ABSTRACT
Manes Sperber's interview appeared in the in the pages of Encounter in the month of his death in Paris at the age of seventy-eight. It showed him even at the end at his thoughtful, polemical best. It was as if he were trying to get across the final messages of his generation of friends and indeed comrades: Aron, Koestler, Silone, and Malraux. It was a peculiar turn of fate that the East European emigre who lived in Paris as a homme de lettres should have found post-war Germany the most fruitful ground for his impassioned views. He was as a speaker a man of certain pathos, mixed with an earnest eloquence; but as a writer, especially in the three volumes of his autobiography, his person took on wit and comedy as he sketched adventures of a frail Galician ghetto boy, wearing a funny little crooked cap, in the disintegrating world -of the Habsburg Empire.
