Prof. Eduard Goldstuecker, prominent Czechoslovak-Jewish writer, has been attacked by a Soviet magazine on the same charges that brought him a death sentence, imprisonment and torture during the Slansky trial of the Stalin era 15 years ago, it was reported here from Moscow today. The Soviet Literary Gazette branded the 55-year-old head of the Czech writers union, now a refugee in hiding, a “Zionist.” It charged him with having openly advocated pro-Israel policies during the brief liberalization in Czechoslovakia this year and said he was among those who “cover themselves with hypocritical calls to ‘normalization’ in order inconspicuously to regroup the forces of counter-revolution” in Czechoslovakia today.
Prof. Goldstuecker, deputy rector of Prague’s ancient Charles University, has been variously reported hiding in Czechoslovakia or in a Western capital. Reports last week said he was in London. The Literary Gazette accused him of having tried to rehabilitate the literary heritage of Franz Kafka, whose works are banned in Russia, of associating with other Czech writers who are under attack for liberalism, and of having given interviews to Israeli and West German periodicals. The Soviet magazine also described as “a crafty maneuver” Dr. Goldstuecker’s public reply last June to anonymous anti-Semitic letters he received from Czechoslovakian Stalinist. It charged his aim was “to discredit the Communist Party.”
Dr. Goldstuecker, a Communist Party member since 1934 and Czechoslovak Minister to Israel in 1950, was arrested in 1951, tortured for months, and compelled to testify to involvement in “Titoist-Zionist-imperialist” plots at the treason trial of the former Communist Party general secretary Rudolph Slansky. He was later tried and condemned to death with Mr. Slansky’s brother, Richard, but the sentences were commuted to life imprisonment after Stalin’s death and both were released in 1958. Sources here that follow the Soviet press said the attack on Prof. Goldstuecker was one of the strongest polemics to appear in the Literary Gazette since its June 26 attack on Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Russian author of a novel on concentration camp life which is banned in the Soviet Union.
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