French Communists Insist on Moscow’s Formal Repudiation of the Book

The storm among Communist and pro-Soviet groups in France over the Soviet anti-Semitic book, “Judaism Without Embellishment, ” continued to rage today. Leftist groups took the lead in what amounted to a plea to the Soviet Union to speak out and case the popular hostility evoked by the book and its virulently anti-Semitic cartoons.

For the third time, L’Humanite, the organ of the French Communist Party, continued its unprecedented criticism of the Soviet Union by the technique of reprinting without comment the wide-ranging protests of other organizations over the Soviet Union’s refusal to repudiate the book, published last year by the Ukrainian Academy of Science, written by T.K. Kitchko.

Among the protests which have been pouring into the Soviet Embassy in Paris were denunciations from the leftist Deportees and Resistance Volunteers. The left-wing “Liberation, ” normally an apologist for the Soviet Union, printed a lengthy editorial citing the long history of anti-Semitism in the Ukraine. The editorial said that: “Even while saying we know what the Soviet Union has done against this — had the brochure been an individual manifestation of anti-Semitism, there would have been no reason to become excited. Unhappily, this is not the case.”

“Kitchko’s book involves not only its author,” the editorial declared, “but numerous other persons who certainly read it. It received the approval of the authorities, and that is what we do not understand. We do not understand either why, until this day, the only Soviet reaction to the feelings aroused by this affair has been a commentary by a press agency which, as far as can be seen, does not deal at all with the true problem.”