers and was pleased with our progress. Unfortunately, the version of a word we learned from our toothless friend did not always correspond to the conventional pronunciation.

In addition to our language deficiencies, our working class hosts considered us backward in culinary skills. Local stores were quite unlike Danish and French ones and we sometimes were hard put to find ingredients for meals we knew how to prepare. We didn’t know to ask for meat in a butcher shop and were unfamiliar with outdoor markets, where most people in Zemun shopped. One day when we opened a can (of tuna, maybe), the entire Katić family stood around the table and watched. (The can opener was part of our camping gear; such a gadget would not have been found in their kitchen.) It wasn’t that they had never seen canned goods, but they scorned unfresh food which came preserved in metal; nevertheless they were curious to see what emerged from the container and if we would eat it without further preparation. Once we became official students at the language institute we usually ate at student restaurants in Belgrade where we had a copious, if not a gourmet, midday meal.

During our three-year stay in Yugoslavia we ate extremely well. We found most of the Yugoslav dishes delicious. Two memorable meals were with the Katić family. One was on a Sunday in late September soon after our arrival. Mr. Katić had made it clear that Vve were invited to eat with them but we didn’t know what the occasion was. We put on our Sunday clothes and waited. In late morning a 1arge pig and a butcher arrived, and the afternoon was spent cutting up the carcass. A number of people took part — none of them wore Sunday clothes. They rendered lard, washed intestines for sausage casings, prepared the hams for smoking. In late afternoon we all sat down to a feast where pork liver was the principal dish.

Another Sunday we accompanied the Katić family and many of their friends and relatives to a wedding in a village about 75 miles from Zemun. Mr. Katić arranged for the use of a city bus of which he, naturally, was the driver. I can’t remember if it was mechanical failure of the bus or if the road was in bad condition, but at one point the twenty or so wedding guests were obliged to get out of the bus and climb the hill; the men pushed the bus to the summit.

The wedding celebration consisted of eating, dancing and drinking. The ceremony itself must have preceded or followed the afternoon events. We ate outside, at long tables; roast pig — the highlight of the meal — was prepared over an open fire. Fredy, who never liked meat, was more appreciative of the gibanica (a pasta and cheese dish) and other delicacies than of the roast pork.

Music was provided by local muscians who, as the festivities continued, received generous donations, usually in the form of bills which were affixed to their foreheads (and which sweat kept there until the end of the piece). Tho dances were line dances and men, women and children of all ages took part, even Fredy and I. The elderly executed every step and turn, but in miniature, so to speak. They hardly raised their foot off the ground, twisted their torso only slightly, reserving their strength. But the rhythm was flawless and every nuance observed. We had been told that dances give an oppportunity for young women to display their endurance and for village bachelors to judge the vigor of potential brides. I hope the dances served a less crass function, but, it’s true, the bride (although already chosen) danced exnberantly from beginning to end. And she was not the only unflagging woman dancer among the celebrants.

In Belgrade, young people had other, less exhausting, criteria when seeking a spouse. Getting acquainted often took place in a well-defined downtown area during the afternoon promenade. On a street (closed to vehicles) leading from Terazija to Kalemegdan Park, one saw crowds of people every afternoon.

At all hours of the day there were also crowds of people at the train station — most of them were coming to the city to live. Fredy observed that we were seeing the migration from the countryside to the city. Zemun was hardly the countryside, but in November we joined the influx to Belgrade, taking a room in an apartment with modern conveniences. Fredy enrolled as a graduate student at the Economics Faculty and I found two jobs in music — one playing, one teaching.

It was our responsibility to secure a visa; since our situation had few precedents, various authorities quoted widely divergent rules. The bureaucrat in one office assured us we had to return to the United States and apply for a visa from there. After trying to communicate the absurdity of this proposal, we left and continued our search at another office which, conveniently, was nearby. Here we were immediately given one-year visas. We wondered if this was the Yugoslav self-managed economy at work.

Most of our Yugoslav friends and associates had been born and raised in Belgrade, but almost all of them had relatives who still lived in villages. The rural ties were part of our friends’ self-definition. Fredy and I were often invited to go with them to visit their parents, grandparents or aunts and uncles. In the course of numerous visits, we traveled to villages that had no roads connecting them; we had a view of Spring as a season of mud; we slept on straw mattresses and helped shell corn by hand. The meals served us were always delicious (sometimes an animal was slaughtered in honor of our visit). It was obvious that our peasant hosts worked long hours doing by hand heavy tasks that a machine could accomplish in a fraction of the time, and it puzzled us that there was not more interest in labor-saving techniques. Though acknowledging that both men and women took great pride in their work, Fredy judged peasant life to be difficult and unrewarding.

As a student of economics, concerned with flow charts which showed the transfer of goods on a national level, Fredy had a patronizing view of the average peasant’s undertaking. The efforts they expended and the time it took (which they never “counted”) to bring their products to city markets made him scornful of their form of distribution and exchange. We were not well informed about collectivization efforts, but when he saw peasants hoeing in the long “ribbon” fields on which tractors would have been very efficient, Fredy felt justified in criticizing the peasants’ reluctance to relinquish control over their private plots.

His later studies of Kosovo and Metohija (Kosmet) softened this view somewhat and he became more sympathetic to peasants who resisted plans imposed by bureaucrats. In the summer of 1965, Fredy went with a friend and fellow student, Velimir Morača, to visit the latter’s family and village in Montenegro. His stay there impressed him. First because of the isolation: the walk from the train station was ten miles uphill. Then by the self-sufficiency of these peasant-herders: the only thing they bought was salt. Finally, by the fierce independence: Morača’s uncle refused to use a plate when eating, even though there were guests from the city. Fredy quoted this man’s vigorous rejection of modern utensils: “Horse shit! What do I need a goddam fucking plate for?”

Urban Yugoslavs, too, were free with their criticisms, although they generally were not too specific, at least in public, when it came to government policies and individuals. Dissidents ran a very real risk of becoming political prisoners. Morača, who became close friends with Fredy, had spent eight years in jail becauseof his beliefs. People often explained to us that backwardness and social problems were due to “the three hundred years the Serbs lived under the Turkish yoke.” Another semi-serious explanation for the county’s difficulties was presented in the form of a frequently quoted joke: Question: “Who invented scientific socialism?” Response: “Marx and Engels.” Comment: “Shouldn’t they have tried it on rats first?” Newspapers rarely attacked official policies but did criticize certain aspects of them and often printed indignant letters from readers. At the theater we heard more profound, albeit more abstract, critiques. Few of our Yugoslav acquaintances hesitated to criticize the government, but all were wary of the authorities’ power.

Fredy’s only critique which reached the mass media was a letter he wrote to the Belgrade papers expressing his indignation at finding a nail in a package of dry soup mix. By then he was familiar with the conventional clichés used to praise Yugoslav socialism and he used them to good effect.

Neither Turkish occupation nor socialism were cited as sources for Yugoslav notions of male supremacy; it presumably had more indigenous roots. Fredy, always sensitive to the practice and verbalization of discrimination, observed that although Yugoslav men vigorously defended male prerogatives, they accepted a large share of domestic responsibility, especially if they had a wife who worked outside the home. Fredy pointed out this gap between principles and practice to some of his male friends. They explained that the situation in their home was different, that their wife needed assistance, still insisting that the tasks of marketing, child-rearing, cooking and cleaning really were a woman’s obligation. A few years later, in texts written in Kalamazoo, Fredy examined other gaps between ideology and practice. One of these was the example of workers who, while verbally denouncing rebellious actions in one breath, take drastic, vigorous steps to protect their own interests in the next. Another example furnished a theme that remained central to all his later writings (in this case, admirable principles are belied by reprehensible practice): the political agitator whose goal is freedom, but who, once in power (and sometimes even before), justifies coercion in the name of a higher good.

Before the end of his first year in Belgrade, Fredy already spoke fluent Serbian and was able to read the textbooks for his classes. In the two subsequent years he learned to speak even better, although never without grammatical faults. People from certain regions in Yugoslavia ignore rules of declension, and new acquaintances often assumed that Fredy was from one of those regions.

To each other we spoke English, however, and some of our friends were English-speaking. Once or twice a month we read plays with John Ricklefs, Paul Pignon (who worked in Belgrade as a technical translatorand who composed music when not working), Paul’s wife Jasna and an Australian woman (who was spending a year in Belgrade to get acquainted with the country her parents had left). We had many opportunities to attend excellent concerts of world-famous artists (Kogan, Richter, Ricci) and Fredy heard many of the opera performances in which I participated as an orchestra violinist. One of Fredy’s undertakings which remained unfinished was a translation into English of a history of Serbia. He worked on this project with a friend; I think that too much time of the weekly sessions was spent on eating and discussing and too little on translating. Between 1963 and 1966, we did some traveling outside Yugoslavia. In the summer of 1964, we spent five weeks in Italy, visiting Venice, Ravenna, Rome, Naples and Florence. In 1965 when the Belgrade Opera made a tour of East Germany, Fredy traveled with the company; we spent a week in both East Berlin and Leipzig. He and I made independent visits, mostly short, to Budapest, Sofia and Bucharest. In the summer of 1965 when I went to the U.S., Fredy traveled in Yugoslavia; in Sarajevo he had a brief reunion with Living Theatre friends (who were performing throughout Europe that year). He also went to Paris to renew friendships there.

For most of the stay in Belgrade, Fredy devoted himself to his studies and was a conscientious student. At the Economics Faculty at least two of his professors were high in governmental circles. One was president the national bank; he came to class in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes. The other was the wife of the country’s vice-president. Both professors appear in Letters of Insurgents.

In his first year of study, Fredy took courses which presented Marxist principles of economic analysis and which used this analysis to study the Yugoslav economy. In the second year the courses were more specialized. Two foreign professors came to lecture: one, a Hungarian mathematician, taught the students how to construct and use input-output matrices; the other, a Soviet economist, discussed the latest management techniques. The textbooks for both classes were by U.S. academics.

Fredy’s master’s thesis, “The Structure of Backwardness,” which he completed in the spring of 1965 was a statistical-economic analysis of certain factors in a number of countries at various levels of industrial development. He used flow charts to study consumption, exports and reinvestment in five basic sectors. In no way does this work foreshadow Fredy’s later, critical, views on industrialization. One of its assumptions is “that a developed economy is a backward economy’s image of the future... There may be various ‘roads to socialism,’ but there is only one road to industrialization: it is a broad highway which may be followed in the freshness of April or the heat of August; one may walk it, ride a horse or go by bulldozer; if he cannot follow it he will not get where it leads” (page 97). The destination itself goes unquestioned in this work.

The panel of professors to whom he presented his thesis was satisfied with its quality even though, at the public defense, some of them quibbled about certain of Fredy’s observations about Yugoslavia. The academic panel’s chief, wife of the country’s vice-president, commented on Comrade Perlman’s remarkable fluency in Serbian.

Fredy found the bland, “official” analyses offered by the Economics Faculty less and less interesting and was pleased to follow courses of and get acquainted with Miloš Samardžija, economics professor at the Law Faculty. This former consultant to the national government had a profound knowledge of Marx and Marxist theoreticians, and was an unequivocal proponent of industrialization. He did not question the goals of the Yugoslav government, but his pragmatic observations combined with his discerning Marxist perspective resulted in trenchant, critiques of the Yugoslav system.

The doctoral thesis which Fredy presented to the Law Faculty where Samardžija was his advisor, was more controversial than the earlier thesis. In this one, Fredy attacked specific economic practices of the Yugoslav govermnent, investment decisions which related to Kosmet. He used Preobrazhensky’s analysis of the primitive accumulation of capital to study prospects for Kosmet’s development and concluded that the other Yugoslav republics should build industrial plants in Kosmet. Failure to do this would heighten the backwardness. Fredy worked hard on this study and gathered much material to defend his conclusions: a statistical study of Yugoslav per capita income since 1945; a documentation of the transfer of the labor force from agriculture; intersectoral comparisons between republics. He thought that the proposals he made were reasonable, that the data he had assembled and carefully analyzed with modern mathematical methods should convince rational people interested in the economic development of all parts of the country. He was disturbed by the warning he got from the more worldly-wise Samardžija not to dwell on the implications of his thesis when he defended it in front of the other professors. Samardžija suggested that these men did not welcome dissertations — no matter how well documented and how closely argued — whose conclusions called on the country’s leaders to change their policies. In June 1966 Fredy defended his “Conditions for the Development of a Backward Region” and was awarded a Ph.D. from the Belgrade University Law Faculty.

During his last year in Belgrade, while still a student at the Law Faculty, Fredy was also a member of an economic planning commission hired by the regional administration in Kosmet. The task of the commission was to propose a program for development. Samardžija was head of this commission; other Law Faculty graduate students also participated. Fredy made many trips to Priština but he did not get a close view of daily life in the region nor did he get acquainted with non-administrative Albanian residents, since most of his time in Priština was spent in offices.

Fredy found this “job” (for which he was well paid) interesting but not particularly satisfying. He realized that the commission was concerned mainly with words, abstractions, and that the situation of Kosmet’s population did not change as a result of his and his colleagues’ proposals. A few years later Fredy would criticize the legitimacy of planning commissions as such.

Most of Fredy’s fellow students were preparing for a career in the Yugoslav bureaucracy and had little interest in initiating changes in economic policies. One friend (who was not a participant in the Kosmet commission) was already employed by a Novi Sad enterprise; he had pursued graduate studies at the request of his superiors. Six months after his graduation we visited Miša in his new office. Except for the handsome furniture surrounding our friend, the room was empty. As we drank the Turkish coffee brought to us by the woman hired by the enterprise to make and serve coffee, we asked Miša to tell us about his job responsibilities. With only a trace of sheepishness, he explained that as yet his duties were undefined; he assured us, however, that before the end of the year the enterprise directors would undoubtedly assign him some projects. When we left, he took the newspaper from a desk drawer and resumed his on-the-job activity.

The experiences of Velimir Morača gave us a more somber view of Yugoslav reality. Although at least one of his close relatives was a famous World War II partisan, the young Morača’s views concerning Yugoslavia’s break with the Soviet Union (in 1948) brought him prison sentences totaling eight year. During his incarceration, he read all of Marx’s and Lenin’s works and exercised his photographic memory on these and other texts. In the mid-1960s Morača was out of prison. He lived and worked in Subotica, but commuted to Belgrade to study at the Economics Faculty.

This ex-political prisoner who was trying to understand the society in which he lived was the model Fredy took for Yarostan in Letters of Insurgents. The disorientation Yarostan described inhis letters to Sophia was all too familiar to Morača. The experiences of Yarostan’s daughter Vesna closely follow the history of Morača’s daughter of the same name. This intelligent and patriotic ten-year-old was confused by the ambiguous position of her father: what could he have done to warrant his being jailed by the authorities of a country based on such admirable principles? The real Vesna’s death occurred after we had left Yugoslavia so Fredy’s depiction of her death in Letters was hypothetical. Morača himself was rearrested in the 1970s and died in prison. This friend’s history — especially the tragic events which occurred after we left the country — played a great part in determining Fredy’s over-all estimation of the Yugoslav system. Morača’s uncompromising nature, his commitment to economic equality and his outspoken critiques were intolerable to the authorities. With absolute clarity, Fredy saw in Morača the individual destroyed by the State.

Our departure from Yugoslavia in 1966 was rather precipitous, but not related to political repression. Yugoslav doctors advised me to return to the United States following an illness and surgery. Had I not been ill, it is likely we would have remained another year in Belgrade. But contestations and anti-war actions made the U.S. seem more interesting than it had four years earlier, and it is probable that we would have returned soon after Fredy finished his studies at the University of Belgrade. We had been welcomed and appreciated in Belgrade and when, after a three-year stay, we bid farewell to our friends, activities, the city itself, we already felt nostalgia and loss.

Seven: A Short Career in Academia

A recommendation by Samardžija resulted in Fredy’s being offered a two-year appointment as assistant professor at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Samardžija himself was visiting professor in the Economics Department at the university in 1966–67. A small city in mid-America was not our first choice among places to live but this job had the advantage of solving financial problems. The return to American surroundings — the pervasive and huge automobiles, the vast supermarkets, the well-tended lawns encircling gadget-filled homes — required a period of adaptation. In this time of aggressive war, the naive joviality of the population and its passion to consume disturbed and offended Fredy.

In the first two years in Kalamazoo, Fredy was not a fringe person. Although constantly involved in controversies, he spoke as an intellectual attached to an institution of higher learning and as a knowledgeable analyst of the Yugoslav economy and culture. The first essay he wrote after returning to the U.S. was a critique of the way social science was taught in American universities. He even traveled to an academic gathering to read it, and the essay was published in a journal of education. In “Critical Education” Fredy identified three types of educators: traditional, adaptive and critical. Capitalist society needs critical thinkers in science and technology, and educators in these fields teach students to question their predecessors’ assumptions. But in the social sciences, current education discourages students from questioning underlying assumptions. Fredy called for the critical perspective to be applied to these fields as well. He even furnished a technique for achieving this end: By studying social critics of an earlier epoch, a student can “play-act” the role of critic and thus prepare himself or herself for a similar role in contemporary society.

This was, in fact, the approach Fredy took in the classes he taught, nearly all of which were introductions to social science. Fredy was an outspoken opponent of U.S. involvement in Vietnam but in his lectures tried to show his students what brought him to this position rather than trying to convert his listeners by authority. He was generous with his time and willing to overlook sometimes shocking deficiencies in the students’ knowledge of history and geography; but he was intolerant of the fervent confidence in American superiority expressed by some of the young people. He expected students to call him by his first name and in his second year he let them give themselves the grades they wanted.

In a second essay, “Corporate-Military Culture and the Social Sciences,” Fredy expanded arguments presented in “Critical Education.” Quoting with approval Veblen’s assertion about machine industry needing a socialist organization of society to function at its best, Fredy maintained that contemporary governments and corporations try to inhibit the “subversive, iconoclastic patterns of thought which accompanied the development of technology.” The essay, never published, e