ABSTRACT
In case you did not know it, we are living in a thoroughly depressing time. Books, reinforced by the media which keep the information hot, tell us of past and present atrocities. There is no escape from the massacres in Bosnia, the violence accompanying a power struggle in Somalia, assassinations and the violation of human rights in Haiti, state-sponsored terror or random killings almost anywhere. I open my newspaper today (November 10, 1993), the morning after the anniversary of Kristallnacht, and learn that the number of refugees in the world has swollen to 44 million. In a single week, or so it seems, books are published that remind us that since the 1960s more than a hundred thousand Guatemalans have been killed, many of them Mayan Indians, and that between 1941 and 1945 Vichy helped to deport 76,000Jews, of whom only 2,600 survived. Newsworthy novels, films, and stories appear regularly to thrill, entertain, or horrify with accounts of ruthless regimes, or they pick at the memory-scabs growing slowly around the deep wounds of the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, and the Cambodian genocide.
