Ethnic Passion: WILL U.S. MAKE MOST OF COMMUNIST CHANGE?
EVEN IF you doubted the Pentagon's persistent characterization of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc as 10 feet tall, the pace of events there now is truly breathtaking.I remember prowling around Eastern Europe in 1982 and the Soviet Union in 1983 and asking myself how such backward and repressive countries could possibly be as strong militarily as they were said to be by the U.S. State and Defense Departments. Here were societies that couldn't make their...
Ethnic Passion: JERUSALEM: DIVIDED IT STANDS
LITTLE BROTHERLY LOVE IN HOLIEST CITY
Welcome to Jerusalem.City of warring Gods.City of fear and anger. City of self-righteousness.City of coexistence failed.City divided.City of Molotov cocktails, smashed car windows, overturned autos, stabbings, police beatings and, most recently, shootings.Jerusalem is not all this bad. Only parts of it are, part of the time.The Holy City is at least five subcities, one of which is compact and intense and yet is further divided into four segments. And this grid...
Ethnic Passion: SLOVAKS AND CZECHS
WHEN THEY jeered and jostled Vaclav Havel, Slovak nationalists were giving a demonstration of the overheated ethnic passion that has become the leading threat to their country. Mr. Havel, the president of Czechoslovakia and a genuine democrat, is regarded in the West as a hero. But to Slovaks, or at least to some of them, he has become a much resented symbol of Czech influence and, as a Marxist would say, hegemony. The nationalists are now calling for secession Is this going to be the fate of...
Ethnic Passion: The Turmoil of a Family--and a Country--in Transition
FUNNY BOY: by Shyam Selvadurai; Morrow; $23, 310 pages
With odd quiet and intimacy, the Sri Lanka novelist Shyam Selvadurai depicts a family's agony on the fault line of a country cracking apart. And through the cycle of insurrection by the Tamil minority and repression by the Sinhalese majority, a child suffers his own insurrection: a gay identity that struggles to assert itself.The novel begins and ends with a battle. At the start, Arjie, the younger son of a prosperous Tamil family in Colombo, insists on playing dress-up bridal...
Ethnic Passion: LOOK CLOSELY, THERE ARE GOOD THINGS
Some nights it seems as if the darkness never brightens. The shabby shredding of a world championship team reminds us that the owners, players, and their lawyers cared so little for baseball that they shut down a World Series. A future Hall of Fame slugger gets traded on successive Fridays, once for three All-Stars, once for three minor leaguers, and in between the attempted beheading of one of the game's best players sets off a chaotic scene out of Tombstone, Ariz.While...