Many of the same contradictory things were being said about Vietnamese who had been settled in Cambodia for generations, and they too were more industrious than the natives, of doubtful loyalty, on the verge of being spies for Communist Vietnam despite their being fervent capitalists, and so on. Two striking similarities exist in these instances – the Chinese in Thailand and the Vietnamese in Cambodia were very frequently visible as merchants, landlords of stores and small houses, peddlers, and an inordinate number of them were teachers and lawyers and intellectuals, enviable in a peasant country. They, so to speak, visibly administered the injustices of life as far as the average Thai or Cambodian could see, since it was to them one paid the rent or the limitlessly inflated prices of food and other necessities of life, and one could see with one’s own eyes how soft a life they led as intellectuals.

It is important also that the host people were self-characterized as somehow more naive than these strangers, less interested in money making and more ‘natural’ – that is, less likely to become intellectuals. In the Soviet Union and the lands ruled by her arms and culture in Eastern Europe the same sort of accusations are made openly or implicitly. Focus is a view of anti-Semitism that is deeply social in this particular sense: the Jew is seen by the anti-Semitic mind as the carrier of that same alienation that the indigenous people resent and fear, the same conniving exploitation. I would only add that they fear it because it is an alienation they feel in themselves, a not-belonging, a helplessly antisocial individualism that belies fervent desires to be a serving part of the mythic whole, the sublime national essence. They fear the Jew as they fear the real, it often seems. And perhaps this is why it is too much to expect a true end of anti-Semitic feelings. In the mirror of reality, of the unbeautiful world, it is hardly reassuring and requires much strength of character to look and see oneself.

Chapter One

HE had gone to sleep exhausted by the heat; his bones hurt. For a long time he lay there purposely seeking a dream that might draw him off to unconsciousness. And seeking it he fell asleep, and a dream arose.

He was in some sort of amusement park. A crowd was listening to a barker whose face was pouring perspiration. He moved away from the crowd and walked aimlessly. The ocean was nearby. Then before him stood a large carousel, strangely colored in green and purple patches. Somehow there were no people there. It was deserted for acres around him. And yet the carousel was moving. The brightly colored carriages, all empty, were going in a circle. And then they stopped, and went backwards. They stopped again and went forwards. He stood there perplexed, watching the shuttling of the carousel, and then he knew that underneath, below the ground, there was a gigantic machine operating: a factory, he realized. Something was being manufactured beneath the carousel, and trying to imagine what it was he grew frightened. The empty carousel kept going forwards and backwards, and he began moving away from it. Then for the first time he heard a noise coming from it, a growing sound, a cry … ‘Aleese! Aleese! Aleese!’