Gather Not My Life with Bloody Men

The Rosa Luxemburg Contraceptives Cooperative: A Primer on Communist Civilization, by Leopold Tyrmand (Macmillan, 287 pp., $5.95)

The title at once tells the reader what is in store for him: a racy, sprightly, witty book, an “intentional hyperbole” about life in a Marxist society. Leopold Tyrmand, escaped from his native Poland and now living in the United States, knows that reality from within. This is crucial, for, as he says, life under Communism has an upside-down quality for the comprehension of which visitors and Western analysts simply have no system of reference. To grasp what it is like, one must pass through the Looking Glass: norms, practices, institutions on the other side are the reverse of normal, and of all things human only two remain the same: drunkenness and love.

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Gerhart Niemeyer

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The Rosa Luxemburg Contraceptives Cooperative: A Primer on Communist Civilization, by Leopold Tyrmand (Macmillan, 287 pp., $5.95)

The title at once tells the reader what is in store for him: a racy, sprightly, witty book, an “intentional hyperbole” about life in a Marxist society. Leopold Tyrmand, escaped from his native Poland and now living in the United States, knows that reality from within. This is crucial, for, as he says, life under Communism has an upside-down quality for the comprehension of which visitors and Western analysts simply have no system of reference. To grasp what it is like, one must pass through the Looking Glass: norms, practices, institutions on the other side are the reverse of normal, and of all things human only two remain the same: drunkenness and love.