Isaac Deutscher | IMG Archive

The scan: The Week v8 no8.pdf (PDF, Marxists Internet Archive, opens at this page)

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The death of Isaac Deutscher comes as a paralysing shock. He leaves a gap in socialism which will not be mended, and a loss to letters which will not be fully appreciated for the blow it is for many years. And, to many of us, the thought that he has gone is a personal wound. To those of us who were groping, in the early fifties, for an explanation of the brutally irrational distortions which had cramped the life of the socialist movement, the almost lone voice of Deutscher came as a blinding revelation. I remember today the excitement of that group of workers in Nottingham, when we discovered 'The Prophet Armed', I found it in the town library, and began reading it one evening before I was due to go to the colliery on the night shift. It caught me inexorably: the more I read, the more clearly the world fell into shape around me, I read on and on, past the time to catch the pit bus, on through the night until the dawn. And then I went straight out to talk to the other comrades, to spread the word among the young communists and up at the University. The book went from hand to hand: all of us stopped what we were doing to read straight through it. It possessed us. Meeting after meeting was convoked, spontaneously, to discuss it. After that, none of us could ever be the same again. And no author ever had a clientele who so keenly awaited his next work as Isaac Deutscher, as we plagued the bookshops for the second volume, week after week, for months before it was released. His great, clear, rational voice has stopped speaking. It is an awful fact. The 'Lenin', which would have been his masterpiece, we shall never see. In an important sense, he was entering the most fertile, most productive period of his life. His last interview, on the Israel-Arab War, in New Left Review, was a model of that utterly clearheaded, absolutely unsentimental, humane concern for which we all came to love him. For so many of us, he was a regenerator of hope. In him we found the link between humanism and socialism which allowed us to rediscover Marx himself and our own history. It is not comforting at this time, but it remains true, that this labour of his can never die,