Books in Brief

Ashes to the Taste, by Irena Penzik (University Publishers, $4.95). Miss Penzik has been through the Communist labyrinth in Poland and has come out of it with the desire to describe to others “the quiet horror of human relationships under Communism.” She succeeds admirably in her purpose. Her book, nonetheless, leaves the impression that a Party critic was correct who said of her that her Marxism was on the emotional rather than on the intellectual level. She still believes that the American Communist Party campaign against “white chauvinism” aroused large numbers of people “to act on the side of fairness and decency on this question,” and that McCarthyism in the United States put unnecessary blocks in the way of her break from Communism.

w. D. JACOBS

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Ashes to the Taste, by Irena Penzik (University Publishers, $4.95). Miss Penzik has been through the Communist labyrinth in Poland and has come out of it with the desire to describe to others “the quiet horror of human relationships under Communism.” She succeeds admirably in her purpose. Her book, nonetheless, leaves the impression that a Party critic was correct who said of her that her Marxism was on the emotional rather than on the intellectual level. She still believes that the American Communist Party campaign against “white chauvinism” aroused large numbers of people “to act on the side of fairness and decency on this question,” and that McCarthyism in the United States put unnecessary blocks in the way of her break from Communism.

w. D. JACOBS