American Abroad: Freedom's Ugly Underside

For more than 40 years, the dead weight of domination by the U.S.S.R. and repression by Stalinist regimes crushed political culture in Eastern Europe. Now, with the encouragement of the Kremlin, reformers are lifting the boulder. But in the midst of burgeoning democracy, personal freedom and national independence, some verminous creatures are crawling into the sunlight. The ugliest and most poisonous is anti-Semitism, which has a long and robust history in that part of the world.

A recent issue of the Soviet weekly Ogonyok, which has campaigned against anti-Semitism, printed some of the hate mail it has received: "You Jews started this damn revolution, and now your plot to ruin Mother Russia has succeeded" and "We must not let you slink out of the country, or we'll have to hunt you down like Trotsky. We'll get you here, because that way it will be cheaper."

Earlier this year Poland's Primate, Jozef Cardinal Glemp, objected to an agreement among four of his fellow prelates and Jewish leaders to remove a Carmelite convent that had been established at the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz. Although he later backed down, Glemp compounded the insult to Jews, charging "Your power lies in the mass media easily at your disposal."

"The Glemp episode is a reminder of the genteel anti-Semitism that has always been just below the surface and, in the current, more permissive climate, can come poking through," says Charles Gati, an expert on Eastern Europe at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y. Gati has found thinly disguised Jew baiting back in fashion in his native Hungary. One of the top-ranked soccer teams, MTK, was heavily financed by Jews in the 1930s before more than half of the Jewish community was murdered by the Nazis and their Hungarian offshoot, the Arrow Cross Party. Now, half a century later, the historical association lingers: when the team runs onto the field, the crowd sometimes shouts, "Goose merchants!" -- a barnyard variation on the odious stereotype of Jews as moneygrubbers. Fears Gati: "It is far from certain that post- Communist Eastern Europe will fully embrace Western values."

When George Lorinczi, a Hungarian-born Washington lawyer, visited Budapest last month, he heard racial epithets on the street directed at people around him. In the anti-Communist tirades of self-professed liberals, there were pointed references to the predominance of Jews in the regime of dictator ! Matyas Rakosi in the early 1950s. "People are now rolling words off their tongues that would have made them jailbait two years ago," says Lorinczi.

Nor is the phenomenon confined to the snarls of the lumpen proletariat or the cafe chatter of polite society. Western diplomats in Budapest say some leaders of the opposition Hungarian Democratic Forum have made Glempish noises about the undue influence in the media of "alien forces" -- code words considerably less obscure than "goose merchants."