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.

Odeh Mutawe Korian was late for his deportation hearing. His brother and an interpreter sat ill at ease in the chamber where the immigration judge and the government prosecutor exchanged annoyed glances as the minutes ticked by. At 9:15 A.M., fifteen minutes late, an unshaven, disheveled little man rushed in followed by two Immigration Service agents, nodded curtly at no one in particular, and slumped into a chair. He stared morosely at a spot on the table before him.

“Please remove your hat,” the judge said. The little man reached up to tear off his beret without shifting his gaze, avoiding all the eyes fixed upon him.

About thirty years ago behavioral scientists introduced the idea of a “zero-sum” game. Poker, chess, and football—these were “zerosum” games. Winning the game implied that someone else lost; an advantage for one party was necessarily a disadvantage for another. At that time the “zero-sum” analogy was not applied to societies as a whole. If the middle class increased its wealth, this did not imply that the resources of the lower class were decreased. The success of Western industrial societies did not necessarily imply the poverty of underdeveloped countries. The total wealth of the planet could expand; the extension of rights to blacks and other minorities did not necessarily undermine the position of the majority. These were the guiding assumptions of liberals in the sixties.

But today these assumptions are under attack. The metaphor of the “zero-sum” game is now thought to describe societies as a whole.

Ten years ago Gatsha Buthelezi would have been in prison; today he is Chief Executive Counsellor of KwaZulu, a potentially independent ''homeland,” now within the boundaries of South Africa.

Buthelezi has grasped the limited possibilities of self-government extended by the white government of South Africa. He has chosen to challenge the apartheid structure from within because “no amount of shouting can, by itself, cause the walls of the ‘apartheid-Jericho' to crumble.” He argues that black people have been voiceless for too long, that whites have for generations arrogated to themselves the right to determine the destinies of millions of Africans. He has chosen to operate within the “white dream” in order to change all that.

We are heading for the last of the gracious societies. The United States stands on the threshold of collapse. The last bastion of freedom and anticommunism is to be found in the Republic of South Africa. These were the views of a recently transplanted American sitting behind me on the flight to the RSA. After two weeks of visiting various parts of the country—the KwaZulu homeland and the cities and townships of Pretoria, Johannesburg, and Durban, plus a sideline look at the situation from nearby Swaziland—my traveling companion's evaluation of South African society leaves, in my judgment, much to be desired.

The painful realization that much is not right with Tanzania is the cause of growing despair both inside and outside that East African country. Tanzania has been the favorite of Social Democrats, Marxists, the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization, Scandinavian governments, and of a host of Africa observers.

Other African states, classified along with Tanzania in the so-called Fourth World of the poorest of the poor countries, have not rated the attention lavished on Tanzania. Indeed, who but the specialist knows the precise geographic location, economic and political orientation of, for examples, Upper Volta, Niger, or Chad? Who can name the leaders of these deprived lands? And who, even within the United Nations or bilateral-aid agencies, feels special affinity with their problems?

Tanzania, on the other hand, has captured the energies, optimism, and increasing anxiety of observers around the world.

Over a hundred million people in the world call themselves Arabs. That is, to say the least, a potential force in world politics, quite apart from the question of oil. Yet many observers are inclined to doubt whether there is any reality underlying the common use of the term Arab, And it is indeed not easy to define what is meant by an Arab.

The Arabs are not a distinct ethnic group, since there are both white Arabs and black Arabs. Some of the black Sudanese Arabs claim descent in the male line from Arabs of Mohammed's time, and may well be correct in their claim. Nor is language a sufficient criterion of Arabness, since there are many Arabic-speaking Jews who are not normally called Arabs.

Thousands of predawn arrests of opposition political figures and journalists, the suspension of civil liberties by presidential decree, the imposition of a rigid press censorship—thus in June, 1975, was signaled the end of Indian democracy. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's actions mean that the number of people in the world living under democratic regimes has been more than halved. Perhaps India's masses prefer bread to liberty, but they are likely to have neither. Having obtained absolute power, Mrs. Gandhi and her ruling Indian National Congress seem to have little idea of what it is to be used for.

Apologists for the emergency say it was necessary to ward off a right-wing conspiracy against Mrs. Gandhi because of her efforts at reform. They note that most of those arrested since the emergency began are hoarders of food, manipulators of prices, and holders of money from secret deals.

I met Makoto Matsuo, leader of the group mat cuts down its rivals with steel pipes in tea parlors and that rampages, with staves and rocks, among innocent train passengers, in a tiny cubicle of a room on the ground floor of a three-story business office building that would normally have no trouble blending into the gray alikeness of a hundred nondescript neighborhoods of Tokyo.

The room was tightly if crudely sealed off from the rest of the building, its walls a patchwork of odd-shaped cardboard pieces and old blankets with patterns you were likely to find in the tourist shop of a Navajo reservation. We entered from the street, ducking our heads under a steel shutter that had been raised part way to let us in and that was then quickly lowered to seal us off from the outside.

While reading Herbert Butterfield's Christianity, Diplomacy and War recently, I was struck as much by some marginal notations a previous reader had left behind as by the masterful text itself (published in 1953). One notation was the word “Vietnam” scribbled in the margin next to Butterfield's treatment of the Korean War. I remembered suddenly an experience I'd had during the Korean War period. I was helping then to care for an elderly gentleman, and we used to listen regularly to radio broadcasts from the battlefield. The old man, whose capacity to differentiate between past and present had failed him, would ask for further news on the war: “And how are the Central Powers doing?” World War I and Korea had for him collapsed into a single struggle.

On April 7, 1976, a New York Times editorial expressed an evidently startled reaction to recent rioting in Peking, for “China had seemed to be so orderly, so completely controlled in recent years….” The same day's mail brought to our address the February, 1976, issue of Letters from Asia, published in Hong Kong. The “letter” on China noted widespread strikes and disorders in 1974 and disruptive “factionalism” at all Party levels. The key line was: “…1975 was a highly agitated year in Chinese politics.”

Having been broken in the traces of contemporary sinology, we are now accustomed to such moments of schizophrenia. Indeed, in our preceding two articles we have ourselves begun to render, in seeming schizoid fashion, a darkly shaded image of China in opposition to the prevailing evenly sunlit one.

I am the only Jew ever invited by the World Council of Churches to an Assembly. With that invitation I attended the latest Assembly, which was held in Nairobi at the end of 1975. For three long weeks I listened, talked to hundreds of delegates, was interviewed on television, lobbied shyly and cautiously for my people, and ate only vegetables and fruit. I found some Christians who had risked their very lives for Jews and open anti-Semites in priestly garb, learned churchmen and ignorant bigots. The Third World was the Assembly's scene and furnished many of its principal actors, but the script could have been as well produced in New Haven or Chicago. There were passionate (and demagogic) speeches aplenty, but the voting was always moderate and the Assembly usually acquiescent. I myself was surrounded by friends and supporters, but I felt very much alone.

Americans are committed by Constitutional ideals to political equality. On the other hand, our economic ideals are libertarian and permit inequalities. Court decisions and federal legislation in the 1950's and '60's created a strong commitment to the practical realization of political and social equality. Yet we have come to see in the 1970's that economic inequalities make this achievement very difficult. The pressures for economic equality are relatively recent, because both poor and rich in Amerjca have in the past assumed the plight of the poor can be relieved most quickly through increases in total production rather than through a change in the distribution of what is produced. The prospect of limited economic growth in the future, or even no growth, dramatically shifts the pressures for economic improvement of the poor away from increased production toward greater equality in distribution.

An intellectual, the current joke has it, is anyone who can listen to the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger—which should be a snap, after all, for a creature who somehow manages to live life with both a high brow and a pointy head. Yet whatever his dexterity, the intellectual is probably harder to define, gravely or lightly, than any other human variety on earth.

Most dictionaries provide three standard, and inordinately unstimulating definitions: (1) a person with intellectual interests (2) a person who does intellectual work (3) a member of the intelligentsia (which, incidentally, defines nothing, since "intelligentsia," despite its overtones of coffeehouse dialectics, simply means intellectuals considered collectively).

The shoeshine boy is a permanent, though far from motionless, part of the landscape of Latin America's city centers. Barefoot, in tattered clothing, and with dirty faces and hands, Latin America's shoeshine boys crowd parks and squares, prowl up and down city streets, and pass in and out of office buildings and stores in search of customers for their services. They are everywhere; even the most casual tourist finds it difficult to avoid them. Tagging after the obvious North American, they ask, in heavy Spanish accents, “Shoeshine, mister? Shoeshine, mister?”