During the war in Vietnam our son-in-law refused to report for induction into the U.S. Army. Now he serves in the Israeli Army. In the next war he will carry an antitank gun outside a tank to protect it from enemy fire. Our son-in-law is brave, but not exceptionally so. He is just doing what Israelis do.

For several years our children had lived at Hamra, a settlement in the occupied territories, east of Nablus overlooking Jordan. At Hamra they lived behind a floodlit, patrolled, barbed wire barricade. Each morning a convoy went out to work the fields behind an army minesweeper, to detonate antipersonnel mines planted during the night. We were therefore much relieved when our children moved to Alonei Abba, a settlement in the most peaceful and fertile part of Israel, the Jezreel Valley.

An old Irish legend tells of a boat race where the prize was the kingdom of Ulster and the victor was the first to "touch the shore." O'Neill, seeing his boat slip behind, cut off his hand, flung it ashore, and won the kingdom. Ulster, but for three counties, is now Northern Ireland. O'Neill's bloody hand has been preserved through the ages as the Red Hand of Ulster, seen on flags, postage stamps, pendants, and paramilitary banners. The passions that led O'Neill to bleed for Ulster have survived as well.

When I arrived in Belfast in late June, the Red Hand was waving from Protestant doorways to herald the impending Orange Parades.

Tehran has been thought of as simply a mistake. Fifty years ago Western “advisors” would incredulously demand of their Iranian hosts, “You call this a city? This is nothing but an overgrown garden.” Obligingly the Iranians eradicated the garden and built Tehran. Maddeningly now the foreigners are more incredulous than ever. “You call this a city? This is simply a concrete wasteland!” Most of the foreigners who come here are simply peddling better mousetraps, however. Aside from the carpetbaggers there are a few visitors, who feel as if they were being forced to look at a distorted reflection of themselves in some grotesque carnival mirror. Here they find the doctrines of progress and the dogmas of development parodied by overearnest disciples; nowadays some of the most vehement proponents of the “Western” concepts of materialism are Easterners.

When the multiple crises of an entire civilization have severely shaken men's confidence in its survival, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn questions the basic goals of that civilization and the direction in which it has been heading for some centuries. To do so is to challenge a much cherished cluster of beliefs about humans and their destiny that together make up, as he wrote inLetter to the Soviet Leaders (1974), "the entire culture and world outlook which were conceived at the time of the Renaissance and attained the peak of their expression with the eighteenth century Enlightenment."

Solzhenitsyn speaks not from the depths of a chair of political science or sociology, but out of the depths of the Gulag Archipelago: "I belong as much to the camps as I do to Russian literature…. There is where I was formed, and for all time," he wrote in a letter to Tvardovsky.

The Jewish poet, Paul Celan, was born in Czernovitz, Rumania, in 1920 and committed suicide in Paris in 1970. His native tongue was German. He wrote eight volumes of poetry, all in German, although he spent almost half his life in France and was fluent in several languages. In a public address delivered in Bremen in 1958, on the occasion of being awarded a literary prize, he spoke of the German language as the one possession that had remained "reachable, close, and unlost in the midst of losses…although it had to pass through a thousand darknesses of deathdealing speech." German is the language of Holderlin, Biichner, and Rilke, all of whom Celan admired, but also the language in which the words Endlösung (final solution), Sonderbehandlung (special treatment), and judenrein (cleansed of Jews) were coined.