Two Villages

GREEN WORLDS -- Maurice Hindus --Doubleday, Doran ($3).

When he was 14, Maurice Hindus left the little Russian village of Bolshoye Bikovo to make his fortune in the U. S. As it turned out, he made his fortune by periodic returns to his Russian village. In the years after the War, when most U. S. foreign correspondents were sitting in the lobby of the Hotel Metropole in Moscow wishing they were in Vienna, Maurice Hindus went once a year to see how his old friends Boris the Cattle, Trofim the Hawk, Blind Sergey, their sons and their daughters were making out under Bolshevism. What he saw he put into the books Red Bread, Humanity Uprooted, Broken Earth, The Great Offensive, which gave the U. S. public its first intimation that more was going on in Soviet Russia than met the eye in the Hearst press.

In Green Worlds he tries to do the same thing for the U. S. village of "Mount Brookville." His technique is the same: he describes the agricultural problem in terms of case histories. But he is handicapped by the fact that the Americans he met talked about themselves only when they were excited; Russians talked about themselves all the time.

Maurice Hindus' father was a Jewish kulak, engaged with great resignation in liquidating himself while Lenin and the Bolsheviks were still down-at-heels in London. When he died, his widow had to go into the vodka-selling business in competition with the Government monopoly. In 1905 the Hindus family went to the U. S., rented a couple of rooms on the lower East Side of Manhattan. Maurice did not like the smells of the city. At his first chance, he took a job as farmhand in the upstate town of "Mount Brookville." There, on page 120, Green Worlds properly starts. To Maurice, fresh from Bolshoye Bikovo, where the streets were a quagmire most of the time, where the peasants killed their colts every spring and lived in one-room huts with pigs, chickens and vast swarms of flies, where no one had ever heard of such products of civilization as underwear, toothbrushes or toilets, "Mount Brookville" was wonderful.

Thirty years later Maurice Hindus went back to Mount Brookville. Most of his friends were dead, the fine stands of pine and cedar were logged off, the best farms had gone to wrack, the farmers were getting 3-c- a quart for milk and were grumbling like Russians. The U. S., said Maurice Hindus, had an agricultural problem.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.